The Three Sons of Euphorion epilogue

On the following morning and over several days in bands or solitary, the Eleusian soldiers returned. They came limping, wrapped in bandages, some with still gaping even bleeding wounds. Death and grief seemed to pall the air. Even the horses and dogs sniffed the air and turned tail. The elderly peasants pointed silently to each other and sighed at carrion birds heading to Marathon.

The days and nights seemed heavy and gloomy without respite. From the richest estates to the meanest hovels every dwelling seemed empty of vigorous, good and handsome men. That was the greatest pain, the glance around the shoulder, the door shutting and closing for men who would never return except as whimpering ghosts from Hades.

Aeschylos and Aminias crept beck to their families consumed with terrible shame that this time their elder brother did not walk beside them. They found Euphorion could not speak more than a few abrupt words to them. Beside Aeschylos walked a man with the tattered remnants of Persian undergarments. His eyes rolled with terror, his skin was black and his hair fuzzy. Euphorion walked to him, struck him sharply once across the face and walked away.

Aeschylos' new man servant and trophy of the Persian war got up from the ground and walked hunched and trembling away to his slave quarters. The slaves washed him, put on him a Greek cloak and took him to the Phoenician girl. She spoke to him a few words, then turned up her nose and said he was a Jew.

The Eleusians had never heard of such an obscure people. They got from the girl the Jews were hill billies from Syria Palestine. Their ancestors were Egyptian lepers who had been expelled from the desert by the King of Egypt. They worshipped an evil ass God. The Eleusians quickly named him Gyptos and he faded away into a shadow of Aeschylos.

Aeschylos moved his family and all his possessions into his elder brother's house. Aeschylos now felt his father and all his father's slaves and even his horse and dogs hated him. The Eleusians learnt that the Athenians burnt the bodies of the dead at Marathon. Two giant mounds had been built. One for the hoplites, the other for their retainers and allies from Plataea.

Then one morning the Eleusians woke up and discovered they had taken part in a great and glorious victory. That everything before Marathon tasted bitter. They now secretly suspected they were bullies to their neighbours and cowards to the Spartans before Marathon. They and the Athenians and Plataeans alone in all the world had stood up to and defeated the Persians.

Stories soon reached them that the Persian King was consumed with anger and fear at their subversive courage and victory. A few Eleusians even began to secretly dream that Hellas was in ascendancy and Asia with all its riches and power would one day fall before them.

At next year's initiation at the temple of Eleusis, the women spontaneously sang the dirge to their fallen men that Aeschylos would recall on his last day. The men were at first angry at this interruption of their ceremony and some whispered they would beat them when they got home. Then they lowered their heads and remembered the dead men at Marathon. The young fallen were their greatest sorrow and their greatest joy. They alone must stay for ever young and golden in the sun.