"Mary Renault - Greece 3 - Praise Singer" - читать интересную книгу автора (Renault Mary)

on a vine-shaded Sicilian porch with a lyre beside me, and memory in my head.

Memory, that's the thing. I've met few men who reached my years, and they were peasants, or else in
second childhood. Who knows what each day may bring? Sometimes when all's quiet at night I take my
lamp to the book-chest. Once or twice I've even taken a pen in hand, when I've thought of a happier
word. If the boy sees my marks, he keeps quiet about it. What a deal of reed-paper poems do take up,
 Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html




that will lie in a man's head as small as a bee-grub in the comb. A dozen rolls. I have had to number the
outsides, to know what's in them.

I shall leave my scrolls, like the potter's cup and the sculptor's marble, for what they're worth. Marble
can break; the cup is a crock thrown in the well; paper burns warm on a winter night. I have seen too
much pass away. So when they come to me, as they do from King Hieron down, asking about the days
before they were begotten, I tell them what deserves remembrance, even if it keeps me up when I crave
for bed. The true songs are still in the minds of men.

KEOS

1

keos is stern. You'd not suppose so from the proverb, that it knows not the horse nor ox, but is rich in
the gladdening vine-fruit, and brings forth poets. That last had not been added, when I was born. On the
other hand, it is a lie that on Keos a man has to take hemlock when he reaches sixty. That was only in the
old siege when the warriors had to be kept alive. Nowadays, it is just considered good manners.

Iulis, my native city, is high up the mountain, above Koressia harbor. I used to sit on a rock with my
father's sheep around me, looking at the foreign sails and wondering where they came from; they thread
the Kyklades from all four corners of the world. I could seldom go down to see. My father was not a
man to leave his land to a steward while he sat at ease, nor let his sons go sightseeing. My elder brother,
Theasides, got leave from work much oftener than I; not because he was the heir, which would have
made it heavier, but because he was good with the disk and javelin and a fine pankratiast, and had to
train for the games to do the family credit. He was handsome too. My parents never told me in so many
words that they preferred me out of sight, but they had no need. I seemed to have known it from my
birth.

Keeping out of sight, one is a good deal alone. But if one is short of company, one can always make it. I
kept, you might say, the very best company in Keos.

If a fine ship with a painted sail passed proudly by the port, keeping its mystery, for me it was the Argo
with its talking prow and its crew of heroes, going north to the bewitched Kolchian shore. If a hawk
hovered, I saw winged Perseus poised for his flashing swoop; grasping, like the hawk its prey, the
Gorgon's deadly head to freeze the dragon. The boulder I sat on had been flung by Herakles, playing ball
as a boy. When I drove my flock to pasture, I was with Achilles on some great cattle-raid, bringing the
spoils of a plundered city back to camp.

As I dreamed I sang, as far back as I can remember. I needed only to be alone, among the creatures of