KITHAIRON

You should let things lie. What’s the good of stirring things up?

The bad weather was just bad luck. Weather comes and goes, rain comes and goes, it’s not the gods that decide if it will storm or not. I know. I’ve seen lots of weather out on Kithairon, watching the flocks. You don’t have much to do out there, so you look at things and you think.

Did you know there are weeds that sheep won’t eat? They smell the poison in belladonna, they won’t eat it. They love the fresh shoots on the trees in the spring, but they won’t eat the ivy that winds round the trunks of the trees. They don’t usually eat willow either, but I’ve seen a sick ewe gnaw the twigs. I tried it myself when I had a fever, I made a brew of willow twigs, it tasted sour and bitter mixed, and it smelled worse, but it cured my fever. Years later, I told this to a Syrian physician who was selling salves and potions in the agora. He said he learned of willow bark from a Persian and used it frequently. He was interested in my story of the sick ewe, and made a note of it on his tablet.

As I said, you have time to notice things when you’re watching sheep. I could tell a storm was coming hours before the first clouds darkened over Kithairon. The birds flew close to the ground, my skin felt, I don’t know, prickly, and the air was very still and smelled of iron. But looking at the clear sky you wouldn’t think there was trouble brewing.

Some days I knew there’d be a storm next morning.

I always had time to whistle up the dogs and herd the sheep into some hollow or into one of the oak groves, and so escape the worst of the weather.

So the bad weather, when it came to the city, I thought it was just bad luck. I still think so. The people were wrong to look for a reason. The priests use our ignorance for their profit, they speak of the wrath of the gods whenever bad luck follows good. Have you ever known good luck to last? I haven’t.

I knew my good luck would run out when Oedipus arrived. I tried to outrun the bad luck he brought, and asked to go back to my old job on Kithairon. I wanted to retire, I said, and to do something easy till I died. My Lady the Queen was kind, and let me run, but I couldn’t evade the bad luck. It spilled over the city, it flooded the valleys, it washed up onto the high pasture where I hoped to hide until either Oedipus died or I did.

But Oedipus called me down from the mountain. He wanted to know who’d killed Laios. How could I tell him he was the man himself? But I had to. When the King commands, you must obey. He whistled me down from the mountain like a dog, and I had to worry the scattered bits of truth together as a dog worries the flock, until he saw the whole terrible shape of it.

Why did he stir it up? If he had never known, he’d have lived happily. The drought and the sickness would pass as they always pass in the end. I could watch the sheep on Kithairon, and