Free The Walled Orchard by Tom Holt

good thunderstorm couldn’t have done twice as thoroughly in half the time. With the tribute-money pouring in and the grain ships jostling each other for space in the Piraeus we were none the worst off for the annual burning of our crops — indeed, some of the people who think that agriculture is a science and not a lottery declared that the annual destructions prevented us from overworking the soil as we have been doing for generations and would result in bumper harvests once the war was over. Now this was an exaggeration, needless to say, and it stands to reason that the plague would have been far less serious had the City not been crammed to bursting-point with human beings. But by and large the policy of Pericles would have worked if we had had the patience to persevere with it, and if Pericles had survived.
    Which is much the same as saying that we could grow far more to the acre if only it rained more often. One of the hallmarks of an Athenian is his impatience and his restlessness, and when you coop all the Athenians in the world up inside a walled city, this characteristic becomes more marked than ever. Another thing that happens is that all these Athenians will go to Assembly and vote for things just to pass the time. For the first time in history, the ideal on which our democracy is based was being put into action; all the citizens of Athens did go to Assembly and listen to the speeches, and of course the result was absolute chaos. Simple-minded straightforward men from the back end of Attica suddenly found out how their State was being run, and of course they wanted to play too. Even Pericles couldn’t have kept control of fifty-odd thousand thinking Athenians for very long.
    By God, though, it made the City an interesting place to live in (though decidedly squalid), having all those people hanging around with nothing at all to do except talk. It may just be the exaggeration of childhood memory, but I’ll swear the City hummed just like a beehive, so that wherever you went you weren’t far from the sound of human voices. With no work to do and not much money to spend, the only available pleasure was the pleasure of words. If ever there was a time and a place to be an aspiring Comic poet, that was it; because, with a few minor exceptions, the one topic of conversation was politics and the war, which of course is what all Comedy has to be about.
    When the Spartans had had enough of smashing up our crops and went away again, and the fleet came back from doing roughly similar things in Messenia and Laconia, we all trooped off home to see what had been burnt or chopped down this year and plant out our winter barley. It’s an extraordinary thing, but we always did plough and plant out vine-cuttings, in the hope that there would be no invasion next year. I think it goes to show that none of us ever dreamed that we could possibly lose the war, and that the worst that could happen is that we would all meet up in the City next year to continue our conversations and discussions. But in those days, we Athenians knew that there was nothing that we could not achieve and no limit to our realisable ambitions; not only were we bound to conquer all the nations of the earth sooner or later, but we were all on the point of pinning down the answers to every question that anyone could ask, and that anything could be solved or explained if you thought and talked about it for long enough. In short, there was always something to be busy with and something new and wonderful to look forward to, and the fact that in the meantime we all had to get on with the business of scratching a living from the same little scraps of land that our fathers had worked themselves to death over before us tended to be overlooked in the general excitement. I remember once an exile from the court of some Scythian chieftain came to Athens at a time when the City was full of people — and this was many years before the war, on just an ordinary market-day —