Free Tides of War by Steven Pressfield Page A

individual could simply call himself a doctor and offer his services for hire. More frequently a private person found himself recruited, so to say, by his own facility for succor. This was the case with my father. He had the gift. Stricken friends sent for him. He made them well.
    From his years upon the land my father had acquired expertise of herbs and
kataplasmata,
poultices and purges, splints, bindings, even surgery, all the folk-derived veterinary usages the husbandman learns seeking to keep his stock sound and thriving. More beneficial stood his manner of proffering comfort. One simply felt better in his presence. My father revered the gods in the simple, straightforward manner of his age. He believed; his friends believed in him; it worked. Soon their friends were calling too. In this manner Nicolaus of Acharnae, bereft of the income of his estate, found himself competent to support his new household in the city. He chucked his farmer’s boots and hung out the physician’s shingle.
    With the rise of the Plague my father’s services became much in demand. My sister Meri took upon herself the role of nurse, accompanying him on his rounds. I was in the city then too. I had married and had a young son. Often I, too, traveled with my father and sister, more to provide security under arms in the remote precincts they were called to than to assist in any medical capacity.
    I detested the sick. I was afraid of them. I could not but feel that they had drawn their distress upon themselves by their own delinquent actions, concealed from mortals but known to the gods. And I dreaded contagion. I stood in awe of my father’s and sister’s intrepidity to enter these dwellings of the doomed. I recall one midnight, summoned to someshantytown quarter, a hive of tent cloth and wicker, where ventilation stood nonexistent and the vapors of the dying loitered noxiously, stinking to heaven. The madness of the street-spawned Theseus religion stood at its zenith then. The lane was plastered with crimson bull’s horns. Every wall read
Proseisin
: “He is coming.” The tenement itself teemed with immigrants, ancients and babes, those foreigners who had flocked to the city in her decades of abundance and now in her affliction remained marooned, dying like flies. Not all the gold of Persia could have induced me to enter that hellhole. Yet in they trooped, my father and sister, armed only with a hidesack of herbs and that handful of inadequate instruments of physic—the listening stick, the lancet, and the speculum.
    Let me show you something, Jason. It is my father’s casebook; I have kept it all these years.
    Female, 30, fever, nausea, abdominal convulsions. Prescriptives: foxglove and valerian, purge of strychnine in wine. Prognosis: poor.
    Infant, 6 months, fever, abdominal convulsions. Prescriptives: tea of willow bark, astringent of comfrey and hellebore in beeswax suppository. Prognosis: poor.
    In the margins my father notes his fees. Those circled are the ones who paid. One may scan twenty and thirty cases without finding a mark. But skip down. The months pass. Economy now informs the notes.
    Male, 50. Plague. Death.
    Child, 2. Plague. Death.
    I was twenty-three then. I was not ready to die, or to stand idly by while those I loved succumbed. Yet what could one do? The helplessness ate your guts. My mother’s father took his own life, yet uninfected by the scourge; the patriarch could not endure to outlive yet another generation of those he loved. My father and I bore his bones away in a child’s phaeton, out through that gate called Lionheart heretofore, now the Gate of Tears, to our tomb in the country. Half a hundred parties of the bereaved trekked with us; the queue stretched to the Anaceum. TheSpartans, the season’s ravagement completed, had withdrawn, save the odd cavalry patrol. One tracked us along the Acharnae Road. Their lieutenant called to us to see reason and seek peace. “This is not war,” he cried, his