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clearly been too much for her to bear, poor creature, and she had cut her own throat with the fine ivory-handled razor my mother used for shaving her legs and armpits. However, I could find no sign of my grandfather anywhere in the house, and I began to hope that he had somehow survived, and maybe even gone to get help. But I found him, too, a little way down the street, which was utterly quiet and deserted, the way an Athenian street never is. He was in one of those big stone troughs set up to catch rainwater in the dictator Pisistratus’ time, and I guess that he found the thirst so unendurable that he had jumped in and drowned. It was a sad way for such a man to die, for he had been at the battle of Plataea, when the Athenians and the Spartans had defeated King Xerxes’ army and killed his great general Mardonius.
    It was a most peculiar feeling to come out of that stable and find that all my family and household had died without letting me know. While I had been ill, I had assumed that I was the only person in the whole of Athens to be afflicted, and that if and when I ever got out of there the world outside would be roughly the same as it had been when I went in. As I stood there looking at my grandfather floating in the rain-trough, I must confess that I felt little or no grief or sadness, and ever since then I have never been able to take the Choruses in the Tragedies very seriously. You know what I mean; the Messenger bustles on with the news of the great disaster, and at once the Chorus start moaning and singing Aiai and Hottotoi, and all those other things that people are supposed to say when they’re upset but never do; and then twenty lines or so later they’ve pulled themselves together again and are saying that the Gods are just. Whereas, in my experience at any rate, I find that bad news takes at least a day to sink in properly, and it’s only after people have stopped sympathising and are saying what a callous brute I am that I start going to pieces. Well, there you are; I felt no great urge to lament or tear my hair, only a sensation which I can best describe as a Godlike detachment, as the Gods must feel when they look down and see mortal men. After all, I had survived and everyone else in the whole world hadn’t; this created a division between them and me as wide as that which separates the immortal Gods from mortal men. I couldn’t feel any sorrow, or even any involvement, just as a human being can never feel involved when he pours boiling water on an ants’ nest and so wipes out a city which in their terms might be as great as Athens or Troy. Perhaps, after all, I was too young to have feelings, or I was stunned by the sheer scale of the disaster. But I don’t think so; I felt the same way when I was a grown man in the walled orchard, and that was just as great a disaster, or maybe even greater.
    So there I was, standing by the rain-trough and thinking these deep thoughts, when I saw a man in armour hurrying up the street with his cloak round his face to keep the bad air out. I was just thinking that this was pretty foolish, since there is no special magic in a cloak that can counteract the effects of plague and death, and that was just another example of the folly of these puny mortals, when the man caught sight of me and nearly jumped out of his skin. Of course, I said to myself, he’s frightened at seeing a God: I must reassure him; so I called out, ‘Don’t be afraid, I won’t hurt you.’
    ‘The hell with you,’ said the man. ‘You’ve got the plague, haven’t you?’
    ‘No,’ I replied, ‘I had it for a while but the God cured me. You’re quite safe, I won’t infect you.’
    He didn’t look at all convinced, so I started describing the symptoms and how I had recovered, and then he wasn’t so frightened. It turned out that a fellow soldier of his had had the plague and survived, and so he knew I was telling the truth. He came over and sat down on the edge of the trough, with