29 X Man, Risen from the Dead X Man, Risen from the Dead Dionysius passed through the open door of his ancestral home, a modest structure of stone and wood situated beside a small stream in the village of Colonus. Old olive trees arched their boughs overhead, almost past bearing any fruit. Grapevines planted by Dionysius’ grandfather’s grandfather had matted two whole walls of the house with dark green. In the garden stood a small statue of Apollo, the god who shoots from afar, the god of healing, and so also the god who in Homer’s Iliad sent a deadly plague among the Greeks for Agamemnon’s brutish treatment of his priest. Dionysius knew many passages of that poem by heart, as any learned Greek would, though he and they hardly believed a word of them anymore. Everywhere Dionysius turned, he saw the vestiges of a world that had been, and was no more. He looked up and saw, a few miles away, the jutting outcrop of the citadel of Athens, the Areopagus— the Hill of Ares, god of war. Dionysius shook his head. The god of war indeed. The god of war had long ago abandoned Athens, and now she was nothing but an appendage of the great empire of those disciplined, shrewd, and efficient louts, the
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