The Laughter of Aphrodite

by Peter Green

  I stretched myself like a cat, glad, as always, to come up from the women’s quarters—that cramped, sour-smelling pit of loud unprivacy—and breathe fresh air again. I was also enjoying a sense of stolen privilege. Arion, being the most distinguished passenger aboard (and, what was more important on a Corinthian ship, in high favour with Periander) had the freedom of the captain’s poop-deck: this meant canvas chairs, cushions, decent seclusion, and a comparative immunity from the smell of goat—or goatish fellow-travellers. Since (as he said) he enjoyed sunning himself, and had, in a weak-minded moment, agreed to act as my escort, it was only fair that I should be allowed to accompany him.

  He was, I think, one of the oddest men I have ever met in my life: a small, bald, brown, wrinkled creature, with wicked black eyes and the beginnings of a hunchback. Despite his shortness (he was only an inch or two taller than I was), the casual physical strength he displayed on occasion impressed everyone—and was meant to. I have seen him lift a full amphora or a pig of lead with one hand, putting some brawny sailor to shame. He had probably decided early in life that strength, talent, and eccentricity would, between them, more than compensate for his physical shortcomings: I found myself, unexpectedly, envying him that rocklike self-assurance, the huge and mischievous delight he took in his own outrageousness.

  He did the most extraordinary things: he seemed determined to defeat not only human conventions but natural law too. He would remove every stitch of clothing (except for an exiguous white loincloth, such as a field-slave might wear) and lie for hours at a time grilling himself in the sun, till his hairy, crab-like body was burnt as brown as the ship’s timbers. Yet far from incurring serious illness as a result of such exposure, he seemed actually to thrive on When I asked him why, he said, with the ghost of a wink, that because of his brilliant musicianship Apollo had made a special exception in his case. “Of course,” he added, “one day I’ll lose my touch; and then he’ll probably flay me like. Marsyas, out of pure spite.”

  The first time he dived overboard he caused a good deal of panic (except among the crew, who knew all about his little peculiarities); but after a while we got used to him frolicking round in the water like a dolphin—he was a superb swimmer, as so many physically handicapped people tend to be—and a special rope ladder was rigged from the counter to let him scramble aboard after his dip. He could shin up the rigging faster than any sailor; and he was capable, it seemed, of out-drinking everyone on board. When he was full of wine he told endless exotic travellers’ stories, in which fact and fancy seemed to mingle like the coloured warp and woof on a loom. One man unwisely called him a liar, and was hit so hard that he remained unconscious for two days.

  Now Arion squatted cross-legged on a cushion in the sun, flexing his strong musician’s fingers after an hour’s work with me on the lyre. He was a magnificent teacher: patient, ruthless, dedicated. He made no allowances whatsoever for feminine weakness. At the end of one particularly testing exercise he suddenly grabbed my right hand as though it were a horse’s hoof and he a farrier, and said: “No wonder girls can’t get any real tone out of a lyre. Too busy keeping their fingers pretty.”

  He thrust his own index-finger under my nose. The nail was grotesque, long and claw-thickened, the flesh of the top joint calloused to a hard yellow pad.

  “D’you see that? Thirty years’ work. Thirty years’ slavery, if you like.”

  “I can believe it.”

  He snorted at my tone. “Ugly, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. And unnecessary.” But I regretted the words almost as soon as they were uttered: for him, I saw, this repulsive physical distortion was a proof of endurance, a source of pride.

  He said: “Have you ever used an Egyptian plectrum?”

  “No, but—”

  “Then you’re in no position to argue, are you? Damned little sliver of ivory. No feeling in it. Not part of you.”

  Stung, I said: “What do you do when you want to write a letter? Slit up your finger-nail with a penknife? Trim it to a point? Dip it in the—”

  He cut me off with an abrupt bark of laughter. “All right, all right: never labour an obvious point. Bad habit you’ve got there, my girl. Comes of living on that extraordinary island of ours, h’m? H’m?” The eyes twinkled beneath their fierce tufted brows. “No one to contradict you. Parochial outlook. Stultifying.”

  I flushed, hurt. “That’s not fair—”

  “Is it not? Don’t forget I was brought up on the island myself. The people who sent you into exile were doing you a favour.”

  As this was what I privately felt, too, I found it hard to disagree. I said with some diffidence: “But an island has some positive advantages—”

  “Indeed it does.” Arion sounded pleased. “And most of them are its disadvantages turned inside out. To take one obvious example. When we reach Corinth, everyone will know where you come from the moment you open your mouth. Vocabulary, idiom, that very charming brogue of yours: unmistakable. But with me it’s different: my accent is international, all the edges have been rubbed off it. My vocabulary’s been patched together from a dozen countries. I belong everywhere and nowhere. Which of us is better off?”

  “Well—” I hesitated; and the more I thought, the harder I found it to answer.

  Arion’s black eyes twinkled. “Just so. There is a price to pay for the individual voice, is there not?”

  “But the price is worth it.”

  “Ah, Sappho, how that remark places you! Ask them in Sparta or Crete, even in Athens, what value they put on the individual voice: you will get a very short answer. There all men speak, or strive to speak, with one voice—that of the State. Talk to them of private passions, of the heart’s supremacy, of the still, significant moment—all these things that your island has enabled you to perceive and cherish—and they will either laugh you to scorn or treat you as a subversive anarchist.”

  “You seem to forget,” I said, “that I am, at this very moment, in exile for my political activities.”

  “Oh, Sappho—” He shook his brown, bald head, momentarily at a loss for words. “You know, when I came back on this visit, I could hardly believe my eyes and ears—such grotesque little intrigues, such outdated Homeric sentiments! Do you realize that even the armour your soldiers wear is nearly a century obsolete by mainland standards?”

  “Are the alternatives you propose so very attractive? Is the voice of the State silent in Corinth?”

  “Corinth,” said Arion, is like myself: international. It stands, in every sense, at the crossroads. All art should, ultimately, be cosmopolitan: and most artists know it. That is why you will find so many of them there.”

  “Indeed? I thought it was because Periander paid them well.”

  Arion grinned. He looked more like a monkey than ever. “You see?” he said. ‘This voyage is broadening your mind already. Of course artists will go where they are well paid; so will any skilled craftsman. The notion of the unpaid bard singing as his Muse dictates was all very well when he belonged to a nobleman’s manor. But even in Mytilene—as you know to your cost—life isn’t like that any more.”

  He nodded down towards the central well of the ship, where a fat merchant was checking the seals on a lashed-down cargo of wine-jars.

  “There goes our future, Sappho,” he said. “Yours and mine.”

  “An ignoble future.”

  “Is it so ignoble? I wonder. Men like Periander and Pittacus have a vision, too. They see a world of peace, prosperity, open frontiers: a world which traffics as freely in ideas as it does in wine or olives, a world where war and narrow national prejudices have no place, a cosmopolitan world in which the artist, the maker, is honoured above the mere ranting general—” He broke off, perhaps a little embarrassed by his own fervour, and chuckled: “It’s not only cash that keeps me in Corinth, you know.”

  “I’m sure it’s not.”

  We both fell silent for a moment, staring out across the bay towards the green folded mountains of Salam
is and Megara. Behind us, on the port bow, lay Aegina, and beyond Aegina the hazed mountains of the Argolid. There, under our horizon, stood Mycenae, Agamemnon’s Mycenae, rich in gold and blood, where men had known honour and upheld that honour with the sword.

  I thought: And what will he be like, this faceless, stateless artist, hawking his talent from one patron to the next, talking of visions when there is nothing in his heart but flattery, greed, fear? He will be like Arion, the great, much-courted, eccentric Arion, who has done no original work for years, who is empty and twisted and has nothing left to him but technique—that clubbed nail, that badge of his existence!—who belongs nowhere, who believes nothing.

  I looked at him squatting there, armoured in his deformity, and for the first time felt nothing but pity: pity and slight contempt. Why is he coming to Sicily? I wondered. Not just to compete in some international musical festival. Perhaps the wind of favour at Corinth is veering into another quarter. Perhaps he wants to see if the obsolete, decadent, aristocratic Sicilian landowners can, after all, offer him a better sinecure than Periander. And what fresh shape will his vision take then?

  I said: “From all I’ve heard, Periander isn’t exactly a pleasant person.”

  “You mustn’t believe all you hear. Besides, he’s old now. Old, and embittered. His personal life”—Arion shrugged—“has been—unfortunate. His wife’s death, his quarrel with his son. You know the stories.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I know the stories.” Aunt Helen’s voice, cutting and contemptuous, came back to me: A man who can kick his wife into a miscarriage—one from which she subsequently dies—and all because of some idiotic story told him by a concubine, can hardly be called a stable character.

  “By the way,” Arion said, with careful casualness, “it might be tactful not to mention the reason for your exile, or indeed that you’re in exile at all: he’s a little touchy on that subject.”

  “It all sounds quite alarming. Do you really think I ought to meet him?”

  The twinkle was back in Arion’s eye as he said: “Periander doesn’t eat the nobility nowadays; they’re too busy working for him. Besides”—and the twinkle broadened into a grin—“he was only told to lop off the tallest corn-ears: you remember?” He looked me up and down, with bland malice, and said: “You’re quite safe, I should think.” Then he lay back, arranged a yellow silk scarf over his eyes, and went to sleep.

  When I remember Corinth, it is always with a sense of vivid, terrifying unreality, as though my recollections had been superimposed on some mad dream-landscape of the mind. But then there is something nightmarish about the whole Corinthian Isthmus, that ass-backed rope of rocks stretched between two encroaching gulfs below the mountains, that shingled, sand-blown wilderness which has, through a geographical accident, become Greece’s supreme monument to human ambition and lust.

  In these narrow passes, under the shadow of that towering rocky citadel, whole armies have been fought and held. Here, astride the same narrow neck where once Sciron dispatched unwary travellers, there runs the great stone-blocked slipway which Periander built from shore to shore. Day in, day out, teams of oxen strain at their safety ropes, while on wet wooden cradles a queue of black ships—like so many Egyptian gods, or Trojan horses—edge overland, barnacle-naked, trailing garlands of green slime, to their innumerable destinations. Iron-bound wheels grind harshly against the sides of those deep marble runnels, dung lies steaming in the salt Isthmus air, all along the slipway there is wordless shouting, the crack of drovers’ whips.

  Poised on his black wet rock beyond the curving arms of the eastern harbour, Poseidon stands, dolphin and trident aloft, stony eyes alert for all weathers, a landmark, used with familiarity by sailors and circling gulls. Up behind a thicket of masts houses fan out— white, grey, lemon—across the hillside. Wet quays are clamorous, customs-hall and fish market echo with tramping feet, trolleys, auctioneers’ harsh parrot-cries. Clash and hammer of bronze-workers in spark-bright alleys, the goose-hiss of hot plunged metal. Red, blue, green, black, the rough dyed wools of the rugmakers; tang of salted fish in creels; sweating, goatish cheeses.

  Here the goldsmiths are tapping with their minuscule hammers: one looks up, grey-faced, secretive, eyes caught by the pomegranate necklace at my throat. I pause, two booths on, pick up an exquisite brooch of rock-crystal: inside the crystal, a marvel of art, is a tiny gold figurine, no longer than my finger-joint, Thetis bearing the arms of Achilles to Troy. But I am an exile: I put down the brooch and move on, Praxinoa a black shadow behind me.

  Round the brick-kilns air is dancing, there are roof-tiles packed flat in the yards between layers of straw, my fingers drag over the matte surface of an unfired terra-cotta bowl. Smell of wet clay, wheels spinning in sunlight, pots surging up, bellying, finger-shaped at a touch, their bright mud-glister soon gone. Then the painters, birdfaced with absorption, jars of coloured pigments at their elbow, pecking and swooping and dabbing over rows of buff-plain vases—too many vases, unending labour, mere repetition—sketching in friezes (the usual themes: chariots, warriors, wild-beast hunts) red and purple, leaving no spaces (value for money), cramming each corner with rosettes, acanthus-leaves: skimping their work, too, tricks of the trade—smudging an outline, stretching a leopard’s spring further and further: four, not six, will encircle the vase now, no one will argue, the market is rising, Corinth can make art, export it, destroy it.

  All too large, too loud, too violent: in false perspective, and smudged, like the leopards; built on shingle, a mirage of gold, a whore of a city, pimping its culture for quick returns, buying esteem with a show of wisdom, buying poets, musicians, artists, cankered, corrupting, sick at the heart. The blood that was spilt can never be dry, the lopped corn-ears gush red in the furrow. Old men sit by the fountain under the shade of the plane-tree, playing draughts, their eyes wary and hooded. The public statues look down, too bored or cautious to make any public pronouncement; better to watch, wait, survive.

  Two thousand feet up, on the summit of the great black rock that lowers over Corinth with the air of a sleeping Titan, I stood, godlike, the wind in my hair, all Greece spread out below me. There to the north, remote and snow-bright peaks, rose Helicon and Parnassus. Beside those high, singing waters, in that clear air, the Muses had their home; there, over Delphi, eagles circled towards the prophetic navel-stone that marks the world’s centre. In the east lay the islands of the Saronic Gulf, and beyond them, a blue shadow, the mountains of Attica. Southward were Argos and Mycenae; to the west, range on dark folded range, rose the forest stronghold of Arcadia. I turned from quarter to quarter, and the world hummed under me, soft, deep, a great spinning top for my delight. Horizons fled, the sky expanded, brighter than white steel in the forge. The city at my feet shrank into nothingness, a small festered chancre, forgotten, insignificant.

  So Arion found me a little later, leaning on the stone parapet, oblivious and content. He had sent me on ahead by mule: he said he needed exercise. When he reached the summit of the rock there was not a drop of sweat visible anywhere on his baked, brown, matte skin. His black eyes blinked lizardlike; there was something very saurian about him that morning. I felt Praxinoa stiffen, reflexively, at his approach.

  “Well, now,” he said. “As I might have guessed. Always prefer your landscapes without figures, h’m?” The tufted eyebrows jerked and twitched. “Let me restore the balance. A rare sight, a very rare sight.” Lizard-tongue flickered, licked lips. “Aphrodite has many strange devotees, h’m? But this—”

  He beckoned imperiously: I fell into step beside him. Our feet kept easy time: he was perhaps half a head the taller, no more. Up the wide, worn steps we plodded, our shadows falling short in front of us, up past the flower-sellers with their garlands, past the hawkers of incense, past the candlemakers’ workshops, past the booths where men with tired, cynical eyes display trinkets, scarves, and cheap, gaudily painted statuettes of the Goddess whose great temple towers above them, on the rock’s highest spur,
tall-columned, bright with gilding and murals. Here, in the precinct itself, were moneychangers and booksellers; the one-legged huckster (what childhood memory stirred at sight of him?) sitting by his wicker cages full of white, bickering, sacrificial doves; the stalled lambs (white also: reputed blemishless) in their cramped pens; the fortune-tellers, the blind beggar, a crudely limned picture of shipwreck hung from his neck.

  Here you could smell cooking meat skewered over charcoal; here the dust was splashed with wine where men had drunk, and wiped their mouths, and emptied the cup for luck; and here were other men, many of them, foreign travellers and merchants by their dress, who all showed the same sick, hot, furtive eyes, who hesitated, joked with a stall-keeper, fingered a sacred picture, then, abrupt and determined, strode up the steps into the temple.

  Arion said: “Do you know what they are here for, h’m?” His dark, lubricious eye moved over me and away.

  “No.” And then, before he could speak again, I knew: how could I not have known? Colour flooded to my cheeks as I recalled the knowing jokes about this temple that I had heard, or overheard, in Mytilene—in particular, about its band of so-called “sacred slaves,” a thousand strong, women dedicated to the Goddess, who must, in Aphrodite’s name, prostitute themselves with any stranger willing to pay gold for the privilege.

  “Ah,” murmured Arion, “I see you remember.” He was watching me avidly, eager to savour my every reaction. “A notable custom of the city. And profitable, of course; very profitable. Not everyone”—he brought out the old saying as though it were his own—“can afford to visit Corinth, h’m?”

  “Not everyone would choose to.”