The Laughter of Aphrodite

by Peter Green

  Sometimes, as now, in the clear-eyed moment after a long, sleepless night, I can face another daemon that prowls restlessly down the twisting, perilous corridors of my mind, a beast that squats at the labyrinth’s core, the nightmarish monster whose bull’s bellow echoes through my dreams while I fumble the thread in darkness, heart pounding, left hand, right hand, which passage to follow what obscenity lies in wait for me, the cold sweat, the cankered fear in the skull, the ultimate, brutal, naked question—

  Am I, could I be, insane?

  Now, while I am alone, while I have a brief respite, I must consider this coolly. It is, after all, important.

  In the end I followed the surgeon’s advice, and took the voyage to Samos with Charaxus for my convalescence. It was dull past belief, and my brother, feeling he had me at a disadvantage, patronized me in the smuggest, most insufferable way. We stayed at the house of a merchant called Iadmon, a tall, thin man with a face like a mullet’s: the same rough, reddish-blue complexion, the same sharp eye-teeth and recessive Olin, the same dull, protruding stare. He and Charaxus were well-matched colleagues.

  But the visit had odder consequences than I, for one, could have guessed at the time. It was here that my brother first set eyes on a pert, fair-haired slave-girl called Doricha, with the rosy complexion that afterwards gave her that more famous nickname by which she is remembered today. Preoccupied with my own problems, I scarcely noticed her—or the effect she had on Charaxus, which must have been devastating. But a year later she had been bought by some high-class pimp and established as a courtesan at Naucratis, the Greek trading-port in the Egyptian delta; and it was here that my brother, having successfully off-loaded a cargo of Lesbian wine, met her again, and proceeded—with that monumental recklessness of which only the habitually cautious are, on rare occasions, capable—to make her his mistress, squander vast sums of money on her, and even, if rumour was to be trusted, offer her marriage.

  After my illness—I come back to this again and again—I became conscious of some fundamental, yet unrecognized change in myself. In ways (how can I describe the sensation without seeming fanciful?) it was as though I walked through the garden of the self, and met a stranger there who bore my face, who stared at me blankly, whose actions were unpredictable and on occasion terrifying. Antimenidas once told me that among the Persians this duality is recognized and accepted. To me it was, and remains, something nightmarish, a usurpation. But how can a usurpation be from within?

  First, during the difficult days of convalescence, I experienced— as the Coan surgeon told me I would—moods of black despair, when mind and body alike seemed to freeze in a long, dead midwinter, and my nerves were bare branches scribbled against a stormy sky. Then, slowly, despair was replaced by random explosions of anger, hysterical suspiciousness, the conviction that nothing was what it seemed, that behind a friendly social façade my undeclared enemies were working to destroy me.

  (There: I think the Coan would approve of this analysis so far. We spent much time discussing clinical method: why should it not be applied to mind as well as to body? But I must not forget the triple golden rule. Describe symptoms: diagnose disease: prescribe treatment. The hardest part of my task is still to come.)

  As my physical strength returned, I began to have a series of crude, unbelievably vivid sexual dreams, unlike anything I had ever experienced before. By day I was working, with an apathy I put down to my illness, on plans for the House of the Muses. But at night the dreams came: faces of sailors, of muscular porters glimpsed on the quayside, cruel, bearded mouths, hard bodies, eyes hot with lust, hands that seized my body, bruising, defiling; and with that defilement pleasure, secret, violent, shameful pleasure such as I had never known.

  I dreaded the dreams, I longed for them, I lived in an endless, burning frenzy of desire. The stranger lusted in my body and soon was a stranger no more. The dividing line between dream and reality became increasingly indistinct. I found myself malting excuses to go through the market, down by the harbour, past taverns, anywhere I could watch young, strong, animal-quick male bodies: the gleaming twist of a torso, muscles that bunched and slid under sun-darkened skin. I lived for days in an unspoken fantasy of lust.

  Somewhere, somehow, this slowly mounting pressure had to find release. It may, or may not, be coincidence that about the same time I caused much astonishment—not to say open scandal—by publicly circulating a series of the most abusive and indeed obscene verse lampoons. I pilloried the sexual habits of Andromeda, Gorgo, and their group with an outspokenness that raised laughter in the taverns, but embarrassed my friends horribly. It was, as they all said, so out of character.

  I remember Meg wailing: “But I’ve never heard you use words like that in your life before, and to publish them openly—I just don’t understand you, Sappho, it’s as though you wanted to destroy yourself and humiliate us.” And Alcaeus, back from his Boeotian wanderings now, hand a little tremulous, the network of veins visible now round eyes and nose: “Congratulations, my dear. You’re being yourself at last. Better late than never.” Then, with the cunning, sideways leer of the drunkard: “But you’re mad, of course, you know that, don’t you? Mad as birds.”

  Yet the scandal, in some curious way, failed to touch me. The more outrageous my behaviour, the greater my indifference to public opinion. I remained, I now realize, quite astonishingly blind to the degree of resentment I was stirring up among people of all classes and political views in Mytilene. I seemed determined to disregard every social convention which holds the fabric of our community together. The fact that my own private conduct was no better than that of my victims did not disturb anyone; it merely caused amusement. But my insistently public gestures—the lampoons, the fishwife arguments, one occasion when I nearly became involved in a brawl— these were regarded as intolerable, and all the worse because. I was a famous citizen, whose acts would be reported in every barber’s shop from Miletus to Syracuse. (Did he hear of them, I wonder?)

  This leads me back to my brother, and his much-publicized infatuation for Doricha. Now, as all the world knows, I attacked Charaxus, when I heard about the liaison, in a series of poems that caused much unkind amusement at the time, but were thought—to say the least of it in taste and reticence. The truth is that if it had not been for me, Mytilene might never have heard of Doricha at all.

  I have invariably maintained, when challenged, that I took this course to preserve our family honour: Charaxus ruining himself was bad enough, but the prospect of this former slave and prostitute coming back to Mytilene as his wife was quite unthinkable. Public ridicule was the only thing which might shock him out of his socially and financially disastrous passion. (I have no doubt he is now enjoying our ironic reversal of roles.)

  But even at the time I had serious doubts about my own argument. It is true that, in the event, my brother did not marry Doricha—or Rosie, as she was now known by every ship’s captain on the delta run—but this, I suspect, was none of his or my doing. It seems clear, in retrospect, that Rosie herself had tired of him (who could blame her?) and was aiming a good deal higher than this ugly, middle-aged island wine-merchant. To judge from her present fame and wealth— it is not every whore who can afford to send offerings to Delphi— she would appear to have made a sensible decision.

  No: my own motives can, all too easily, be fitted into that other, uglier pattern I have begun to sketch—a pattern in which conscious choice has little place, where freedom is illusion, and our most deliberate acts (as we think) are dictated by some capricious deity who, for his own pleasure, sheds a blinding glamour on our eyes. I disliked my brother, true, and was not slow to seize so perfect an opportunity of humiliating him. This, if not to my credit, is at least understandable, and leaves the will intact. But when I consider the way I behaved in the light of those other strange episodes, I feel the self dissolve, I hear the cold laughter of immortal, devious Aphrodite as she moves her pawn across the board. And now the game is nearly over.

  Th
at day, like any other, I walked slowly along the harbour-front of Mytilene, a small, thin, greying woman, no longer ill indeed, but still bearing the marks of my illness. The old man leaning against the bollard eyed me curiously as I went past—unescorted, another scandal for my aristocratic friends to chew on—with sad, hesitant eyes that had been blurred and paled by too many long watches, reefs awash to leeward in the storm-driven darkness, the Pole Star dancing faint above a stripped mast while men cursed or prayed.

  When he accosted me it was with great respect and a natural dignity that I found both touching and impressive. He begged my pardon for the impertinence of speaking to so great a lady, but grief overcame his modesty. His son, his beloved son, had been drowned at sea ten days ago, and now his body had been washed ashore and given burial, all that the dead could wish for he had had unstintingly, but—And here the old man hesitated, cracking gaunt fingers, uncertain how to go on.

  I smiled, guessing his trouble, why he had come to me. “You would like me to compose his epitaph,” I said, and, he nodded eagerly, still anxious, unable to believe that I would agree. “I have money,” he said, “I can pay you what is fitting. And my sons’ sons and their children after them will remember Pelagon, on whose grave are carved words by the greatest poet we have known. It is an honour to stand in your shadow, Lady Sappho.” “It is a short enough shadow,” I said, laughing, more moved than I cared to admit (yet would he have approached me at all if it had not been for the scandal?). “Very well: I will compose your son’s epitaph.”

  He said, “You must come to my house, Lady Sappho. It is a poor home, but we will welcome you with the best we have, and my wife will speak to you of our son.” So I went with him through the winding, sunlit alleys clamorous with children and women, till we reached the small harbour beyond the city walls, and the old man led me down a flight of worn, grey steps to a cottage on the foreshore, washed in blue lime, with a lean-to shed behind it, and red nets drying, and a pair of black-and-white goats tethered under a barren fig-tree.

  As we stooped through the low doorway, a chicken ran out past us, clucking shrilly. My eyes, sun-dazzled, took a moment to adjust themselves in the half-light. I smelt the smell of fish and tar and masculine sweat, a clean rankness. Then my vision cleared, and I saw the man who sat in one corner, stripped to the waist, whittling, a bird-call, his heavy chestnut hair falling over one eye as he worked. He turned, and gave me a lazy, appraising smile. “This is my other son,” the old man said. “This is Phaon.” So we met for the first time: and from that first meeting all else followed.

  Am I pursuing a phantom to Sicily, as Agamemnon pursued the phantom Helen to Troy? The lust for self-destruction; to be ravished by Death, what ecstasy!

  When I took Hippias and made him the slave of my body, when Phaon burned me with that all-consuming fire of passion, was it I, or they, or Aphrodite who cast the spell? Where does the fault lie, who must bear the weight of it before Cods and men? Am I deceiving myself still, still anxious only to shift the burden from my shoulders, careless who may be compelled to take it up in my stead? The nightmare of madness, this sick frenzy in the womb, even Aphrodite herself, so cold, so capricious—may not these, too, be mere simulacra, the mind’s last defence against surrender to the truth? How can I know? How can I ever be certain?

  One way remains.

  Westward from Corinth at dawn, with black wedges of migrant birds flying south to Egypt and the sun, and a cold wind blowing in gusts across the Gulf. The helmsman sniffs the weather like a dog, there are tiny white flecks on the water: the ship’s bows dip and thrust, tackle creaks. Here am I, an unexplained traveller in a black cloak, propped against this handy bulk-head below the after-deck, out of the wind, writing, writing, scratching down my present and my past, using the one art that I possess still, the craft of words to which, ultimately, all else in my life has been sacrificed. Which was truth, the lover or the poem? This love endures, that is transient. Odysseus in the flesh must have been a devious, lumpish mercenary captain: it took Homer to give him immortality. Yet I ache for the flesh now, his hard body, where, where? Sprawled in some tavern of Syracuse? Handling tarry ropes among others of his kind, the men who live by boats and the longshore trade? Or—no, I must stop this, close the bright doors of imagination, shut out the light. Which can blind as well as heal. Apollo, be merciful.

  So we have come here to harbour under the high white cliffs of Leucas, sailing north out of the Gulf by the scattered islands, past Cephallenia, with its high, ridged back, and Ithaca, where Odysseus returned at last after so many years and perhaps set his troubled house in order. We lie moored against a square stone quay, while sacks of food and water-jars are carried aboard, and friends exchange greetings. The dawn air strikes fresh: this is our last landfall in Greece. West of us lies the wide Ionian Sea, below that curving horizon rise the mountains of Sicily. We sail at noon.

  It seemed somehow natural that I should hear his name: natural and inevitable. I looked and saw a knot of sailors on the quayside— our helmsman and several others I did not recognize, but my mind leaped, the blood cried out Is he there? seeing the dark merchantman lying beyond us with that well-remembered flag at its masthead, the cuttlefish emblem of Syracuse. What’s the news? one said, and another, laughing, replied: You remember Phaon? Yes, I whispered, the unregarded shadow, a hooded woman standing alone in mid-journey, yes, I remember Phaon. And the first voice said: Who is it this time, then? They laughed at that, all of them, drinking hot spiced wine from the tavern, copper tankards aglow in, the morning light, men among men, while I waited, waited. You can guess what happened, the Syracusan said. It was inevitable. Sooner or later. The helmsman wiped his mouth. Tell us, then, he said. You know Aristippe, the Syracusan said. Glaucus’ wife? someone asked, and another cut in: Who doesn’t know her? and the laughter broke again, till I heard a voice say: She’s not as young as she was, and the Syracusan’s reply: Phaon liked them ripe. Ripe and easy. Liked? That’s right, let me tell this my own way. Glaucus came back from his last voyage ten days early—Some laughter, not much, and the first voice breaking in: And caught them? Pause. Oh yes, he caught them, said the Syracusan. There’ll be no more stories about Phaon, so make the most of this one. Our helmsman hawked, drank his wine, said, falsely casual, a great lecher himself by the look of him: A knife in the ribs? And the Syracusan, swilling dregs, spilling the last drop for luck: What else? Scuffling of feet. So that’s the end of Phaon. He had fun while it lasted. The Syracusan said: Here’s something, now: they found it on him, and Glaucus sold it to me. Pause, whispers. Alabaster, eh? Beautiful workmanship. Looks like an ointment-jar. And the helmsman: What was in it? The Syracusan shrugged. Nothing, he said. It was empty. Another voice, cold, sniggering: Maybe Phaon kept his luck in it. They moved away down the quay, swaggering slightly like all seamen ashore, men from an alien element.

  Here on this promontory, high above Leucas and the sea, the morning air strikes fresh. It is clear to the west still, the Ionian waters lie calm out and away over the horizon to distant Sicily, though eastward, above the high mountains of Acarnania, storm-clouds are gathering. As we sailed in, an hour, a life ago, the rising sun shone slantwise across these sheer, towering cliffs, tingeing their natural white a delicate rose-pink. It is two thousand feet from the edge down to that dark, wrinkling surface, where our ship, like some minuscule black insect, lies at anchor still by the stone quayside. A few yards behind me, white and peaceful, stands a small temple to Apollo. It is some grateful worshipper, the inscription tells me—yes, Menexus the son of Cratylus—who, in gratitude for the God’s favours, set up the pleasant stone bench where I sit now and write these words.

  When the captain asked me, in amused perplexity, why I wanted a mule, I said: “I must make an offering to Apollo.” It was not what I intended to say, but it is true, and it is why I am here now. My mind is clear, no doubt remains.

  After that first shock, reaching a nadir of despair, I wrote: “We are Aphrodite’s plaything
s, there it begins and ends: our passions flare or fade at her cold whim, the self is nothing, the will is nothing, our splendid gestures contain the unconscious pathos and irony of a jerking puppet, that mimes—parodies—our human illusions. We laugh at the witless doll, with its all-too-visible strings, and bold, seeming-decisive movements: it is ourselves we see.”

  I, Sappho of Mytilene, daughter of Scamandronymus, deny, irrevocably, the words I have just set down. What I do now, I do by free choice and knowledge. My will is sovereign, and for all acts and decisions in my life I accept, without hesitation, the burden which that liberty imposes. No God, not immortal Aphrodite herself, can act through me if I will it otherwise.

  Now I have set down these last words, I shall seal all I have written, the testament of my life, and leave it as an offering on Apollo’s altar. Let the God and his priests keep it in their protection. Then I shall come back, alone, to this windy headland, while the sun is still bright, while no storm-clouds have yet overshadowed the western sky, and finish my journey as I must. Apollo, Lord of Light, accept my homage; Poseidon, sovereign over all seas and oceans, grant me a gentle passing.

  μνάσασθαί τινά φαιμ᾿ ὕστερον ἀμμέων

  ON SAPPHO

  Since The Laughter of Aphrodite, though a novel, attempts to recreate a famous historical character as faithfully as the evidence at our disposal will allow; and since the evidence is so mutilated and fragmentary that much invention has been necessary, while hardly one statement fails to involve historical detective-work; and since, lastly, the figure of Sappho is one round which curious myth and violent moral prejudice have clung since at least as early as the second half of the fifth century b.c.—for all these reasons it may be desirable to give the reader some idea of how much fact and how much fiction my novel contains.