by Mary Renault
When I knew her first, she dazzled Athens, and great men sent gifts to her door. She accepted their flowers and garlands and their presents of fruit and game, but never took jewels from men she had not slept with. She did not like, she said, to live in debt; and besides, she liked it known who her chosen friends were. Indeed, men would brag even about having been asked to one of her parties, and she charged a good deal for the privilege; but she never let anyone buy himself in if he was boorish or tedious or made jealous scenes. She set her style. It was no wonder she aroused envy in women; and, as I’d learned at Hipparchos’ party, also in men.
As for the contests she’d told me of, they were of various kinds, as the whim took her, or sometimes the need of money. Then, having ensured that no one she disliked was there, she just put herself up to auction. I was never present on such nights. Though well off for a poet, I was poor as her lovers went; and, besides taking thought for my feelings, she liked to see a sporting run. When wealthy rivals were there, the bidding went high, and there might be no such contest again for several months. She spent a great deal of money, having, as she said, very simple tastes. She hated clutter and tawdriness and mess; all she asked were a few good things, standing where she could see them; things that were plain and tasteful, like Egyptian alabaster or heavy gold.
Most of her contests, however, were for her own amusement and her guests’. Some were absurd, and the outcome left quite to chance; I remember she once had a bath brought in full of live fish, which we had to catch one-handed. The prize was always the same; so the contests were very eager. Some of them went by favor, for her poorer lovers. There was a young athlete well known for his straight eye with a javelin, who could hit the bowl just as straight at kottabos, and could have won with both eyes shut. Very soon after I knew her, she held a contest for a song.
She called me last. After the skolions and catches, I gave her something new, a hymn to violet-eyed Aphrodite. Then I was king of the feast, till it broke up soon after. It was understood on such nights that the victor would be waiting to enjoy the prize.
No pleasure comes free. On the night of the javelin-thrower I lay awake; he was a handsome fellow, whom I knew she’d wanted; I guessed he was learning more about the management of his javelin than he’d ever known. Well, it is all gone by. Aphrodite herself could not raise my old spear now, and I can scarcely recall the rage of that wakeful night. Yet her beauty lives for me as clear as ever, her room with its treasures, her laugh, her friendship. Often, still, I find myself thinking, I must tell Lyra that.
We were gossips from the first, exchanging my court news for hers from the city. Between Hippias’ gravity and Hipparchos’ boys, courtesans scarcely passed the doors of either Archon. It had been different, old men said, in Pisistratos’ prime. Only performers and musicians were hired for the suppers now, and it was seldom that even dancing-girls were asked to sit with the guests. So Lyra valued my fresh bits of news, more than some of her costlier presents. I was glad therefore to bring her word that Onomakritos had been exiled, a scandal that shook the court for days.
As guardian of the oracles, he had great consequence with Hippias, who never so much as received a foreign envoy without consulting him first. He and his scrolls had been moved to the temple of Athene, and he was made free of the inner sanctuary as if he were a priest. This suited him well; he was a solemn man. Most of us got used to him; but not the young poet, Lasos of Hermione. It was his nature to dislike pomposity, and he let it show. So, when he had offered to present a dithyramb in honor of Theseus’ victorious return from Crete, and it had been accepted, Onomakritos produced some ancient oracle which said the day should not be honored by any ruler; it was most unlucky, King Aigeus having taken his death-leap then, on seeing his son’s black sail.
The feast was called off, and Lasos was enraged; he had already rehearsed his chorus. He came bursting into my house at breakfast-time, burning with his wrongs. I shared my food and wine with him—he had been too angry to sleep or eat—and said, to calm him, that between us we could surely get the piece put on to celebrate some other deed of Theseus. In respect of Aigeus’ death, the oracle did make a kind of sense.
“What kind of sense?” He ran his fingers through his fair hair; he was a stocky, pink-faced Argive. “It was a lucky day for Theseus, it made him King. And for Athens too, he was a better king than his father. No, it was spite, Simonides. It’s my belief that old fraud makes half his oracles up.”
“I’ve seen the scrolls; they look a hundred years old to me.”
“They look dirty, you mean. From old inscriptions I’ve seen, a few generations back they had a different way of writing, more like Phoenician. They’re hard to read. Not his. He makes them up, I swear.”
It was true that those I’d seen, I’d had no trouble in reading. “All the same,” I said, “you might find yourself well out of it after all. Suppose you sang your dithyramb, and by chance some piece of bad luck did happen. Or Hippias got some notion stuck in his mind, about rulers being put out of the way. Then, if anyone were ever mad enough to try such a thing, your song would have an unhappy echo.” I put this carefully; it was the fruit of Lyra’s gossip.
After some thought, he said I might be right, but if so it was the fault of that old dog-face, and it was time he was shown up. When, on the day he would have sung his dithyramb, we had an untimely hailstorm, I said that Onomakritos did seem to have smelled out an unfavorable day. But I might as well have saved my breath.
I was surprised when he began professing to Hippias a keen interest in ancient oracles; it seemed he had taken on a contest against a master. Most people took it for mere sycophancy, and I got a number of unsought compliments for not having stooped to it. I had my own suspicions, so thought it better to hold my peace, for Lasos’ sake. Onomakritos was far from a bad poet, if rather portentous as a man; and stood well not only with Hippias, but with Hipparchos too, having composed a whole Dionysiac rite for him with action, music and words. If he’d stayed in Athens, I shouldn’t wonder if he would have gone on to tragedy. He was a dangerous enemy; and I feared that Lasos, whom I liked upon the whole, would get the worst of it.
However, Hippias received very well his modest seekings, and at last was so pleased with his new pupil that he took him to the sanctuary to see the oracular scrolls. From there he rushed panting to my house, crying in the doorway, “I knew it, Simonides! I knew it!”
As it happened, I had just got half of a good line, and had had the rest almost in reach before he scattered my thoughts. I felt like telling him to jump off the Rock, but resigned myself to listen.
“You were right, some of those scrolls are old: the Pythians, the Orphics, the Mousaios. I asked to look at them; but no one’s to look at them any more, in case they crumble. Only Onomakritos, and guess why. Because he’s recopying them!”
Keeping my patience, I said that it seemed best, if they were to be read by men to come.
“Copying, he says. Hippias read me some of the Mousaios. Why, the old charlatan’s style is stamped all over it! The very plod of his feet. Listen to this.”
He had a sound memory, did Lasos. (How seldom one finds it now!) He had kept a dozen lines from a single hearing. They were very gnomic, about a lightning-flash from Macedon which would burn the Great King’s throne. I had to admit that, apart from their being nonsense, they did have an Onomakritan sound.
“Oh, some were crazier still. About Atlantis rising in the west, and aspiring to rule the moon, sending up heroes in flying chariots. And a thunderbolt that burned a whole city of men. I can’t give you above two lines of that, but they have his mark. He must be plotting something, just working up to it.”
“So what will you do? Tell Hippias?”
“No use. He has the ear of a cow. And I expect the old scrolls have all been tampered with to match. Never mind. From now on I see my way.” On which he took leave of me, and I tried to make a flying bird from the shed feathers of my shot-down song.
I
had no quarrel of my own with Onomakritos; we had been judges together in one of the Homer contests, and worked on the recension. So I minded my own business. The Isthmian Games came on soon after; and the boxing was won by the son of one of my own tenants, young Glaukos of Karystos. His father found out by chance how strong he was; told him to fit a plowshare to the shaft, and came on him hammering it in with his naked fist. I’d encouraged him to enter; he was a sweet-natured boy whom I’d known from childhood, had never used his strength for bullying, had trained hard for the games, and looked almost godlike in the glow of victory. I made him an ode as a gift; I still think it is one of my best. After all this, Lasos’ feud slipped my mind; and the war was over before I knew it.
The inner shrine of Athene’s temple, before the Medes burned it down, was pretty full, and looked like an ancient lumber-room. It was less than thirty years old; but besides the sacred scrolls, it had all the goddess’s old clothes, discarded when the maidens rerobed her; any number of ritual vessels and emblems for processions; and a great scrap-heap of old iron and bronze, battle-trophies offered in thanksgiving. Nowadays they build treasuries to house such things, but then they were heaped up halfway to the roof, ships’ beaks and shields and helmets and so forth, from the Megarian and Salaminian wars. Behind all this stuff, it seems, Lasos had made himself a lair with a spyhole in it. He had seen Onomakritos visiting the place at daybreak, early enough to need a lamp, and bringing a fire-pot to kindle it. Lasos got up still earlier, feeling his way to his ambush in the dark.
Why do men do such things? Maybe, like dogs, they hate each other’s smell and ask no reason. Lasos had lost nothing much through Onomakritos—in the end his dithyramb had been put on another day—his place at court and his stipend had never been threatened. He had lost some face, which certain men feel more than others. Or, it may be he was just possessed with a love of truth.
Came at last the long-awaited morning. Onomakritos kindled his lamp, and brought forth his own new copy of the Mousaios oracles. He did not unroll the old one. He took a wax tablet from his breast, and began to copy from that.
It was Lasos’ moment. He sprang from his ambush, dislodging a heap of shields which crashed down with a noise like thunder. While Onomakritos sprang up open-mouthed, thinking no doubt that it was an earthquake, Lasos snatched the scroll from his nerveless hand, grabbed up the tablet, and ran straight to Hippias’ house.
The Archon rose early for his devotions. He had just poured the libation when Lasos came rushing up. The ink was still wet on the scroll, indeed had smudged in the scramble; and the wax of the tablet was soft and fresh.
I had thought Hippias a much milder man than his father. I had been wrong. Pisistratos’ hardness was a kind of tool, like a craftsman’s hammer. He used it when the work required, skillfully, and then he put it away. With Hippias, it was a thing you came upon; and so, I think, did the man himself. No Pisistratid ever took kindly to being made a fool of. Lasos told me later that when, for a moment, he wondered if he could have been wrong, it brought him out in a cold sweat.
What proved his case was simply his being alone. No injured seer had come after him to accuse him of impiety. Hippias sent for his brother; they scanned the scroll; went to the sanctuary, untenanted but for an acolyte clearing up the mess (unless you count the goddess, who one assumes had witnessed everything); compared the ancient writing with the new. A messenger, sent to Onomakritos’ house, found him already packing.
Lasos was present when he was brought before the Archons. All he could find to say in his own defense was that these visions had come to him, sent him by some god; and that he wished them to be read by men to come. He was told to be over the Attic border by nightfall; an order he obeyed so fast that he never bade me goodbye.
Lasos came to me to report his triumph; and I asked him what oracle the man had been forging, when he was caught. A prophecy, Lasos said, that the islands off Lemnos would one day sink into the sea.
“What madness,” I said, “to lose a good living for. I’ve sailed by Lemnos, and those islets hardly serve for fishermen to put in overnight. I doubt more than a couple have water. What possessed the man?”
“I can tell you that. He was possessed with a belief that these things would really happen.”
“You mean he really took himself for a prophet?”
“I believe so, now.” He sat back in my guest-chair, quite limp. I called my boy to bring him a cup of wine. He had had his moment; now the flame had sunk in him, leaving him chilled. “Yes, I think that he really thought so. I never saw a man more earnest. He could have fudged up some story; but he never tried. He said he had sought no glory for himself; he’d been content to give Mousaios all the credit; he only wanted his predictions kept safe.”
The wine was good, but he swallowed it down untasted. “He was mad, of course. Not fit to be in charge of anything sacred. What could I do but say so? … Do you know, Simonides, I wish I’d let it alone. I wish I’d never found out.”
Perhaps he wished wisely. I shall never know. While I knew Onomakritos, I never found him base. His songs have lived; even some he made in Persian-held Ionia, when he’d sold himself to the Great King. In the end, he had sold everything: his new master, his old one, and any gift the gods had given him. All to buy him a recall to Athens, though she were enslaved. I wonder what happened to him after Salamis, that false prophet of Xerxes’ victory. And I ask myself even now: if he had stayed in Athens undiscovered, among his forged scrolls, would he have grown so base?
But there, he was mad. I suppose one day we would have found him raving. After all, he never foretold the fate of Samos.
7
I WAS IN KEOS, visiting Philomache for the naming of her third boy. She had borne her second son four or five years before, delighting the heart of the old grandfather Bacchylides, after whom of course he had been named. I had heard great tales of the celebrations, but had had to miss them for the Olympic Games. She had let me know that this was preferring the lesser to the greater. I was resolved not to fail twice.
I found a big baby with red hair and a carrying yell; built on Bacchylides’ pattern, I daresay. Indeed, when I got there, the ancient victor had him naked in his lap, jogging him and admiring his sturdy limbs. “Big babes, tall men,” he said. The infant kicked agreement, and made a puddle in his robe.
The dark elder son stood by, watching in silence. It was clear by now that he would never make the weight for the pankration. Even so, he had been, all his life, the wished-for heir, spoiled by his sisters, sole lord of his small estate. Though his parents were too kind to blow cold towards him, no one had much time for him just then. His throne had passed to another, and he saw it.
I admired the new tyrant, spoke good-luck words and offered gifts. But I was glad that when shopping I had remembered the fallen ruler. I had brought him a little flute, stopped for the Lokrian mode. It was ivory with a gold band; it’s never too soon to learn that music is precious. I saw his parents look sideways; some people think the aulos is no instrument for a gentleman. But he was too young for the lyre, and when he was only three I’d seen him beating time to songs. At all events, he was enraptured, tooted diligently, and was puzzled that he made no music. I took him outside and showed him how to finger it, and in no time he was picking out a tune. After that, he hardly glanced at the usurper’s court.
One thing clouded the feast: Theas had not come. He knew when the birth was due, had sworn to be at the naming, and had a short run to make, no further than from Samos. The sea was calm; but sudden squalls come down from the heights of Mykale, that can wreck a squadron when ships a mile off can barely fill their sails.
However, his ship was descried not long after the naming; and he rode up on a hired mule a little before sunset, when the feasting was still lively. Keos has laws against costly naming-feasts, as against all other extravagance; but Kean wine, if not up to Chian or Lesbian, is very drinkable, and at least there is no law telling guests when to go home.
There was a moment’s dead hush, then a clamor of questions. Most seamen are good at news-telling, from being so often first with it. Theas took a swallow from his wine-cup, and pitched his voice to carry. “He was lured over the strait by Oroites, the Satrap there, who wanted to buy Kambyses’ favor. He sent word over to Samos that Kambyses wanted him dead, and he planned to fly. Well, after all that madman’s killings, it sounded likely enough. So, would Polykrates take him in, if he brought all his wealth along? He had gold enough to make Samos master of the seas, just like old Minos’ Crete. If Polykrates would come across the strait and swear a peace with him, he could see the gold for himself.”
“And he went?” I said. “Had he lost his wits?”
“No, he was too clever by half. He sent an envoy to view the gold. The man was shown chests and chests of it, so he said. Spread thin over pebbles, I daresay, it’s a trick as old as the hills. At any rate, he reported this great hoard; so then Polykrates went.”
“But, if he was satisfied, why not have sent the Persian a safe-conduct under his seal, and a ship to carry him? He claimed he was living in fear. Why should Polykrates go to Sardis?”
“He was taken when he stepped ashore at Ephesos. Don’t ask me why he went; I asked in vain. Of course I met no one from the Palace, where I expect they were all running mad. But they said in the harbor that half his friends followed him down to his galley, begging him to change his mind. Even that daughter of his, crying out like Kassandra and telling her bad-luck dream. He told her to shut her mouth or he’d never get her a husband; and she called on the gods to grant her even that, if he came home safe again. And that was the last they saw of him.”