by Jack Lindsay
Callirhoe hadn’t liked towns. She had fretted for her home-farm on the Attic hills. A strong country-frame that yet ailed in Alexandria. And she had grown to resent all literature, had secretly torn up several manuscripts in the rather difficult years before she died. The only thing she’d liked about Egypt was the beer.
Nicias tired of unpicking the web of his dead wife’s character. Such efforts never explained; they only hid the person analysed. Better the forthright verdict of poetry.
He glanced at the quick graceful Greek script:
Since this is so, you Argive Elders here, laugh if you can, and I am glorying...
To glory amid a world of collapsing values: it was hard to be individually righteous in a commercialised society. For it wasn’t only the commentary. Everything else was failing. What would happen to Greek culture when Alexandria fell to Rome, as fall it must. Yet perhaps something would save it—an irruption from Parthia, something. Surely Rome would not swallow the last stronghold of Hellenism, the city of Alexandros the Macedonian? Nicias would gladly have given his life to avert such a fate; but he was an ageing man, whose wife was dead and whose work was getting more and more out of hand, and he had no illusion that his life could effect anything. He could only stand aside, and hope, and utter a prayer before he poured a libation at dinner, on the days that he dined at home; he had no gift for public professions of piety.
He turned over the roll till he found the passage, though he knew it by heart:
O wail, echo the wail. But let the good prevail.
I call on Zeus, whoever Zeus may be.
If thus he wishes to be known,
I call him Zeus obediently.
There is one Zeus who reigns alone.
I’ve searched all life from first to last
and Zeus remains my only stay
if from my mind I’m yet to cast
these shadowy crushing fears away.
Was the Hellenic voice to be silenced and the noble poet to have his vision of high purposes and overcome discords falsified? At least the exposition of discords was to be proved true, down to the innermost fibre of things. But where was the Reconciliation? The Furies were evident enough, rubbing shoulders with one in the street; but where could the driven sinner now find his peace?
Sinners all, Nicias murmured; and wondered wherein he had sinned. The Mother was slain; the Earth was desecrated, But though all the spectators died and the Theatre of the god fell into ruin, yet would the drama go on; and the end would be peaceful in beauty, though the god alone held the stage, dancing in his loneliness, beholding in himself the perfected ritual of his Tragedy.
Let the end come. Let the Romans take Alexandria.
But it would be pleasanter if the commentary were completed, though no one read it, though the flames curled it up before the ink was dry. It would be more fitting.
Nicias rose unhappily, twitching his heavy eyelids. His bushy brows contracted. He stood looking with a frown at the wall, on which a squashed mosquito, long dried, still stuck. Then he went out and knocked at the door of the next room. A drowsy uninterested voice replied.
“Come in.”
He entered. Daphne was seated at her toilet-table with her back turned, nervously shaking a perfume-bottle with narrow neck. Her light-hued hair hung down her back, tied with a red ribbon at the nape, then bunching out. She wore only a chemise picked out with blue florets.
“I thought I heard someone crying,” he said mildly, his eyes ranging around the room and then returning to Daphne without noticing anything. “I’ve thought so several times of late? Or is it the swan-song of the earth?” The measured wail of the choruses, the tragic undertone, the seas that moaned about contaminated shores...He quoted from the Homeric Hymn:
“On earth all the foliage lies, and out of the sunlight a tree and a spirit dies—”
adding beneath his breath “lines 71-72.” He knew that Daphne wouldn’t be able to follow what he was saying, but felt too sorrowful to explain, too pleased at his own secret acceptance of the fated end.
“I don’t know,” she said, and up-ended the bottle, letting the liquid perfume drop on the face of the bronze minor that lay before her on the maple table. The viscous liquid fell in tiny drops. One drop fell, and the liquid retreated, emerged again, welled into a new drop, lengthened tear-wise, fell. She was wasting an expensive perfume; when her father went, she’d rub the soles of her feet with it. Meanwhile she was blotting him out with violet-fumes, clouding herself away.
“Are you happy?” he asked after a while, feeling that perhaps he didn’t show his daughter enough love. She was so unlike her mother. But the young had nothing to think about.
“O yes,” she answered, vaguely, yawning; and patted her mouth. “Now, father dear, do shut the door. I want to change.”
Nicias went out, closing the door carefully, somewhat saddened, yet relieved—as if he’d offered Daphne an affection for which she had no use; his conscience need not fret him.
I may truly say
there came to Troy one day
a Spirit of calm summer seas,
a gentle shrine of luxuries...
he quoted to himself, and felt how entirely inept the quotation was. But that was the kind of daughter he’d like to have. Still, Daphne, for all her faults, was a good girl. Not very interested in literature, but an efficient cook. He was sure that she had many faults, but found himself unable to catalogue any. She’d been naughty a few years ago, with a rouge-pot and other things; but then she’d grown up and behaved herself ever since. Yes, she was a good girl. He forgot all about her again.
To his annoyance he heard someone on the stairs ex-postulating with Simon. Then his annoyance went in part as he recognised the voice.
“Come on up, Olympos,” he said, speaking in deeper tones and assuming the host. “Come on up. You know all the bumps of the stairs, all the danger-spots. Scylla creaking on the second step up from the landing, and the mouse-hole for Charybdis. Come on up.”
Olympos, his brother-in-law, smiled, only half-listening to the time-worn jests and leaning on the rail. He was an older man than Nicias, lean and thin-featured, frailer than his sister had been, though he, many years her senior, had outlived her.
The two men settled down on the couches in the room of Nicias. Olympos was panting slightly and pressed a linen napkin to his mouth, looking round with his quick pale observing eyes. The rafters were hung with cobwebs, stained with smoke; the floor hadn’t been swept for two days; some bread lay on a plate in a shelf let into the wall. Olympos, who was fastidious in his ways, decided that he must have a word apart with his niece, who was degenerating as a house-keeper.
“Any news?” asked Nicias, for whom there was no news in the world except the report of a new emendation in the text of Aischulos; but he knew from of old that Olympos liked to show his inside knowledge of court affairs—a harmless vanity. Nicias felt very tolerant. After all Olympos was much older than he, Nicias.
Olympos watched Nicias pour out some wine. Turpentine and pitch flavoured with wine it would be. Nicias had no palate, no finesse.
Nicias went on in his best bass voice. “Speak up. All friends present. Except Simon, who’s deaf. Now if you doctors were any use, you’d cure a little ailment like deafness...”
Olympos, the court-physician, smiled. But really, these stock family jokes took some stomaching.
“Thank you.” He took the wine. “No news in particular. Except that Cleopatra’s finished all her arrangements for the Red Sea fleet.”
“Does she really mean to set sail on such a mad adventure?” She could set sail in a bath-tub for all that Nicias cared, but he wished to be polite.
“Yes,” said Olympos, pressing the linen napkin to his lips to hide the shudder caused by the raw wine. “She’s a brave woman, you must admit. She’s in touch with Parthia already, and a man’s been sent to India.”
Nicias felt some interest awakening. The plan was a lunatic plagiarism from Alexandros
, and Alexandros was the last character in history for whom he had a full reverence.
“But what will Parthia have to say? Do they want such an ally? and what Indian king will listen?”
He shook his head over the folly of the world. He had always applauded the Seleucid, Attalid and Ptolemaic kingdoms for their patronage of the arts, but they’d been rotted from the start by money-greeds, commercial organistions, slave-production—the forerunners of Rome.
“She says that she can go where Alexandros went.”
“She can’t...”
Words failed him. He was stricken with a sense of tumbling empires, headlong summers, an earth out of control; and it was all so beautiful while it so lasted, so astonishing in its impermanence, haunted by the cries of ravished children. Out of lust had come everything, out of lust and hatred the spine fighting skywards, the beast that refused to crawl. By denying his lust man built, and by the denial destroyed what he built. All passed. I call on Zeus, whoever Zeus may be.
Olympos spread out his thin manicured hands.
“Of course not. But would you hamper her from making a fine end?”
End. That was the word. The end was coming. Cleopatra was only seeking a fitting way out, to sail in a burning ship towards the sunrise, to be drowned among the pearls; as Nicias was seeking to finish his commentary in time. Before the end, when the world died with his breath. For the first time Nicias wished Cleopatra entirely well.
“However, I hope she pays our salaries in full before she goes.”
“It’s her son, Casarion—”
There was a tap at the door and Daphne entered, wearing a white linen dress loosely girt and sweeping the floor.
“I thought I heard who it was.”
She moved across to Olympos with a pretence of queenly gait, lifting her hand; then jumped towards him, and kissed him on the brow, the cheeks, the nose; laughed and stood back.
Nicias was panged with jealousy, then soothed the pang. Perhaps it was his own fault. He took his love for granted, and so she did the same with hers. He gave her so little of his time, having to finish the commentary which he would never finish. Perhaps he worked too hard and multiplied unnecessary difficulties. He would think more about Daphne.
Olympos chuckled and rubbed his thin bony hands together, as if before the fire that warmed his old blood. His eyes almost disappeared in the creases of his silent laughter.
“You’ve been a good girl, I hope?”
“Ever so good. So good that I deserve a present.”
“You’re too old for presents,” said Nicias, wishing that she would leave the room; he had been enjoying the conversation with Olympos more than he realised. Women spoiled conversation, especially young girls.
“There’s no such age,” chuckled Olympos. “You never did understand women, Nicias.”
Nicias coloured, feeling in the remark some obscure criticism of his behaviour as a husband; but Olympos seemed unaware of offence. He chuckled again, and Nicias watched Daphne sitting on his knee and teasing him to learn what present he had in mind. He was no longer jealous; he wanted the pair of them to go away, to leave him alone to his meditations and the priceless manuscript which had been stolen from Athens years ago by a trick. The original script. After all, why should history go on repeating itself? Everything was locked up in the tragic rite, the rhythmic knowledge of Aischulos. Why must people go on suffering instead of listening to the poet?
Yet he remembered again the day when he had rushed to speak to Callirhoe of his freshly imagined project, the day when Daphne had been conceived. Had he any thought that day of the right or wrong, the intelligence or madness, of handing on the family curse, the restless blood that refused to see all action as repetition? He looked at Daphne, so very much alive as she teased Olympos; and tried to think her back to that moment of conception, that moment when she was nothing but the transfigured contact of himself and the woman he loved. How had this stranger, conjured incredibly out of a private flux of warmth, come between him and his wife? Somebody he didn’t know and would never know...
That was something he couldn’t understand, something that not even the chorus of Aischulos could fathom. It was the quick body of his daughter, at which he seemed to be gazing for the first time, rather afraid that he would be noticed. He raised his hand to his brow.
*
As soon as Olympos had gone and her father left for the Museion, Daphne hurried out, careless of the questioning glance of Simon with his flat face and small turned-up nose. Today was the 20th of Athyr in the Egyptian calendar, and she wanted to see the Finding of Osiris. Last year a girl-friend had seen it, and talked of nothing else for weeks on finding that Daphne had stayed at home; but Daphne couldn’t have brought herself to the point of venturing out unless she had had Victor to take her.
She found him loitering at the corner of the Street of the Sema, watching the carriages that drove out for the open-air restaurants and dancing-shows of the outlying suburb, Eleusis. It was a clear day, and only the whiter tinge of the blue sky suggested autumn. With one clasp of hands, one effort to bring the soul of love up into the eyes (producing a yearning stomach-qualm), they started off for the eastern gate, beyond which lay the Cemetery and the poorer-class dwellings of the natives. The cloud of steam and smoke that usually, at this time of the day, hung over the workshop-quarters, belching from food-ovens, vat-dyes, pottery and glass-kilns, smelting-forges, was nowhere to be seen. The clatter and clang of tools, the tap-tap of the metal-beaters, the whirr and clash of the looms, were gone. The area of the embalmers, between the gate and the necropolis, was still heavy with stale spices and gums; but the workers were on holy-day.
For four days the Egyptians had been mourning for Osiris murdered by Set, his brother, the evil one; they had fasted, torn their clothes, and touched neither their own genitals nor those of another. The earth was dying and the sun slackening; the Nile had begun to sink and the winter was coming; the leaves were falling from the trees. The terror of loss was upon the world.
The motley Greek population of Alexandria might con-sider religion as a social function or as an occasional safe-guard of vow and offering; but the Egyptian section remained true to their national convictions, and for years now the rites of even the Greek temples had shown an Egyptianising tendency. Isis was absorbing Aphrodite, the sea-born version of her desirable mother-self vouchsafed to the Greeks
“I heard them wailing,” said Daphne with pride.
“I heard the lions roaring as I passed the Gardens,” replied Victor irreverently. He found himself unable to take much interest. It was all rather similar to the Adonia, one image after another for death and the hope of overcoming death. He felt the arguments of Aristocrates after all to be rather futile, of no relation to two young lovers in a dusty street of sunlight; and these public ceremonies were vaguely disgusting. But he was glad of the excuse of a long walk, and preferred to chat of how he’d managed to get away despite the hostility of Eros. Life was too full, too absorbingly vital in its interplay between him and Daphne, to leave much meaning over for the pageantry of the world, its business or its worships. Nothing was real but the curve of Daphne’s back as she walked, the endless ripples and changes of motion that she made. The variety of things was here, in a single body, not in the scattered tumult.
Even to walk was a subtle matter: so many muscles lifting and pulling, sinews and tendons; the milk-warm flesh fed by its network-river of blood; the knees rising, falling, shapely and bent, then padded with a soft intricacy of shadows; flat-sandalled feet raised, undecided as the weight of the body left them, then gracefully swinging in and on according to the laws of shifting balance, to take the weight of the body again. Beautiful poise of the legs swelling into the rounded strength of thighs, meeting to receive the rich mass of the upper-body so harmoniously imposed...She was beautiful; and in loving her body the lover revalued his own body, finding it strange and yet hauntingly familiar.
He noticed some expensively dre
ssed women who were wearing Tyrrhenian shoes, bedizened things set on high rectangular wooden soles, the latchets plated with gold; and he thought how stiffly they walked, a kind of a strut, and how uglily their feet went, straight ahead, like dead weights, unlike the graceful swing of Daphne. Why did women dress up in such uglifying ways? It wasn’t to please men, not to please Victor anyway. A woman with high-heeled shoes could never get that reposeful curve of the back that Daphne showed. Although Victor couldn’t see it at the moment, he knew it was there; so often had he watched her walk down the street, coming to him or going away.
Who cared if Osiris was murdered and cut up in little bits? He was glad that Daphne used no paint of any kind. He told her so.
She was very serious on the subject.
“It isn’t good for the pores of the skin. I’ve an uncle who’s a doctor and he told me so.” She never mentioned Olympos by name, afraid somehow that, if she did, Victor, also a member of the court, would inadvertently give her away.
“It looks ugly,” said Victor. For some reason a painted woman didn’t remind him of a woman at all, but of a man: somebody like Eros, or the merchant at Antioch, who had painted himself, who had once had roses drawn in red and purple on Victor’s palms and soles...Why should a woman disguise herself to attract, unless she wasn’t a woman at all?
“I’d rather freckle all over.”
“Of course. I’d rather you were all freckled too. Any-thing.”
She stopped in alarm.
“Are there really freckles on my nose?”
“Of course there aren’t.”
She never did her hair up carefully enough, and it was always threatening to come loose. She had stopped so suddenly and thrown her head back as if trying to bring her nose up to the level of her eyes, that the back-knot slipped out of its fillet and she had to hide behind a pillar and arrange it again. Her hands were lifted behind her head, and her raised breasts showed clearly through the thin linen. Her feet were planted apart, firmly on the ground, the wind blowing the skirt tremblingly between, an end of the violet-fillet was caught in her mouth, pushing out the lower-lip.