by Mary Renault
As one finds later, the early speeches are only supposed to show the bottom of love’s ascent. But it was the dream of my boyhood, the knightly bond of Aristogeiton and Harmodios, Achilles and Patroklos, Pylades and Orestes. I remembered how I had lived it with my first lover, the Syracusan actor. He had worn the hero’s mask for me, not in deceit, but, as I had long since understood, at my demand. Poor man, he would far sooner have had a listener for his little troubles—the rival who topped his lines or spoiled his big scene with bits of business, the tour that went broke in the wilds of Thessaly. I looked back at his kindness gratefully; he had been tender with my illusions; I had been lucky, as it mostly goes today. I had long since ceased to believe that the reality existed. Now I knew that it did, though not for me.
Plato and Dion had known it. I had seen proof. Twenty years after that torch was kindled, with all the heat burned out of it, it still gave light. It was bitter to me, though I had hoped nothing for myself; such is man’s nature. However, words and their sound being in my blood, I could not cease to read. I was like someone who, hearing a lyre upon the mountain, must follow it over rocks and thorns. The man wrote like a god. Now he is dead, people begin to say his mother conceived by Apollo. Well, he was mortal. I met him; I know. But I can understand the story.
Aside from all this, it was splendid theater. One itched to put it on a stage. Alkibiades was a bravura role I would have given my ears for. Sokrates seemed to fall between tragedy and comedy (the modern writers are just starting to explore this ground), but the character arrested me, since I knew him mostly from the lampoon in The Clouds. If he was really such a man as Plato makes him, then his death was murder, and Aristophanes’ hands are far from clean. This set me thinking that it was not wonderful if Plato had no time for dramatists, nor much for actors.
When I gave the book back to Axiothea I asked her if this was so. Though it was long before her time, she had heard the tradition of the school: that at Sokrates’ trial Plato had got up to speak for the defense, which, considering the temper of the court and of the government, must have put him in great danger. He had opened with, “Gentlemen, though I am the youngest who ever stood up before you—” planning to say he spoke for the young men Sokrates was accused of having corrupted. But the dikasts all bawled out, “Sit down!” and, being an amateur, he could not make himself heard. I suppose it was hardly surprising that he never got over this; but, as I told Axiothea, it was a real loss to the theater. There was no doubt he had it in him.
I met her often in the park, because I liked her company, and for the sake of what she could tell me about Dion. Not having lost hope of bringing me to philosophy, she introduced me to her friends, one of whom was Speusippos, Plato’s nephew. He was an elegant young man, spare and wiry, with a face like a handsome monkey’s, who usually looked as if he had been up late, sometimes at his books, but sometimes not. In spite of this he missed nothing; Axiothea said he was one of their most brilliant men. He certainly had charming manners, and, though he knew every play worth hearing, always asked my opinion first.
On the other hand there was Xenokrates, a lean fellow with an untrimmed beard and dirty nails, who never moved any of his face but his mouth to talk, so that I often felt like telling him he could buy a better mask for ten drachmas. As coolly as if I had been a deaf post, he maintained to the company that it was casting nets for the wind to try and philosophize an actor, a man, he said, who lent himself to every passion, not to learn the mastery of pain and pleasure, but rather to display their worst excesses for the applause of the ignorant. As well expound chastity in a brothel. No one rebuked him for his rudeness; it was their custom that any proposition must be debated before it was condemned. Perceiving this, I kept my temper; the discussion lasted some time, but Speusippos took my side, and was agreed to have won the day.
They often talked about Dion without any prompting from me. They believed (getting it from Sokrates) that a memory of justice is born in man; and Dion was their favorite illustration.
His father, Hipparinos, had come of the highest blood in Syracuse, and had always spent like a king. What with race horses, palace-building and banquets, he was nearly broke when he backed Dionysios’ rise to power, and got his stake back fivefold. Dionysios must have liked the man as well as valuing him, for he bound their families as close as law allowed, marrying Hipparinos’ sister, Dion’s aunt, and, when she bore a daughter, betrothing the girl to Dion, whom he treated almost as a son.
Sicily, however, is not Greece, whatever the Greeks there tell you. Dionysios, a king in all but name, indulged a king’s whim and took two wives. Aristomache, the sister of Dion, was for friendship and support at home, Doris of Lokri for foreign policy. It might have set the kindred at each other’s throats if he had not been a resourceful man. He avoided disputes about precedence by marrying them both the same day; what’s more, he lay with them both that night, and no one was allowed to see which door he entered first.
It was Doris of Lokri who first bore a son; this was not, it would seem, what he had hoped, for after some time, Aristomache still not conceiving, he had Doris’s mother put to death for casting a barren spell on her. (As I was saying, Hellas stops at the straits.) Doris’ son was a growing lad when Aristomache’s first son was born.
Meantime, young Dion was growing up, all the gods’ darling: as free of the Archon’s house as of his own; so rich he need never ask what anything cost; ranking like a king’s nephew, or rather higher; and with the looks of some youth on a frieze by Pheidias. Courted both for his favor and his person, in that most dissolute of cities, he managed to keep his honor. It left its mark on him; though not vain, he learned aloofness in self-defense, and people called him proud. At sixteen he escaped, with relief, to war. The gods had stinted him of nothing; he was brave as well. Campaigning in Italy, he found time to study with the Pythagoreans. At twenty, with his brilliant youth dawning into a manhood not less splendid, he received news that Plato was their guest. He dashed at once across the straits to offer homage.
By now I had read one or two of Plato’s dialogues, written some time before this happened. There is nearly always, somewhere, a glorious youth, Lysis or Alkibiades or Charmides, as athletic in mind as body, who neglects his jostling suitors to alight by Sokrates, asks all the right questions, modest but keen, and goes off all radiant from the play of minds, sure to return. Here was the dream come true. I could imagine how Plato felt.
Before long they were in Sicily, climbing Mount Etna to view the craters. The pure form of the distant mountain, floating in ether, white as foam; the climb above the orchards among fierce shapes of black lava; the snows bathed in light sighing out dragon’s breath; the fire-fuming stithy plunging unfathomed from the skies to the core of earth—nothing less, I daresay, seemed worthy of the elements released within them.
Meantime, Dion had sent word to Syracuse; and Dionysios, who loved to think his court a Helikon of muses, sent the expected summons.
Young Dion was enraptured. Love and philosophy had opened his eyes; he saw all was not well in Syracuse where things had gone so well for him. But he had learned too that man only sins from ignorance. He must love the good, once seen. And—how not?—everyone must love Plato.
As I heard this tale in the Academy olive grove, I must say I felt for the man. He had been brought up to politics; lived, in forty years, through the bitter end of war and three kinds of misgovernment at home; had seen his own kinsmen, earnest reformers, turn to ruthless despots once they had seized power; had had to beg Sokrates’ life from them; then, having cut himself off from half his family and given up his career, he had been forced to watch, helpless, while his friend who had defied the tyranny with unflinching courage was murdered by the democrats under form of law. Now here was the beloved youth, who believed in him like a god, inviting him to bring the good life to Syracuse. What could he do?
I was told in full, by my friends at the Academy, what Plato and Dionysios said to each other. Even philosoph
ers are human, and I never knew a man, repeating a set-to he had had with anyone, who did not improve it here and there; however, I believe most of it. Plato’s manners were superb and he must have begun with courtesy. But having lived under the Thirty, he could not miss the smell of tyranny where it sweated from the very walls. Meantime, he was made much of. In due course he was asked to do his act, and speak on the Good Life.
I don’t know if Dionysios expected to be used as an exemplar; in Sicily it would not surprise me. It turned out that Plato’s good life was that of just men in a just city, whose governors were chosen for merit without regard to rank, and trained up in temperance and virtue. He had been by now to one or two Sicilian banquets, where guests stuffed with food and soaked in drink finish up with an orgy on the supper couches; this, he made pretty clear, was how not to make life good. He quoted Pythagoras upon Circe’s swine.
Dionysios was not broken-in to free Athenian speech. He lost his head and his temper. Plato was as used to respect as Dionysios was to flattery; there were high words. Dionysios was furious; perhaps he was jealous, too, of Dion’s new allegiance. He lost the argument, but planned to have the last word.
Plato, of course, would leave at once; he only needed a ship, and this Dion had found him. It sailed with sealed orders from the Archon. It must have looked like a choice revenge to have Plato betrayed into slavery by the man to whom Dion had entrusted him. When later he learned that Plato had never doubted Dion for a moment, I daresay he was astounded.
The well-off philosopher who bought Plato would not take back a drachma; he said it had been a privilege. Plato went home and kept quiet from pride; when it got about, he testified to Dion’s innocence. Old Dionysios, who cared what people thought of him, became uneasy; he wrote trying to patch things up, and saying he hoped Plato was not speaking ill of him. Plato replied that he had been too busy to recall the matter.
What Dion thought, when he heard the news, is not recorded. But his life was changed. When he was free to travel, he was already so much a man of the Academy that he seemed rather to have returned there than arrived. He was temperate as Pythagoras; he studied, he met philosophers; but in Sicily, any mission he was trusted with—war, embassy, judgment—was faultlessly discharged. If he departed from his orders for justice’s sake, it was always in the open. No conspirator would have thought of sounding Dion’s loyalty. It was as if, because Plato had not been allowed to stay in Syracuse to defend his own honor, Dion had made his whole life bear witness for his friend. As Axiothea had said, treachery was not in him—nor in Plato, who thought no cause greater than truth, and had lived through revolutions enough in Athens, each sowing hate, perfidy and revenge like dragons’ teeth, to beget the next, each changing one sort of injustice for another. They had all failed, for the simple reason that men had got no better. Hate, he had found, destroys; only love creates; a state can be redeemed only by good men spreading goodness round them, till the lump is leavened, and there are enough just men to govern. All this they told me at the Academy; and I saw sense in it, if it could be got started. If anybody could do it, Dion could.
Soon, however, it was time to forgo these pleasures. They would be casting for the Lenaia, and then rehearsals would begin.
“You must win,” said Axiothea, when I told her this. “It will draw Dionysios towards Athens and away from Sparta. That can’t but be good.”
“Can’t it?” I said. “From what I’ve seen of politics, anything you can think of can go bad; it only needs bad will. I leave all that to the experts. Artists in politics are like the whore’s child at the wedding; we remember things out of season, and get the stick.”
“Take care, Niko, how you shrug off public business. One day it may concern you whether you choose or not.”
“So may the black plague or the marsh fever. Meantime I’ll stick to what I know. The more time Dionysios spends writing plays, the less he’ll have for his tyranny; a day’s no longer for him than any other man. Besides, an artist has to know himself, which can’t do anyone harm. Can it?” I added, remembering the method.
“No, indeed.”
5
HECTOR’S RANSOM WAS PASSED BY THE SELECTORS and booked for the Lenaia, a rich Syracusan resident standing choregos. Everything went as planned, except for one hitch over the casting. Leontis, our sponsor, had drawn third turn to choose his protagonist; and the man before chose me. He said he had seen my work at Delphi. There was a hasty conference, and the other sponsor changed his mind. I don’t know what he got for it, but there was no cheese-paring in that production. When we heard who were doing the masks and costumes, painting the skene and training the chorus, and for how much, even the Persian-backed play at Delphi looked like a fit-up.
Phileas was a chorus-master who, if he had had to stand the chorus upside down, would still have achieved faultless grouping and each syllable crystal clear. I used to sit in front often just for the pleasure of watching him work. You may ask how I felt, playing lead and directing where Aischylos once did it; where Sophokles danced as a chorus boy and, later, had only to walk on as an extra in one of his own plays to bring the audience up standing. Well, the place was my second home. I could not remember a time before I had known it. It was like being the son of a great house, who has come of age. I don’t know when I have been happier.
I had lived with the play by now; I knew what the verse would give the actor, and where it would need heightening or throwing away. Just as I’d feared, Anaxis had got over-keyed and was ranting terribly as Achilles. “My dear,” I said at length, “you were splendid today, but you showed up the lines a little, if you understand me. We must cover for the old man here and there. Don’t forget that to get us to Syracuse, it’s the play that has to win.”
He took this pretty well, but complained that the third actor, Hermippos, was always trying to upset him, which was only too true. This was the man Dion had wanted instead of him. I had agreed he was a sound artist; and so I did not like to object, when Dion put him forward, that it might not answer to have a well-known second man playing third. The fee was big; there was also the golden lure of Syracuse; Hermippos had sunk his pride and accepted, but needed to show us he was somebody in case it was forgotten. This he did not by being pompous, which was not his style, but by playing the fool. He was one of the few actors to do well in both tragedy and comedy, and it was the latter which seemed to have shaped his face, which was round, with a big mouth and a button nose. On stage he behaved perfectly; but he was one of those men who, once having learned their lines, can do anything they like up to the moment when they go on. He would crack jokes with the mechanics, lay bets on races, clown about in masks from other plays, to let us all know he thought as well of himself as ever. For myself, my father taught me to think what I was about, but not to be put off by trifles. I had met Hermippos’ sort before. But Anaxis, who thought it proper never to put his mask on till he had brooded before it like an actor carved on a gravestone, was driven mad and had not the sense to hide it. This was all Hermippos needed to egg him on. It was tiresome having to keep peace, when I wanted my mind on Priam.
Sometimes I got anxious about the role. I had turned down Achilles because it was too easy; I could have got the effects in my sleep. Perhaps I ought to have taken it, and proposed for Priam some good old actor who had done the role in this or that play more times than he could count and could get the effects in his sleep, too. That would have been the safer thing. I had wanted the part because it was something new for me; it was testing; I had thoughts about it; in a word, I had pleased myself. If I was not to break faith with Dion, and throw my own chance away, I had better be good.
I have never been the sort of actor who blusters about while rehearsing Herakles, smolders for Medea, and so on. But this time I swear my bones would ache when it rained, and when I got out of a chair I leaned upon the arms. I read the Iliad through and through, coming back to the passage where Priam tries to keep Hector from the death-fight. You are our last defense,
he says; when you are gone, I shall see our house in ruins, Troy sacked, the women ravished, the children dashed on the stones, before I am cut down to he where I am thrown until my own dogs eat me. A young man fallen on the field, rent with sharp bronze, looks seemly even in his blood; death can lay nothing bare that is not beautiful. But an old man’s corpse flung down, his gray hair and his beard and privates torn by curs, ah, that is the most wretched sight in all mortality. These lines always came into my mind, when I played the scene with Achilles.
Then came the day for the Presentation of the Poets, which always makes the contest seem very near. We went to the Odeion in our festival robes and garlands, to make our bow while the subjects of the plays were given out. Our poet being in Syracuse, some sweet-voiced orator deputized, no doubt a good exchange. I was anxious lest our robes might be overdone—it is, after all, a ceremony, not a performance; one appears as oneself, without a mask, and should dress without hubris. But we were fitted out with sumptuous elegance; if our sponsor did not have good taste, he knew where to buy it.
As Anaxis had foretold, the name of Dionysios got no booing; but Hermippos was greeted with a few laughs, because he had last been seen in comedy. A comedian, in the nature of things, gets more typed and known by sight than a tragedian; and if audiences remember you waving a string of sausages, with a great stuffed phallos bouncing about, it takes more than a gilt wreath to make them forget it. If Hermippos was displeased he did not let it show, but bowed as if to a tribute. He was a stout-hearted man; even when he was tiresome, I could not keep from liking him. I said to Anaxis, later, that it was a good thing he had been there to keep the public sweet.