by Mary Renault
There was nothing on at the theater; but we saw a fit-up in the Agora, a mumming show in the Italian style. As we all know, bawdry in comedy pleases the god, and I don’t think I am prudish; but in Athens, we do keep inside the bounds of blasphemy. Dionysos, being master of the revel, is fair game; but with Zeus Almighty no one jests, and even in a satyr play Apollo is done straight. Here he was being chased with a club by Herakles, and scolding from the roof of his shrine like a treed cat; tempted with cake, he leaned down, got walloped, and fell into a water tub. Worse still, we had Zeus, with a big nose and phallos, scrambling up a ladder to debauch Alkmena; Hermes peeped in at the window after him and told the audience all about it. Even Hermippos, after laughing at the gags at first, finished quite shocked.
But this, disgusting as it was, did not so turn my stomach as a show put on by some Etruscans from up north. They are brown, sloe-eyed men, good dancers and flute-players, whose forebears came, it is said, from Lydia. I don’t know what story they were enacting; the Italians seemed to follow their jargon. All I can tell you is that their faces were quite bare; they were using them to act with.
It is hard to describe how this display affected me. Some barbarian peoples are ashamed to show their bodies, while civilized men take pride in making theirs fit to be seen. But to strip one’s own face to the crowd, as if it were all happening to oneself instead of to Oidipos or Priam—one would need a front of brass to bear it. One knows, as one plays, that behind the mask one’s face is speaking, as it must if one feels at all; but that’s one’s own secret, and the god’s. Anaxis, outraged as a gentleman not less than as an artist, said one would feel like a whore.
Two days later we rounded Cape Herakles, and saw the cloud-white breast of Etna float high above the sea. Standing astern, to get windward of the rowers’ stink which a springlike sun made ranker, we saw the loom of the land appear. The shipmaster, a friend by now, clapped our shoulders and said we should be made men once we got to Syracuse. Apart from Dionysios’ own gifts, which were sure to be magnificent, we could play all the Greek cities along the coast, which had splendid theaters, and pretty well name our terms. This trip should set us up for life.
When he had gone, Anaxis said, “This is his regular run; he must know what he is talking about. As I may have told you, before the war my family had a small estate near Marathon. A very good piece of land—the olives were sold by name in Athens. The man who owns it now lives in town, and farms it with a factor. One never knows; he might sell.”
“What I should like,” said Hermippos, “would be to form my own company and do first-class tours. Three actors, two extras, a good flute-player who can train a chorus. One year, say, Corinth, Epidauros, Delphi, and north to Pella; another, Delos and Ionia. One hears great things of Pergamon. Samos I know; Ephesos—ah, there’s a city! As for Sicily, while we’re here I shall look about. Think of those top-rank companies, like Diphilos’; what really marks them out from ours? Only trimmings—costumes, masks, a good traveling turn-out, fancy-marked mules and some gilding on the cart. Once set up, one can stay there. I’d buy a little house in Corinth, in Theater Street, to come back to between tours. I know just the girl to keep it warm. She’d jump at it; she’s kept now by a paunchy spavined old banker who …” And so on. After a while he said, “And you, Niko? Why so quiet?”
I laughed, saying, “Don’t price the unborn calf.” I was as full of myself as the others, just more superstitious. My father bred it into me. We used to walk tiptoe before a festival, in case we should speak ill-omened words, or frighten the house-snake, or tell an unlucky dream. But nothing was so bad as counting on a win beforehand. I learned that for good the first time, he was so angry. Someone else won, too, and I blamed myself for years.
The wind favored us so well that the rowers shipped oars. At sunup we sighted Syracuse.
As we sailed into the Great Harbor, Anaxis said, “So this is the place that made me an actor.” I knew what he meant. His family had been ruined in the Great War, and here Athens had lost it. We must just about be crossing where the boom had trapped our fleet. Over there—good drained land now—were the swampy flats where they had camped, and got the marsh fever, which I’m told was unknown in Greece when our grandfathers were young. It was all flattish country; even the famous Heights of Epipolai one would call a ridge in Attica. But none of the actors in that old tragedy would have recognized the skene. The upper town was now armored like a dragon, all walls and gatehouses; and it had a dragon’s head. At the end of its neck of causeway, scaly with towers, the island fortress of Ortygia thrust out into the sea, bristling with war engines, and with walls like cliffs. All this was the work of Dionysios. The cost hardly bore thinking of; but then his rapacity was famous all over Greece; it was said, and I started now to believe it, that he taxed his subjects’ incomes as high as twenty percent. I asked the captain how they bore it.
“You would soon know how,” he said, “or rather why, if you’d been, as I have once, into a town the Carthaginians had just been sacking. I thought I’d seen evil, before that day. It’s better, I tell you, not to know that men can do such things. Nothing here makes sense, without the Carthaginians. It was for fear of them, not of the tyrant, that free men worked on these walls like slaves; and the old man has kept power all these years for the same reason he got it: because they’d still sooner have him than the Carthaginians. Remember that when you go ashore, and watch your tongues.”
Presently the theater came in sight, on the footslopes of Epipolai. We craned and stared, and Anaxis said, “We may need extra rehearsals. It has that sound cave.” I agreed, this being well known. It was a theater where the low rake spoiled the acoustics and they had had to put in amplifiers. Some theaters use hollow bronze to throw up the sound, others wooden screens; but here they had worked on a natural cave hard by. The echo chamber had the shape of a pointed ear; some wit had named it Dionysios’ Ear, referring to the ass-ears of King Midas, and it was so known by artists everywhere. I had been warned one needed to practice with it.
Some kind of bustle had started on deck; the sails were down, but the rowers sat idle. Instead of taking us in, the captain was up in the prow with the pilot, shading his brows. When I came up he said, “Are your eyes good, Niko?”
“What’s to see?” I asked.
“Not enough by half. Too quiet; too few people about, and their heads together. No crowd to watch the ship in. Something’s amiss on shore.”
I could see this too. If an odd man came from the upper town, people were stopping him for news; it looks the same anywhere. Then they would huddle in talk again. There was hardly any of the working noise and shouting one expects in a busy port.
The other two looked at me. I said, “Whatever it is, it will take a good deal to stop Dionysios from seeing his play.” Some Sicilian passengers were starting to look uneasy. I said to the captain, “What do you think it is? The plague?”
“No; there would be smoke from the pyres. And in war they would all be busy. This is something political. If we stand well out, someone will come—a merchant for his cargo, or someone wanting a passage. Then we shall know.” A knot of Syracusans came up to him, demanding to disembark, while others argued against it
“By the dog!” said Hermippos. “Always some scare or other before a big performance. Well, whatever it is, they’ll have had time to get over it before the end of rehearsals with the chorus.”
We dropped anchor where we were. The sun grew hot, the sights grew tedious. Some of the passengers chaffered with a fishing boat to take them off, and we saw them on the waterfront, asking for news. It made us fidgety, and we said to each other that we would take the next boat ourselves. Soon we saw one. There was no need to hail it, it was heading for the ship.
Two men scrambled on board, the first clearly a merchant—Greek clothes, Greek barbering, brown skin and hooked nose from some Sikel or Carthaginian strain; Sicily has always been a meeting-place of races. In good Greek, he asked the captain after a
consignment of lapis from Ephesos. The captain sent to the hold for it, and asked what news. You may suppose they could hardly breathe for eavesdroppers.
“No news since yesterday,” said the Syracusan. “No one’s been let through the posterns, and the guards won’t open their mouths. The doctors have been in there three days, and even their own wives can’t get word to them.”
The captain said, “My friend, you’re starting the race at the turn-post. What’s wrong with whom?”
“What, you know nothing?” He looked as if it should have been written on the air.
“Only what I could see. You’re our first news-bringer.”
The man looked about him as if from habit; then, though there were a dozen of us breathing down his neck, “It’s Dionysios. Dying, they say.”
I could feel my mouth open, like the jaws of a landed fish. There was a gasp from Hermippos. Anaxis stood like stone. For longer than any one of us had lived, Dionysios had ruled in Syracuse. I had thought of pretty well every stroke of fate, except this.
Someone asked how long he had been sick. Six days, the merchant said, with fever; then his eyes went past us to the wharfside, where some stir was going on. He ran to the rail, waving at someone. The man on shore lifted his hand, and dropped it palm down. There was no need of an interpreter.
Someone, however, always explains. “The news is out,” said the merchant. “Dead.”
A babble broke out all over the ship, in three or four languages: bleating, barking, clucking; it was like a farm at feeding time. Actors are said to be talkative, but I think we were the only ones dead quiet. Nobody dared speak first. Not that there was anything to say. We put off our hopes in silence, like gorgeous costumes and masks from a failed play; we would not be needing them again. After a while I said, “Well, my dears. That’s the theater.”
Someone moved sharply. It was the merchant, who had turned to stare. He was waiting for his goods, while the other man from the boat talked with the captain. He had a bundle with him, and seemed to want a passage. Breaking in on this, the merchant pointed at us like one who complains that the cargo stinks. “Are those men actors?”
Reminded of our troubles, the captain said we were distinguished artists from Athens, who had been sent to play at Court, but had lost our luck. At this, I saw the other man sidle away, trying to get the captain between him and us. It made me notice him; there was something I half remembered. But the merchant had not done. “Are they,” he said, still pointing, “the actors from the Archon’s play?”
I had had enough before and found this too much. “Where do you think you are?” I asked. “Pricing goats at market? Ask civilly, if you want to know.”
He neither took this up nor begged our pardon; he was too full of his feelings to waste the time. “Well, then, if you care for your own good you’d turn straight round with the ship. How it will end what god can say, this day’s work you did for our city, you and your fellow there?” He jerked his thumb, as it seemed, at the other man. “I’m no politician, no sophist”—he was working right up into the next register—“all I ask is to live in peace. Say what you choose about the Archon, but he built these walls, yes, hitched up his own gown and carried a hod, and made the quality do their stint, too. He built them, and kept them manned, and saw the shipping got through. And now whom are we left with? What now?” He spun round at the second man, who had been creeping off, and gazed back like a snared rabbit. “You! You bad-luck piece, you cadging Athenian mummer with your moneybag up your shirt! May you never get fat on it! I hope it buys you a rope!”
We could make nothing of these Delphic ravings, but the captain, sharp as a nail, said, “What? What’s this man done? Was it murder then? You, there—get off my ship before you’re put overside. Do you think I want the war fleet out after me? Look alive—off!”
The man ran forward, gabbling. With one hand he grasped the hem of the captain’s tunic, with the other the breast of his own, where I suppose he had his money. Invoking every god from Zeus to Serapis, he vowed he had done nothing, nothing, contrary to any law of gods or men. A babe unweaned was not more guiltless. I could not believe, with all this grabbing and swallowing, he could be any sort of actor; and yet something said theater in my mind.
Next moment Hermippos caught my arm. “Niko! I know him now. He was in the chorus; the first line of the antistrophes. That fellow who used to come in half a beat early. Don’t you remember?”
He was right; it had happened as late as the dress rehearsal. “But,” I said, “how in the name of Hekate did he get out here?”
“Let us ask him,” said Anaxis. We all moved forward. The chorus man clutched his brows and shook his head about, like Orestes beset by Furies. But there is a time and place for everything. So I stepped up sharply, and suddenly letting out my Angry Achilles voice, said, “Enough! Tell us the truth.”
Wringing his hands till I thought they would come off, he gasped out, “Oh, Nikeratos! I appeal to you, sir, I ask you, how could I have foreseen it? On my life, by all that’s holy, I meant no harm to anyone. Somebody had to bring Dionysios the news, and get the good-tidings gift; why some hired courier, why not me? I rode up to Corinth, and got a ship through the gulf from there, and saved two days. Who could have thought of its harming artists like yourselves, who were sure of all the honors? Who could have known? Am I a soothsayer? A god?”
“No,” I said. “Not by the look of you. So you shipped ahead of us with the news. What then?”
He showed the whites of his eyes, like a beaten dog. I would have shaken it out of him, but the merchant said, “I can tell you quicker. When the Archon got the news, he paid Wingfoot Hermes here the price of it, and a good price too. Then he began the victory feast. It went on two days and I daresay they would still be at it, but that he took a turn in the gardens to get cool. He wasn’t young; he’d had the marsh fever more than once, and it clings then to one’s bones. He went sick within two hours.”
The chorus man gazed from one to the other of us, his silence giving assent. Hermippos caught Anaxis’ eye, and jerked his head at the water. They rolled back their gowns from their arms.
It was hard to blame them. I had half a mind to it, too. But the wretched man had only done what anyone else might who thought of it; and the sponsor’s courier, no doubt, would still have got here before us with the same effect. Even when I had talked them out of it, they were all for putting him back on shore, saying he carried bad luck enough to sink a squadron. The only man more superstitious than an actor is a sailor, and I saw the captain listening. The chorus man—whose name I can’t recall, though I thought it graven on my mind forever—fell down and clasped my knees. I have seen it done better. Weeping, he cried that his sole hope of life was to get away before the Syracusans started to blame him for the death; otherwise he would be crucified on the walls, and his ghost would haunt us.
It was a good long speech, so I had time to think. I had been pretty late about it. Still, what need of time? A man who gets omens at the hour of fate should not turn back at the door and call it chance.
“Stop grizzling,” I said. “No one can hear himself speak.” He choked it down, and I went on, “Very well, you meant no harm. But you did it. You’ve still come off with your profit, which I’m sure was a good one; while these artists here have lost the chance of their lives. As I see it, the least you can do is to stand them their fares to Athens. In that case, we will ask the captain to let you sail.”
He could not offer fast enough. Anaxis said, “Of course that includes Nikeratos, though he was too much the gentleman to mention it. As protagonist, he has borne the greatest loss.”
“Thank you, my dear,” I said. “But there’s no need, I shan’t be sailing. I’ve a fancy to see Sicily.”
This line, as I had feared it might, stopped the show. Then the big scene started. Even the captain joined in. Had I lost my wits, they asked. What would be doing in the theater? Civil war was the likeliest thing, and then maybe the Carthaginian
s moving in while the walls were weakly manned. Even for a man tired of life, said the captain, there are ways and ways of losing it. To all this I replied that I could look out for myself, and had always wanted to see Syracuse. After a while Hermippos and the captain gave me up; but Anaxis drew me aside.
“Niko, my dear friend.” He grabbed my shoulders, a thing I had never known him do. I saw, surprised, that he really liked me. “Don’t, I beseech you, rush off like a boy into a battle, looking for the one he loves without helm or shield. I said nothing before the others, out of respect for your feelings; but it needed no oracle at Delphi to tell me how things were with you. Think! You have no head for affairs; you know it; you’ll find nothing but trouble; and the man whose fortunes you want to follow, excellent as no doubt he is, won’t be at leisure now to remember that such a man as Nikeratos walks upon the earth. You have no notion what can happen in a city when a tyranny changes hands. Once faction fights begin, and throats are cut in the streets, men don’t wait to ask if you are a stranger in those parts. Come, sail home with us now, and come back later when everything is settled.”
“Don’t fret so, dear boy,” I said. “I toured with Lamprias at nineteen, on the second-class circuit, and came out of that alive. I daresay I can shift in Sicily.”
“How will you even eat?”
“I’ve some prize-money still in hand. Look, the boatman’s shoving off; I must catch him now.” If I had to wait for another, I should have all this two or three times over.