The Mask of Apollo: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  We were together through most of this year’s spring. He was crowned at the Dionysia, and gave a party which, like all his others, will be talked of through the year. Then he went touring north, to Pella. Nobody nowadays who wishes to be considered at all in theater can leave Pella out for long. Actors are so esteemed there, we even send them on embassies.

  Thettalos enjoyed his tour, and came back with some handsome presents as well as his fee. He told me he felt startled when, being presented to Queen Olympias, he found her wreathed with tame snakes, which stood up and hissed at him; she seemed to have stepped straight out of The Bacchae, but then Pella was never dull. “Besides,” he said, sighing and shaking his head, “I am in love. I have lost my heart forever. I shall never be the same again.”

  I was used to this declaration, and to pulling him out of whatever scrape it meant, and said I hoped this time she was not the wife of a general. I was quite relieved when he told me it was a boy, and asked if he had brought the fair one to Athens. He laughed immoderately, and said when he could get it out, “No, I was afraid of his father.”

  Macedon being as full as it is of powerful brigands, I praised his wisdom. He added, “And still more of his mother, and more than all of him.” I raised my brows and waited. “No,” he said. “You’ll be at Pella next month, and can see him for yourself.”

  “Excellent. Tell me his name.”

  “You will know when you see him. He will be there. He never misses a play.”

  He would tell me no more, but said a little later, “When you go up to Pella, why don’t you put on The Myrmidons?”

  “My dear,” I said, “I think it is time I hung up the mask of Achilles. I’ve left fifty behind, though it is kind of you to forget.”

  “Nonsense. You wear a young mask as well as ever. You know if you were making a fool of yourself I’d be the first to tell you. Do it while you can; you are a beautiful Achilles. Give them something to remember.”

  I was touched, and pleased, for it was true he could not have lied about it. Then I said, “But why The Myrmidons?”

  “Well, it has not been done there for something like ten years; the young generation has never seen it.”

  “Thettalos!” I said. “I believe you are asking me to put on this whole production simply to oblige your boy friend.”

  “My …?” He stared, laughed, then said, “Alas, you flatter my hopes. But it is true he is anxious to see it. I would have done it myself, if I could have raised a script in Pella.”

  “Couldn’t he lend you his?”

  “He’s never had one. It is only that he has heard it follows the Iliad, most of which he knows by heart.”

  “Well,” I said, “that’s something. Your last flame could not read. I might really do it, if it’s so long since they had it there; I should enjoy it myself.”

  “Good. I promise you won’t regret it. But let your third man fly on as Apollo. I can’t spare you, dearest Niko. The crane-man drinks.”

  “I’ve never done it, except that once in Delphi as an offering to the god.” I fell silent, thinking of the war there, the very sanctuary plundered of its gold. Nothing is sacred to our age.

  In due course I took my company to Pella, which gave us its usual eager welcome. By now, however, they are used to actors going to bed early before the play instead of drinking till dawn. The noise downstairs is something one must put up with.

  King Philip has adorned King Archelaos’ theater; everything of the best. The crane-man was sober. Just before I went on, I touched, as I always do, the antique mask of Apollo. I no longer wear it; no one would understand it now; but I take it everywhere, thinking, like Lamprias’ old friend, that it brings me luck. The god looked stern but serene. I thought he said to me, “You must be good today; there are reasons. But don’t fret; I will look after you.” I had been doubting myself before, but it left me as I went on, and I don’t think I was ever better. At the end I thought, I must never do it again, for fear of tempting the gods.

  There was a crowd in the dressing room. I was still in costume, with the dresser combing my mask, when there was a stir about the door, and the people parted, just like extras for a big upstage entrance.

  A boy was standing there, about fourteen or so, with fire-gold hair lying loose on his brow and down his neck. All Macedonians have blue eyes, but not of a blue like that. Half a dozen other lads, about his age or somewhat older, were standing behind him. When I saw that none of them pushed in front, I guessed who he was.

  He came in, sweeping his gaze about the room, and said, “Where is Achilles?”

  It is a big theater; even from the front row, one is a good way off when one takes one’s bow. I said, “Here, my lord.”

  He stood still, looking. His eyes were big, which made them look even bluer. I was sorry that so beautiful a boy should be disappointed; at his age, they always half expect the face to match the mask. I supposed him at a loss for words, till he came nearer and said quietly, “That is most wonderful. There must be a god in your soul.”

  I did not spoil it by telling him I was lucky to have kept my teeth. I said, “I had a good father, sir, to start me off young, and I keep up my practice.”

  “Then you’ve been an actor always, all your life?” When I assented he nodded his head as if this answer satisfied him, and said, “And you always knew.” He asked me one or two questions about technique, which were far from foolish; I could see that he had talked with Thettalos. Presently he looked at the people standing round and said, “You have leave to go.”

  They bowed out. When the lads behind him started to follow, he reached out and caught one by the arm, saying, “No, you stay, Hephaistion.” The tall boy came back with a lightening of all his face, and stood close beside him. He said to me, “The others are the Companions of the Prince; but we two are just Hephaistion and Alexander.”

  “So it was,” I said, smiling at them, “in the tent of Achilles.”

  He nodded; it was a thought he was used to. He came up and touched my flimsy stage armor to see how it was made. On his arm, half covered by his big gold bracelet, was a thick scar one would have thought had been done in battle if he had not been so young. His face was a little longer than the sculptors’ canon, just enough to make the canon look insipid. His skin was clear, with a ruddy, even tan; he was fresh, yet warm. A sweetness came from him; not bath oil, but something of himself, like the scent of a summer meadow. I would have liked to draw him nearer, to feel the glow from him; but I would as soon have touched a flame, or a lion.

  He noted that we had the place to ourselves, and said, “I have something to tell you. You shall be the first to hear. One day, I shall make a sacrifice at Achilles’ tomb. Hephaistion will do it for Patroklos. It is a vow we have made.”

  Good news, I thought, if King Philip means to turn eastward. I said, “That’s in Persia, my lord.”

  “Yes.” He looked serene, like Apollo among the Lapiths. “When we are there, you shall come out and play The Myrmidons.”

  I shook my head, saying, “Even though it is soon, I shall be too old.”

  He looked at me with his head a little sideways, as if reckoning the time. “Perhaps,” he said. “But I want to hear your voice on the plain of Troy. No one else will be the same, now. So if I ask you, you will come?”

  As if he had bidden me to supper across the street, I answered, “Yes, my lord. I will come.”

  “I knew that you would. You understand these things. There is a question I have to ask you.”

  Someone coughed in the doorway. A small, dapper, thin-legged man came in, with the beard of a philosopher. He looked at the boy with dissatisfaction, like a hen that has hatched an eagle chick. The boy looked back, and then at me, as if saying, One must take men as they are, no sense in making a fuss. “Nikeratos,” he said, “let me present my tutor, Aristoteles. Or perhaps you have met in Athens?”

  It was plain he did not recall it, and plainer still that he didn’t like being presented to an a
ctor. One could hardly blame him. I smoothed it over as best I could. He had left the Academy, so someone had told me, in displeasure when Speusippos became its head. I had not known he was here.

  Setting this business briskly aside, the boy said to me, “There is one thing in the Iliad I have never understood; I was hoping the play might explain it. Why didn’t Achilles kill Agamemnon in the very beginning? Then Patroklos and the other heroes need not have died. Have you heard why it was?”

  “Well, Athene counseled prudence. Agamemnon was the greater king. And he was supreme commander.”

  “But what a general! He wasted his men’s lives. He never really led them. He robbed his best officer, to cover a debt he owed himself, and had to beg his pardon. He started a rout with a stupid order, and then couldn’t even get them in hand; he had to let Odysseus do it. Can you think of anything more disgraceful? Supreme commander! He couldn’t have stopped a Thracian cattle raid. I can’t think why Achilles didn’t kill him. He owed it to the Greeks. They knew him. They’d all have followed him, and finished off the war. No one but Agamemnon could have made it last ten years. They should have taken Troy between two winters.”

  Aristoteles fidgeted, trying, I perceived, to get the prince away without telling him to come, in case he might say no and authority be lost. I could see the boy taking it in, not as boys do, but like a man measuring men. I think it amused him, too, but not enough to keep him long from his thought.

  “If Achilles had taken Troy, I doubt he’d have sacked it, not if Patroklos was alive. (If they’d killed him—yes, then!) It was such a waste. The Trojans were fine, brave people. They could have made a great kingdom together. Think where Troy was! And all those ships, never used at all. He could have married one of Priam’s daughters. He would never have stooped to enslave the royal ladies. I am sure of that.” He gazed out past me, seeing it all. The shine from him almost scorched me. He said, speaking the verse well, “Sing, Goddess, the destroying anger of Achilles, Peleus’ son, which brought great sorrows to the Greeks. Many the brave man’s soul it sent to Hades, and flung the flesh of heroes for the gorging of dogs and kites … But it wasn’t his anger. It was his not seeing at first what he had to do.”

  With his long hair, cut as they show it in the archaic statues (Macedon is full of these old customs) and his ardent eyes bluer even than theirs, he was like some kouros in ancient legend, listening for the voice of a lover who is also a god. Aristoteles coughed, and the boy withdrew himself calmly from his vision. He said, “But Achilles must have had some reason. It was so long ago—twelve generations of men, they say. I suppose the real reason has been forgotten.”

  Aristoteles reached out discreetly and plucked Hephaistion’s tunic. The young prince looked round, as if by chance, just in time to catch him at it. “We must be going,” he said, like someone rewarding a dog that has done its trick. He remained, however, standing by me. I thought it was just to tease the man. Then he said, “I have always tried, when I read the Iliad, to give a voice to Achilles, and have only heard my own. He will have your voice now. This is a great gift you have given me.”

  As I was seeking some answer fit for this, he tugged off his arm his great heavy bracelet of Macedonian goldwork, a thrice-coiled snake with ruby eyes and delicately graven scales. He took my hand, and slid it up into place. There was a life in his touch that seemed to kindle all up my arm, with the warmed gold. “This for remembrance,” he said. I thought he spoke of the gift, till he took me by both shoulders and kissed my mouth. Then he put his arm round Hephaistion’s waist, and they went out together, the philosopher following behind.

  This morning, having got back to Athens, I went out to the Academy. No one was about; I chose the quiet time, when everyone is working. The myrtle they planted on Plato’s grave is getting thick and tall, and the marble begins to mellow.

  The grove was green. But I saw in my mind the white slopes of Etna, the titan lava-rocks black on fields of snow, and the snowlight on those blue eyes, enrapt and listening.

  He will wander through the world, like a flame, like a lion, seeking, never finding, never knowing (for he will look always forward, never back) that while he was still a child the thing he seeks slipped from the world, worn out and spent. Like a lion he will hunt for his proper food, and, fasting, make do with what he finds; like a lion he will be sometimes angry. Always he will be loved, never knowing the love he missed.

  No one would fight for Dion, when he gave, as his own soul saw it, his very life for justice. But for this boy they will die, whether he is right or wrong; he need only gaze at them with that blue fire and say, “My friends, I believe in you.” How many of us, like Thettalos, I suppose, and me, will follow this golden daimon, wherever he calls us to show him gods and heroes, kindling our art at his dreams and his dreams at our art, to Troy, to Babylon or the world’s end, to leave our bones in barbarian cities? He need only call.

  I thought how, before I went on at Pella, I had touched the mask for luck, and it seemed that the god had said to me, “Speak for me, Nikeratos. Someone’s soul is listening.” Someone’s always is, I suppose, if one only knew. Plato never forgot it.

  Sitting by the tomb, I took from my arm the golden bracelet. It seldom leaves me; most people put it down to conceit, but not Thettalos, though he laughs at me. The marble was warm with sun and dappled with shade. I laid the gold on it, as if it could speak, as if I laid a hand in a hand.

  All tragedies deal with fated meetings; how else could there be a play? Fate deals its stroke; sorrow is purged, or turned to rejoicing; there is death, or triumph; there has been a meeting, and a change. No one will ever make a tragedy—and that is as well, for one could not bear it—whose grief is that the principals never met.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  NIKERATOS IS AN INVENTED character. The inscriptions which listed the victors in the Athenian dramatic festivals survive only in fragments, few of which relate to the years covered by the story; the name of the leading man in The Ransoming of Hector has not come down to us. Nor is it known who the actors were, or what they did, when the exiled oligarchs of Phigeleia stormed the theater. Both events are related by Diodorus Siculus; so is the story of the chorus-man who brought Dionysios the news of his fatal victory in 368 B.C.

  Thettalos and Theodoros are both named in the victors’ lists, and there are literary references to their gifts and fame. I have inferred the character of Thettalos from a highly dangerous adventure he undertook on behalf of the young Alexander in 338 B.C., four years after this story closes. During one of the recurrent Macedonian family feuds, Alexander, on purpose to foil his father’s dynastic plans, wanted to arrange a marriage contract between himself and the daughter of the satrap of Karia. Thettalos went on this secret mission, in which he was succeeding until Philip found out. The King’s arm was by then a long one, and he had Thettalos brought to him from Corinth in chains, apparently reprieving him later. It seems unlikely that Thettalos could have expected, in the circumstances, payment from the eighteen-year-old prince in proportion to the risks involved. That he took them is informative about both parties.

  Theodoros was one of the Greek theater’s greatest stars. Like all other actors of the day he must have had to satisfy his audiences in male roles; but his fame rested on his tragic heroines. When he was playing Merope before Alexander of Pherai, that bloodthirsty brigand had to leave the theater, ashamed to be seen in tears.

  It is important to remember that the grimacing, flat-faced masks of Tragedy and Comedy which are a cliché of today’s commercial art bear no relation to anything worn on the Greek stage. Masks covered the whole head and included a wig mounted upon cloth, only the front being of rigid material. In Graeco-Roman times, as theaters grew more enormous and taste declined, tragic masks were grotesquely enlarged and stylized, while the actor was padded and raised on high pattens to give size and height. Since his neck could not be extended in proportion, the total effect became progressively uglier and more conventional. But in th
e fifth and fourth centuries masks followed the trend of sculpture, idealizing or enhancing nature; from the few representations that survive, they seem to have had great subtlety, variety and often beauty. The mouths were not, as with late examples, opened in a vast dolorous gape, but parted as if in natural speech.

  No part of Greek life has aroused more scholarly debate than the techniques of the theater. Literary accounts are late and conflicting, contemporary references casual. In a novel one has to choose between rival theories on such matters as the use and form of the machines, and the height of the stage above the orchestra. (I have fisted some books for those who would like to examine the evidence for themselves.) It is certain however that three men sustained all the speaking roles in every tragedy, the extra, if there was one, being almost or wholly mute, and that the actors somehow achieved the amazing versatility required. There is an anecdote about one who became so absorbed in doing his voice exercises that he missed his cue to go on.

  By the start of the third century, actors were highly organized in guilds centered in large cities, through which their tours were arranged. The fourth century must have been a period of transition, with a good deal more left to private enterprise; I have had to conjecture what arrangements actor-managers of the time may have made for themselves. Their use in diplomacy is well attested.

  Throughout the whole classical period, actors, though often dissolute in private life, were held in their work to be performing a religious rite in the service of Dionysos, or any god to whom the performance was dedicated. (For this reason they were exempt from military service.) Plato’s concern about the content of plays should, in fairness, be seen not as a mere censorship of ideas, but more like the wish of an enlightened Christian to drop from the liturgy passages about the wicked gnashing their teeth in flames of eternal torment.

  The deep political disillusion of the time expressed itself intellectually in a search for ideal systems, and historically in the phenomenon of Alexander. To understand it one has only to recall the long miseries of the Peloponnesian War, and to read the speeches of fourth-century politicians. The mean-minded, snobbish and dishonest personalities to which even Demosthenes sank in public controversy have to be read to be believed; and these were not published by enemies, but by the author himself after careful polishing.