by Tom Holt
I think we were both nerving ourselves to get out of there when I felt this incredibly sharp pain in my foot and found that I had stepped on a broken sabre-blade and lacerated my right heel. I communicated this fact to Callicrates, who sagged as if someone had just melted his spine with a candle.
‘You idiot,’ he said miserably, ‘what the hell did you want to go and do that for?’
I explained that it wasn’t intentional, and that I must have lost my sandal somewhere; I felt terribly guilty for some reason and very conscious of having picked quite the wrong moment. Gallicrates cut a strip off his cloak and bandaged my foot as best he could; but for all the inventiveness of mankind, there is no known way of bandaging a heel effectively, because it’s such a difficult shape and so there’s nothing to tie the bandage to. So we glanced round to see that nobody was looking, and tugged a right sandal off the body of a dead man lying close by, and tied that firmly to my foot with the strip of cloak. It was better than nothing, but it was profoundly uncomfortable.
‘That settles it,’ said Callicrates, as if he was secretly glad of the excuse, ‘we’d better get going.’
‘Where?’ I asked, like a fool. ‘We’re surely not going to try and get back to Athens.’
‘Well, we aren’t going to Sparta,’ Callicrates snapped, ‘and we’d better not stay here. Look around and see if you can find something to use as a walking stick.’
I found a javelin — I won’t mention where — and Callicrates chopped the head off with his sword. With this to lean on, I was able to hobble along reasonably well, but I won’t pretend that I was relishing the prospect of a ten-hour hike back to the City across the mountains. Callicrates could see that I was worried and even offered to carry me on his back — he would have done it, too, if I’d let him — but that was obviously a stupid idea. What we needed was a horse or a mule or something like that.
‘You’re off your head,’ said Gallicrates when I suggested it. ‘I’m not wasting time combing through the village looking for our mules. And anyway, Philodemus may have taken them back to the City with him.’
‘All right then,’ I said, ‘we’ll buy one.’
Callicrates blinked. ‘In the middle of a massacre you want to stop and buy a mule.’
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘Oh, for God’s sake.’ Callicrates scratched the back of his head, and I could see he was lost for words. ‘Have you got any money on you?’ he asked after a while.
I turned out my purse into my hand. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thirty-two drachmas.’
‘You won’t get much of a mule for thirty-two drachmas.’
I didn’t bother to reply to that. Instead I hoisted myself up on the javelin-shaft and hobbled over to where I could see an old woman standing beside a cart. The cart itself had been smashed — the axle was broken — but there were two mules standing beside it with their harness still on. I looked them over for a while and then said, ‘How much for the little grey one.’
‘You what?’ said the old woman.
‘I want to buy the grey mule,’ I said. ‘How much are you asking?’
The old woman frowned. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to ask my husband.’
Then she seemed to remember something, and she looked down at the cart. What had broken it was being turned over by the cavalry, and under a big clay jar, obviously crushed to death, was an old man’s body.
‘Well,’ said the old woman, pulling herself together, ‘it’s no good asking him, is it? How much are you offering?’
‘Twenty-eight drachmas,’ I replied.
‘Thirty,’ she said.
‘Done with you,’ I answered, and tipped the eight coins into her hand.
‘Hold it,’ she said, ‘you’ve given me too much. There’s thirty-two here.’
I was busily stripping the harness off the mule. ‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I haven’t got anything smaller, I’m afraid.’
She frowned. ‘I might have some change,’ she said, and she opened her mouth and picked out two half-drachmas and an obol. ‘That’s still five obols short,’ she said.
‘Never mind,’ I said, ‘that’ll do.’ I pulled the harness clear and tried to get up on the mule’s back, but I couldn’t make it. Instinctively, I stood on the cart as a mounting-block and there was a sort of creaking noise where the running-board was resting on the dead man’s head. I didn’t look to see the expression on the woman’s face; I just kicked the mule with my good foot and trotted it over to where Callicrates was standing.
‘Ready?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I reckon if we go back the way we came we can go overland to Thria and then on to the City from there without crossing too many roads.’
That sounded eminently sensible to me, and so off we went. We made good time, what with me riding along like a gentleman and Callicrates striding along beside me, and it was comforting to see Parnes away in the distance on our right. After about two hours and a bit we were in country that I knew reasonably well; in fact, we weren’t far from a bit of land that we had been looking at only a day or so before, which belonged to me.
‘Callicrates,’ I said, ‘why don’t we go to the house at Phyle instead of making for Athens? We’d be safe there.’
‘Why?’ said Callicrates.
I thought. ‘I don’t know why,’ I said. ‘Except the Spartans have been raiding for all these years and they’ve never burnt it yet.’
‘They’ve never attacked Eleutherae yet,’ Callicrates replied. ‘Haven’t you had enough of visiting your estates for the time being?’
‘My foot is hurting and I want to go to Phyle,’ I replied. So we went to Phyle, getting there just before nightfall. They were all most surprised to see us, but not half as surprised as we were to see them. They had no idea the Spartans had arrived; they were just considering packing up to go.
‘So they’ve come early this year, have they?’ said the steward. He made the Spartans sound like the frost or locusts.
‘I think we ought to move on tonight,’ Callicrates replied. ‘I don’t imagine the Spartans will be too active in the dark.’
Of course, I protested like anything, but I don’t think my views on matters were being taken too seriously by that stage. The steward hurried off to see to the last of the packing, while Callicrates eased the dead man’s sandal off my foot and put on a new bandage.
Well, there’s nothing to tell about our journey back to the City, except that it seemed very long and unpleasant and that as soon as we got home I tumbled on to a couch by the hearth and went straight to sleep, leaving Callicrates to take the news of the massacre at Eleutherae to the Council. My foot healed up quickly enough, since it was a clean wound and I was young, and a week or so later I was virtually back to normal and playing at being a landlord again. I didn’t even have nightmares, which was a great relief to me, as I need my sleep; but I remember that I got rid of that mule as quickly as I could. In fact, I got forty-five drachmas three obols for it in the Market Square, and I felt dreadful about making a profit on the deal. It wasn’t even a particularly good mule; but the man who bought it from me seemed happy enough. He was probably an idiot too.
It was at about this time that I composed the bulk of what was to be my first Comedy, although it wasn’t presented for some time, as you’ll hear in due course. In fact, between composing it and presenting it to the Archon I changed most of the jokes and completely rethought two of the characters, since the political situation changed and even I couldn’t salvage material that was so hopelessly out of date. Nothing, except possibly fish, goes stale so quickly as topical jokes, and if I hadn’t lost all my hair as a result of the plague I’d probably have torn it all out in exasperation at seeing my funniest jokes floating hopelessly out of my reach just because some fool of a politician fails to get re-elected.
You see, I can’t abide wasting good material, and this is a serious handicap for a Comedian. I think the root of the trouble lies in the way I started off as a
Comic dramatist, composing things on Hymettus among the goats. What I did then was to work up little set pieces and then fit them together to make up a play; which is rather like trying to build one pot from the smashed fragments of six different pots. I know I shouldn’t do it. A proper poet starts off with an idea or a theme and creates characters and situations to illustrate and dramatise his idea. But if you’re a bodger like me, you start with some clever little scene, like a fight between two pastry cooks or a Big Speech, or even just a single very funny joke, and you make up a story to go round it. Mind you, I’m not the only one who does it this way; and at least I don’t repeat myself endlessly, like Aristophanes does.
The idea for this first play of mine was a single joke, and as it happens the joke was cut out as being no longer topical long before the play was produced and I can’t remember it any more (which shows that it can’t have been all that funny). Once I had the Joke, I knew who two of the characters in the play had to be, and after that it just seemed to flow. The next thing I had to think of was a new and startlingly funny costume for the Chorus; if you can do that, then you stand a chance of winning the prize however dreadful the dialogue is. And there’s nothing quite like that tension you get in the Theatre when the audience all lean forward in their seats to catch the first glimpse of the Chorus as it makes its entry. I’ve heard it said that it’s physically impossible for ten thousand people to be absolutely quiet all at the same time, and I suppose that’s right; but the audience in the Theatre come pretty close to dead silence in that crucial moment. And then they either burst out into furious applause or they start muttering, and one way or another the tension is broken.
Well, my Chorus was original, if nothing else, since they were all dressed as trireme warships. So as not to give this away, I called the play simply The General — I don’t hold with the school of thought that says that you ought to whet their appetites by calling the play The Four-Toed Camels or The Two-Headed Satyrs, because all that happens then is that the audience expects too much and will be disappointed when they see what the costume designer has actually managed to come up with.
I started off with a good safe opening scene; two slaves sitting outside their master’s house at sunrise, listening to some peculiar and unexplained noise going on inside. This is scarcely original but it’s the best way to start a play off unless you’re going for a really high-powered opening, since it doesn’t commit you to anything and it doesn’t let the audience know too much about what’s going to happen next. Anyway, the slaves sit there exchanging wisecracks about the domestic problems of prominent statesmen, and meanwhile the noises get louder and more inexplicable. The trick with this, of course, is to know exactly how long you can keep it up without the audience seeing that you’re just doing it to be clever (which is fatal). At last one of the slaves catches sight of the audience out of the corner of his eye and condescends to let them in on the secret.
Their master, he says (like countless Comic slaves before him), is a lunatic. A complete and utter lunatic. What sort of a lunatic? Well, he’s got this idea for ending the war at a stroke and providing for the People for ever, not to mention making himself General for life. He’s going to take the fleet and sail up Olympus, to make the Gods into allies. Since the Athenian fleet has never been defeated, and an oracle has just said that it never will be, even the Gods themselves won’t be able to stop him. Then he’ll confiscate Zeus’ thunderbolt, flatten Sparta, wipe out the Great King, and set himself up as King of Heaven with all the citizens of Athens as his new Pantheon. There is then a short digression about which prominent public figures of the time will replace which Gods, which was probably very funny in its day but which wouldn’t mean a thing to you and doesn’t mean much more to me, after all these years.
The only problem, the slave continues, is that Olympus is quite some way inland. That worried his master for a bit, but he’s found a way round it. He’s going to fit little wheels to each of the ships, like the platform in the Theatre, so that they can be propelled along the ground.
This doesn’t explain the funny noises off-stage, of course, because they aren’t hammering and wheel-fitting noises at all. Oh well, says the slave, we thought you’d be able to work that one out for yourselves, since you’re Athenians and so damned clever about everything. You can’t? Honest? Well, then, you’d better see for yourselves.
Then the stage-hands wheel out the platform with the interior set on it, to show what’s going on inside the house. There we see the hero — originally Pericles; eventually, after many changes, Cleon — being sliced up like bacon by two sorcerers armed with whopping great knives. The sorcerers are in fact the City’s two leading teachers of public speaking — I can’t remember their names any more, I’m afraid — and they’re chopping Cleon up and boiling him in a tanning solution, just as Medea chopped up Aegeus and boiled him to make him young again. But the purpose of this experiment is not to make Cleon young but to transform him from a reasonably honest man into a politician capable of getting his motion passed by Assembly. You can imagine what this scene was like, with the two sorcerers flinging in little turns of phrase and figures of speech like herbs and potions, until Cleon is well and truly tanned.
When they’ve finished and said the magic words Three Obols a Day for Life, out jumps Cleon, in the most grotesque portrait-mask you’ve ever seen, and indicts the two sorcerers for conspiracy to overthrow the democracy by helping him to succeed in justifying the conquest of Heaven. Then he stomps off to the Pnyx, and we have the big debate scene, with his speech. And still the Chorus haven’t come on — the voters in Assembly haven’t said a thing, since they’re just the stage-hands without masks on. Then, as soon as his bill is passed, Cleon claps his hands and out comes the fleet, complete with little wheels, hats shaped like battering-rams and little banks of oars instead of sleeves.
The upshot of all this is that the fleet goes off to Olympus and besieges the Gods, just as we besieged the people of Samos, until they surrender and are sold as slaves to the Savages. Zeus, for instance, is sold to an Egyptian who wants him to make rain, and Aphrodite is bought by a Syrian pimp, while the celebrated poet Euripides turns up to buy some of the strange metaphysical concepts he keeps putting into his Tragedies, only of course they don’t exist anywhere outside his needled brain. Eventually he buys Hermes, since as God of Thieves and the Dead he’ll be able to help Euripides steal even more ideas from his predecessors on the Tragic stage. The play ends with Cleon taking his place on Zeus’ throne, while the fleet is wheeled off to be broken up and sold to the Spartans (in whose pocket Cleon has been all along) for firewood.
From all that, you can see that it was a dialogue-play rather than a chorus-play, and that’s my personal preference. But I was particularly pleased with the Address to the Audience, when the Chorus-leader takes off his mask and comes to the front of the stage and addresses the audience as if he were the author. In it, I begged the citizens of Athens not to allow the campaigns in Sicily (which, as you’ve already guessed, was what the play was all about) to get out of hand; they were simply State piracy, I said; and although there’s nothing wrong with that per se, it was plain stupidity to embark on any ambitious scheme of that sort when we hadn’t dealt with the Spartans on a permanent basis. There would be plenty of time for conquering the universe when Sparta was a heap of rubble, I said; in the meantime, we should get on with the job in hand. I reminded everyone of the great disaster in the days of the celebrated Cimon, when we sent our whole army and fleet off gallivanting round Egypt when we should have been consolidating our gains against the Persians in Ionia, and most of them were wiped out in the marshes. If that happened now, I said, we would inevitably lose the war and the empire, and the Spartans would pull down the Long Walls and leave us an open city.
When I showed the play to Cratinus (for I was still young and naive) he was quite sullen and bad-tempered, which meant that he thought it was good. Never believe what they say about truly great poets always bein
g ready to encourage talented young newcomers; in my experience, the better a poet is the more paranoid he is about competitors. Anyway, I pressed him for a comment of some sort, and he finally admitted that it might conceivably stand a chance of coming second, in a bad year, if everyone else presented farces.
‘Only for God’s sake,’ he said, ‘fix that parabasis. That Sicilian stuff is a load of crap. When you advise against something, make it something that’s likely to be proposed, or you’re wasting your time. Nobody in their right mind would ever seriously consider trying to conquer Sicily.’
I think the Gods must hate sensible people.
CHAPTER SIX
Do you remember Diogenes the offspring of Zeus, who was the son of the Scythian who had an affair with Myrrhine, wife of the pious Euergetes? Well, his eldest son was named Diogenides (‘son of the offspring of Zeus’) who was born on the same day of the same year as me. Everyone knew the true story of his parentage, of course, and so he acquired the nickname of Little Zeus.
I met this remarkable person when I first harvested my own olives at Phyle; he was one of the itinerant day-labourers who came looking for work. You may be surprised that the scion of such a noble line should be reduced to being another man’s employee, which is the worst degradation (barring actual slavery) that a human being can endure; think of what Achilles says in the Iliad, when he renounces glory —I’d rather be alive and a farm labourer, Working for a poor man with only a few acres, Than be King and Kaiser of the glorious Dead.
But Little Zeus had been the victim of one of those family disasters that can ruin the noblest of houses. His father had had seven children, all sons, and none of them had died in childhood.