by Tom Holt
‘You know me, Phaedra,’ I said, ‘Eupolis the song-and-dance man. Always good for a laugh, young Eupolis, especially if you kick him hard enough.’
She sat down on the bed and took off the necklace. I think she was going to throw it on the floor, but she just sat there with it in her hands, as if it was a dead bird. ‘Just what do you want from me?’ she said.
‘I don’t know,’ I replied.
‘Well it can’t be much, can it?’ she said. ‘Look at me, will you? I’m an ugly woman with a dead child, and nobody can bear to have me in the house. I can frighten the thieves away for you, but not much else.’
‘You’re all I deserve,’ I said, sitting down beside her. I wanted to take hold of her hand, but I was afraid to. ‘Listen to me for a moment, will you? You know the story of how, when the Gods made the first man, he was so happy and content that they were afraid he wouldn’t need them any more, so they went away and made the first woman? Well, I think the Gods made us marry each other so that we’d each have someone else to hate instead of ourselves. They even gave us both crooked faces, to make sure we never go off with anyone else. That’s why I think—’
‘Oh do shut up,’ said Phaedra, ‘you’re giving me a headache with all your whining.’ She gave me a look that I’ll never forget; contempt and pity and something else, too, which made her look more lovely than ever before. ‘You never know when to stop talking, do you?’
‘Will you have me back then?’ I asked.
‘I don’t remember throwing you out in the first place,’ she said. ‘It was you who went prancing off to Pallene and digging holes in the mountains rather than sleep with your wife. It was you who wouldn’t touch me on our wedding-night. It was you, I seem to remember, who wouldn’t even come to see your own child.’ She shook her head and sighed. ‘Oh, Eupolis, why are you such a complete fool?’
‘Because your father couldn’t get you a proper husband,’ I said. ‘Don’t you remember?’
‘Come here,’ she said softly. ‘No, not like that, with my uncle listening at the door and my face all full of splinters. Just come here.’
The next day, we drove back to the City in Parmenides’ cart, and we quarrelled all the way.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
My son Eutychides (‘son of a lucky man’ — Phaedra’s idea was born just over nine months later, in the year when Alcibiades was elected General for the second time. He was a small, sickly child, although he hadn’t inherited his parents’ idiotic grins, and nobody expected him to survive longer than a week. But he did, and as soon as he looked big enough to last we got him the best nurse money could buy.
Naturally, Phaedra and I quarrelled bitterly over him from the day he was born. I was all for having him brought up in the country, among the goats and the olive trees, as I had been, away from the fads and trends of the City; that way, I said, if later on he wanted to live in Athens and take part in City life, it would be his own choice. But a man who has been brought up in the City is never really at home in the country, I said. He hasn’t learned to use his eyes and ears, and he never values his neighbours properly. But Phaedra said that I could do what I liked, but her son was going to be brought up a Cavalryman, with a proper education in polite society, so that he would one day be a General. We compromised; she was to have her own way, and in return, she wouldn’t shout at me about it. In fact his upbringing was quite different, as you will see.
Now on the one hand we were still theoretically at peace with Sparta; on the other hand we seemed to be at war with everyone else. But it was the sort of war that seemed to do nobody much harm — that is to say, it stayed well outside Attica, so that we were able to farm in peace, while there was plenty of employment for anyone who needed it, particularly for the fleet. There were still the annual State funeral celebrations for the heavy infantrymen who had been killed on active service, and every year I lost another fifteen or twenty men who I had come to consider friends. On the other hand, I inherited another twelve acres, being the nearest surviving heir to some dead cousin or other, which brought me perilously close to the five hundred measure mark at one stage. Most of my wealth comes from plague or war, yet it was all honestly acquired. Perhaps that is why I have never striven after money and property as so many other men do; I have simply continued to live, and the Gods have crowned me with flowers. Yet because I was not born rich, I have never felt the need to become richer still. My attempt to improve the yield of my land was more instinct than anything else. After all, it is not as if I were a Corinthian or lived in Persia, or needed money for a political career; there is not very much that I want that money can buy.
At long last, Athens had put the effects of the plague behind her. The tribute-money from the empire was coming in promptly every year — and each time I went down to read the Tribute lists, I thought of that little shrine in Samos — while our own produce in Attica, though still below pre-war levels, was like an unexpected bonus after all the years of war. Wise men say that the earth needed a good long rest after years of being driven too hard by a population too large for it to sustain, and that the Spartans had provided her with it. Men were talking about returns of fifty gallons of wine an acre in some parts of the country, which had not been heard of since the days of the dictator Pisistratus, and as soon as the new vines, which we were putting in every day to replace the ones cut down by the Spartans, started yielding, we all expected to be as rich as kings. But none of us expected to see the olive trees yield much in our lifetime; it takes nearly a generation for a tree to be of any use in Attica.
That reminds me; to celebrate the birth of my son and to get rid of the man generally, I fulfilled my oath to little Zeus and planted out his land in the best vines. I had been meaning to get around to it ever since the war ended, but there had been a lawsuit about them — I wrote little Zeus some good speeches, the first time I ever tried my hand at such work — and that had dragged on for some time, and then I was busy with a play. Then two of little Zeus’ brothers were killed at sea, and neither of them had children, so there were more lawsuits. Eventually it was all cleared up, and little Zeus was master of nine and a bit acres of good but empty land. I planted out the whole lot, for which the man was embarrassingly grateful, lent him enough money to tide him over until his first vintage, made him promise to come to me if he needed help, and wished him good luck. When I next passed by his holding, I was amazed at the transformation. What had been a useless little drip of a stream coming off the side of the mountain had been hacked into a model irrigation channel, with branches off it right across the estate. Every vine was nicely propped and expertly pruned, and every inch of ground between the trenches had been ploughed for barley. There was not a stone to be seen anywhere, and from behind an ambitious-looking half-built wall I heard an unmistakably loud voice reciting the Entry of the Chorus from Aeschylus’ Persians. I called out, and little Zeus, looking bigger than over, came running over.
‘Well,’ I said, ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen a better vineyard.’
He nodded enthusiastically. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘it’s the best in Attica. And there’s more.’ He pointed away over towards the mountainside. ‘I’ve taken in another acre, waste land that nobody was using.’
I stared. ‘But that’s all bare rock,’ I said.
‘You did it,’ he said. ‘Everything here I learned from what you did in Pallene and Phrearrhos. Whenever I felt myself getting discouraged, or I couldn’t think what to do, I said to myself, What would Eupolis have done? And then it all became clear in my mind.’
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. ‘But you’ve achieved more here than I could ever have done,’ I said. ‘I mean, it’s extraordinary. Where did you get the men from?’
‘Oh no,’ he replied, ‘I did it all myself. I didn’t want to spend more of that money you lent me than I had to, because it’ll be at least a year after my first vintage before I can pay you back, and—’
The thought of him half-killing himself up
the mountain just to pay back what I thought he had understood was a gift was almost more than I could bear. ‘For God’s sake,’ I said, ‘don’t worry about it.’
He smiled beatifically, as if he had seen a God. ‘That’s just like you,’ he said, ‘but it’s a debt of honour. Now, if you’ve got a moment, I’d like your opinion on these trellises. Should they be a finger higher, do you think, or are they too high already?’
I almost expected to find a little shrine of the Blessed Eupolis somewhere about the place, and I was glad to get away.
Little Zeus wasn’t the only man working hard at that time, and with the return of prosperity, men started to think hard thoughts about Sparta. The general opinion was that we as a city, and Nicias in particular, had more or less let them name their own terms. It went deeper than that, of course; deep down, everyone was convinced that Athens would never be safe until Sparta was a heap of rubble and her people were exterminated. But if we were actually to destroy Sparta, so the argument ran, we needed to double or even treble our strength, in terms of ships, money and above all, manpower. We needed to enlarge the empire, and that must be our next priority. There was little room for expansion in the east, although some people spoke grandly of casting the Great King of Persia from his throne and stamping Sparta flat under the heels of Egyptian and Median levies. But that was foolish talk; the King was much too powerful, and besides, what we needed was Greeks. So men’s eyes began to turn west, to the Greek cities of Italy and Sicily, and even further. People started to remember the stories they had heard from their fathers; about the man called Colaeus who was blown off course sailing west, and came back with his ship loaded with silver, or the Golden Islands on the edge of the world, which are so far over that the sun sets in the east. There were more sensible stories, too, about the wealth of the west; not just corn, although the whole region is incomparably fertile and nothing is grown but wheat, but also metals and timber, hides and wool, gold, silver, amber and precious stones —everything that the east has to offer, but guarded only by a few fat Greeks and sub-human savages. From Italy, men were saying, we could conquer the land round Massilia, where it rains so often that men dig ditches not to gain water but to get rid of it; and we could go south, to Carthage and Cyrene, and down into the hot country where there are people blacker even than the Libyans. The Pillars of Heracles were not the end of the world, as our fathers had taught us; the Phoenicians had gone beyond them, and found tin and copper, and huge animals with thick hides suitable for making shields. There was no limit to the opportunities that awaited us, just as soon as we had secured ourselves a base.
It occurred to me that if we could take over so many distant lands without exerting ourselves too much, it was curious to say the least that we had so much trouble in dealing with a little city not two hundred miles away, where they use iron spits instead of money. What appealed to me was the argument I heard from Cleonymus and his friends. They asked who among the Peloponnesian Alliance had the most warships? Corinth, of course. And wasn’t it true that Corinthian ships carried most of the corn imported into the Peloponnese? True indeed. And where did the Corinthians get the corn that they supplied to their allies? Wasn’t it from the golden plains of Sicily, and most particularly from their allies the Syracusans? And didn’t we have allies in Sicily already, good, trustworthy places with plenty of money, who lived in fear of Syracusan aggression? What better pretext would we need for interfering in Sicily than coming to the aid of our own cities there? But there was more; these cities had actually offered to pay for the war out of their bottomless reserves of coined silver. The war would not cost Athens an obol; yet if we were successful (and how could we fail?) not only would we seize the immeasurable wealth of Sicily for ourselves, but we would also cut off Corinth, and through her the Peloponnese, from their main source of imported food. Corinth would be ruined and would have to defect to us, the Peloponnesians would lose their food supplies and their fleet, both together, and with absolute control of the sea and the Isthmus of Corinth in our possession, we could simply starve them to death.
It was not, they went on, as if Sicily was an unknown land to us, for we had fought wars there only a few years ago. True, we had not been successful, but neither had we failed; and the forces we had sent out then were small and poorly equipped, and fools had led them, men like Laches. Some people said that Syracuse was a great city, strong and well armed; but they were living in the past, in the time of the Persian Wars. Then, it was true, the power of the cities of Sicily had been equal to that of all the other Greeks put together, when the dictators Hiero and Gelo had been in control. But they had worn themselves out in wars with the Carthaginians, and the dictators had been deposed and replaced in Syracuse by a ramshackle democracy, who were constantly fighting with the aristocrats for control of the city. With two sides to play off against each other, in the way which we Athenians know better than any other nation in the world, it was highly probable that we could gain control of Syracuse, which was effectively control of Sicily, without having to fight a single battle.
These arguments were put forward at a time when the urge to be doing something was at its height. Without them, I believe the fever would have broken — there would have been some scandal or crisis, and everyone would have forgotten all about the world to the west of Piraeus — but by giving a realistic shape to their hitherto quite nebulous ideas, the propounders of the Sicilian project were able to harness the dreams of the Athenians, just as Aeolus once tied up the Four Winds in a sack.
There were people who opposed the idea, of course, but most of those were lovers of words who oppose things just to provoke an interesting debate. They were not short of arguments, of course; no Athenian ever is. Some of them recalled the Great Armada to Egypt, just after the Persian Wars. That was when we sent the best part of our army and our fleet to help Inaros and Amyrtaeus, the Kings in the Marshes, against the Persians. The motives were almost exactly identical, except that the enemy then was Persia. By seizing Egypt, it was argued then, not only would we become masters of the richest country in the world, and add the mighty Egyptian fleet to our own, but we would also cut off the Persians from their principal source of food. Then, with Egypt as a base, we proposed to overrun the east and take the Great King’s sceptre from his hands, with which to crush our real enemies the Spartans into dust. What happened was that the Armada, both land and sea forces, was wiped out in the biggest disaster ever to befall the Athenians.
But that was different, came the reply. Then, we had taken on the whole of the Persian empire; now, we proposed to deal with one or two cities. Then, we had been fighting a land-locked country, and our fleet had not been much use to us; now, we were sailing against an island. Then, our only allies had been two bandit chieftains and our enemy the best-organised system of government the world has ever seen; now, we had rich and substantial allies in the country we proposed to invade, and our opponents were in a state of virtual civil war. Then, the Persians had the manpower of all Asia to call upon; now, the Sicilians could not hope to receive any assistance from our enemies, since everybody knew that the Spartans never went to war outside Greece. In fact, the superficial resemblances between the Egyptian disaster and the Sicilian project served only to highlight our wonderful prospects of success.
And so on, day after day, wherever two Athenians met together. For we Athenians love to have something to look forward to, and something to discuss; and since everyone enjoyed talking about Sicily so much, they fell in love with the project itself. I have said that we had all been working hard since the end of the war to get our fields and vineyards productive again; well, that was part of it too. Athenians love working hard in short bursts, but the prospect of working hard at the same thing for the rest of their lives fills them with gloom and misery, and they start to consider themselves little better than the slaves of their own land. On the other hand, they had done most of what they could usefully do already — the vines and olives and figs were planted, and it
would be years before they could enjoy the fruits of that work. What they wanted now was some new project, preferably with unlimited scope; something which they could hand on, unfinished, to their grandchildren.
Above all, I believe, it was the complete safety of the enterprise that thrilled them so much. For even if we lost the war, what harm could possibly come of it? After all, the Syracusans were hardly likely to leap aboard their ships and come after us; and even if they did, we always had the City walls to keep us safe. There was no power on earth capable of storming the City, and so long as we had the fleet, no siege could starve us out. As to the cost of the war, hadn’t we been assured that Egesta and Catana and all those other fat, wealthy Sicilian allies would pay for the whole thing? Hadn’t our men been to those cities and been entertained in private houses there, and seen that every vessel, from the mixing-bowl to the chamber pot, was made of solid silver? Hadn’t they been shown the floors of the temple treasuries, knee-deep in four-drachma pieces?
Now the trouble with being a Comic poet is that you see everything in terms of individual people; if you don’t like an idea, you look for some person, some notable public face, to attack. And then you don’t attack his policies or his public work — that would make terribly dreary poetry. No, you go for him personally, and in particular his sex life, for it seems to be a generally held belief that what a man does in bed is a perfect paradigm of all his other activities. Now it so happened that the man behind the Sicilian project did all sorts of funny things in bed with all sorts of peculiar people, and so I started to feel instinctively suspicious.
The whole thing, you see, had been Alcibiades’ idea. The best Alcibiades story I know, as it happens, has nothing to do with his sexual activities; if I find time, I shall tell you some Stories about those later. No, this story originated as a Pericles joke, and I got it from Cratinus, so you may feel quite free to laugh if you so wish.