by Gary Corby
“Do you know anything about him?” Diotima asked.
“Well, his mother sells vegetables in the agora. Woman has a voice like the Furies on a bad day.”
“How do you know that?”
“She came here once, looking for her son. You should have heard what she had to say to the poor fellow. Apparently he was supposed to be moving boxes of vegetables instead of watching us work. Every man present could hear what she said, and it wasn’t pretty.” He paused. “Mind you, with her projection, if she’d been a man she could have had a career on stage.”
SCENE 26
THE VEGETABLE WOMAN
DIOTIMA AND I went to the agora in search of a woman stall holder who had a voice like the Furies on a bad day.
Unfortunately, that description fit many of those who worked behind the stalls. Haggling with agora shoppers every day wasn’t the kind of job that led to gentle feelings. The fishwives were the worst. They used language that would make a soldier blush. I wondered why. Was it their husbands? Was it all that salt?
Next for rudeness after the fishwives came the farmwives. I supposed it was all the dirt.
There’s no official rule, but people who sold the same things tended to cluster in the same parts of the agora. I wasn’t quite sure how this arrangement had come about, but like so many things it was traditional and thus no one questioned it. One area in the northwest held all the bronzeware stalls. The smell of fish came from another in the southwest, close to the road that leads to Piraeus port town. The east side serviced the many people who passed by along the Panathenaic Way. That was where the sellers of fashionable cloth and the wine sellers and the people selling ready food set themselves. They made a small fortune at inflated prices. Toward the center, behind the fashionable vendors, were the unfashionable vegetables.
Patches of dark clouds had been threatening all day. Now there was a sudden clap of thunder and it poured down, as it had the night before Romanos died. Everyone ran for the cover of roofs and awnings. With all the stalls up there were plenty of sunshades, under which people squeezed.
There was general agreement on the unseasonable weather: Dionysos had deserted us.
“He punishes us for the death at the theater,” someone said.
Luckily no one had recognized me as the man supposed to find the killer to placate the God. If they did, they’d probably blame me for not having solved the crime yet.
“If it’s to be like this throughout spring my crops will be ruined,” a farmer said. “My family will starve.”
“We’ll all starve,” said an optimist.
The storm dripped to a sudden end, to be followed by a burst of sun that did nothing but turn the puddles into muggy steam. It had been the worst spring of my remembrance. Everyone in the agora returned to business as usual.
Diotima and I walked along the two rows of vegetables, now somewhat damp. I imagined anyone who bought the produce now would see it rot faster than it usually did.
In the way of Athens it was mostly the women who managed the stalls while their men worked the fields. There were few men to check. It didn’t take us long to see that the man we were looking for wasn’t there. This reduced us to walking along the rows of vegetable merchants one more time, stopping to talk to each woman who looked old enough to have a grown son.
“Excuse me, do you have a son who likes going to the theater?”
This got us nowhere in the investigation, but a long way in invective.
I had lost hope by the time we came to the second to last woman in the last row, who said, “That’ll be my good-for-nothing troublemaker son Euripides. What’s he done this time?”
Hope returned, and also interest. Did this Euripides have a reputation as a troublemaker?
I told her the truth. I said, “As far as we know, your son has done nothing.”
She snorted. “That’d be right. He’s a lazy bugger.”
I wondered how someone could be both a troublemaker and lazy.
I said, “We merely want to speak with him. May I ask your name, ma’am?”
“Cleito.”
Cleito was larger than life, in the sense that there was twice as much of her in every direction as you would find on any normal woman.
“Why did you say, what’s he done this time?” Diotima asked carefully.
Cleito scowled at Diotima. “Well, it’ll be because he’s the son of that other good-for-nothing lazy troublemaker, my husband Mnesarchus.”
Cleito was angry about something. She shook her cleaver at us, decided against severing our limbs, and instead with a force that could have penetrated armor brought the blade down against an innocent, unsuspecting onion. The onion was stripped of its extra stalk. She tossed the stalk into one of the puddles at her feet and the onion in the basket, ready for sale.
“You want to buy onions?” she asked with a breath that indicated she’d been sampling her wares. “I got some good garlic too,” she added.
“No thank—” I began, until Diotima jabbed me with an elbow. “Er, that is, we’ve been looking forward to some good onions,” I corrected myself. “Diotima loves to cook onions, don’t you dear?”
“I certainly do,” Diotima agreed. “As much as you love to eat them, dear husband.”
I loathed onions. When I’d been in the army, onion and cheese was all they fed us on route marches. The mere smell of onions reminded me of sore feet, cramped calf muscles, and given what usually happened during a forced march, having the runs in both meanings of the word.
If there was any food I never wanted to see again, it was onions.
“How many do you want?” Cleito demanded. “A basket?”
“That would be lovely.”
Cleito looked around, expecting something that she couldn’t see. “Where’s your slave to carry them?” she asked.
“We don’t have a slave.”
She looked from one to the other of us, astonished. “None? You can’t afford a single slave? How poor can you get?”
We weren’t that poor. I just didn’t like having a slave follow me around everywhere. In my line of business it didn’t work.
She said, “In that case you gotta carry this.”
She heaved up the basket with her massive biceps and practically threw it at me. I staggered under the weight.
Diotima paid Cleito the coins. It was a lot of coins, but at least we had enough onions to last us the rest of our lives, plus some useful information.
“Cleito, you haven’t told us where we can find your son?” Diotima said.
“Where he always is, if he isn’t mooning about in that theater.”
“Yes?”
“At home avoiding as much work as possible.”
“Where’s home?” Diotima asked patiently. Getting information from the vegetable woman was like pulling thorns from your feet. Painful. And slow.
“Phyla,” said Cleito. “Our farm is in the deme of Phyla.” She told us where to find their farm, then waved her cleaver at us again. “And if you see the lazy good-for-nothing, tell him his mother expects him to come here to do some real work.”
THE DEME OF Phyla is well to the northeast of the city. It’s true farmland out there, where the success or failure of the harvest decided all our futures for the next year. It was, in short, exactly the sort of place where the god Dionysos would make us suffer if he was offended by the murder at his shrine.
We knocked on the door of the farmhouse. We heard footsteps behind. They grew louder, then stopped. There was a fumbling with the bolt, before the door opened a crack and two worried eyes stared out at us.
“Oh, I thought you might be my mother,” he said. “Or the murderers.”
“Are you Euripides, son of Mnesarchus?” I asked.
“I’m Euripides, son of Cleito, more to the point,” he said.
I knew what he meant. I said as much.
He was suddenly concerned.
“My mother didn’t send you, did she?”
“Your
mother did mention something about doing useful work, but we’ll tell her we couldn’t find you.”
His shoulders relaxed. “Thanks. You’re theater people, aren’t you? I saw you there.”
“That’s what we came to ask you about.”
“The theater? I spend all my spare time there. I’m going to be a writer.”
“I see.” My tone must have told him how difficult I found that to believe.
Euripides sniffed. “I’m sure you’ve heard men say that a hundred times.”
I hadn’t. Normal men talked about sport and women.
“Well, I’m different,” Euripides said. “I study the theater like other men study war.”
I knew only two writers: Aeschylus and Sophocles. Neither of them was anything like Euripides. Aeschylus was a hard man, a veteran soldier who had survived the worst fighting of the Persian Wars. Sophocles was the very image of an Athenian gentleman, one of the rulers of the world. This Euripides was a weedy weakling who hid from his mother. To look at him up close, I realized Euripides and I must be almost exactly the same age.
“When did you complete your army time?” I asked, because every man must serve in the army from the year he turns eighteen until his twentieth birthday.
“Three years ago,” he said. “Why do you ask?”
“I was in then too. I don’t remember you.”
Euripides shrugged. “We’re in different tribes.”
That was true enough. Army units are arranged according to the ten tribes of Athens. Euripides and I could have been on the same route marches and not known it. Yet I was struck by how different our physiques and our situations were. Somehow in the last three years I had progressed without even noticing it. I was a married man with a fine woman and an important job, and a few successes to my name, while Euripides, it seemed to me, was no different to the boy I had been on that first chilly morning when we all stood in line as raw recruits. I understood now why the stage manager had called Euripides a kid.
“I’ve studied every play, memorized every speech,” Euripides said. He was back on the only subject he cared about. His voice rose with excitement. “I know who played what parts in every play that anyone remembers.” He paused. “I guess you like that sort of thing too.”
“No.”
“Every proper man wants to be a writer,” Euripides added, as if there must be something wrong with me.
“What about women?” Diotima asked.
Euripides turned to Diotima. So far he’d ignored her. “Women can’t write,” he said. “Everybody knows that.”
“Oh, I see,” Diotima said in a chill voice. I grabbed her right hand to make sure our witness lived long enough to tell us something useful.
“Did I hear you say that you saw the murderers?” I said, not because I thought he meant it, but to distract Diotima.
“I saw them. I was there,” Euripides said. “I saw them kill him.”
“What? When? How?” I demanded.
“It was late at night. I …” He hesitated. “You won’t tell anyone about this, will you?”
“Of course not,” I lied.
He looked relieved.
“Well, the thing is, I like to act out plays at the theater of Dionysos.”
“Without performing a sacrifice first?” Diotima said, shocked.
“Well, no,” Euripides admitted.
“That’s against the law,” Diotima pointed out. “The theater is a temple.”
“Yes, that’s why I do it late at night, when it’s dark,” he said. He looked from one to the other of us. “I’ve done it before; I knew I wouldn’t get caught.”
“Did you know I’d posted guards there?” I asked.
His eyes widened. “I didn’t see them.”
Either he was completely naïve, or a great actor.
“All right. Go on.”
“With all the actors gone for the day and everyone at parties, I was inspired to go to the theater. I wanted to block out what I would do—stage movements, that sort of thing, you know what I mean—if in case I was asked to present at the Great Dionysia.”
He had about as much chance of that as I had.
“In the dark?” Diotima asked the practical question.
“Well if I did it in daylight, people would notice, wouldn’t they?” Euripides said.
That was true enough.
“I walked in from the audience end. It’s easier that way.”
He meant he was less likely to be seen.
“Right away I saw them, the murderers—”
“Them?” I interrupted. “More than one?”
“Yes.”
“How many?”
“I didn’t count.”
I wanted to demand why not. But Euripides wasn’t the man to notice details. He was too immersed in his own world.
“Are you sure it wasn’t the guards you saw?” I said.
“Not unless the guards killed the actor.”
Our witness must have sensed my annoyance. He said, “There was a whole group. They walked about the stage. The machine arm was already over the stage. They must have moved it before I arrived.”
“If it was dark, how did you see this?”
“They carried small torches.”
“What did they look like?” Diotima asked at once.
“They wore capes with hoods.”
I swore.
Euripides said, “They all looked the same, and they moved about in the dark.”
“Take a guess at their number,” I ordered.
Euripides thought about it. “Ten?” he guessed. “More than five. Less than fifteen.”
I had to hide my shock at the number of killers.
Diotima remained calm. She said, “Very well. Let’s go from the start. You arrived at the theater. What happened then?”
“I sat down to enjoy the show.” To our horrified looks he said, “Well, I didn’t know they were about to kill him!”
“So you watched while they hanged that poor man,” Diotima said in contempt.
“I told you I didn’t know,” Euripides sounded very unhappy indeed. “I thought they were … well … playing around in the theater, like I do. Especially with those identical capes and hoods. They looked more like a chorus than anything.”
“Hmm.” I could understand how someone might make that mistake. “Go on.”
“There was a man in amongst them who wasn’t wearing the cape and hood.”
“Was he standing?” I asked. “Did they carry him?”
“Standing, but it seemed like they propped him up.”
“Go on.”
“They put the rope on him, and the noose around his neck, like I’d seen the players do during the rehearsals. They fussed about him. I thought they were putting the harness on, honest.”
“But they weren’t.”
“No, I realize now they were tying the noose tightly to the holding rope. Three men went behind the skene. Then the machine rose.”
Exactly as Socrates had predicted.
“It all seemed … well … very dramatic.” Euripides shrugged. “He hung limp. Just like in the play. That was the other reason I didn’t realize what was happening: there was no struggle. Hanged men struggle, don’t they?”
“Yes.”
“Well, this one didn’t.”
Romanos must already have been unconscious.
“What happened then?”
“They filed off. They walked straight past me!”
“Why didn’t they see you?” I asked.
“I … uh … that is …” He gulped.
“You hid?” I helped him out.
“There wasn’t anywhere to hide. I got down on all fours and crawled away between the wooden benches.”
“You saw the killers, yet you didn’t challenge them? You ran away?” Diotima said. Her tone told us what she thought of that.
“There were more of them than me,” Euripides said.
“So what?” Diotima said. “A coward migh
t turn away. A brave man would have turned to face the danger.”
“Hmm.” Euripides looked startled, then he stared at Diotima in a rather odd way. He reached for a scrap of papyrus. He wrote something on it.
As he scribbled Euripides tried to excuse his behavior. “When I saw those killers in the dark, I realized that I had a moral obligation to survive. I owe it to my future fans, you see. I have a sacred debt to art to avoid my own death.”
I tried to ignore his rudeness in writing with his head down as he spoke to us.
Diotima snorted. “That’s nonsense. Death is a debt we must all pay,” she said.
“That’s not bad either.” Euripides kept scribbling.
“What are you doing?” Diotima asked.
“Writing down what you just said. I might have a use for it some time.”
“I thought you just said women couldn’t write?”
“Why didn’t you tell anyone that you were a witness?” I demanded.
Euripides finished writing Diotima’s words. He looked up. “You just said it: I’m a witness. How long do you think I’d survive when word got out? Even if I lived, I can’t afford to be banned from the theater for the rest of my life. I have my plays to consider.”
“You haven’t written any,” I pointed out.
“Yes I have!” Euripides practically shouted in his excitement. “I’ve written twenty-seven so far.” Euripides flung open the chest beside him. There, lying in bundles tied with cord, was more papyrus than I’d ever seen outside a state office. It must have cost his mother a small fortune. No wonder she was cranky.
“You’ve submitted these plays to the archon,” I guessed. I recalled Chorilos’s description of desperate men applying to have their plays shown.
Euripides said, “For some reason, whenever I present myself to demand a place in the Great Dionysia, they throw me out.”
“I can’t imagine why.”
“Yes, it’s ridiculous, isn’t it?” Euripides threw his arms up in despair and disgust. “The whole system’s rigged to favor the writers people like best.”
“But isn’t that the idea?”
“Not at the expense of better writers. People like Aeschylus get a chance every time they ask for one, while people like me must struggle.”
“Life is hard, Euripides, then you die.” I waited, but Euripides didn’t move.