by John Gardner
Helots passed in the darkness afterward, down by the river, moving quietly over the snow toward the high white hills where they’ve lived for generations, semi- slaves to Sparta. They passed as quietly as lepers. It must have been some Spartan that died, and his stiff, bullheaded dignity put them to shame. Even a weak, sickly Spartan, a man who’s a failure and criminal by his own code, puts other men to shame. I might assert, and prove by double-talk and winks, that the shame is nonsense—a man might as well be ashamed in the presence of a lion’s gaze or the logical reflections of a striking snake—but the shame’s there just the same. We live by the myths imposed on us, like actors in an endless play. (If you quote me, remember who said it.) In my moments of greater than usual senility I look at myself, befuddled, complex, disloyal to everything I know (my wife abandoned years ago, and my two children, my city, my art, my philosophical ruminations), and I look at my jailer, calm, self-righteous, intransigent as a mountain, and though I know him to be no cleverer than a clothespin, I am ashamed. His shaggy eyebrows are thick with ice, his nose is white, as if someone had just pinched it, his coat goes out in the wind like a sail, but his heart’s indifferent. He does his Spartan duty.
The boy observes this, of course, and despite all I’ve taught him, he’s greatly drawn to it. He sits in the doorway bent over so far that his vertebrae stick out like the spikes on a dragon, and he peeks up through his hair in wonder at the thickness of our jailer’s thighs. I caught him this afternoon flexing the place on his arm where there should be a muscle. “Vanity, vanity!” I cried. I delight, I revel, in his embarrassment. His head goes down, his bony feet and knees come up, his elbows rise as he tries to hide behind his arms. He looks like a bundle of sticks that has come untied. “Ah, Peeker,” I say, “poor misbegotten Peeker!” and touch his hand, which he withdraws. At times I torment him, merely to keep my mind alert—and for his good, of course. “At least you could come over here by the fire. You’ll freeze, sitting there by the door in all that snow.”
“You’re crazy! You’re truly crazy!” says Peeker. “It’s the middle of summer and we’ve got no fire, for which praise God, and you keep babbling about snow!” His eyes roll like a new colt’s and his arms go up over his ears, holding onto his head.
I chuckle wickedly. “Ah well,” I say, feeling generous. “Time is a matter of the greatest perplexity.”
He hides again. “Complexity, you mean.”
I nod, benign as Apollo, benign as Athena. “That too.”
I will win him over eventually. Not in the matter of the weather, perhaps, but to other valuable opinions. I suppose there’s no harm in his obstinate clinging to “facticity,” as Thaletes used to say—though it smacks, to me, of niggardliness and concupiscence, even hubris. He couldn’t turn into a Spartan if he wished. He hasn’t got the chin for it. Helot through and through, my poor disciple, and not even one of the revolutionist crowd: one of those who, instead, endure, blindly imagine that by suffering and piety they will prevail. They too will be bloodied. The word of Apollo’s Watchman. And so eventually he’ll face the fact that he’s ridiculous and become, like me, a Seer. And I’ll pity him, of course; that’s only decent. These are not predictions but griseous facts.
But ah! A Seer without a book! The first of his kind in the world, probably. I had the best book to be seen, once, or one of the best: a pile of scrolls as tall as a man and as wide as a man could stretch his arms, thick with scratches, column on column, parchment on parchment, all the best pages brought down from the six great ancient books, and all the best pages from the last generation—Solon, Thales, Thaletes, and Gorias the Commentator (his book went into his grave with him). I had, in the oldest section of the book, all the names of the true Akhaians and where they came from in the time of the Great Wanderings, back to the age of the Orchomenians, and which of the heroes were guilty of human sacrifice and which were not, and which of them married their sisters and which took enemies’ wives. I had all the names of the tree gods and the animal gods, and the names of the stars, with their characters, and how they became confused with Zeus and Athena and the gods of spirit. I had in that old book the secret of embalming, which not even Homer understood, and the secret of ciphering curves, and the secrets of poisoning. Wherever I traveled in the world—and I traveled plenty for Solon and later Lykourgos—I traded secrets with the wisemen I met, and when I came home I would set it all down carefully, cunningly, hide on hide, adding the new to the old, as did Klinias before me and as Phemios the Doubter did before him; and then I’d lock up the book once more in its secret place. There were men who’d have killed me to get that book, though no one could have read it but myself or a disciple. I wrote in the secret grammata of Klinias, my teacher, and in later years borrowed the alphabets of Prastos and Kalaphos. Nevertheless, I meant it to last forever, safe and sound. (It was hundreds of years old already, I believe, by the time it fell into Klinias’s hands. Philombrotos, who kept it in his palace, valued the book more highly than he did the palace itself, though he couldn’t read a word in it.) But so much for elegy. The book is gone. Fittingly enough, in this age of universal darkness, and plague, and war. And rightly, perhaps. It could answer none of the final questions: a great, sour garbage heap of facts and figures, tricks, devices. Let Peeker start fresh, as I myself, in my old age, have resolved to start fresh. I will scramble his wits to a fine fury and send him on his way. The gods be with us.
3 Peeker:
The old bastard’s crazy as a loon. He’s trying to drive me crazy too, for company. An hour before dawn I hear this terrible crash and I think the room is tumbling down but it’s Agathon falling out of bed. “Ye gods!” he yells, “I’ve been remiss! Remiss!” I’m thinking he means the gods made him fall as a punishment, which I happen to believe, but then I see it isn’t that. He comes crawling over on all fours to shake me—it’s too dark for him to see that I’m awake—and as soon as his breath comes over me like a dead rhinoceros I shrink back against the wall. “Ah ha!” he yells, “so you’re awake! Good boy! It’s time for your education.”
“Fat hell!” I say. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“Count it as yesterday,” he says. “We let yesterday slip by us.” He grabs ahold of my hair and I’ve got no choice. “Now,” he says, “I am going to teach you history.”
“History is irrelevant!” I yell. “Education is meaningless. You can’t piss in the same mud puddle twice!” Sometimes you can beat him by an appeal to principle.
But his mind was made up. “Be still, Peeker. History’s useful, even when it’s false. It strengthens a young man’s character, leads him upward to the knowledge of Joy and Death. Besides, this is a personal history. To reject it would be inhumane. I’m a feeling creature, Peeker—whatever you may think.”
There was a catch in his voice, and, dark as it was, I was aware that he was clutching his heart. Though I know his tricks, I decided to be cautious. “Personal,” I echoed, noncommittal.
“Exactly!” he said. “It’s the story of my loves and hates, and how they made me a Seer.”
He was sounding downright fraught now, and I knew there had to be a catch. At last I saw it. “Loves!” I said. “You mean women, master?” It cracked me up.
“I mean women,” he said, and his tone was so lugubrious I stopped laughing. I thought of the women. They’d all be dead now, suffocated by his breath. I could see that in a way it was sort of sad.
“OK,” I said, though I knew better.
“We’ll begin with Lykourgos. A grisly tale of hate.”
“OK.”
He let go of my hair.
For a long time, once I’d given in, he sat on my bedside not saying a word, just patting my head and thinking, full of woe. The donkeys and chickens started up. It would be morning soon. At last Agathon left my bedside and crawled over to his own bed to find his crutch, then climbed up it and jerked his way over to the cell door to stand looking out, lecturing mostly with his back to me. He pulled thought
fully at his beard as he talked, except when he paused to scratch himself, and sometimes he’d turn to glance at me, crafty, and would laugh as if in rage.
“Peeker, my boy—”
Zeus only knows why he does these things. Here we are in prison, and the whole world’s reeling as if the gods have gone mad—wars on every side—the Spartans moving one by one through the cities of the Perioikoi: Methone has fallen and all its citizens are dead; Pylos, ancient home of Nestor, has been turned to a charred desert; Algonia, Gerenia, Leuktra, and Thalemae are burning. The suicidal Helots are rising in rebellion, terrorizing the outer suburbs; and while the Spartan army pushes out through valleys and plains like a tidal wave, Kyros the Persian stares across at Lakonia from the ashes of Sardis. Agathon knows all this better than I do. The finest Seer in Greece. But he twiddles his fingers, tells frivolous tales of kings nobody remembers. What am I to do?
“Peeker, my boy, they tell a story of Lykourgos’s great-grandfather Soös. In the dead heat of summer he attacked the king of the Klitorians in a dry and stony place, and neither army had water. Near the end of the day the Klitorians asked for a truce and offered a deal: King Soös would give up all he had taken in land and spoils if the two armies, to save themselves, might drink in peace at the nearest spring. After the usual oaths and ratifications, the armies moved to a spring three miles away, and the Klitorians drank while Soös and his Dorian army stood with folded arms and waited. When the Klitorians had drunk their fill, King Soös himself came up to the spring and sprinkled his face without swallowing a drop, then turned on his heel and marched his army off through the dust in scorn of his enemies, relinquishing nothing, since neither he nor his men had drunk their water.
“No legend, this little Spartan tale! I give you my word as Apollo’s Aid, I see its truth in our jailer’s murderous eyes.” He leered and winked (it was daylight now).
He tells about their hero of heroes, Lykourgos.
“Lykourgos, when he was a young man, was king of Sparta for eight months. While he was king it came to light that his sister-in-law, the former queen, who’d been barren heretofore (known to be an insatiable slut, and feebleminded), was pregnant. With characteristic self-righteousness, Lykourgos immediately declared that the kingdom belonged to her issue, provided it were male, and that he himself had regal jurisdiction only as the child’s guardian. Soon after, an overture was made to him by the queen, that she would herself in some way destroy the child, on condition that Lykourgos would marry her. Lykourgos brooded—grinding his teeth together, if I know him—outraged to blisters and boils by the woman’s wickedness.
“I give you the heart of the matter in a vision, Peeker:
Lykourgos stomps in his fourth-floor chamber, black, oh, black
Of beard and heart, pacing; and though he’s a dwarf, a crack
Flies through the marble tiles at every step. He turns,
He kicks the wall. He stomps to the other end and turns
And kicks again. Dark cracks go up and down the halls
Like trees, like lightning upside down. The palace falls,
Lies still in billowing dust! Then, lo! from the towering dump,
Lykourgos rises, scowling, scattering boulders off his hump!
O Lord, let us be fierce and bold
Like him, before we grow too old!
Oh, let us seize our Destinies
As wrestlers seize each other’s knees
And throw ourselves, head over heels,
To where life shocks like mating eels!”
I groaned and hid. He could at least have a little respect for visions. And for dactyls! He was once the most famous poet—or at least second most famous—in Athens. Is nothing sacred to him?
“But that’s something else,” Agathon said. He cleared his throat and drew himself up, struggling to be more formal.
“Lykourgos played the fox. He pretended to accept the woman’s proposal, sending a messenger with thanks and expressions of joy—hah!—but he urged her not to force a miscarriage for fear of impairing her health or endangering her life. He himself, he said, would see to it that when the child was born it should be gotten out of the way. And so the woman came to the time of delivery. As soon as he heard she was in labor, Lykourgos sent people to be on hand and observe all that happened, with orders that if the child was a girl they should give it to the woman, to eat or dandle, whichever she pleased—” He cackled, transported by his imagery, then caught himself and looked angry. “—But if it was a boy, this child of the queen’s, they should bring it to Lykourgos, wherever he was and whatever he might be doing. It came about that when Lykourgos was at supper with the principal magistrates of the city, the queen was delivered of a boy, who was soon after that presented to Lykourgos at his table. Lykourgos took the child in his arms and said to those around him, ‘Men of Sparta, here is a king born unto us!’ So saying, he placed the child in the king’s seat and named him Kharilaus, or ‘Joy of the People.’ All this without a trace of humor or embarrassment, and without a flicker of doubt as to why he behaved as he did or why the queen behaved in the strange way she did. Needless to say (though the story does not report this part), nobody laughed. They were Spartans.”
He shook his head, his lips trembling. He found it all very tragic, but also infuriating. He said:
“And later when, inevitably, the lady turned on Lykourgos in rage, threatening to kill both him and the child, and crown her brother Leonidas, it did not so much as occur to Lykourgos to strike out at the queen mother. (She was of royal blood, and wife to his own dead brother.) He packed his trunks and set out to study the legal systems of the world, avoiding Sparta till his nephew should come to marriageable years and, by having a son, secure the succession. Again, nobody laughed. They followed him to the edge of the city, with deep respect for his virtue. He traveled to Krete, to Asia, to Egypt, to Athens. Wherever he went he stood watching, listening, brooding like angry stone. Most of what he saw (as you could guess, my boy) repelled him. When he found things that might be of use to the new Sparta he had in mind, he was repelled by the admixture of good laws with bad.”
My master was beginning to shake, now, in his indignation.
“He wrote himself notes: A species originates, and a type becomes established and strong in the long struggle with essentially unfavorable conditions. On the other hand, it is known by the experience of breeders that species which receive superabundant nourishment are fertile in prodigies and monstrosities (also in monstrous vices). Consider the hearty eating of peasants, the sparse fare of born aristocrats. His suffering made him a wolf.”
He turned from the doorway with these last words and glared at me like a madman, trembling all over. He’d pulled his beard all out of shape in his agitation. He looked like a tree full of seaweed after a hurricane.
“More wolf than you are, master?” I said. “He he he!” It was a dangerous thing to say, no doubt, but his anger was infectious. Anyway, I can outrun him. I could put the table between us, and if necessary I could brain him with the lamp.
“Yaargh!” he said, or something like that, and took a step toward me. I jumped out of bed and snatched up the cover and held it out like a bullfighter’s cape. His neck swole like an adder’s, but he realized his disadvantage and merely shook his finger, sucking his mouth in.
“Look at you,” I said. “Supposed to be so wise, supposed to be so full of sophrosyne!* You’re like everybody else!”
“Not so!” he roared. “It’s because you broke my jug!”
“It was empty,” I roared back.
His face moved slowly together like a square knot tightening, and he thought about it “That’s true,” he said. His voice cracked. “That’s what I like about you, Peeker. Even in this freezing weather, you care about the Truth.” He smiled and took a step toward me, but I was no fool. I put the table between us.
Agathon sighed and his face came loose again. I thought he would cry. “Ah well,” he said, as usual. The jailer came, just th
en, with two plates of food. It was overcooked cabbage.
“We only eat onions,” I said, to make up with my master.
The jailer said nothing.
We sat down, on opposite sides of the table, and ate.
Agathon was still shaking. “They’re all alike, these Spartans,” he whispered.
I nodded and went on eating.
He smiled politely at the guard, then whispered again, fiercely, “I am not one of these crazy people. I’m Athenian. Fact! A scribe by profession, originally; once chief scribe to the Lawgiver Solon himself. I am educated, civilized to a fault! I conceal it, of course. I’ve done so so long it’s no longer easy to keep in mind. Even with respect to simple things, my mind wanders like a blind man tapping in the grass with his stick. But I manage. Yes! I remind myself by the fact that the rats in my cell—like you, dear Peeker—are not morally offensive to me, though they frighten me, of course—incredibly furry in their brown winter coats.” (“Summer,” I mumbled.) His eyes burned darker, fuliginous. “They materialize as if by witchcraft at the edge of the glow my lamp sends out or near the embers of my paltry hearth, and they come straight at me, hurrying, their shadows sneaking up on them like cats. Their close-set, coal-black idiot eyes never move, not even to blink. A Spartan would kill them at once, without thought, in righteous loathing. ‘For superior men,’ Lykourgos says, ‘evil is not what is bad by some theoretical system, but that which disgusts him as inferior to himself.’ ‘He he ho ha,’ I answer.—But though I have resided in Lakonia a long time, I have not lost all capacity for philosophical objectivity and amusement, especially amusement at my own inferiority. Though I am larger than the rat, and armed (I have my crutch), I climb up on my stool and draw my tattered skirts around my knees and cry, eyes wide, my huge beard shaking, ‘Shoo! Shoo!’—This partly for the jailer, partly for the rat. Only the rat notices, and, being a Spartan rat, he keeps on coming.” (I have never seen my master do any such thing.) “In Athens,” he continued with great feeling, “the rat and I would sit down over black bean soup, with side dishes of olives and nuts, white napkins at our necks, and we’d talk of metaphysics. The rat would perhaps not be good at it, but we Athenians are a cheerful people, infinitely tolerant, always hopeful. Nevertheless, though I joke, Peeker, I’m afraid of them. I’m frightened by everything, worshipful toward everything, like any decent Seer.”