The Wreckage of Agathon

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by John Gardner


  Our plates were empty. I gave them back to the jailer and he went away. Agathon watched me, then belched once, softly for a Seer, and went to sleep. His snores drowned out the irenic buzzing of the flies.

  If ever I have to become a Seer, I mean to be a gentleman about it.

  * From σαóøρων, opposite of σλοóøρων. ED.

  4 Agathon:

  Ah, Peeker, Peeker, poor miserable wretch! He has no understanding of anything! He sits across the table from me, writing and writing—his opinions, I trust, or his youthful memoirs—and he hasn’t an inkling that he’s falling into their trap. Does he ever inquire of himself or of me why the ephors give us parchment? No! They come, look us over, and leave a great gray stack of it—it’s worth a small fortune—and as soon as I hand him his third of the stack (he writes smaller than I) he begins to spill out his opinions like logs down a flume. I should stop him, if I were an ethical person and cared for my fellowman. But alas, I am a sensualist who takes frivolous delight in the way he leans forward and clamps his tongue between his teeth and crosses his eyes, preserving his soul in fustian. When I try to peek at what he’s writing, he shades the parchment, blocking my view, with a hand as big as a shovel. Well, I am resigned to it. As I watch each new day’s prisoners brought in, lifting their feet unnaturally as they labor through the drifted snow, or when I hear the roars of an execution, I think back fondly to my onion patch and the beautiful women who made me what I am. At times the thought of their gentleness, fitful and dubious as it was, awakens my soul to civilized guilt, and I do what I can to distract him from self-destruction.

  “Time for lessons!” I say. “All play no work makes Jackie a jerk!”

  His shoulders shrink inward, his head droops like a frond. “For the love of God, master, take pity!”

  I fulminate. That too takes up time, after all: delays his pen. When his eyes glaze and I know he’s no longer hearing my rant, I descend to pedagogical harassment. “Young man, do you want to be a Seer or a stupid-shit pig?” His choice is predictable and not as amusing as he thinks. “We will speak of Lykourgos,” I tell him. He puts down his pen and the blood drains out of his face. I tell him with fulgent rhetoric things of no interest, the nature of his doom.

  “Lykourgos was missed, during his time away from Sparta. There had been for a long time an absolute abyss between the rulers and the common people, and each watched the other with hostility. The Spartans, you know, are descendants of old-time mountaineers—tough, rugged, stubborn men, Dorians and various breeds of Northmen, a black- and red-headed mixed rabble of cattle raiders by nature impatient of reasonable law or of complexity in any form.” I get up from the table and hobble around on my crutch as I speak, to keep my mind off women. Occasionally I pause behind his chair. He broke my jug.

  “To make myself clear,” I say, “I must stoop to fact.”

  He sighs, but I am a tempest. I tell him how it was.

  When the Mykenaians were weak from the last of their booty hunts—the invasion of Troy—the Dorians and newer waves of Northmen, who’d been watching all along, perched in the mountains like starlings on a clothesline, swooped down to attack them. By animal courage and stupidity and luck they wiped out the majestic old civilization (only cultural islands survived, refuges for the disposessed, such as Athens), and they occupied—along with the Helots, who seem to have been there since time began, everybody’s slaves—what was left of the ancient cities. They lived as squatters in the burnt-out palaces, like goats nibbling at the cracks in old altars, and they made no effort to rebuild. Record-keeping vanished, the art of writing disappeared, handicrafts decayed, old gods became confused with new ones. Finely wrought weapons of bronze gave way to clumsy iron. Burial in magnificent tombs gave way to quick cremation. “All things were Chaos,” Anaxagoras says, “when Mind arose and made Order.” He might have added, All things were Mind when the Dorians came down and made Chaos. (But I veer from my matter.)

  Even so, a Dorian aristocracy developed, a thing impossible back in the mountains, and it modeled itself, as well as it knew how, on the one it had overthrown. The process took a long time, but old ways hang on, especially among Northmen. The commoners scorned this froufrou new class, bringing the state close to anarchy; and the ruling class scorned the commoners as insolent. Both the commoners and the two kings of the diarchy sent again and again for Lykourgos, but he wouldn’t return until Kharilaus had engendered an heir. Lykourgos was in Athens when word came that finally it was done. He started for home the same day, set himself up in the two kings’ palace like a statue of its original owner, and began his fierce reforms.

  His aim was total reconstruction. He compared himself to the wise physician who brings all the humors to the brink of exhaustion and then, by surgery, diet, and exercise, rebuilds the sick man’s constitution from scratch. He went first to the oracle at Delphi to collect his set of laws from the god himself. (This was always a favorite trick of his, a thing not to be inquired into too narrowly.) When he returned to Sparta he broke his plans—or some of them—to his closest friends and then, little by little, to others. He organized a police force on the Egyptian model, one which could operate swiftly, secretly, and without any bothersome scrutiny by the courts. His opposition soon became more flexible of disposition, and the kings, Kharilaus and Arkhelaus, came to his side. He established a senate of twenty-eight men—all hard-line old military leaders—and denied the people any right but ratification or temporary rejection of what they might decide. Then he began his more daring innovations.

  He outlawed wealth. First, he redistributed the land, splitting all Lakonia into thirty thousand equal shares and Sparta itself into nine thousand, with a provision for yearly review and redistribution. Of those who fought him, some stood trial for treason, some merely vanished. Nevertheless, men still had money, and Lykourgos knew from his travels in Asia, especially Sardis, that treasure hoards, like land, mean inequality. Finding that it would be dangerous to go about seizing men’s gold openly, Lykourgos took another course and defeated greed by a stratagem: he commanded that all gold and silver coin should be called in to be reminted and standardized. When the money came in—you remember the story—he returned it not in gold or silver but in iron bars, the coin of the ancients, before the Asian influence. A great weight and quantity of the stuff was of very little worth: to lay up, say, three thousand dollars’ worth required at least a large shed. Thus he closed out several vices at once. Who would rob a man of such coin? Who would even accept as a bribe a thing by no means easy to hide, a thing not a great credit to possess or of any worth cut in pieces? Moreover, it was ugly. When it was red hot they quenched it in vinegar and spoiled it: it couldn’t be worked.

  The trick had further implications. It ended trade. Foreign nations—“inferior breeds,” Lykourgos called them—scorned the coin of the Spartans and would not sell to Lakonia. No more fat merchants came with shiploads of trinkets or finely carved furniture or spices. No more rhetoric masters, fortune-tellers, whores, engravers, or jewelers cast their wide, comfortable shadows on Spartan soil. As for local arts, all but the useful were outlawed. Spartans made bedsteads, chairs, tables, golden cups. In time, for reasons I could never make clear to Lykourgos, they made nothing but cups—neurotically elegant—and left all other work to the Helots—in effect, though not technically, their slaves. An incredible thing, when you muse on it. The Spartans stood over the land like gods, grandly posing with their round shields and swords, while a more populous race which they judged inferior—a civilization as separate from theirs as the woodbine is from the elm tree—provided the bulk of Lakonia’s blacksmiths, shipwrights, masons, bakers, cooks, woodcutters, messengers, longshoremen, saddlers, shepherds, dry cleaners, doctors, foresters, carpenters, bowmakers, weavers, unguent boilers, ditch diggers, even wine inspectors! Any fool should have guessed what trouble it would lead to! But the Spartans were clever, intuitively. They developed an almost unconscious theory that the one thing Helots were incapabl
e of was fighting, even to prevent, say, the rape of their wives or the murder of their children. And the Helots, who’d been losing for centuries, believed it I don’t credit Lykourgos himself with inventing this ingenious weapon, but no doubt he knew how to wield it.

  Then came the masterstroke that almost killed him. He destroyed the last refuge of gentility—fine manners. He ordered, backed by a Rhetra from the god, that all Spartan men should eat in common, of the same bread and meat and of kinds officially specified, and should not spend their fives at home, lying on costly couches at splendid tables, delivering themselves into the hands of their tradesmen and cooks, fattening themselves in corners like hogs, destroying both their bodies and their minds. No man henceforth could indulge in the Sardinian luxury of daintiness or effeminacy. The princeling who could not stand the chomping and slobbering of honest warriors must sicken on it and die.

  When the law was announced, all who opposed Lykourgos gathered in the central square of the city to wait for him. (The sun beat straight down. The three- story stone buildings of the government, with those wide sterile columns and tier on tier of marble steps, trapped the heat inside the square like oven walls. Hawks circled in the sky overhead as if riding the crests of the heat waves. At the crowd’s edges, Helots watched, loaded like animals, and hobbled donkeys waited with their eyes shut.) When Lykourgos appeared, dark and morose as a volcano, as always, they met him with no overt sign of hostility, drawing him into their snare. He came toward them, and when he had approached too near for retreat they rushed him, hurling the stones and sticks they’d hidden until then behind their backs. It was holy, and I was there, I witnessed it! He stood his ground for a moment, like a man undecided as to whether saving his life was worth the trouble, and splashes of blood appeared on his forehead, his bare shoulders, his legs. Then he laughed, a single irate snort, as if he had glimpsed for an instant the full senselessness of life, and he turned, stretching his arms out before him, and ran. His mouth gaped, his black hair flew out behind him, his feet slapped down on the pavement as if he were clowning. But he outran them—or outran all but one, a young man named Alkander. He was right on Lykourgos’s heels, and when Lykourgos turned to see who was so close, the boy swung his stick and popped Lykourgos’s left eye like a grape. Lykourgos stumbled. When he got up he was holding both hands over the eye, and blackish blood came bubbling like oil through the cracks between his fingers. Alkander stood still, terrified, no doubt, and the crowd behind him stopped too. With the one eye he had left, Lykourgos looked at the boy. Then he said, “Come with me.”

  Alkander hung back, glanced at the crowd. They looked like they’d just remembered they’d missed their lunch.

  Lykourgos said again, “Come with me.”

  The boy obeyed, looking at the ground, and Lykourgos led him to his house. He made Alkander his personal servant and bodyguard, and in a few weeks Alkander worshiped Lykourgos as he would a god.

  Nobody laughed.

  I pause for questions and comments. Peeker is asleep.

  Ah well, ah well. It’s for my sake I lecture him, not his. When he sits asleep, skinny legs aspraddle, feet sticking out under the far side of the table, beneath where his hands hang (his head is balanced on his square chin like a dancer on the wedge of four square toes), my mind, left to its own devices, falls back, like a boulder returning to earth, to thoughts of my beautiful Tuka, my beautiful Iona. I am a man in the clutch of goddesses. You too would wink and leer, break wind, speak poetry. I have been blinded, deafened by holiness; they have severed the frenum of my tongue as boys slit a crow’s.

  But I hardly show it. No trifling comfort. I showed it less in the insouciant days of my onion patch, my peeking through windows, my jug. Yet even now I manufacture distractions: my wonderful weather, my pedagogy, my fond recollections of lunatic converse with kings.

  I must wake up Peeker and explain to him that THE WORLD IS A SHRIVELED PUMPKIN.

  I’ll tell him tomorrow. Let him rest.

  5 Agathon:

  By daylight I have a splendid view. It has, like all views, its drawbacks—chiefly the fact that I view it through a squat Kretan door which, most of the time, is wide open to the elements, or open except for nineteen crude iron bars on an iron frame, so that the north wind strikes me not as Zeus sent it, but sliced. Snow drifts to the legs of my table, then melts, turning my floor to mud. It’s a cell that hasn’t been used in years—hence the absence of the outer door—but the prison’s bursting its seams just now, thanks to the revolutionists’ plots, the Messenian saboteurs, the sickness in the seaports, the general worldwide climate of rapine and destruction. No doubt they thought I’d be indifferent to cold, being a philosopher and a messenger from Apollo. I endure, however. I can sleep, wrapped in my horrible blankets, curled up to the right of the door, my feet near the hearth, where the wind gets me on the rebound, reduced to an irritable turbulence full of dampness and unwholesome smells—my own. Sometimes, though not always, they cover the door for me at night, thanks not so much to their kindness as to my craft. When I came here, two weeks and three days ago, I used to sit by the door every night making marks on the dirt floor or in the drifted snow with my crutch, pretending to plot the positions of the stars. When my jailer glared at me, as if to ask what the devil I was up to, I would merely roll my eyes up, open my hands in wise-old-Athenian despair, and murmur, “It’s going to be soon, my good man, very soon! Look! Ares in the ascendant!” But I wouldn’t tell him what it was that was coming soon, would merely cackle as if with no hope for Sparta. It made him nervous. They don’t believe in knowledge, and their councilors scorn the opinion of the Helots (which I used to promote when I was loose—partly from meanness, partly from conviction) that earthquakes will soon destroy this wicked land. But it made him nervous just the same. Whenever he’s sure no inspectors will come, he puts wide planks in front of my door to block my spying on the stars. I accept it philosophically. I say, “Jailer, dear friend, a man of my years has no time left for grudges. Apollo bless you! I’m his Seer, you know. He does what I tell him. I snap my fingers and he jumps.”

  But despite drawbacks, my view is impressive. I look down from my low hill to the beautiful Eurotas River, gray blue and glassy, virtually abandoned at this time of year (a few young idiots swim there at times, proving themselves, as usual, or possibly washing). The snow-covered summits of Mount Taygetos rise to the west of the river, a few Helot huts against their base, sending up threads of smoke to the home of the eagles. On the east side of the valley there are the glittering bluffs where the shrine of Menelaos is, and beyond the bluffs the pale-blue ridges of Mount Parnon. Only a Spartan would leave such a view to mere prisoners and plant his best houses where a civilized man would dig sewage ditches. It’s not, I suspect, that Spartans have no eye for scenery, and not that they’re so stupid as not to know that a fine landscape can pick up a doomed man’s spirits. It’s their stony superiority: they disdain their own inclination toward beauty (“even pigs make aesthetic choices,” Lykourgos claims), and they disdain such paltry sadism as giving a prisoner nothing of interest to look at. As usual, I can think of no revenge. “Such splendor!” I say, wringing my hands and clutching my chest with my inner arms like a man about to faint. I faint. He leans on the bars and frowns (I watch through one eye), then goes away.

  I begin to think he is, all things considered, a harmless dog, no more to be feared than, say, Peeker. He’s fierce, dangerous, not to be toyed with, he lets me know by the twist of his eyebrows and mouth; but he’s one of the older ones. Though his face looks only middle-aged, his hair is the color of milkweed pod. I would not play games with Lykourgos’s new generation.

  Or would I? I would. I’ve done it a hundred times with my antics as wobbly old arrow of the far-shooter Apollo. Clearly, the urge toward self-destruction in a civilized man is irrepressible. I’ve played my games with Lykourgos himself—never doubting the outcome, which now is upon me.—Or us. I must not forget my faithful Peeker, my footnote, my
apistill. Civilization, mother of the arts, implies a failure of healthy imagination. So Lykourgos. Hence his insistence that girls go bare, and that burials, not to mention tortures and executions, take place in the heart of the city, for all to see. Babies look over their mothers’ breasts to watch small boys beat a smaller, weaker companion with iron bars—the coins of the Spartans. Gangs of young thugs, in their war games, knife Helots in the streets, and passersby, wrinkling their noses against the Helot smell, give thoughtful criticism.

  My jailer, I suspect, would find knifing me distasteful, though he would do it. Though he never talks to me, naturally, I believe he occasionally listens to me when I teach him things of interest. I never teach him anything true. What little I know of reality I’m saving, in hopes of bribing him with it, when my case gets even more desperate. I told him this morning that in the old days (the days of Theseus and the rest) goats were male, sheep female. This is seditious, actually. It cuts to the heart of Lykourgos’s theory about women, namely, that women are merely a variant sort of men. “In the process of time,” I said, leaning heavily on my crutch and looking skyward thoughtfully, but smiling and smiling to keep his attention, “sheep and goats became separate species.” (Peeker hid his head.) “No one fully understands it, but the evidence is irrefragable. It has to do with our erroneous notions of time and space. We define objects in terms of the shape of space they displace, and we forget that old men are what they are because they’re old. You follow me?” He looked at me, very cross, and I had an inkling that he did not fully understand. “Time is a thing,” I said, and, leaning closer to him: “It bites.”

 

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