by John Gardner
But I told him. He looked over my head as I talked. I was crying at the end, as I hadn’t been able to cry at the time. My fellow student Konon watched me with a look that teetered between pity and scorn. I said, “Why did they do it, Klinias? Why?”
He cleared his throat. “Don’t think about it. You just get to sleep, my boy.” He patted my shoulder and grinned, showing the holes where he’d lost teeth.
I whispered, “I think they’re crazy.”
“No no,” he said. He stood up and cleared his throat again and tugged at his loincloth, and scratched one hairy, bare leg. “We all do strange things sometimes,” he said. But he stood there thinking for a long time, fiercely scratching his head, making the dandruff fall like snow, “You boys get to sleep,” he said at last, and went over and sat on his bed. His lips were pursed. Then he straightened up a little and pulled in his chin, like a man about to burp, and said, “We’ll talk this over in the morning.” But we didn’t.
It had one other mask. Once I was playing with Tuka and her younger brother, and one of us, I don’t remember which, broke a large clay amphora that stood just inside the door. Her father was passing, abstracted as usual, but the crash of shattering pottery brought him to himself. He said, “Tuka!” Tuka and her brother ran out of the room, quick as snakes. It astonished me, but it didn’t occur to me to follow. Her father walked past me, almost running, as though I were invisible in the dappled light, and called to her again from the doorway. She didn’t answer, and he went after her. When I reached the doorway he was standing on the lawn, red-faced, sharp-nosed, the shadows of maple leaves splotching his cloak, and they were running from him, laughing. He came back at last and walked past me again without seeing me, his gray mouth working in spasms.
I said to her later, “Won’t he get you, when you go in to eat supper?”
She smiled, showing her dimples. “He’ll forget by then.”
“Still—” I said.
“Oh, Agathon, Agathon!” she said.
I tried again. “If I were your father—”
She clasped her hands as if in prayer and tipped her face, grinning. “You’d get a huge net, and you’d make these elephant traps all over the lawn, and you’d get a sling full of sharp stones and nails and things, and you’d get some slaves with bows and arrows that shoot flaming torches, and you’d have these trained wolves and some puff adders and moray eels, and if some little child ran away from you—”
Her brother laughed, wildly gleeful, and I too smiled. But all the same, it left me uneasy. I couldn’t answer her—I never could, because her way of thinking ruled out sober discourse—but just the same it was wrong, I thought, full of righteousness, to make a fool of a grown-up. Not because of what he could do to you. It was wrong to know that he would forget, even if he would; wrong to know that he would chase you only so far and then stop. Do you love your father? I should have asked. But I was too young to think of it, and she wouldn’t have understood.
Klinias said, “Ethics gives us generalizations, rules. Er-hem. But the first rule of ethics is: Never judge particular cases by general laws.” He nodded, pleased that he’d thought of it, then strode on.
I ran to catch up. We were climbing the old stone path toward where the shrine of Menelaos scrapes the clouds. He was teaching on the hoof, as he called it. I said, “Then ethics is nonsense. What good are rules if the first rule is: Don’t believe rules?”
“Fiddlesticks,” he said. “You take too narrow a view. Ethics is like medicine, to be taken only when needed. A man can enjoy good health in any number of ways. People who understand one another are beyond mere ethics. They can do things quite innocently to one another that it would be vicious to do to a stranger.”
“Maybe,” I said. (I was, as I’ve told you, a morose and rigid young man.) “But how will she know not to do those things to strangers?”
Klinias stopped climbing, leaned on his stick, and turned back to face me. He smiled. His hair shot out like red sunbeams. “My dear young Agathon,” he said, “you take this world too seriously. Look there!” He pointed upward to where the big, rough boulders hung on the side of the bluff, the homes of eagles. “You know what those rocks are thinking?”
Konon looked too, eyes narrowed. He said, “They’re thinking of rockhood.”
Klinias laughed. “Exactly! They’re thinking, I am a rock, I am a rock. Not a tree, not a goose, not a goat’s blood pudding, but a rock. That’s what holds them together! And what is our quester for truth, here, thinking?” He laughed again and bobbed his head, delighted with himself. “He’s thinking: I am a human. Is Tuka human? What is a human? If he isn’t careful, we’ll be carrying him home in loose atoms.”
Konon jerked one shoulder and gave a sort of sneering grin. “Poor ol’ Agathon’s in love,” he said. He ducked as if I were going to hit him and picked up a pebble to toss up and down.
“In love!” Klinias said, and looked at me in amazement. Then he laughed again. “Of course!”
“The shit I am!” I said, forgetting myself in my wrath.
“Here now,” Klinias said. “Here now!”
Konon went into a laughing fit, maybe at Klinias’s startled, stern face, or maybe at me. I went for him with my fists. Klinias was yelling, “Here here here!” and banging the stones with his stick. The mountain walls screeched it back at him like crows.
We were hardly aware, for all Konon’s teasing, that what we felt for each other was love. She was my closest friend, closer even than Konon. When we were in our teens I would sometimes walk with Tuka, holding her hand, her slave behind us, sullenly observing, but even then I misunderstood. I knew, I suppose, how I felt about her, but she was to me some higher form of life, as distant from me as a goddess would be from a cow. She knew other boys, lean and elegant, boys of her own class, whose fathers had mansions in the country, and though I knew I was smarter than they were, I understood my lot. I chased and tumbled humbler girls, kitchen slaves mostly, and Tuka and I would sit on a hillside talking about them, refulgent as the sun- swept hills, and we would laugh and laugh. Her eyes sometimes flashed. I stubbornly misunderstood. As was proper and right, of course. Her father was an arkhon: his land, his wealth, his power sprawled for miles.
Then, when I was fifteen, I met Solon, who brought about a change, a whole new world.
We were in Philombrotos’s high, timbered central chamber—five or six of the chief rulers of the city, my teacher Klinias (dressed in the fine cloak Philombrotos had given him), Konon, and myself. I was often in on important deliberations at this time. I had no part in them—Konon and I took notes, carried unimportant messages, filled the wine bowls. As for Klinias, he was a sort of adviser to Philombrotos. He would sit with a great frown, pink eyes gazing at his toes, and would never speak until Philombrotos would say, “Well?” Klinias, who was extremely nearsighted, would look up, vaguely in Philombrotos’s direction, pulling his fingers through his hair like a comb, and with great shrugs and greater pauses and throat-clearings that made his Adam’s apple bob, would deliver his delicately reasoned-out opinion. There were those who said in mockery that he was king of Athens. He wasn’t, but he had a kind of sixth sense about what the commoners would accept and what they wouldn’t, and what they’d do. It was Klinias who brought Solon to the attention of the oligarchy. “A profoundly philosophical person,” Klinias called him. Meaning: very tricky.
It was a heady summer day, late afternoon: light splashed through the room like something alive, making every painted and polished surface gleam as if newly oiled. All the city leaders were gathered, including the older Pysistratos, all sitting in their usual genteel poses, Philombrotos at his glinting marble table, Konon and I at our wooden desks, the slaves unobtrusively waiting in their places like furniture; but the meeting didn’t begin. I looked out at the hills and wished I was there. Then at last a slave came to announce a guest. Philombrotos stood up and bowed. Except for Pysistratos, who merely looked frosty, as usual, the others stood up too,
as if the guest were someone like the King of Sardis. The slave reappeared, drew back the drape, and in walked the fattest, silliest-looking man I have ever met. (Only Kroesos himself is said to have been fatter, who weighed seven hundred pounds.) Solon was in his middle thirties, but nearly bald already. His nose was pink. No one needed to be told he was a wine merchant, without a drop of noble blood in his lineage—despite what people say now. His flesh jiggled like a mile-wide field of flowers in a breeze. He spread his legs and stretched his milk-white arms like a man meeting his concubines after long separation, and said, “Gentlemen, God bless you one and all!”
Klinias winced and focused his pink eyes harder on his toes. The slave closed the big door, bolted it, and stood waiting, holding the door hook. Pysistratos looked dour.
Philombrotos said, “My friends, meet Citizen Solon.”
They approached him gravely and tentatively and, one by one, shook his hand. “I’m honored!” Solon said. “Deeply flattered!”
Philombrotos said, “Not only is Solon one of our city’s most brilliant merchants and a widely admired philosopher, he is, they tell me, one of the favorite poets of our commoners.”
“A terrible condemnation,” Solon said. “Such taste!” He kissed his fingers in despair.
Philombrotos himself led Solon to his seat. They made a ludicrous couple—Philombrotos tall and lean and frail, keen-eyed, masculine, sensitive to the point of palsy, Solon fat as a monstrous baby, with a face as impish and androgynous (he had pretty lips) as Pan’s. Solon eased himself down, though the seat was marble, saying, “Thank you, God bless you!” his flesh all aquiver, and he let out his breath in puffs.
Philombrotos talked of Solon’s virtues. His father had been a wealthy man named Euphorion, a commoner who’d proved that arithmetic could be worth as much as vast holdings, but who, in middle age, had decided to give away all he had to the poor. They’d erected a statue in his honor. He’d died when Solon was under twenty, and Solon, having what he called a modest taste for luxury, had in four years (with a bare minimum of double-dealing, he often said) made a fortune as large as his father’s. He had sympathies—and some influence—with both the rich and the poor, and he was famous with both for his extraordinary good sense. In these times of political chaos, no man was better qualified to bring the two parties together.
The city leaders knew all this already, as Solon was no doubt aware, but he accepted the flattery of the recitation, even relished it, tapping his fingertips and beaming like a child. They came at last to the point. The war with the Megarians had come to a kind of stalemate, not so much because of the difficulties of war as because the commoners believed they were being taken advantage of, which they were. It was always the commoners and slaves who were killed, the aristocrats—a handful of powerful families—who collected the spoils; and whenever troubles came up at home, the war was blamed for their having to go unsolved. The problem was simple: how to trick the commoners back into battle and beat the Megarians once and for all so that problems at home could, where necessary, be dealt with.
Solon was radiant, gorging himself on the power the leaders were lending him, but though he could not hide his happiness, he pretended the thing was difficult. “Awesome!” he said, and rolled his head from side to side obscenely. He giggled, a laugh like a girl’s. “Simply awesome! Gentlemen, we stand at the rim of a new and startling age—a whole new spectrum of human emotions! It’s a thrilling and terrifying moment! History will remember us either as monsters or as midwives to gods! Let us struggle to prove ourselves midwives, the Mothers of Humanism!”
“Humanism?” Pysistratos said, looking skeptical.
“It’s a new word I’ve made up,” Solon said. “You don’t like it?”
They were offended, repelled by everything about him, not just his word—though no one in the room had any inkling yet that this pig would steal their power. But no one, on the other hand, could miss his confidence, and it was catching. You’d have sworn by his manner that he had in mind some hero, completely unknown to them, who could stand with the heroes of the First Age, like Theseus, or at least the Second, like Akhilles. Though Solon was grotesque, a sort of hog in the bath, he could solve their problems, they all knew, with a snap of his dough-white fingers.
“Let me think on it,” he said. He sat forward and rubbed his knees. “Let me pray on it—for a week.”
“In a week’s time—” one of the leaders began.
“Come come!” Solon said. He threw up his hands in alarm. “Against the vast span of futurity—”
They gave him a week.
Solon had, as he said himself, a great advantage over them: he had no dignity.
Within two days we heard the report that Solon had gone mad. He played the lyre half the night (he had no ear, could hardly tell note from note), he danced stark nude, he approached wealthy ladies with obscene propositions. His family confined him to his house and went about in mourning. His physician let it out that he was “possessed.” On the fourth day he escaped and ran straight to the center of the city, with a tin cup and some leaves on his head and, pushing aside the more familiar nuts, prophets, soapbox orators, he climbed up onto the herald’s stand. When people gathered around him, some in amusement, some in dismay, he began singing, thwanging out horrible noises on his lyre and rolling his eyes:
“I come as a messenger from Salamis the fair!
The news he sends this town my verses shall declare!”
And then, in mad, mock-elegant dactyls, he called the commoners to one last valiant attempt against the Megarians, an attempt all their own, to be led by himself, indefatigable, mad Solon. The victory, he hinted, would bring on a whole new age for common men. He swore solemn oaths that Apollo was inside him. It was a long poem, and brilliant in its way—the best entertainment seen in Athens for years. If it was full of joking, it was earnest too. For all his reading, for all his self- mockery, he had a childlike, merchant-class patriotism that couldn’t be scoffed away. When he talked of “a man’s debt to his country” it didn’t sound hackneyed: it made you think, coming from Solon, of merchants’ iron cash boxes and the famous scrupulous honesty of the old-guard Athenian tradesman. It was a brand-new metaphor, in Solon’s mouth: more telling, at least for that audience, than all the silvery Homeric talk of Philombrotos. Some agreed to join him on the joyous impulse of holiday spirit, others because they believed the god—or anyway truth—was in him. (That might seem strange to some people, but in Athens we were not of the opinion that gods are necessarily morose. Whatever strikes true, strikes deep and honest, whatever fills the furthest mountains with beauty and hope, we attribute to the gods.) He got a fair party of men behind him, and Pysistratos, along with other civic leaders, got him more by sober reasoning and bribery.
At the end of the week he’d asked for, the leaders met with Solon again at Philombrotos’s house. He arrived late again, and this time he was carried in on a litter by four of his slaves. He hadn’t slept all week; I doubt that he’d eaten. He looked terrible. The leaders said nothing, but you could see they were distressed. This sick, decrepit thing that could barely wave its arms was to lead the Greeks to victory! But they waited to hear what he would say. He told them his plan, and it was that afternoon that I myself joined his army. I watched Philombrotos as Solon, with much ambiage, unfolded the scheme. The old man squinted in acute embarrassment. He could see that it would work, but I knew he would rather be dead than have beautiful Athens so deflowered. When the vote came, he abstained, and when he left, afterward, he did not speak to the others.
I saw Tuka in the entry hall. “Praise me,” I said at the top of the steps. “I’m going to be a soldier.”
“You’re crazy,” she said. She stared at me hard, then laughed. “Are you going to talk them to death with metaphysics?”
“I may not be much with a dagger,” I said, “but I’m sneaky.”
She laughed again, but now she knew I meant it. I was looking up with new eyes at where the Ak
ropolis scraped the clouds.
After a moment she took my hand. She said, “You can’t. I forbid it.”
“It’s out of your hands,” I said. “I’m a citizen of Athens.”
She went on looking at me, then glanced back at her slave as if for help. None came. Tuka shook her head. “You haven’t a chance. How you do overestimate yourself!”
I was angry. “I’ll pick on someone little,” I said. “I’ll see who’s wounded and sneak up and get them from behind.”
She turned away. The slave went on watching with eyes full of darkness.
I started out and Tuka called to me. I kept going.
Two weeks later I fought the only battle of my life. (We trained like fools, that two weeks. Most of the men, though all of us were young, were veterans. All I learned was to be scared to death of good soldiers.) Word went, by a supposed renegade, to Salamis, to tell the Megarians that, according to our ancient custom, the chief women of Athens were at Kolias, giving sacrifice to Keres, unattended except for their slaves. The Megarians could capture them with ease, for pleasure or ransom. The Megarians bit. We moved the women and children out and, clean-shaven, dressed like girls, we danced and played by the shore until the Megarians arrived. They came pouring out of the ship like unleashed hounds, and we danced and smiled and tightened our fists on our daggers. We got them all and hardly lost a man, but it was horrible, a matter for shame. The one that came for me was a big, handsomish man that thought he would have me right there on the sand. I opened up his kidneys with both hands on the dagger, and the look on his face was like a child’s, shocked, betrayed. He pushed me away—there were people fighting all around us, bumping against us, stepping on us—and he lay twisting and kicking in a circle and I couldn’t get the dagger out. Blood spattered all over and soaked up in the sand and people slipped in it. I tried to strangle him, but even dying he was ten times stronger than I was. He pushed me away as if I were unimportant, an annoyance, like a swarm of gnats, in the way of his dying. I was crying so hard I could hardly see—a dead Megarian lay across my left leg—but I got a rock and lifted it over him. When he saw what was happening he lay still a moment and gave up. I killed him. He look of indifference shook me to the heart. Then I lay in the sand and sobbed and yelled obscenities at Tuka. I believed I saw her, shining like a mountain, naked, smiling at me, her slave in the distance. A strange experience. When the battle was over we sailed for Salamis, still in our women’s clothes, all bloodied now, and took it. I didn’t fight in that one. I was unfortunate, which no doubt saved my life. When I jumped to the rocks from the ship I broke my leg.