The Wreckage of Agathon

by John Gardner

  I returned the parchments to Solon. He said, “Well?”

  “Stark raving mad,” I said.

  “Terrible, but not insane.” He tapped the desktop with his stick. “I admire his courage. It’s going to be a great experiment—a great adventure. I wish I could see it.” He giggled.

  I shrugged. “So when he gets it going, go see it.”

  His eyebrows went up in alarm. “Good heavens no! I’ll send some friend.” He smiled.

  “Don’t look at me,” I said.

  “Don’t worry.” He laughed. “When the time comes, you’ll beg me to let you go. You see, you’re a tyrant. His mirror image.”

  “That’s not true,” I said. He really seemed to mean it. “What makes you say that?”

  “Sheer whimsy, my love.” He laughed again, glancing over at his slave. Solon’s mind, I could see, was far away.

  I told Tuka later what he’d said. She said, more soft, more sweet than morning bells, “It’s really true, you know. You’re a tyrant.” She had a marvelous capacity for defending the wrong if it seemed to give her power over me. This time, for some reason, I was persistent. It was this, partly: she had an irritating way of forever comparing me with her father. Either her father was good at something, like taking care of the tedious details of daily life, busy as he was, and for me it was simply impossible, or else her father was bad at something, like listening to things his family said, and I was exactly like him. It was her father she wanted to be married to, not me.

  “Tell me one single thing that I ever did that was tyrannical,” I said.

  She sighed as if there were thousands and took my hand. “Agathon, look at your fingernails. That’s disgusting!”

  But Solon’s prediction was right, in a sense. It was at my request that, two years later, after travels for Solon had inclined my spirit to wandering, I went with Tuka to Sparta. Lykourgos had just pulled his money trick. In Athens it would have meant civil war. (Solon was skirting war hour by hour, straddling the chasm between the commoners and Pysistratos.) Lykourgos’s nightmarish vision of men was becoming actuality. I had to see it. It may be I thought I could stop it.

  One last word on all that. The truth is, I was much impressed by Lykourgos’s Sparta when I arrived. Though I came full of scorn, even humanistic outrage—though also full of admiration for any man who could bring it off—I was impressed by the studied simplicity of the world Lykourgos had recreated. I saw his whole scheme, now that I was here, in the simplest and most lucid terms, and I was amazed at my former narrowness of vision. A matter of simple geography. Sparta was agricultural, required a huge labor force—not slaves but something almost slave, because that many slaves would be a threat to the master race—and required, above all, the reactionary temper which keeps a farmer regular of habit and stable. Athens lived by trade, a thing requiring liberalism, tolerance, flexibility. Neither was right or wrong, then: the Just Life was a mythological beast. I would study the world for its images of aspects of myself. I wrote poems about it.

  For example:

  Is it utter fancy that once one’s mind

  was clear, one’s heart pure?

  fancy that once one’s will inclined

  to what one loved for sure?

  On a stone road where donkeys grazed

  high slopes above our heads,

  and rocks like giant wolf skulls gazed

  at the vast march of clouds,

  we found a small, improbable

  stone shrine—a barren place

  where none would watch but a carved wood doll

  with a staring, Dorian face.

  Carnations bloomed inside the shrine

  and coins lay on its stone;

  someone had swept to the road’s rim

  where the cliff wall rushed down.

  A mile beyond that, high in the hills

  past ruined silver mines,

  juts that once spanned waterfalls,

  old houses choked in vines,

  we reached a huge gray-granite church

  some god had pushed akilter.

  Children played at its black mouth;

  goats watched from the altar.

  On the road, donkey path, two young workmen,

  blackened as if by fire,

  smiled, holy, then moved on,

  patient as old desire.

  Well, good. Who past the age of two has not experienced a hunger for simplicity? I wrote many poems of this kind when I first came to Sparta. But enough of that. I have been, like Lykourgos, a desperate man all my life.

  14 Peeker:

  “You’ll never make a Seer,” Agathon tells me in a voice of scorn, trying to nag me into it. But I’m no longer fooled. It’s true. I won’t. I don’t even want to be anymore. I watch him sitting at the table, breathing with his mouth open—the August heat’s deadly for a man as old and fat as him—writing, writing, hour after hour, not all the wisdom he’s collected from sages but the squalid details of his onion-stinking life: I see him wake up in the morning and sit up suddenly, with a startled look, remembering his project (he’s writing it all for my sake, he says), and I see him stand up at the side of his bed, trembling all over, tasting his sunken mouth, dusting his lips with his dry tongue—then he splashes water from the corner bowl over his moustache and beard and forehead (like King Soös, I think, and laugh), then wipes it off with the back of his hand—all this absentmindedly, thinking only of his crackpot project; and I think, Where’s your spooky gift gotten you, old man? “Mus’ get busy,” he mumbles, and glances out through the cell door, worried, checking what time it is by the slant of the sun.

  It was different, in the beginning. I had personal problems, you might say, and Agathon was some kind of hope. I don’t know. I’d be peddling apples with Mother, and she’d keep saying things to me, trying to make me mind my business: “Mind them baskets, Demodokos. Money don’t grow on trees, you know.” And sometimes, to herself, “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” And then she’d holler, “Biffins! Snow apples! Fresh as a day in spri-ing!” I would hurry along behind her, trying to catch up to where she went striding like a war-horse, eyes like a rooster’s, her back loaded like a mule’s. She could carry four times what I could carry, and she liked to remind me of it. “It’s not my fault,” I would say. “When I was little you didn’t feed me right.” “Hah! Accusing his poor mother!” she would say. (But she liked it when I stood up to her. I’d hear her telling people, “He’s not much to look at, good Zeus knows. But he’s got spirit! He’ll be my death!”) I would run along behind her, trying to catch up, and then a bunch of those girls would go past, Spartan girls naked as jellyfish, and I’d look down as long as they were coming toward me but as soon as they passed I’d peek back at them, those beautiful beautiful swinging asses, sleek and powerful and arrogant as the hams of deer, and all the muscle and bone would go out of my knees and the apples would go rolling. “Mind them baskets, Demodokos,” Mother would say. Sometimes as they passed they would swipe a couple of apples from the basket and would smile at me, and that was worse than anything. I wanted to talk to them, ask them what their names were and where they lived. But I was afraid. As I got older—fifteen and sixteen and seventeen—I thought I’d go out of my mind. My mother kept watching me, watching, watching, watching. “Stick to your own kind,” she’d say when she’d see me sort of peeking sideways at a troop of Spartan girls. A laugh. I felt the same thing with Helot girls. I would strip them with my eyes, imagine the blush around the nipples, the softness of bush between their legs, and then when I looked back at their faces I would practically faint from the beauty of their mouths and eyes, wanting to say “Hi!”—wanting to tell them I cared about them, tell them I’d listen to whatever they might wish to express, listen for ninety-nine years. I wanted to know if they were happy, what they dreamed at night, what they liked best to eat. I would watch them talking with good-looking boys or the boys that could always think of something funny, or the moody ones with knowing smiles, a
nd then I’d look at how skinny my arms and legs are and I’d want to kill myself.

  Sometimes when we were peddling we’d see Agathon. My mother would give him a wide berth, merely working the crowds that gathered when he talked. Sometimes she stuffed beeswax in her ears to defend her soul.—Not that he always had crowds. Sometimes he’d be sitting all alone, sprawled out over some steps with his thumb hooked in the jug handle, and he’d be singing, louder, more raucous than thunder. Or sometimes he’d just be standing on a corner, like a blind man waiting for help across the street. Sometimes he’d be playing with children. They liked him—they always liked crazy people. He’d try to skip rope with them, clinging with both hands to his jug and gasping for air like a weight lifter as he bounced, kicking out one foot, then the other. He drew large crowds when he wanted to, though, because of the crazy way he talked and because of the way he could mimic people: you’d swear the man he was mimicking was inside him. But naturally what the crowds liked best was his prophecies. He wouldn’t do that often. He had to wait for the mood to come over him, and sometimes, no matter how he strained, it wouldn’t, even if he was leaning on a horse. (Horses make impressions come, he says. He used to make me lean on horses sometimes when he was trying to teach me to get holy impressions. I hate horses. The smell makes me sick, and if I shut my eyes, feeling woozy, they turn around and bite.) Anyway, when we’d see him prophesying I’d go watch from way in back, jumping up and down to see. “Come away from there,” my mother would say. “A man’s known by the company he keeps.” And sometimes he’d preach. “Your bodies are naked, pretty ladies, but your minds are tucked away like things obscene!” Once he said, exactly in the voice of an old woman we knew “Husband, talk to me! You haven’t spoken a word in sixteen years.” The old man Agathon was pointing at was a garrulous fool, but what Agathon said was like an icy wind, and it made the old man cry.

  And then one day as I was working my way around the edge of the crowd selling apples with Mother, the old man pointed his horrible shaking finger at me and yelled, “You, you miserable misbegotten wretch! Why such sorrow on this day of joyous festival?” I could feel the whole crowd’s eyes on me, and my heart was like a hot coal at the root of my throat. I tried to be smart-aleck: “Because of girls,” I said. “Oh, master, all because of girls! He he he!” The whole crowd laughed, but the Seer’s eyes were solemn as the plague. He said nothing. The crowd grew still. Then he said, “The gods are in that boy!” Everyone was scared. The old man said, “Come with me!” Everyone was looking at me. My feet started moving toward him: I couldn’t do a thing about it, even when my mother started screaming. I sank down on my knees when I got to him, because my legs had gone weak. He got down on his knees too, so he could look me in the eye. He was breathing hard, excited. “I’m going to make you a Seer,” he said, and smiled. The holes in his teeth were like craters.

  You’ve got no choice, when a Seer says a thing like that to you—even if you know for a fact he’s a crazy old drunk. Which I didn’t, for that matter. You never know anything about a Seer, unless you happen to have such bad luck as to become a disciple. I mean, they’re special, mysterious. A little like the ephors used to seem to me, or the revolutionists when someone would whisper, pointing them out in a crowd. I remember the first time I saw one. Someone said, “Look! That’s Wolf.” That was what people called him, not his name. I followed the furtive, pointing finger and couldn’t tell which man they meant. “The one with the gray sash,” someone said. He turned, just that instant, and I saw his face. He looked like anyone, mouse-colored curly hair, quiet, friendly eyes. You couldn’t believe he had killed people, gutted buildings with midnight fire. He nodded, seeing me staring at him. Maybe he thought I was someone he ought to know. I nodded back.—But all that’s not the point. I might have passed him a hundred times and never given him a second thought; but now, now that I knew he was a famous revolutionist, he was a riddle, unfathomable, no longer Helot, no longer even human, some baffling and terrible alien. I saw one die once, an execution. Snake, they called him. He’d been blinded and beaten horribly, but he was awesome. He died like a god, almost laughing at us, holding back only from gentleness and pity. Even the Spartans felt it.

  And that’s how it was with Agathon. He might stink like a man, he might share certain features with ordinary men—two eyes, a nose, a beard, a paunch—but he was special, set apart. His mind was different from a merely human mind. Augurers, now—the people who pretend to read the future from bones or goats’ intestines or the flight of birds—they’re not special; they know it themselves. Either there really are things in bones or guts or patterns of flight that have readable meaning, and they know how to read it, or there aren’t, and the augurers are fakes. Either way, it’s no stranger than reading from a parchment, or pretending to read when you can’t. But Agathon, he can run his hands over a cane and say, “The man who owns this cane once murdered a chicken farmer.” Or he can become very still, standing in a field as if listening to the wind, and it will come to him that war has broken out in Amyklai. He knows.

  He’s crazy, of course, to think he can teach me that. It’s a gift, for better or worse. And because it’s natural, easy for him, he thinks if I learn to relax or something, zonk! I’ll get a vision. I used to try. I’d practically pass out, trying. He’d stare and stare, trying to figure out what the hell I was doing wrong. His face, his whole body would become a mirror of mine, trying to feel out in himself where my mistake was. He’d say, “You haven’t suffered enough, boy. That’s the trouble!” His eyes would be glittering like sunlit pits of ice, and I knew as sure as day what he was thinking. He was going to get me beat up, or kicked by a mule or something. I’d keep clear of him. It was for my sake, he said, that he started us prowling the streets at night, getting us pounded on as peeping toms. It was a he. He’d been doing it for years and the only difference now was that he didn’t have to drag his own jug. I should have left him as soon as I knew for sure I would never be a Seer. I thought of it. Time after time. But then I’d find him in the road, knocked down by a cart or something, and I’d see that his moustache was all gucky with blood, and I’d be scared. He’d do it on purpose, I think, to keep me with him. Or else one day he’d pause, looking puzzled, in front of some house, and after a while he’d go in and we’d find some woman crying, and tears would be streaming from his eyes too, and there’d be a young man sitting in the corner, dead. And so I stayed on—a victim of Destiny. It was sickening, but I was trapped. The same way Alkander is trapped with Lykourgos, I guess.

  I saw him once. I was close enough that I could have reached out and touched him. Lykourgos had been walking in the square in front of the Hall of Justice, and Agathon had caught sight of him and had run up to him, wringing his hands and making faces and God knows what—and Lykourgos stopped, looking sad, tragic even.

  “Agathon, for the love of God,” Lykourgos said, very low, so no one would hear. He stood with his arms slightly bent, his hands hanging limp, as though Agathon were a terrible torment to him.

  “Have I offended thee? Have I offended thee?” Agathon squealed.

  “Agathon,” he said. It was like a plea but also like the warning growl of a dog.

  I watched Alkander. He stood two feet behind Lykourgos, towering over him, naked except for his sandals, the sword and dagger harness, the wide iron bracelets on his wrists—they too were weapons. He looked casual, limp, but I saw that he was balanced on the balls of his feet, and his eyes were closed to slits. His mind closed out everything in the world but Agathon. Should the old man so much as spit in the direction of Lykourgos’s feet, he’d be dead before the spittle hit the pavement.

  I tried to say “Let’s go home,” but my throat was dried up with fear.

  “The revolution’s upon you, Lykourgos,” Agathon said. “I warned you! I warned you! As long as time lasts, you’ll be known as the murderer of a thousand thousand men. And all for blind ego!” He cringed, leering and winking, but I saw that he made n
o move to touch Lykourgos. “I haven’t offended thee, I hope? You see how it is, sir. The god says ‘Speak!’ and I speak.”

  “The god indeed!” Lykourgos said. He tried to turn away, but Agathon was around him, quick as a rabbit Lykourgos gave up, simply stood, one hand closed over his beard, his one eye patiently staring at the pavement “You tell me of pride,” he said. “Shame, Agathon. Shame!”

  Agathon grabbed hold of his belly and laughed. “Brilliant!” he yelled. “O philosopher!” He laughed and laughed, but he was furious. Alkander watched him. “I’ve given up Athens, my wife, my children, even poetry, to cry out a warning in the savage Spartan wilderness, and you say it’s from pride!” He was drooling in his rage, but still faking laughter. I too, like Alkander, watched him. He was wrong: the anger proved it. But Lykourgos was incapable of answering his scorn. The old Lawgiver’s mind and heart were as simple and rural as a barn: I could see in his patient, mulish stance all the country generations that led up to him—fierce men plowing straight furrows behind oxen; farm owners rising to bless the food in a big spare dining room of thrashers; country politicians, red- faced and laconic, campaigning not with clever appeals but with facts drawn up like wagons.

  “We’re old men, you and I,” Lykourgos said. “Let’s come to truce.”

  “O deathless gods, hear what he asks of me!” Agathon said. “O motionless mild Apollo, behold this indignity done my old age!”

  He was wrong. Any fool could see it. Even if Lykourgos was all he said, an enemy to the laws of earth and heaven, still Lykourgos was a man, had rights. He could burn cities with one word, but he couldn’t get justice from Agathon, yet was too just a man to destroy him. Alkander saw it too. I don’t know how I knew that, but I knew. The crease beside his mouth moved like a tingle in the back of your mind, but he did nothing. I wanted to talk to him, let him know I understood how it was between him and his master. People think Alkander’s a machine, a sort of walking weapon to protect the old man, but I knew better. I would have let him tell me whatever he wanted, and I would have kept all his secrets safe.