by John Gardner
“Stop that!” she said, and made a face. “Revolutions don’t start because some dumb female…” She let it trail off, maybe concentrating on the movement of my hand on her back. She grinned. “Now I have to do it. You’ve given me a reason.” She drew away, sat up, fixed her hair.
“Tell me one thing,” I said, watching her. The moment had passed. I could feel it yawning away, and I was filled with anguish. “Did you just now make all that up on the spot—the revolution business? Or is it something you’ve been working on?” Light, flip. But I was drowning.
“On the spot,” she said, mock-innocent. “Would I spend days on such a morbid idea?”
“It’s pretty clever. If the Helots weren’t people I cared about, I’d advise them to give it a try.”
“You think we won’t, don’t you? That’s really dumb.”
“You might, from pure stubbornness. Most things people do is mere stubbornness—a sort of proof to themselves that they exist.”
“Boy, that’s really dumb,” she said again. “Believing the things you do, how come you don’t kill yourself?”
“I do,” I said. “Second by second.”
She smiled wryly, shaking her head so that the hair she’d just gotten neat flew out. “I’m beginning to understand you. You’re on some drug.”
I stood up and gave her my hand. When she was standing I closed my arms around her and kissed her, pulling her body tight to mine. But the moment had passed; I believed in neither of us. After a time she pulled her mouth away and kissed my shoulder. “I really don’t believe this,” she said. “This can’t be me.”
In the aerie, Tuka was lying naked on the bed. Dorkis was out somewhere, walking. I wondered, cowardly, whether he’d seen us. I listened to Iona undressing beyond the screen and looked at Tuka. My mind couldn’t separate them. She was beautiful, white as old stone by moonlight. It filled me with self-hate—sexual desire and impotence of soul.
Tuka said, “Agathon, we really have to talk about all this. Not tonight, but sometime.” I laughed. I undressed and made rough love to her. When she climaxed she growled, for the benefit of Iona.
After that I lay awake for a long time, listening, sweating and remorseful, for Spartan boys with daggers. I heard Dorkis pass in front of the hut, then behind it. He too, it came to me, was expecting Spartans. That was why he’d come. When I got up and crept to the door to look out, he was hunkering in the shadow of a rock pile, a little up the hill, behind the hut. His bow lay on the rocks beside him; his knife lay unsheathed across his knees. The feeling came over me again: This is it.
I woke up in bright sunlight. Dorkis was already up, beaming, getting our breakfast ready. His thought of fleeing Sparta, killing Lykourgos, all the rest, seemed to have evaporated. I watched his huge, muscular arms, his wide hairy chest, and wondered if he’d had my wife. He’d had his, I knew. She looked pummeled to limpness, and joyful. She blew me a kiss as she came from behind the screen.
“How’s the revolution?” I said.
“Oh, that was yesterday!” She laughed.
Tuka said later, “I don’t understand them. They laugh and screw around and drink, and the soldiers kill them off like mice. What’s the matter with them?”
“Second by second,” I said. “One hour at a time.”
She looked at her hands. “He really was good, you know.” She shot a glance at me.
It wasn’t true, I learned later, that she’d slept with him, though she could have. He was tentative, impotent for all his fondling (or so she decided), and in the end he was embarrassed. She thought it was funny. Tuka has a curious mind.
16 Peeker:
The tall ephor was here again. I’m more convinced than ever of his honest concern. It’s all very well for idealists to howl that Sparta’s rotten to the core, as my master does, but the fact remains, it’s the greatest city in the whole world, not only because of its size and beauty and natural wealth—the fertile plains stretching out all around it—and not only because of its army either, but also because of, so to speak, its vision. No place is perfect—anyone knows that—but where except Sparta have kings and commoners united behind the ideals Equality and Justice, and fought with all their might against corrupting forces like wealth and laziness? You’ll notice the god doesn’t hit Sparta with plagues and pestilences, the way he does places like Pylos and Methone. I’ve heard about the seaport plague from people that have seen it, and it’s something. It starts with fainting and stomach trouble, and then fever develops and terrible, terrible pain. It comes and goes in waves. You think you’re getting better and suddenly it’s worse than before and at last it kills you. (“That’s life,” my master says.) Anyway, we don’t get such things here in Sparta. My father fought and died for Sparta, even though he was a Helot. I think I’d do the same. Lykourgos’s vision’s not achieved yet, true, and it’s true that some of his methods are questionable. Nevertheless, it’s a great experiment—as Agathon says in his mocking voice. And however bad a few Spartans here and there may be, there are still men like the tall ephor, devoted to making the vision into reality. I feel as if I’ve been blind, all this time with old Agathon. He’s a good man, I still say that, for all his boring self-centeredness; and men like him served a purpose once: no matter how faithful to his vision a man like Lykourgos may be, he can always use a critic. Lykourgos must have known that all along. If he were here in Sparta, Agathon would be free in a minute, putrid old husk though he is.
Still, I look at the tall ephor, standing erect and mild at the door, asking in his dignified soft-spoken way about Agathon’s health, inquiring whether something might not be done about the rats (there are always rats in prison; getting rid of them for good would take a god’s intervention), and then I look over at Agathon, sitting on his bed with his skirt above his knees and his pupils rolled up and that leer on his face, and I feel as if scales have fallen from my eyes. While the ephor was quietly, determinedly working for the power that sits on him now like a casual cloak, the power that will sooner or later make Sparta the moral torch for the whole world, where was Agathon? I was there: I can tell you. He was sneaking up alleys to peek through windows at people making love. He was shinnying up columns and whispering back at me, “Peeker! Peeker! The jug!” He was sitting on his ass in the onion patch, peeling onions with his dirty thumbs and crying—“for all mankind,” he said. Or he was strutting with the soldiers, making fools of them, or mimicking feeble King Kharilaus, so that no one afterward who looked at the king could feel any proper respect for his position. You call that healthy? “If you don’t want to be criticized, don’t criticize,” my mother says. He brought the whole thing on himself. I don’t mean I abandon him. He’s a sort of national monument, you might say, but just the same…
I told the ephor everything I could, and he listened. I explained how Agathon had been driven out of his mind by women, how that gave him compassion for everyone and everything and made him see through everything the way a lover sees through both himself and his love but forgives himself and forgives the love and goes on and on in his hopeless pursuit, and how, also, the same things that turned him into a Seer are the causes of his looks and actions—his ungodly singing, for instance, things like:
Nobody loves a drunkard
and nobody loves a whore,
but nobody loves Their Majesties
more! Much more, oh,
nobody loves Their Majesties more!
“What does that mean, exactly?” the ephor said.
“Who knows?” I said.
Or his peeking through windows, for instance, not because he’s really got a dirty mind but because seeing people in love, especially ugly people, old people, or best of all cripples, fills his heart with joy. But people get the wrong idea, I said. Once late at night we saw a fat old lady eliminating behind a house, trying to hide in some azalea bushes, and it was holy to him—the human spirit’s struggle to keep its baseness private—and he couldn’t contain himself; he went right up to her shou
lder and whispered, “God bless you!” The old lady was mad as hell, and she started throwing stones at us. I understood, but how could you ask some ignorant old Spartan lady to comprehend a thing like that? We ran, Agathon giggling and vaulting along on his crutch, and people came to the doors in their loincloths and saw the old lady throwing stones and screaming, and they grabbed some stones and joined in with her. I didn’t blame them, I could see their point of view; he looked like any other old drunk to them. But I could understand Agathon’s side too, not that I wasn’t ashamed, of course. In fact, when he wasn’t looking I lobbed a stone at him myself. It clipped him in the ear. But it was beautiful to him: it was a vision of the gap between ideal and real, a thing nobody but a lover could understand.
The ephor looked steadily over my head, not showing anything because of course he had to judge these things impartially. “Was this incident recent?” he said.
I told him about the time he caused that uproar in the bullring. One minute he’s sitting beside me in the stands, banging his crutch from time to time, the way he does when he’s a little cross, and the next minute he’s down there in the ring, holding this stupid little square of cloth that he uses for his nose, holding it up like a bullfighter’s cape. The bull comes at him and plows right through him. I had to nurse him for six months. “What in hell did you prove?” I howl at him when he’s able to talk. “That bulls are smarter than people,” he says. I’d like to have killed him—who wouldn’t?—but I could understand. As a lover, he lives his whole life by trickery and deceit, and he can’t stand it. Any fool can see the poor bull’s got no chance, the whole thing’s rigged. So Agathon has to show how things really are. He can’t stop himself. I admire him for it, up to a point. But naturally people don’t understand. They think it’s political, they think he’s making fun of Spartan courage.
The ephor said, “The bullfight was part of a religious festival?”
I was glad he asked it right out. “Yes. But Agathon’s deeply devoted to the gods, in his way. It wasn’t that.”
He looked over my head, weighing it. The ephors standing a little behind him looked uneasy, the fat one smiling nervously, wringing his hands, the stolid one looking at the ground. They were sweating rivers from hurrying to keep up with the tall one’s stride and then standing all this time in the sun. The tall one only had a drop or two over his eyebrows.
I said, “Whatever the charges against him are, I can prove they’re all lies. He’s got a lot of enemies, but I’ve been following him for three years and I can guarantee you he never did anything illegal. Especially, he’s got political enemies. But he loves this city. He worked with politicians for years. If you investigate—”
The ephor’s eyes dropped down from over my head to meet mine, and he was listening more closely than ever.
“If you investigate, you’ll find his accusers are the enemies of the state.”
“A full investigation may well be necessary,” the ephor said. He meant it, and he would see to it. He tried to talk then to Agathon, but the old man was hopeless.
After they’d left I asked Agathon what he thought. He rolled the pupils back down into sight, then closed his eyes and rubbed the lids with his fingertips. “I’m glad you asked,” he said. “Peeker, my boy, I’ve been rethinking the philosophical positions of my youth.”
I had a feeling he was at it again, but I waited, hoping against hope.
“It’s recently struck me that the fundamental material of the world is not earth or fire or water or even air, as people like Thales maintain, but wind.”
I sighed.
“The precise distinction between wind and air is not yet perfectly clear to me, but I’m working on it; and in any case, as I used to tell Tuka, what matters in natural philosophy is not so much what is true as what is interesting.” He puckered up his lips. “Wind I tentatively define as the Poseidonic essence: that which moves whatever moves (as for example, air, water, fire, or earth). The implications are staggering, my boy.”
“I bet,” I said.
“Movement can only be perceived within time, so that without time (if my theory is right) there can be nothing. I am forced to conclude, reluctantly, that time is space. Or to convert the terms, matter is the breath of God for a certain span of time. I am of course perfectly aware that all this is absolute rubbish, but I tolerate that. It takes care of Zeno’s arrow, anyway. So it comes to this: Every event, every adventure, is a ripple in God’s exhalation. Or should I say His fart? Maybe Solon from one end, Lykourgos from the other. He he he!”
I did not choose to comment. He told a story.
17 Agathon:
I have just made up a marvelous story that, if Peeker’s credulity does not fail me, will go down through History:
It is said that Solon, when he was old, once visited Kroesos at Sardis. They say that when he went into Kroesos’s palace he was like an inland man when he first goes to see the ocean. As the inland man thinks every river he comes upon must be the sea, so Solon, passing through Kroesos’s court and seeing a great many nobles in rich attire and surrounded by attendants, supposed every nobleman he met must be the king. When he came to Kroesos, who was seated, so fat he couldn’t move a finger, high on a throne of gold and ivory and silver, gloriously decked with every possible rarity and spangle, in ornaments of jewels, purple, gold, scarlet, and surrounded by an army of terracotta statues, he seemed not especially impressed and, in fact, failed to give King Kroesos the compliments he expected. Kroesos commanded his men to open all his treasure houses and take Solon to look at his sumptuous furniture and luxuries—his superb black-figure jugs, cups, bowls, his perfume flasks and ivories, seraboidal seal amulets with pictures of sphinxes, his seal stones, carpets, Phoenikian jewelry, Skythian carvings, Phrygian figures, his fine painted chariots, horses, ibexes, lions. When Solon came back from viewing the treasures, puffing and huffing and blinking like an owl, trembling like an earthquake from all that exertion, Kroesos asked him if ever he had known a happier man than he. Solon, after he’d got his wind, stretched his cheeks with his fingertips and pursed his lips and finally answered, softly and gently, that he’d known a man named Tellos once, a fellow citizen of his, and he told the king that this Tellos had been an honest man, had had good children and a competent estate, and had died bravely in battle for his country. Kroesos, staring down from his seven hundred pounds like an angry whale, took him for an ill-bred fool, but he kept his temper and asked if he knew, besides Tellos, any other man more happy than himself. Solon nodded like an Indian sage. “Two,” he said. “Kloebis and Biton. They were loving brothers, and extremely dutiful sons to their mother. One famous day when the oxen delayed her, they hitched themselves to the wagon and drew her to Hera’s temple for worship. Everyone there called her fortunate indeed to have such sons, and she agreed that it was so. Later, after the sacrifice and feast, they went to their beds and rose no more. They died in the midst of their honor a painless and tranquil death. We named a road for them.”
Kroesos was furious. “Look here,” he said, “do you figure we’re not among the happy men at all?”
Solon, unwilling to exasperate him more, replied with great and gentle formality: “The gods, O king, have given the Greeks all other gifts in moderate degree; and so our wisdom, too, is cheerful and homely, not kingly wisdom. Our humble understanding, observing the numerous misfortunes that attend upon all conditions, forbids us to grow overconfident of our present enjoyments, or to admire any man’s happiness that may yet, in the course of time, suffer alteration. To salute as happy a man who is still in the midst of life’s hazard we think as unwise as crowning a wrestler still honking and blowing in the ring.”
After this, he was dismissed, having given Kroesos some pain but not much instruction, as it seemed to Kroesos.
Aesop, the man who writes the fables, was in Sardis at the time on Kroesos’s invitation—an old friend of Solon’s—and he was troubled that Solon was so ill received as a result of his own mulishness
. “Solon,” said he, “when a man gives advice to kings he should make it pert and seasonable.”
Solon nodded as if abashed and said softly, feebly, for he was well up in years: “Or short and reasonable. Or curt and treasonable. Or tart and please-him-able.”
Aesop sighed. Though a person of the greatest sobriety, he was always unmanned by a jest.
Why I made the story up I’m not exactly sure, except that it has of course things to do with my demon Lykourgos. Has to do with Time and Scorn. Solon—realist, pragmatist, democrat—scorns in moderation. Lykourgos’s scorn is absolute, like a god’s. (“Moderation in all things including moderation,” Dorkis used to say.) Solon babbles, filling the air and suffocating his enemies with “humble wisdom” or else comforting noise; Lykourgos hardly speaks and, when he does, speaks in aphorisms or rebukes as quick and short as Spartan daggers or, say, thunderbolts. Solon, in his prime, would fall in love with ten women and five or six boys a years; Lykourgos turns women into men. His marriage laws, for instance. He’s set it up so that the husband carries his bride off by a sort of force. The woman who supervises the wedding clips the bride’s hair off close around her head and dresses her up in man’s clothes and leaves her on a mattress in the dark. The bridegroom comes in in his everyday clothes, unties her virgin zone, and takes her. When he’s finished he returns to his own dormitory, to sleep as usual with the other young men. So it continues night after night, year after year, so that sometimes a man may have several children before he has ever seen his wife’s face by daylight. If a man falls in love with another man’s wife—which happens fairly often where women walk naked—the law allows him to ask the husband for her company; and it forbids the husband to refuse him except if the lover or the wife is sickly or a weakling. Lykourgos goes further. He orders that children not be begotten by the first comer but by the best man that can be found. I suggested to him once that the law was perhaps a little inhuman. “The reverse,” he said. “Is it human to breed better horses and cows than men?” When a child is born, they carry it to the judges, and if the child looks sickly, they kill it, throw it from a cliff as they would a runt pig.