The Mask of Apollo (20 page)

Certainly, I thought, Dion means to have his way. But I suppose that’s what makes a king.

A
FTER THIS, I WAS BUSY FOR SOME TIME WITH
my own affairs. When the choregoi drew for protagonists at the Dionysia, I was picked quite early, and cast as Orpheus in a play of that name by Eucharmos. It was a good acting role, very pathetic; my music was done off stage by a concert kitharist, but I sang myself. The play was well received; I was told later, on good authority, that I was in the running for the crown and did not lose by many votes. It went to Aristodemos, who had done a big bravura part as Ajax, perhaps a little florid, but, I don’t deny, sound on the whole.

If I do not dwell on this time, it’s not from pique at having missed the crown; I was lucky to get so near it. But I started a little love affair, of the sort that is well enough if you don’t let it take hold. If he had been anyone else’s choice, I should have known just what to advise. But getting deep in, I started to deceive myself, finding all that I wished to see, and calling the rest youthful heedlessness. So, when my Alkibiades of the Agora left me for a well-off fool with a racehorse and a house in the Kerameikos, I could not sweeten it with the thought that I had lost my peace for something worth my pains. I had known well enough, but would not know, for the sake of his laughing eyebrows and golden bloom.

Even so, once I could have taken it lightly. I could not now. I was at war with myself. All the while, when I was wasting hours in guessing where he was, planning the next supper, which had always some bitterness in the cup, brooding on a word or look—in a word, fishing for moonshine—the mask of Apollo looked at me with empty eyes. Once he gives you knowledge, you can’t unknow it; if you try, he makes you suffer. I was haunted by those scornful eyeholes, and by a youth whom only my mind’s eye had seen, climbing the slopes of Etna with the snow-light on his upturned face. He had stolen my joy in my old contentments, by showing me what men can be.

With such thoughts, I took a walk one day to the Academy in the warm green of spring. I did not seek Axiothea; she might have heard things, and would not understand. But I happened to notice in the garden the dour-faced Xenokrates, who I knew would neither question nor detain me; so I asked when Plato intended going to Syracuse. He raised his brows. Plato had been gone, he said, above a month.

Had all that time slipped by? Since the Dionysia, I thought, every day wasted. Suddenly I felt the need to shake it all off, as a wet dog shakes off water. Here in Athens, I would be meeting at every turn the youth, or his new lover, or friends who had seen my folly. The very air felt stale.

Next day, therefore, I did a round of the foreign consulates, to learn what cities were planning plays. It was not an Isthmian or Pythian year, and too early for Olympia. I hoped I had finished with small-town theaters, and was therefore passing by the Megarian proxenos’ office, when I met Eupolis coming out. I greeted him and said I was thinking of a tour. But he was already not the man he had been before he lost his teeth and spoiled his voice. He had been drinking though it was not mid-morning; and, without taking the trouble to wrap it in civility, said he wondered I did not try Sicily again, if I had had such a success there as I claimed.

“As for that,” I said, “I don’t claim even to have trodden a stage in Sicily. All I did was speak Dionysios’ epitaph. But since you ask, it’s true I’ve been thinking of going back there. I daresay that’s what I shall do.”

I walked on, amazed at myself, thinking, “Now I shall have to go, or he’ll put it all over Athens. I, who swore never to set foot in a ship again. What fate made him cross my path? And why did I speak to him? He would have passed me by.” Then I went home, to think. The mask hung on the wall, straight-faced in the bright light of noon. But when I turned my hack, I felt it smiling.

At least, by now, it was sailing weather. The Sicilian consul greeted me warmly, offered me wine, and said he had been expecting my inquiry. “Not,” he said, “that I have any special commission. But with youth at the helm, as the saying is, the crew will all be singing. Syracuse today is a gay city, very gay. I don’t think it would be possible for an artist like yourself to lose by going just now. I shall announce you by letter, mentioning your success as Orpheus. Such poetry, such pathos—we were all in tears.” I thanked him, but could have done without it; I knew I had overworked the pathos, feeling sorry for myself just then. At all events, I left committed; he was writing by a ship which left that day. It had all been as if a hand in my back were shoving me.

All the same, remembering young Dionysios’ fitfulness, I did not mean to put all my eggs under one hen, but called on the consuls of Leontini, Akragas, Gela and Tauromenion, telling them of my visit, and anything else it would do me good for them to know.

The question was whether to try and form a company. But Anaxis had joined a tour going to Ionia; Hermippos was back in comedy; and I was short of capital, having spent too many of those beautiful gold staters they mint in Syracuse, on human gold as lovely and as quick to slip away. I thought I would chance Menekrates’ being free, and willing. Though I had never seen his work, he had seemed well thought of; and one can learn much from an artist’s way of talking.

Some nights later, when all was done but my goodbyes, at the time of lamplighting came a knock upon my door. There he stood, sure of his welcome, in all the insolence of his beauty and my past surrenders, waiting to see me reel with joy. He had quarreled, he said, with the new friend; after all there was no one like me. I suppose he had asked too much; rich men get the measure of that sooner than poor ones. For a moment Eupolis, the consuls, the westbound passage, seemed never to have been. It would do next year. Then, when I thought I had eyes only for him, I felt other eyes upon me. In the lamplight which flickered in the draft from the open door, the mask was watching.

Beside those eyes of shadow, the blue ones looked shallow as glass. I found my voice. He should have told me, I said, that he was coming; I had promised to dine out with friends. He stayed awhile, not believing that I meant it, then made to go, certain I would call him back. In the street outside I heard his feet pause, and go away.

I had a perfect passage to Syracuse. Halcyons could have nested on the sea. At Tarentum I called on my kind hosts with some gifts to show my gratitude, then on Archytas, in case he wanted any letters taken to Plato. When I went in he did not know me, properly dressed and with something on my bones under the skin. I had put on my soberest robe; but an actor going to Sicily is bound to look frivolous in the study of a Pythagorean, and he gazed doubtfully at first. Presently, finding me the same man still, he talked more freely. He would be glad, he said, to write to Plato, from whom they had heard quite lately. The letter had been brought by a court courier, to whom he could have entrusted nothing private, but he had seemed cheerful and hopeful. He had asked for some of Pythagoras’ treatises on geometry, and some of Archytas’ own works, for plane and solid figures, and instruments. All these had already been sent. He spoke too of Dionysios’ eagerness to improve his mind, with which he had infected his whole court; this was why Plato’s own equipment was not enough to go round. “If the gods please,” he had ended, “this is the beginning of new things for Syracuse.”

“Plato knows how to be discreet,” Archytas said, “but is incapable of falsehood. You can picture, therefore, our rejoicing. One must be happy to see Zeus’ work done anywhere on earth. But our city lives in the shadow of Ortygia’s sails; the health of Syracuse is ours.”

He added that this good news had followed hard on bad, for not long before, rumors had been pouring across the straits about young Dionysios’ dissipations and debaucheries. Archytas, a veteran of many wars and not one to call three cups of wine an orgy, sounded quite impressed.

The young man had sobered up, however, in time to give Plato a state welcome. A gilded chariot had been sent down to the harbor for him. But this had been as nothing, it was said, to the effect of Plato’s presence. Archytas added that if on my way home I would report to him how matters stood, I could expect his gratitude; and, as he hinted civilly, some solid token of it.

When I asked if he had any word for Dion, he said at once that he was anxious to get a letter to him by someone of discretion. This was state business, a serious matter, and I showed him I understood it. Now I was sure of seeing Dion, I would have put to sea in another Tarentine gale, if nothing else would get me there.

In fact, however, we had a good passage and sailed straight into harbor. As I made for Menekrates’ lodging, I saw Syracuse was itself again. The streets were loud and jostling; the shops had everything a ship can bring from the shores of ocean; in the gutters bony children scuffled like rats for bits of garbage, while the painted mule-carriages threw dust on them, and the carriage folk held flowers to their noses against the smell. When a Gaulish or Iberian or Nubian mercenary came in sight, the stall-holders would hide their choicest things before he passed.

The sun was just declining. Menekrates, still drowsy from his siesta, was shaving when I arrived. He jumped and cut himself; we had to clamber about finding cobweb to stop the blood. I felt I had never been away.

It was a thousand pities, he said, that I had missed these last few months, especially to get shipwrecked instead. I told him that at Tarentum I had heard wild stories; but no doubt they had gained in the passing-on.

“Not possible,” he said. “Lost, more likely. Well, at least there was work for artists.”

“I never thought young Dionysios had it in him.”

“My dear Niko, even he would hardly ask flute-girls and rope-dancers to his father’s funeral. He did observe the month of mourning decently. I suppose it took him as long as that to believe the old man was really dead. Even then, it looked for a while as if Dion would step smoothly in and become another father.” Then he seemed to catch himself up, and changed the subject. When, however, I asked him for news of Dion, he answered that he was well, and, lest the Carthaginians should grow too bold with the news of old Dionysios’ death, he had made the city a gift of thirty triremes.

“
Thirty!
” I exclaimed. “The richest man in Athens would cry murder if he were tax-assessed at more than one.”

“Well, he gave thirty. Our rich men are very rich, believe me. Didn’t you sail past the patrol?” He pushed it off too briskly; again I felt words unsaid.

“What is it?” I asked. “You have heard something. I wish you would tell me, and not beat about.”

“Didn’t you stop at the barber’s tavern on your way?”

“No; it was calm enough to shave on board. What news would I have heard there?”

“Why,” he answered, making a business of giving me a drink, sweetmeats, and so on, “the story of young Dionysios. To put first things first, it began when Philistos was recalled.” This name meant nothing to me. He said, “He’s still a great name here, though I was a lad when he was banished. Captain of Ortygia, he was before, as rich as King Midas; gave parties that made history. So did his love affairs. Old Dionysios’ mother was one of his mistresses, but the Archon was only just in power, and turned a blind eye because he was too big to quarrel with. Later on, though, he married into Dionysios’ family without his leave, and that was another story. That looked ambitious. He was whisked straight off into a trireme bound for Italy, to honeymoon in exile. There he stayed till this year, when we had the amnesty.”

“So,” I said, “there have been reforms, then?”

“Oh, yes. As I was saying, Dion did wonders in the first couple of months, getting people out of the quarries who had been in for years, or recalling exiles. When Philistos applied, I suppose he advised consent as a matter of principle. It can hardly have been Dionysios’ doing; he was too young to have known the man. At all events, he came. They say he’s spent his leisure writing history, as all these broke generals do, so no doubt he’s kept himself informed. He’s still very game for his age; he’d hardly set his house in order before he gave a party, quite up to the former ones, so people say who remember. Dion left early. But young Dionysios stayed. The party broke up two mornings later.”

“And that was the beginning?”

“Well, he always stole a little entertainment behind his father’s back. No, I think it first came home to him then that he was the Archon and could do just what he liked.”

My mind returned to my second audience at Ortygia, and his face when he spoke of the pleasures of Syracuse. As Menekrates said, it was the mourning that had kept me from taking notice.

“It might have been worse,” he went on. “It might have been blood he had a taste for. But while living like a mouse in his father’s wainscot, he hadn’t much chance of making enemies. He called for no heads but maidenheads. All he fancied was a party that would last forever, without his father roaring in to demand quiet for his writing, and pack everyone home. So the next banquet was at the palace. I heard a good deal about it from a girl I know who dances with a snake. Remarkable what she has taught it; you must see her act. But she left on the third day of the party; by then they were looking for something fresh. When the host wants novelty, and can pay, with the place so full too of hetairas and acrobats and so on, one thing leads to another. After a week or so, there was no tale coming out of Ortygia so farfetched that someone couldn’t cap it. There has always been a back-door traffic between the citadel and Carthage; the old man used it when he chose; Philistos knew of it. Now instead of secret treaties, the exchange or death of hostages, and so on, it came in useful for summoning jugglers, fire-swallowers, knife-dancers, or experts in never-mind-what.

“From time to time the party would come out for fresh air, first into the streets of Ortygia, later, sometimes, through all the gates into the town. Pretty soon, when the torches were seen weaving along, wives and sons and daughters were bundled behind locked doors; the revelers seemed to think they conferred a favor on anyone they ravished; no one was expected to pull a long face and spoil the fun. Anyone on business was shown the door at once. Soldiers and ephors ran the city; the bribery rate doubled overnight, when they knew no one was watching them.”