The Walled Orchard (12 page)

When I showed the play to Cratinus (for I was still young and naive) he was quite sullen and bad-tempered, which meant that he thought it was good. Never believe what they say about truly great poets always being ready to encourage talented young newcomers; in my experience, the better a poet is the more paranoid he is about competitors. Anyway, I pressed him for a comment of some sort, and he finally admitted that it might conceivably stand a chance of coming second, in a bad year, if everyone else presented farces.

‘Only for God’s sake,’ he said, ‘fix that
parabasis.
That Sicilian stuff is a load of crap. When you advise against something, make it something that’s likely to be proposed, or you’re wasting your time. Nobody in their right mind would ever seriously consider trying to conquer Sicily.’

I think the Gods must hate sensible people.

CHAPTER SIX

Do you remember Diogenes the offspring of Zeus, who was the son of the Scythian who had an affair with Myrrhine, wife of the pious Euergetes? Well, his eldest son was named Diogenides
(‘son
of the offspring of Zeus’) who was born on the same day of the same year as me. Everyone knew the true story of his parentage, of course, and so he acquired the nickname of Little Zeus.

I met this remarkable person when I first harvested my own olives at Phyle; he was one of the itinerant day-labourers who came looking for work. You may be surprised that the scion of such a noble line should be reduced to being another man’s employee, which is the worst degradation (barring actual slavery) that a human being can endure; think of what Achilles says in the
Iliad,
when he renounces glory —I’d rather be alive and a farm labourer, Working for a poor man with only a few acres, Than be King and Kaiser of the glorious Dead.

But Little Zeus had been the victim of one of those family disasters that can ruin the noblest of houses. His father had had seven children, all sons, and none of them had died in childhood.

Diogenes had done his best to reduce this formidable total. He had brought them up to love boar-hunting and horse-racing and other aristocratic but dangerous sports; but they had all proved naturally talented, and all survived. He set them, while still young, to watch the sheep on wolf-infested hillsides; but they killed all the wolves with their slingshots and became heroes. Finally, during the plague, he moved house to the middle of the Ceramicus; but the only member of his family to die was Diogenes himself.

The result was that his thirty acres of vines, which produced enough wealth to keep him in the Cavalry class, was split up into seven plots of just over four acres, one for each son. This would have been bad enough, but since the Spartans chose that year to devastate Archarnae, the seven heirs of the Offspring of Zeus each inherited nothing but vine-stalks and smashed trellises.

The brothers paid for Diogenes’ funeral by selling his Infantry armour, registered for service as oarsmen, and set out to make the best living they could. The other six stayed in the City and were soon regular jurymen, loyal members of what we used to call the Order of the Three Obols; but Little Zeus (who was, by the way, the tallest and biggest man I ever met) felt that such a life was too demeaning for a descendant of a family who had been in Athens before Theseus was ever born, and became a hired hand, hoping to save enough money to buy vine-shoots when the war was over and replant his four acres.

He told me this tragic story as we harvested the olives — me up in the tree knocking them down with a stick, and Little Zeus underneath catching them in a basket — and I  am not ashamed to say that I wept (with laugher, naturally). However, since his four acres shared a short boundary with some land held by my mother’s uncle Philodemus, he was effectively a neighbour, and since I was young and full of my new Cavalry status, I decided to help him.

Descending from the olive tree like Prometheus the Saviour from heaven, I said, ‘Your troubles are at an end, Little Zeus. I will buy your four acres as a present for my uncle, and with the money you can set up as a trader or a craftsman, which is a better life than day-labouring.’

But Little Zeus shook his head vigorously. ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ he said. ‘That land is our land. We’ve lived there since before the Dorians came, and my forefathers are buried there. Do you want their Furies to haunt me?’

I was rather taken aback by this. ‘All right then,’ I said, ‘I’ll enter into a bond of hectemorage with you, and plant out your land for you in return for a sixth of your produce until you’ve paid off the debt.’

Again he shook his head, and spat into his gown to avert evil. ‘My great-great-great-great-uncle was related by marriage to the sons of Solon, who tore up the mortgage-stones,’ he replied. ‘Do you think he would rest easy in his grave if one of his seed became a hectemore?’ He lifted the basket of olives on to his shoulder with all the resignation of Niobe, and carried it over to where the donkey was tethered.

‘Tell you what I’ll do, then,’ I said, struggling to keep a straight face, ‘I’ll plant out your four acres for you as a gift between neighbours, in memory of your immortal ancestor Solon.’

‘He wasn’t actually an ancestor, just a relative by marriage,’ Little Zeus started to say; then he dropped the basket of olives. ‘You’ll do what?’

‘And if,’ I continued blithely, ‘when your vines are yielding fifteen jars to the furrow, you would care to share your good fortune with a neighbour, I’m sure the great Solon would approve, from whichever mansion he shares in the Isles of the Blessed with Harmodius and Cleisthenes the Liberator.’

‘As it happens,’ said Little Zeus, ‘I am indirectly descended from the glorious Cleisthenes.’ And he told me all about it as he shovelled the spilt olives back into the basket.

From that day onwards, I found it hard to turn round without finding Little Zeus there, all six and a half feet of him, watching me intently like a dog at feeding-time. He was forever warning me to take care lest I slip when the street was muddy, and warning me of the approach of fast-moving wagons; and if he thought the water I was about to drink was in any way tainted, he would snatch the cup from my hand, pour the water out, and sprint off to refill it from the nearest reliable well. At first I put this down to natural gratitude and was deeply touched. It was only later that I realised that he was determined not to let any harm come to me until his four acres were safely planted and producing. Twice he was nearly arrested and brought to trial for striking citizens, because they dared come near me when Little Zeus thought they might have the plague; and when I went to visit Phaedra once, he killed her father’s dog because he imagined it was about to bite me.

Apart from this obsession, however, and his total lack of a sense of humour, Little Zeus had many sterling qualities. He was totally fearless — which is understandable given his immense size — and a tireless worker, once he had got it into his head that he was not so much a hired hand but a sort of dispossessed prince at the court of a royal benefactor who would one day restore him to his possessions. As befitted a man in this Homeric position, he strove to act as a hero should, ‘always being the best’ as the poet says, and excelling all around him in whatever the task of the moment happened to be. He would stay at the plough when the rest of us had long since given up and collapsed under a handy fig tree; and when he stood guard over the vines with a slingshot, not a single bird dared show the tip of its beak for miles around. He swung his mattock as if he were Ajax and the clods of earth were Trojan warriors, so that the rest of us were showered with flying stones and fragments of root; and when the harvest or the vintage was carried in, he would bear almost his own weight in produce, all the way from the barns to the City, watching me every step of the way like a hawk to make sure I didn’t slip or fall on the mountain-tracks.

In the City, too, his zeal to please and excel was unabatable. Whenever there was wine or company he would sing the Harmodius until the roof shook; he had a fine voice but rather too much of it. As befitted a gentleman, he knew all the aristocratic poets — Theognis and Archilochus and every word ever written by Pindar —which was a great help to me when I needed a quotation for parody in a play. His greatest aesthetic accomplishment, however, was his ability to give a one-man performance of Aeschylus’
Persians;
his great-grandfather, needless to say, had been in the same rank of the phalanx as the great poet at Marathon, so the play was virtually family property. First he would be the Chorus of Persian nobles — with occasional interpolations such as ‘This is the authentic mourning posture of the Persian aristocracy; my great-grandfather saw them in the battle, you know’ — and then he would be each of the actors, turning round to indicate a change of speakers during the dialogues and raising his voice to a squeak for the female roles, until his audience had to stuff their gowns into their mouths to keep themselves from laughing. Once my dear Callicrates was too slow and a snigger eluded him, at which Little Zeus stopped in mid-verse and looked round to see who had cracked a joke.

By and large, then, Little Zeus was an asset to me as I started to go about in Cavalry society. For I had outgrown, in a very short time, the Infantry friends of Callicrates and Philodemus, and I wanted to get to know the men I was insulting in my Comedy: the politicians like Cleon and Hyperbolus, and their henchmen Theorus and Cleonymus; the Tragic poets Agathon and Euripides, and the wicked and corrupt scientists, men like Socrates and Chaerophon, who was reputed to be a vampire.

Of course I knew all these people by sight and had greeted them by name in the Fish Market or the Propylaea, but that was not the same thing as drinking out of the same cup or joining them in the songs. It is essential for a Comic poet when he brings on a real person that he should be able to reproduce exactly the way that person speaks, and teach his actor precisely how each man makes his characteristic gestures. There is no substitute for close observation in this respect; anyone can make Cleon shout or Alcibiades talk with a lisp, but what makes the audience laugh is the way Cleon always brushes away the dust with his hand before he sits down, and Alcibiades’ habit of sneezing elegantly over his shoulder.

I remember as if it was yesterday the first really prestigious party I went to. It was given by Aristophanes to celebrate his victory with
The Acharnians
— a truly awful play and well worth avoiding if you ever come across a revival of it in one of those theatres-cum-cattle pens in the outlying parts of Attica where they still occasionally produce old plays for people who can’t get to the City — and I was in two minds whether to go or not, bearing in mind my previous encounters with that gentleman. However, a houseboy had appeared at our front door that morning, bidding Eupolis of Pallene to bring food and himself to the house of Aristophanes son of Philip at nightfall, and I could not resist the invitation, especially when I heard who else the boy had been told to summon.

‘I’ve already called on Theorus, and he’s coming,’ he said, ‘and Socrates the scientist, who’s promised to come, and next I’m going to call on Euripides the poet, who’s bound to come after what my master made him say in the play; and Cleisthenes the Pervert will probably accept, because he likes being put in plays and wants to be in the next one.’

‘Why me?’ I asked, and added, pouring out a cup of wine, ‘Go on, you can tell me.’

‘My master said invite you so I did,’ said the boy, draining the cup quickly. ‘And now I’ve got to get on. Good health!’

So that evening, with Callicrates and Little Zeus as my supporters, I set off for Aristophanes’ house, carrying with me two fine sea bass in a rich cream sauce, a basket of wheat bread and twelve roast thrushes which Little Zeus had snared the day before. I had not the faintest idea what to expect, and my heart was beating like a drum.

You could hear the singing half-way down the street.

‘We call upon our local Muse, Our wonderfuel goddess Coal;

The radiant heat thy chips produce Shines in the embers of our soul…’

Which was the Invocation from
The Acharnians,
of course, and the loud and rather tuneless voice leading it was unmistakably that of the poet himself, as I had heard him singing the Harmodius in the Serenade. One day, I thought, they’ll be singing something of mine to celebrate a victory, with Little Zeus bawling out the words so loud they’ll hear them in Corinth. I set my jaw as firmly as I could, and hammered on the door with my stick.

‘You heat the pan,’ they sang, ‘that fries the fish,

That turns the sprats a golden brown,

(Golden BROWN!)

Come, Anthracite, and grant a wish,

To all who love Acharnae town!’

Pathetic, I murmured under my breath, and the house-boy opened the door.

‘You’re late,’ he said, shouting to make himself heard, ‘so they’ve started without you. Don’t you know how to behave in good society?’

This scarcely encouraged me, but Callicrates grinned, and we made our way through to join the party.

Let me first describe the house. It was most sumptuously furnished, with hangings on the walls that had obviously been liberated from the Theatre; I recognised the front of Chremylus’ house from
The Banqueters,
and the treadmill from
The Babylonians.
The floor was newly strewn, there were couches
and
chairs for everyone — never had I seen so many chairs together in one place — and the mixing-bowl for the wine was not earthenware but bronze. All the storage jars were painted, the flitch of bacon hung over the hearth by a brass chain, and the clothes chest was richly carved cedar wood, almost certainly imported. Up in the rafters I could see Aristophanes’ shield; the rim was embossed with figures, and on its face, where usually there is a painted Gorgon to strike terror into the enemy, was a grotesque portrait of Cleon, his jaws open in the middle of a thundering tirade. The shield was also totally unmarked, which showed how much soldiering the fearless young poet had actually done. The rest of his armour was draped over an old-fashioned statue of Hermes in the corner of the room, with a sword-belt hanging from its upraised phallus, and three Victor’s Wreaths encircling its brows under the (virtually unworn) helmet.