The Walled Orchard (29 page)

‘Well?’ Phaedra called out. ‘Who did you kill? You were gone a long time.’

‘They’d gone by the time I got there,’ I replied. ‘You were worried, weren’t you?’

‘No I wasn’t,’ said Phaedra. ‘Who cares a damn what happens to you?’

I tossed my sword into a corner. My little brush with danger had taken most of the sting out of not going to Sicily, and my own moderate cleverness in getting out of the danger had left me feeling rather cheerful.

‘Come here and say that,’ I said.

The next day, nobody was feeling very cheerful. You must understand how superstitious people were then, before Philosophy became so fashionable, and how everyone was terribly edgy because of the sailing of the fleet. So when they woke up and found that someone had been smashing up statues of the Gods (apparently the jolly stone-masons had made a clean sweep of most of the little Hermeses in the City), they were appalled and took it as an omen. Hermes, they said, was the God of Escorts He goes with us when our souls travel across the Styx, and watches over all embassies and perilous journeys —and now all His statues were only fit for the lime-kilns; the God was angry with us. I think the main reason for the panic was that nobody knew who had done it, because everyone (except me) had been asleep; either they were sailing the next day with the fleet and had had an early night, or they had been to good-luck parties and were sleeping it off. So it was anybody’s guess who was responsible, and under such circumstances, anybody tends to guess at hidden conspiracies. By dawn, the general view was that the anti-democratic faction, whoever they were, had done the deed in order to bring disaster on the fleet and then, by some undefined means, seize control of the State. It was all very worrying.

Put together three or four worried Athenians, and they will immediately demand that the General be impeached. The General at this time, of course, was Alcibiades; and thanks to the inscrutable processes of the democratic mind, it was assumed, without question, that since the expedition was Alcibiades’ idea and had been conceived and organised by him, he must have sabotaged it. After all, people said, Alcibiades is always going to parties and getting drunk, and people who get drunk smash up statues. Therefore it followed, as night follows day, that Alcibiades, single-handed or with accomplices, smashed up the statues.

Now I knew for a fact that he hadn’t, but even I am not so stupid as to open my mouth at such a time, and so I kept quiet. After all, I had no great love for the man, and given his career to date it was inevitable that he was going to be put to death sooner or later, so why not now? Besides, I am an Athenian and so must always find someone to blame for my misfortunes; and I think that deep inside my soul, I was blaming Alcibiades — if he hadn’t organised it, there would be no fleet for me not to sail with. It was the wrong thing to do, of course, but I was amply punished for it later.

So the Athenians were in a difficult position. Unless they impeached Alcibiades, they couldn’t execute him for blasphemy; but if they did that, there would be no Sicilian project and everybody would have to go back to work. There was a frenzied debate about it in the Assembly which amused me very much, with everybody calling everybody else a monarchist and accusing each other of betraying naval secrets to the Persians, and finally they reached an Athenian compromise. Alcibiades would lead the fleet to conquest and glory in Sicily, and they would try him for blasphemy on his return. This would give his enemies plenty of time to buy the requisite witnesses, and everybody would have two treats to look forward to instead of one.

Do I sound as if I hate my city and this monster we used to call democracy? I don’t. I suppose I felt for Athens in those days the same tortuous jumble of emotions as I felt for Phaedra; even when she behaved most terribly, she fascinated me utterly, and I would not have had a different city, or a different wife, for all the wealth of King Gyges. All my life I have loved the Festivals, where three Tragedies are followed by one Comedy, and the horror and the humour get mixed up in your mind until you can barely tell them apart. Now I am a worshipper of Comedy: I believe in it absolutely, as being the purpose of the world and of mankind, and I believe that Zeus thinks as I do, which is the only possible explanation I can think of for most things that happen, and so I winnow out the Comedy and let the wind blow everything else away. Now tell me, where else in all the kingdoms of the earth could Zeus and I find a richer Comedy than in Athens, where men used to conduct their affairs in the way I have described to you? And of all the little Comedies of Athens, what could be better than the Comedy of bad-faced Eupolis and his bad-faced wife?

Dexitheus the bookseller, who is a man of taste and discrimination, tells me that I should stop here. He thinks that this first part of my life makes a complete story in itself, dealing as it does with Athens before its downfall. He feels that in what I have written so far I have so perfectly blended Tragedy and Comedy that to add any more would be a display of sacrilegious ingratitude towards the Muses who have so clearly inspired me up till now, and that the next part of my story, which deals with what actually happened when we got to Sicily, would therefore be best published under separate cover. Now I have known Dexitheus since before the holes in his ears healed up and everybody thought he was just another ex-slave on the make, and so I can honestly say that the fact that he can make two drachmas by selling two short books but only one and a half by selling one long one has not influenced his advice to me on this matter in any respect, and I am bound to say that on the whole I agree with him.

I shall therefore leave you at this point and catch up on my sleep, which I have been neglecting lately. If you want to find out what happened in the end, and what became of the greatest expedition ever mounted and the most perfect democracy the world has ever seen, I recommend that you buy at least three copies of this book, and advise all your friends and relatives to do the same; that way, Dexitheus may feel justified in asking me (and the Muses, of course) to exert ourselves just one more time.

One last thing. I was talking to a man of my age yesterday night, and he assured me that the fighting-cock killed by Ajax Bloodfoot wasn’t called Euryalus the Foesmiter at all. He is positive that I’ve confused the bird I saw (which, according to him, was called The Mighty Hercules) with the bird that eventually did for Ajax Bloodfoot about three months later. He may well be right, at that; so, since this is meant to be a work of history, I record his opinion on the matter as well as my own and leave the final choice to generations yet unborn.

PART TWO

THE WALLED ORCHARD

CHAPTER ONE

W
e Athenians despise optimists, but we occasionally perpetrate unintentional optimism in the sacred name of shrewdness. For example: Dexitheus the bookseller commissioned me to write the history of my times for three hundred drachmas, at a time when History seemed to be the coming thing and paper was cheap. I settled down to my task and was happily scribbling away when he came to me and suggested that, since my life had clearly been so fascinating and packed with incident, it would be a good idea to publish my history in two volumes. Being somewhat over sceptical as a result of this long and fascinating life of mine, I assumed that he wanted to sell two volumes at a drachma each rather than one long one at one drachma three obols, and agreed. After all, it suited me fine, since I anticipated that Dexitheus would be left with a lot of copies of my first volume on his hands and would abandon the idea of a second, and that I would therefore get three hundred drachmas for half the work.

Well, nothing definite has been said about the matter, but I believe Dexitheus still has plenty of Volume One taking up space in his barn at Gholleidae and getting nibbled by mice; but he has just come bounding back asking me how far I’ve got with Volume Two, and making vague breach-of-contract noises when he hears that I haven’t actually started yet. What his clever little soul is saying to him is that if enough people buy Volume Two, they’ll want to buy Volume One to catch up on the first part of the story, and then he’ll have some space in his barns again to put his winter barley in once it’s cut.

Personally, I think Dexitheus’ reasoning is somewhat flawed, but far be it from me to argue with a man as depressingly litigious as Dexitheus of Cholleidae. I only mention this sordid little detail as an illustration of the Athenian character, and in particular my fellow citizens’ obsession with cleverness.

You will understand the relevance of this if you’ve just finished reading Volume One, and recall that I broke my narrative at the point at which the great Sicilian Expedition was about to set sail. But I don’t suppose you have, so in order to do my duty by Dexitheus and the Muse of History, I will now give a very brief epitome of what is contained in the first roll. Once you have read this, you will immediately want to read it, and so before I begin I must just tell you that Dexitheus’ stall in the Market Square is just to the left of the shield-maker’s stands as you come in from the Acropolis past the Mint. Say Eupolis sent you.

I, Eupolis of Pallene, the Comic playwright, was born thirty-eight years after the defeat of the Persian fleet at Salamis, and eleven years before the outbreak of the Great Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta. I lived through the plague which killed the celebrated Pericles, catching the disease myself but being cured of it by the God Dionysus, and in my twentieth year I presented my first Comic play at the Dramatic Festivals, which came third out of three. I was not put off, and eventually won first prize with
Maricas,
which is undoubtedly the best Comic play ever written. By this stage I was married to one Phaedra daughter of Theocrates, whose temper was so filthy she made Medusa look like a kitten. At first we didn’t get on terribly well, but shortly before the start of this volume she had had her very beautiful face kicked in by a mule, leaving her looking as well as sounding like Medusa, after which her behaviour towards me became rather less ferocious.

While all this was going on, Athens had been getting further and further into the Great Peloponnesian War; and, after the short, brilliant and disastrous career of the celebrated Cleon, had fallen under the spell of the celebrated Alcibiades. This Alcibiades had hit on the idea of conquering the fabulously rich island of Sicily as a means of replenishing our depleted exchequer, and had so filled the heads of his fellow Athenians with his idea that everyone, even I, wanted to be part of it. A great expedition was organised, and a huge army was raised, in which every man in Athens except me and a few people with only one leg seemed to be enlisted. I was livid at not being allowed to go, but on balance this didn’t seem to worry our leaders terribly much. Then, the night before the fleet was due to sail, a group of drunks (including my rival Comic poet and evil spirit Aristophanes son of Philip) smashed up all the little statues of Hermes in the City, causing a wave of superstitious hysteria. I was about the only eye-witness to this, by the way. For some reason which defies logical analysis, the Athenian people decided that Alcibiades was behind the sacrilege; but, not wanting to be deprived of their treat, voted that Alcibiades should continue to lead the Sicilian Expedition, subject to his coming back to Athens after it was all over to be impartially tried and executed for blasphemy.

If that is not a complete summary of Volume One it will do to be going on with, and I think you have a general idea of who everyone is. Various other points to note, such as the fact that Aristophanes and I had been generally getting in each other’s way and on each other’s nerves since childhood, and that Aristophanes had an affair with my wife before her face got kicked in, will no doubt emerge from context, and you will guess without my having to tell you that the Callicrates who occasionally crops up was the son of my uncle Philodemus (who looked after me since I was orphaned by the plague as a boy) and general guardian angel, and that the curious person named Little Zeus was a hanger-on I acquired in the course of my boyhood as a result of a rash promise to plant out his tiny and unproductive holding of three acres in vines for him as soon as the War was over. I certainly won’t insult your deductive powers and general knowledge of Athenian history by telling you who Nicias and Demosthenes are, or how I came to be quite comfortably off and a member of the cavalry class by virtue of inheriting land from relatives who died in the plague. Now then, about Alcibiades.