The Walled Orchard (6 page)

And that is how Athens came to be at war with Sparta, eleven years after I was born. One of the first Athenians to be killed was my father, who went with the expeditionary force to Potidaea. By that stage, Themistocles had proved beyond question that he was the wisest and cleverest man in the whole of Athens, and had paid the inevitable penalty. As I recall, he escaped with his life and immediately went to the court of the Great King of Persia, who gave him a city to govern, and if he had managed to conceal his cleverness a little better he might have lived to be an old man. But he contrived to avoid being killed, for he took his own life by drinking bull’s blood, stylish to the very end. A number of marginally less clever Athenians took his place in turn, in particular the glorious but profoundly stupid Cimon, who actually believed that the purpose of the League was to fight the Persians, until the celebrated Pericles came to power, just as the Spartan situation was beginning to come to a head.

In fact, it was this same Pericles who gave me my first set of armour. You see, in those days it was the law that when a man’s father was killed on active service, the State provided his son with a suit of armour absolutely free, which is a very generous gesture in view of the price of bronze, if not exactly tactful. There is a touching little ceremony, and the General for the year makes a speech before handing each bewildered infant his breastplate, shield and helmet. Now in those days the General was elected, and Pericles’ power depended on his being elected General every year — it was the one great office of State that still retained even vestiges of actual power — so it was natural enough that he should make as much as possible of this great speech of his, in front of the whole population of the City. Since I was already a budding dramatist I was extremely excited about the coming performance and looked forward to it with the greatest possible anticipation. For I would be placed right up close to the Great Man, in an ideal position to make mental notes of all his mannerisms and personal peculiarities, all of which I would lovingly reproduce in dramatic form.

You remember I told you about that little general who wrote that incredibly dull and pompous history of the war, the one who thought he’d had the plague? Well, I came across a copy of the first part of his book the other day; I had bought some cheese and someone had used the immortal work to wrap it in, which shows the degree of aesthetic judgement our Attic cheesemongers have.

Before putting it on the fire I looked up a few things in it, and to my amazement I found that the little general had included the speech Pericles made that day. In fact, he had made a great fuss of it, using it as a convenient place to stuff in all the things he thought Pericles would have said if he had been half as clever as the little general, and by the time he’d finished with it the speech bore no relation at all to what I remembered Pericles saying; and I think I ought to know, since I was actually there, in the front row, studying the whole thing with the greatest possible care for the reasons I have just given you. But then again, my memory is not what it was. Still, I feel I ought to put down just a little bit of what I remember Pericles saying, just to set the record straight; and then if anyone else who was actually there reads it, he can either confirm that I am right or go around telling his friends that Eupolis of Pallene is a silly old fool, which may be the truth.

I remember that we all walked out to the public cemetery, which actually lies outside the walls of the City, and that it was a remarkably warm day for the time of year. Now I had been dressed up in my smartest clothes and had some sort of foul sweet-smelling oil daubed all over my hair, and I was feeling distinctly uncomfortable — the oil on my head seemed to be frying my brains — and the whole thing seemed entirely unlike the way a funeral should be. On the one hand there were plenty of women howling away and gouging their cheeks with their nails until they bled, the way women do at funerals; but the men seemed to regard the whole thing as a party of some sort, for a lot of them had brought little flasks of wine and jars of olives and figs, and were chattering away as if it were market-day. There were sausage-sellers hovering around the edges of the crowd, and the very sight of them made me feel hungry (I love sausages) but of course I wasn’t allowed to have one since I was supposed to be mourning my dead. As it happens, I didn’t feel particularly grief-stricken, since I couldn’t associate all this fuss and performance with my father’s death, and the thought that his body was in one of the big cypress wood trunks trundling along on the carriers carts seemed distinctly improbable. Still, I think I would have been able to make a reasonable job of looking solemn if it hadn’t been for the flies. The smelly stuff on my hair seemed to have drawn out every fly in Greece, and I defy anyone to look serious and dignified if he can’t see where he’s going for a thick cloud of flies. I tried my best, but in the end I had to start swatting at them, and that was it as far as I was concerned.

It’s a strange feeling being part of a huge crowd of moving people, and I don’t suppose I had ever seen so many human beings congregated together in one place before. It wasn’t the same as the Theatre, where the people don’t all arrive at once. It was as if the whole world was crowded into one small space, with some of them feeling miserable and others feeling happy, and most of them feeling slightly bored and wishing they were doing something else, just as you’d expect. As we came near the cemetery it occurred to me that I was going to have to step out in front of all these people to collect a suit of armour, and I knew in my liver that I was bound to make a fool of myself— drop the helmet or send the shield rolling off on its rim into the crowd like a hoop — and for a while I was paralysed with fear in the way that only a small and self-conscious child can be.

At last it was time for Pericles to make his speech, and the crowd divided to let him through. It was the first time I had seen him close to, and it was rather a shock. I had been expecting a tall, important-looking man with plenty of presence and bearing, and sure enough that was what I saw. I followed this figure with my eyes, dazzled by the dignity of the man; he was wearing a suit of burnished bronze armour that shone like gold and his back was as straight as a column. Trotting along beside him was a chubby little fellow with a strange-shaped head and rather thin legs, who I took to be his secretary, since he was carrying a scroll of paper. These two made their way to the side of the coffins, and the glorious fellow stopped. I held my breath, waiting for him to start speaking, but he just stood there, while the little chubby man climbed up on to the small wooden stage and cleared his throat, rather like a sheep in the early morning. Everyone immediately stopped wailing and chattering, and I realised that the man who I had taken to be the secretary was Pericles himself.

Once he started to speak, of course, there was no mistaking him, and when I began listening to that rich, elegant voice the man himself seemed to grow a head taller and lose about a stone in weight in front of my very eyes. It’s extraordinary the difference a person’s voice makes to the way you perceive him. I remember when I was in the army in Sicily there was a huge man with a head of hair like a lion’s mane, but with the silliest little voice you’ve ever heard in your life. Before I heard him speak, I had always taken care to be near him in the line, since he looked like a useful person to be near in the event of fighting. As soon as he opened his mouth I revised this opinion and kept well clear of him, since it is well known that freaks tend to come to a bad end.

Where was I? Oh yes. Pericles cleared his throat and began to speak, and for the first few minutes everyone was spellbound. But after a while, I began to feel strangely uncomfortable with this wonderful speech. He was speaking tremendously well, even I could tell that; but he didn’t actually seem to be saying anything. The words just sort of bubbled out of him, like one of those beautiful little springs you see in the mountains after the rain, which then soak away without leaving any trace of moisture behind. I particularly remember this bit, which doesn’t appear anywhere in the little general’s version. See what you make of it.

‘Men of Athens,’ said Pericles, ‘when we say that these glorious heroes died for liberty, what exactly do we mean by liberty? Is it the liberty of the individual, to do what he pleases when he pleases? Can this be the sort of liberty for which brave men would selflessly lay down their lives? Is that rather not a form of lawlessness and self-indulgence? No, surely we mean the liberty of our great and imperishable City, which will still be here, in one form or another, when we are all long since dead and buried. For no man can be free while his fellow citizen is in chains, and no one man can claim to live in a free city when his brother Athenian is not every bit as free as he is. It is precisely this, men of Athens, which these comrades of ours shed their priceless blood for, and that same liberty shall be their memorial when all the temples of the Gods have fallen into dust and the statues of famous men are buried by the sands of Time.’

I wanted to interrupt at this point, for the celebrated Pericles had just said that the City would always be here, and now he was saying that the temples would one day fall down and the statues in the Market Square would get covered up with sand. In short, I was feeling terribly confused and I didn’t think much of a public speaker who allowed his audience to lose the thread of what he was saying. But everyone else in the audience was standing there with his mouth open, as if this was some message from the Gods, and I remember thinking how stupid I must be to have missed the point of it all.

Then the great speech came to a splendid but largely obscure end, and it was time for the presentation of the armour. We children were formed up in an orderly queue, with me somewhere towards the end, and a large cart full of trussed-up breastplates, shields, helmets and leg-guards was backed carefully into the space by the rostrum. A couple of men let down the tail-gate and started unloading suits of armour and reading off the names, and the recipients walked forwards, were embraced by Pericles (who seemed to have shrunk back into a chubby little fellow once again) and clanked off into the crowd to be fussed over by their mothers. After what seemed like years I heard my name, and so I took a deep breath, prayed to Dionysus for luck, and plodded across to the rostrum. By this stage the two men who were unloading the armour were feeling tired and thirsty, and they bundled the great mass of metalwork into my arms and virtually shoved me at Pericles, who tried to embrace me and nearly lacerated his arm on the sharp rim of the brand-new shield. Without altering the expression of dignified grandeur on his face he whispered, ‘Watch out, you clumsy little toad, you nearly had my arm off,’ then he dragged me towards him, gave me a token squeeze, and pushed me away. I was so intent on keeping hold of all that armour that I bumped into the next child on his way up to the rostrum and knocked him clean off his feet. After a journey that seemed longer than all the wanderings of Odysseus put together I found my way back to my place in the crowd, breathed a deep sigh of relief, and let go of the armour. Of course it all fell to the ground with the most almighty clang, and everyone in the crowd seemed to turn round and stare at me. I hated that suit of armour from that day forward, and it didn’t bring me a great deal of good luck, as you will see in due course.

Well, a year or so later Pericles was dead, as I have told you. I suppose as a Historian I should consider myself lucky to have met such an important and significant man, but I don’t. I think it would have been much better if my father hadn’t been killed and I had never received a suit of public armour. My excuse for this deplorable attitude is that although I am a Historian now, I Wasn’t one at the time — in fact, I’m not sure that the writing of History had been invented then — and so my impression of the whole business was formed without the benefit of the Historian’s instinct. As for Pericles himself, I have managed in a quite extraordinary way not to let my meeting with him influence the vaguely superhuman image of him that I have .to this day. The dumpy little man with the funny head, I argue, can’t have been the glorious leader who led the City in the days before the war, and neither can he have been the spectacular monster of depravity that springs to mind whenever I hear one of my contemporaries singing a passage from a play by Cratinus after a good night out. Those two beings had, and still have, a life of their own, and it’s enough to make you believe in all that nonsense you hear these days from the men who hang around talking in the Gymnasium about the Immortality of the Soul and the Existence of the Essential Forms.

In fact, all this remembering the past has got me confused, and I find it difficult sometimes to come to terms with the fact that I was there in those days and mixed up in all those great events which are now thought worthy of being recorded. There’s a bit in the
Odyssey
that’s quite like this strange sensation. Odysseus has been shipwrecked on some benighted island miles from anywhere, with all his ships lost and his men drowned, and nobody has the faintest idea who he is. But he’s sitting there in the King’s hall, eating his porridge and minding his own business, and the minstrel starts singing a tale of ancient valour, all about the legendary hero Odysseus and the fall of Troy. For a moment our hero thinks of standing up and saying ‘That’s me’, but he doesn’t bother; after all, it’s a hero they’re singing about and not him at all, and he never did the wonderful deeds that are being attributed to him.

Come now, Eupolis, return to your story while you are still within a long bowshot of coherence. Pericles’ policy for fighting the Great War was nothing if not simple; he reckoned that since any major land battle between Athens and Sparta would be bound to result in a decisive Spartan victory, it would be a shrewd move on his part to delete major land battles from his programme of events. Instead, he crowded the population of Attica into the City whenever so much as the toe of a Spartan sandal crossed the border, and sent out the fleet to cause legitimised mayhem up and down the coast of the Spartan possessions in the Pelopennese. The Spartan army came bounding into Attica like a dog after a cat, only to find that the cat climbed up a tree and refused to come down to fight. So the Spartans amused themselves as best they could by chopping down our newly matured olive trees and rooting up our vines like a lot of wild pigs, and then went home again, having achieved nothing that a really good thunderstorm couldn’t have done twice as thoroughly in half the time. With the tribute-money pouring in and the grain ships jostling each other for space in the Piraeus we were none the worst off for the annual burning of our crops — indeed, some of the people who think that agriculture is a science and not a lottery declared that the annual destructions prevented us from overworking the soil as we have been doing for generations and would result in bumper harvests once the war was over. Now this was an exaggeration, needless to say, and it stands to reason that the plague would have been far less serious had the City not been crammed to bursting-point with human beings. But by and large the policy of Pericles would have worked if we had had the patience to persevere with it, and if Pericles had survived.