The Walled Orchard (65 page)

You take my point. Everything I’ve seen and done has seemed to me at the time to be the crucial point of my life; and then something else has happened to me that makes me reconsider. This has made writing a coherent history of my times rather difficult. So if I have any advice for you, ground out like flour between the stones of the turning years, it is to go and have something to eat immediately, and leave the sightseeing until later. In other words, don’t be what I have always been, an observer; or you will find, as I did when Phaedra died, that you’ve been looking in the wrong direction all your life. That was the one regret of my life, and the one thing I didn’t find any Comedy in. Everything else I have laughed at, in one way or another.

One last joke, while I remember. The celebrated Socrates was put to death, along with a lot of better men, after the end of the War. He was brought to trial on a palpably trumped-up charge, his real crime being that he used to give Alcibiades lessons in clever speaking; and at his trial he remembered me and tried making a Comic defence-speech, as I had done. But this time it didn’t work, and much to his surprise he was condemned to death and executed. I remember going to see him in prison while he was awaiting execution, and the poor fool still believed that he would be reprieved, right down to the last moment, when they handed him the cup of poison. He has become very fashionable since his death, and people have started writing down those great long one-sided conversations he used to have with people who couldn’t get away in time. In fact, there is a strange wave of nostalgia for the War and all the celebrated men of the time. No sooner had Euripides died, up in Macedon where he went to escape from Cleophon’s men, than they started reviving his plays in the Theatre. They don’t revive any of my work, of course, but then, I’m still alive.

My son has been, generally speaking, an unmitigated disappointment to me, for he has taken to writing epic poetry, and nothing good will come of that. On the other hand, he married a nice girl and has two sons, and when I die he will inherit a large and well-cared-for estate, which I think he will look after. He has the makings of a good farmer, if the Muses don’t get to him first. He hasn’t inherited wit from either me or his mother, which is probably a blessing. He has her looks, though, and a little of my skill with words. When he was young he wanted to be a soldier. I made sure that I got to know him well enough, for fear of making the same mistake twice, but by and large I wasted my time. I have known hundreds of men like him, and they don’t interest me much.

And Athens is still standing, more or less, and will probably still be there in ten thousand years’ time; but it is an unimportant place now, the market town for that mountainous, unfertile district of Greece called Attica. The most important place in the world these days is probably Thebes, where the eels and the idiots come from; and if that isn’t irony, I don’t know what is. That is a good joke, and this is a good time to die.

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