School of Athens
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ATHENS
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Euripides, the son of Mnesarchus and a playwright of enough renown that he can claim it as a profession, scales the final steps leading to the top of the Acropolis and gazes on the Parthenon for what feels like the first time.
“Psshh! Opulence for the sake of opulence should not impress the gods. They can craft finer marble in the time it takes most men to have a shit,” he concludes aloud, a curious habit he’s developed after years of writing soliloquies and asides for the stage. He shakes his head and carries his bitterness through the construction site, dismissing the magnificence of the Parthenon with every step.
Nothing along the way impresses Euripides. Not the ivory statute of the goddess Athena standing taller than eight men stacked head to toe. Not the exquisite detail of the interior friezes. Not the thousands of talents of stone suspended precariously overhead as if solely by an act of mercy from the goddess herself. Not even the magisterial view of the city of Athens, home to a quarter of a million souls and illuminated by the radiance of the midday sun, from atop the Old City’s citadel moves him. He is a poet immune to beauty.
Euripides’ sour disposition is notorious among Athenian artists who regularly see him brooding on sullen constitutionals through the city. He is forty-nine years old and unaccomplished in all aspects of his life, according to his own very high standards. This has not always been the case. When he was only twenty-two, Euripides placed third in the Dionysian drama competition, an impressive achievement that occurred just before Aeschylus’ death at a time when the old master of tragedies monopolized the victor’s laurels of every festival he entered. At the time the young playwright appeared to have a promising career ahead of him.
Yet almost thirty years later he has little to show for it. His colleagues attribute his melancholy to a pair of failed marriages, both of which ended in humiliating cuckoldings, but thier interpretation is backwards: Euripides’ muse has always been his mistress. He has written well over sixty plays, forty of which have been produced, a prodigious output that enables him to maintain a busy playhouse in a tony neighborhood of Athens. Between long hours writing in solitude and even longer hours tending to the capricious needs of actors, there remained precious few moments during the day to devote to his wives and all the time in the world for them to seek companionship elsewhere.
Financially, Euripides is quite successful, but the rabble’s coins cannot buy him the esteem of the drama competition judges he do desperately craves. He has won the Dionysian exactly once, ten years earlier. In his mind, his promise has been squandered and his time has passed. All that Euripides expects from the rest of his life is a slow, miserable decline toward the inevitable fate that awaits all men.
“Gleenos,” he utters in his native tongue as he glances at the bright colors of the Parthenon’s interior frieze, the quartz embedded in the tiny pieces of fractured pottery glimmering in the midday sun. “That’s what this temple is: gaudy, like the jewels Priam brings Achilles in exchange for Hector’s body. Homer would not have approved of such ostentaciousness.”
Being a poet, Homer’s opinion on all matters, and particularly those of an aesthetic nature, was very important to Euripides and, not coincidently, frequently mirrored his own.
From the moment the cornerstone was first laid the playwright has been suspicious of the Parthenon. He quietly believes that the architects designed a structure to rest atop the city’s brow as a laurel wreath to distinguish the city as preeminent among its Greek peers. Yet from a window in his home across Athens, the temple looks like little more than a single pearl about to be swallowed by the brick and stone homes rolling over the suburban hills in the distance. To Euripides the building evokes perilousness, not prestige.
Most Athenians, however, disagree. The city is in awe of the Parthenon and is eager to finally see it completed after sixteen years of construction. All that remains is painstaking detail work to the interior frieze, exterior façade and statues of the Olympian gods scattered throughout the complex. On most afternoons dozens of master artisans and their assistants work diligently throughout the building with remarkable skill, concentration and industry that creates a hum to their movements, a rhythm to the hammers hitting chisels and picks cracking stone. A strong breeze might even spit out enough dust through the columns to give a visitor the impression that the temple is even breathing.
But today is different. The craftsmen have been given the afternoon off and the only sound that can be heard at the site is a single lonely chisel tapping against a marble column off in the distance. “That must be him,” Euripides says, still addressing his imaginary audience as he clumsily tip-toes and skips around abandoned tools, discarded stone and other assorted jetsam haphazardly left behind by the laborers.
Euripides follows the sound through the colonnade, a shifting labyrinth of scaffolding, ladders and lode-bearing columns and immediately regrets not simply walking around the building. After a frustrating series of attempts to escape, he finally emerges at the southwestern corner and looks down the length of the edifice to find a solitary mason, worshipfully down on his hands and knees tending to the feet of a statue of the goddess Hera.
The playwright grins and begins a stealthy approach toward the man and his statue, which is conspicuously uglier than the others. In fact, the closer Euripides comes to it the more he realizes he has never seen the goddess look so hideous. He creeps closer, careful not to give himself away as the mason carefully evaluates where to strike the marble next. Then, just as the hammer is about to fall on the chisel, Euripides speaks: “Have you been commissioned to create a self-portrait, Socrates?”
The mason’s concentration is broken and his hammer falls squarely on the right foot of the poor goddess, breaking it into a dozen pieces.
Socrates tosses away his chisel in frustration and rolls over onto his back to get a glimpse of the offender. “I thought you wrote tragedies, Euripides, not comedies,” he says, motioning for his friend to help him from the ground. “That is, when you’re actually writing these days. Any luck this morning?”
“About as much as you seem to have with that statue,” Euripides replies.
The mason gets to his feet and brushes the day’s worth of dirt and dust from his robes. Socrates is a handsome man and, even at the age of thirty-seven, still reflects a youthful light through a mischievous smile. He has an athlete’s body more suited for carrying stone instead of carving it. His hair is dark and unkempt, peppered with a few gray strands behind his ears.
The statute, on the other hand, looks ancient and leprous. Hera’s face is pock-marked and coarse, her hands plump and varicose. Unlike the regal robes that flow down from the stout shoulders of the neighboring deities, Socrates’ Hera seems sclerotic and dressed in a wine barrel. Euripides nods his head slowly as he scrutinizes his friend’s handiwork. “I wonder if the priests at Delphi would consider such a rendering sacrilegious?”
Socrates smirks. “Have you come here to talk theology or to get me drunk?” he asks.
“I don’t see any reason why we can’t do both,” Euripides replies. “Shall we?”
“I thought you’d never ask!”
The two men begin the dangerous trek back through the construction site. “Did you hear about Zeno?” Euripides asks.
“I did,” Socrates answers. “The poor bastard. I never imagined he would conspire to assassinate anyone, even a usurper.”
“Then you two were close?”
“Close enough to say that he knew better than to aim for a king and miss.”