capable of nodding off during a recital of the greatest tragedy ever. So
instead, he sentenced him to hard labour for life in the stone quarries.
When this story was first told in Athens , a lot of people suddenly went all
silent and thoughtful at the mention of the stone quarries of Syracuse . That’s
because it was those same quarries where the men taken prisoner by the
Syracusans during the War ended up; suffice to say, none of them ever came back.
Not one.
Somehow or other, though, Dion managed to survive in the quarries for three
years, at the end of which time Dionysius relented, pardoned him and had him
cleaned up, given a decent meal and brought back in honour to the royal court.
And to celebrate his old friend’s pardon and return, Dionysius announced, he was
going to hold a grand banquet and read them all his latest play, Niobe In
Chains.
Dion, looking rather thin and rather frail, had the seat of honour for the feast
and the subsequent recital, Well, to cut a long story short he sat quietly
through the first half-hour of the play-reading and then stood up and started to
walk slowly towards the door.
‘Hey,’ roared Dionysius, looking up from his roll. ‘Where the hell do you think
you’re going?’
‘Back to the stone quarries,’ Dion replied.
That was Dion; noble, fearless, a champion of truth and integrity, thick as a
brick. Dionysius stared at him speechlessly for a couple of heartbeats; then he
roared with laughter, tore up the manuscript and made Dion his chief minister.
When Dionysius was on his deathbed (as a result, so they say, of the lethal dose
of raw wine he gulped down to celebrate the news that finally one of his plays
had been accepted by the Athenian Inspectors) he made him regent and Lord
Protector during the infancy of the utterly worthless crown prince, who in due
course became King Dionysius II.
The younger Dionysius was said by those who knew him well to be so bland and
ineffectual a man that if you dissolved him in water and drank him, you’d hardly
notice the taste; in consequence, Syracuse was ruled by the noble Dion, who
announced as soon as the old reprobate had been safely reduced to charcoal on
his funeral pyre that the bad times were over at last and henceforth Syracuse
was going to be run along the lines of the most perfect state, namely the
theoretical Republic devised and written about at interminable length by the
celebrated Athenian philosopher Plato.
That’s right: Plato, the featherless biped, Diogenes’ habitual victim. Plato had
been a pupil of Socrates, the legendary wizard whose little demon I pretended to
keep imprisoned in my jar. After Socrates’ death (he was convicted on twelve
counts of being generally guilty, and quite properly executed; according to
Eupolis, he was a veritable human toad) Plato set up a thinking shop called the
Academy, where rich young men went to learn wisdom and stuff, at highly
competitive rates. When not lecturing or putting up with Diogenes, he wrote
books of philosophy, including this same Republic that Dion admired so much. In
this celebrated work, he set out his idea of the perfect society; and to be fair
to him, he did have a few good ideas. For example, in Plato’s Republic, poetry
was illegal. No poets were allowed inside the City, and all books of poetry were
to be called in and publicly burned; specifically including (and this is why
I’ve always had a soft spot for the old fool) Homer.
The main thrust of Plato’s work, though, was that democracy isn’t a terribly
good idea (it was, after all, a democracy that executed Socrates). Instead,
Plato’s state was ruled by a king; but not just any king. Plato’s king had to be
a philosopher; in fact, he had to be a philosopher who was more or less bullied
into being a king against his will.
Something tells me that it was this, rather than the stuff about outlawing
poetry or abolishing families and replacing them with state-hired nannies, that
appealed to Dion. According to Plato, the king/philosopher was to be supreme
ruler, advised and guided by a select group of other philosophers who governed
the people, who were to be treated more or less as slaves. I can see Dion
reading this stuff and thinking Yes! Do away with ruthless oppression of the
citizen body by a drunken, intemperate madman and replace it with ruthless
oppression of the citizen body by a load of philosophers. Just the thing, and
utterly Syracusan.
So Dion sent a messenger to Athens begging Plato to come to Syracuse and help
set up the perfect society; and if he could bring along a couple of dozen other
philosophers, so much the better. To his eternal credit, Diogenes, when asked,
refused to go; but he was one of the very few who stayed behind. It was,
Diogenes said, like the lancing of a monumental boil, as all the philosophers
left Athens in a fleet of hastily chartered bulk timber freighters, sailing west
to found the perfect society among the people who’d massacred their
grandfathers.
For some reason, they didn’t even ask me. But they made a special point of
inviting Plato’s most devoted and brilliant pupil, a man of my own age by the
name of Aristotle; and that’s why Dion’s ghost deserves to rot for ever at the
bottom of the Great Shit Lake in Hell, with giant seals gnawing his testicles.
Aristotle; that sad, bewildered, ill-used, misunderstood, brilliant, pedantic
little man, the cause of so much evil.
He wasn’t Athenian, of course; he was the son of a doctor from a little place
called Stagira , up north somewhere, and when he was young his father went to
work for King Amyntas of Macedon, the father of the King Philip I’ve already
mentioned. But young Aristotle knew what he wanted to be when he grew up, and
when he was seventeen he made the long and dangerous journey south (oh, I can
picture him, that thin, nervous, fastidious traveller, suffering the torments of
the damned from dusty, rutted tracks and flea-infested mattresses) to sign up
with Plato’s Academy. There he stayed, not even paying any fees because he was
so brilliant and so admiring, until the time came for the whole circus to move
to Syracuse .
They had several good years there, playing perfect societies, until finally the
Syracusan people (who’d put up with Dionysius, but who found that the one thing
they couldn’t take was too much perfection) threw them out with prejudice and
stuck young Dionysius on the throne. Dion escaped with his life, most of his
philosophers and a new perspective on what was really needed for a truly perfect
society, namely young Dionysius’ head on a pole in the middle of the market
square. Despite several attempts, he never quite attained this state of grace;
but he did finally manage, with the help of some non-philosophical mercenaries
recruited from the pirate bands of Rhegium, to throw young Dionysius out, make
himself king and rule in absolute, blood-soaked perfection for a year or so
before someone with a bad attitude towards wisdom in general slit his throat for
him and brought Dionysius back, quite possibly (knowing the Syracusans) in the
Aristotle followed his master Plato home, of course, and for a while there
wasn’t quite so much talk about perfect societies and philosopher kings as
there had been. Plato, in fact, never recovered from his bad experience. He
lived to be nearly ninety, but he grew steadily dottier as he grew older, so
much so that even Diogenes stopped teasing him. Aristotle stuck by him, out of
loyalty and love and because the Academy was still a thoroughly sound commercial
concern, until he died; but all the while Aristotle was thinking long, hard
thoughts about such matters as human society and perfection and the sort of
low-down, dirty little bastards who’d chased him out of cosy Syracuse. It was at
this time that he evolved his theory of Natures, which states that every living
thing has its own Nature, which defines its existence. You are, in other words,
what you’re born as; and everybody who isn’t born a philosopher or a seeker
after perfection is by nature a slave (physei doulos; it sounds so much neater
in Greek).
Bear with me, Phryzeutzis; even after all this time, I’m still a devoutly
yapping dog, or a Cynic as we came to call ourselves when we wanted to be a
little bit more respectable (the word sounds impressive but it just means
‘doggy’). None of it ought to have mattered, you see; it should just have been
word-games, entertainments with lies, like King Dionysius’ plays. It was
Alexander who made the evil possible, but the fact remains, if it hadn’t been
for Dion, there wouldn’t have been an Alexander, and I would be home now, in
Athens , instead of here at the end of the world.
You know Pigface (I can’t remember his real name and I couldn’t pronounce it if
I could), the big, burly man who trudges round the villages with that enormous
basket on his back selling bits and pieces of trash to the country people? Well,
he passed through this morning just before dawn (I expect you were still fast
asleep, you layabout) and I saw that he had a few Athenian-made scent bottles in
with the rest of his junk; I could only just see the necks, poking up out of the
straw and felt they were wrapped in, but I’d recognise Attic ware at night down
a mineshaft. Well; I guess that means the place is still there, or it was a few
months ago, when those pots began their commercial odyssey. I don’t suppose the
man who made them ever imagined they’d end up out here, right on the pie-crust
of the world. You could say the same about me, too, of course.
There are parts of your life that move slowly, like goats going back up the hill
after they’ve been milked — childhood, of course, and bad experiences, like
being in the army or a nasty illness — and there are other parts that skim by,
like swallows or kingflshers. As often as not they’re the good times, or else
those parts of your life where one day was just like another, you had somewhere
to sleep and enough to eat, and you were like a man with an old mule yoked up to
his cart, letting him find his own way home.
My years as a jobbing oracle to the wealthy and gullible traders of Attica
passed like that — zip, all gone, and before I knew it I’d stopped being a cocky
kid and weathered into a minor landmark, a very small part of Athens . What
happened to me during that time, I wonder? Well, I did get married.
Her name was Myrrhine, and the thing that most attracted me to her was four
acres of mature vines in the Mesogaia. They were good vines; south-facing, well
dug-in and laid out so as to leave enough room to plant useful raps of barley
between the rows (which not only supplements your cereals yield and makes the
most use of precious land, but also slows the growth of the vines and so
produces better grapes). Her father even threw in the complete set of vine-props
— a worthwhile consideration at the time, when good, seasoned ash prop-shafts
were at a premium, what with all the good timber being used up by the
spear-makers. Also included in the deal were two big wicker baskets for
harvesting the grapes. I couldn’t persuade him to include the pressing-vat, but
I got it at cost, with a pruning and grafting knife on top as luck-money (but it
was worthless; the blade was bent and I never could get it to keep an edge).
Myrrhine herself — well, she was sixteen when we got married, and I was eight
years older. Her father was solid Heavy Infantry class, with one serving son
(the other had been killed in the Theban war) and an honest enough man according
to his lights. Certainly, nothing he told me about Myrrhine was a lie.
She ate. Non-stop. Incessantly. You don’t see fat people in Attica as a rule;
those of us who can afford to get fat don’t, because your upper classes of
society have all been taught the Athenian doctrine of beauty. It’s a linguistic
thing, I fancy; our word for ‘beautiful’ is also the word for ‘good’, and ‘ugly’
also means ‘bad’, and the words also have political meanings that you simply
can’t bleach out of them —kalos means beautiful, good and upper class, aischros
is ugly, bad, common. In consequence, we can’t imagine things being any other
way, because we can’t find the words to express it. I tell you, it plays merry
hell with light comedy; the best-loved and most-used plot in modern comedy is
rich boy meets lovely peasant girl, they fall in love, his dad won’t let them
marry, your variation on the theme here, and at the end it turns out that she’s
not a peasant after all, she’s a rich man’s daughter who was snatched from her
cradle by an eagle or stolen by pirates or some such trash — it’s got to be that
way, or else if she’s an Oarsman’s daughter, how can she possibly be pretty?
Yes, I know I’m hedging round the subject. It’s deliberate. I feel really
uncomfortable telling you about this, because it’s a part of my life I’m not
particularly proud of. Not that I did anything wrong. I married her for the
dowry, and I was the only husband they could get for her, even with five acres.
I fulfilled my part of the bargain by taking her off her father’s hands and
keeping her housed, clothed and fed (the latter element being no trifle, I’m
here to tell you). She didn’t expect anything more out of the arrangement and
that was just as well. I wasn’t cruel or horrible. I just kept out of her way,
which wasn’t a problem for me. I took to giving consultations on the steps of
Hephaestus’ temple, and when I wasn’t working I was out at the vineyard — that
is, I spent about as much time at home as the average Athenian husband, who gets
up an hour before dawn and goes out to the fields, comes home when it’s getting
dark and very soon afterwards goes to sleep.
But I know I made a bad job of the marriage, and it was for the simple reason
that outside of the dowry, she didn’t interest me in the least. The gods alone
know what she found to do all day; we had a houseboy for the domestic chores,
and she simply couldn’t spin or weave to save her life, though she tried so
desperately hard (but wool costs money, and she wasted so much of it I had to
stop her trying). I t
hink most of the time she just sat and ate, great handfuls
of the coarse, dry barley bread I bought in the hope that it would discourage
her (but no; even the stale ends I got cheap were always gone by the time I got
home), washed down with a substantial proportion of the yield of her dowry. She
had a little bird in a cage for a while, but one day I came home and it wasn’t
there any more. The houseboy tried to convince me she’d eaten it, but my guess
is she let it out for a fly round the room and it got away. That’d be entirely
possible; she was the clumsiest person I ever knew, except for Aristotle of
Stagira.
She lived to the age of nineteen and died in childbirth; poor girl, she
desperately wanted a baby, it was the only thing she ever asked of me, and it
killed her, as everybody said it would. They told me that because she was so
obese, her heart would never stand the strain of labour. Unforgivably, my main
reaction when they told me she was dead was exasperation (serves her right, she
should have listened), followed immediately by the numb despair caused by the
knowledge that if she died childless the dowry reverted to her father.
So that was my career in husbandry, so to speak, and a fine mess I made of it.
Diogenes summed it up perfectly. ‘You put in just the right amount of effort,’
he said, as we walked back together from the funeral, ‘but you made a mess of
the proportions. If you’d spent a bit more effort on the girl and a bit less on
the vineyard, you’d be a father and a man of property today instead of a—’
‘Thank you,’ I interrupted. ‘And thank you very much for waiting till now to
point it out tome.’
He shrugged. ‘I was thinking of her,’ he said. ‘She’s gone safely home now. It’d
have been wrong to keep her here just to spare you from feeling guilty.’
I didn’t speak to Diogenes for a week after that; but for once I believe he was
being sincere, not just trying to be annoying for effect. I don’t know; where
the monstering stopped and the philosophy began, I don’t think even he knew most
of the time.
What else did I do during that time? Well, I became a philosopher. Sounds grand,
doesn’t it? But in Athens in those days you were a philosopher by default; if
Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Page 9
