you could tell your right from your left without tying a hank of straw to your
left foot and you weren’t a total recluse, sooner or later you’d find yourself
talking philosophy with someone or other, in the queue at the cheap fish stall
or while you were waiting for your shoes to be mended.
In Eupolis’ day it had been plays; all Athenians were crazy about the theatre,
they followed it avidly, the way you people follow the horse-races and the
archery leagues and the cockfights, only more so — there’s much more to discuss
and argue over in Drama than there is in cockflghting. But the love of the
theatre gradually petered out after the War. They stopped writing Eupolis’ kind
of comedy, the topical satires, and turned to the wishy-washy love-stories we’re
stuck with nowadays, while tragedy died for lack of interest, because everything
had already been said. So the Athenians, always yearning for something new,
turned their enthusiasm towards philosophy, and soon enough they were even
starting to get it muddled up with religion, which made it even more addictive.
Now, philosophy for its own sake interests me about as much as watching iron
rust, but I am (as you may have noticed) a garrulous sort, fond of nothing so
much as the sound of my own voice, and since I was one of the Founders of the
Cynic school of philosophy, the pupil of the one and only Yapping Dog, I’d have
had a hard time steering clear of philosophical debates even if I’d been born
mute or half-witted. Diogenes thought it was all desperately amusing, of course;
it was clear proof of the validity of his theory of self-fulfilling bullshit,
and he did everything he could to encourage it, sending earnest young men to
follow me about writing down my maxims and apothegms on those little portable
wax tablets that fit so neatly into the palm of your left hand, and attributing
to me some of his wittiest and most profound (not to mention outrageous and
blasphemous) sayings. I had the privilege of perfect strangers thronging round
me in the street and not knowing whether they were going to fall at my feet or
knock out my teeth. Still, it was very good for business and I’ll be perfectly
honest, I enjoyed it. Political and social philosophy was my forte, since you
didn’t need to know any arithmetic or geometry and you didn’t have to go
traipsing round naming species of plants or measuring shadows or finding out
what causes volcanoes.
But I shouldn’t, I really shouldn’t ever have started taking it seriously. It
was, after all, mere self-fulfilling bullshit, and I ought to have been on my
guard about the self-fulfilling part. But it’s such seductive stuff; you
wouldn’t be human if you didn’t have your own pet theories on how to create the
perfect society. Everybody does it; you do, Phryzeutzis, I’ve heard you. ‘The
world’d be a better place if we could all just get along together,’ I’ve heard
you say, and that’s political philosophy, of the most pernicious and dangerous
sort, I might add. Oh, it doesn’t matter fleabites if it’s just you saying it;
but if someone who people listen to comes out with something like that —the
triter the better, because it’s easier to understand — it becomes invested with
a thick furry pelt of profundity, and the idiot proposer of the notion gets a
reputation for marvellously uncluttered vision and cutting clean through to the
heart of the matter. And if the next thing he happens to say in an unguarded
moment is along the lines of, ‘The world’d be a better place if we lined up
those damned Thebans and shoved ‘em off a cliff,’ next thing you know, the
City’s filled with men in armour trying to find where their regiment’s supposed
to be mustering, and you can’t buy olives because the navy commissioners have
bought the lot for the Fleet. Not to mention, of course, all the deaths and
amputated legs and burned-out houses. Wonderful stuff, political philosophy;
like strong wine, only cheaper.
But of course you know it’ll never do any harm if it’s you saying it, because
first you’re not important enough for anybody to take any notice of, and second,
you’d never be irresponsible enough to say anything dangerous or inflammatory,
like the other fools do. Oh, no. Never meant anything by it. Just harmless
philosophy, that’s all.
Of course, working conditions can colour your view of any trade or vocation.
Think of the poor charcoal-burner, who spends his life with red eyes and tears
running down his face, or the wretched man who works all day in the lime-kilns;
or the sword-grinder, whose snot and spit come out like wet mortar because of
all the fine grit-dust he breathes in as he sits behind his grinding-wheel. What
about the scorched and blistered hands of the smith, or the shredded fingertips
of the leatherworker, or the red-raw palms of the oarsman? The seamstress ends
up blind, the potter’s knees wear out, the tanner gets tanned himself, and as
for the miserable creatures who work in the mines — well, if they were mules
you’d have knocked them on the head and cut them up for the dogs years ago, out
of simple humanity. The farmer, of course, plies many different trades and each
one mutilates a different bit of him, from the top of his sunburned head to the
verrucas on his feet after he’s trodden the season’s grapes, by way of his
permanently stooped shoulders and hopelessly twisted back.
Worst afflicted of all, it goes without saying, is the poor bloody philosopher,
who must exercise his calling at dinner-parties and drinking-parties, or huddled
in the dust under the shade of a tree or a tall building. When he isn’t being
stuffed like a barn-yard pig with rich food, his host is trying to soak him to
death in neat wine; and some of the couches you find yourself lying on are just
instruments of torture in disguise, like the celebrated bed of Procrustes in the
old fable. Gods help you if you fall asleep after a heavy dinner on the average
Athenian dining-room couch; you’ll wake up feeling as if someone had cut off
your head while you were asleep and then stuck it back on with fish-glue without
taking proper care to see if the seams were lined up just right.
But the physical pain and discomfort’s nothing compared with the mental agony of
a really protracted, seventeen-course dinner where your host fancies himself as
a bit of a philosopher, and you daren’t sit up and point out his deplorable
errors of logic unless you want to find yourself out in the street before
they’ve even brought in the mullet baked in cream cheese.
(Now, I’ve noticed, Phryzeutzis, that in these parts, the host of a feast or
banquet provides all the food himself. The greater the ostentatious expense, the
rule seems to be, the greater the prestige. Foolish, of course, but logical.
Where I come from, though, the tradition was different. At an Athenian party,
all the host provided was the wine — but gods help him if it ran out — and it
was up to the guests to produce the food. That’s why you’d sometimes see those
solemn little processions, headed by a kitchen slave bearing a huge dish covered
over with a towel, as a gourmet shipped his dinne
r across central Athens in the
cool of the early evening.)
And yet, just as pure refined silver comes out of the hell of the mines, so true
philosophy somehow drains out of the endless boozy nights we philosophers spend
in the course of our arduous vocation. I can best illustrate this, I think, by
telling you about a dinner party I went to in Athens when I was just beginning
to be recognised as a force to be reckoned with in the cut-throat arena of
political theory. Our host was a man called Memnides, a relentlessly generous
patron of the sciences who’d made a lot of money in the Black Sea grain trade
over the years. There were always one or two house philosophers lounging around
at his place, mostly the philosophical equivalent of punch-drunk old boxers
whose bodies and reactions are shot but who can still make a fight of it out of
sheer technique and experience; men like Speusippus and Erastus, who’d been
minor-league sparring partners of the likes of Plato, hard to injure as they’d
long since spat out their last remaining tooth. Then there’d be young
garlic-primed fighting-cocks like me, some new discovery from out of town, like
Coriscus or Aristotle, and always at least one true heavyweight champion, such
as Diogenes— All these names are whizzing over your head like the first volley
of arrows on a blustery day, when the archers are still trying to gauge
elevation and windage. Don’t worry about it; most of them live now only in the
minds of old men like me with memories like a miser s barn, where nothing that’s
truly useless ever gets thrown away. And as for the few you’d be expected to
have heard of if you were an Athenian, the truth is that fame and glory attach
themselves almost at random in philosophy, with no more regard for merit or
originality in their choice of target than a seagull’s droppings falling from a
great height. There were always plenty more to take the places of the ones who
went down and stayed down, and quite soon you stopped trying to tell them apart
and just thought of them by the categories they fell into — Platonist,
Peripatetic, Cynic, what have you.
As was his custom, Memnides chose the starting point of the debate, and then let
it go where it wanted, provided it didn’t leave a trail of blood and bone all
over the furniture. Because Diogenes and I were there, Memnides selected a topic
that was pretty well certain to be political whichever way it decided to drift.
‘If I was the Great King,’ he said, ‘and I was to say to you, here’s five
thousand families and enough money and goods to start a colony, where would you
go and how’d you go about setting it up? Coriscus, your city’s a fairly recent
foundation, you should have some pretty clear insights into the process. What do
you reckon?’
The part of me that wasn’t groaning, Ye gods, not again! was happy enough at the
choice of subject. It was one that the conscientious philosopher practised
daily, the way a musician practises scales; as he trimmed his vines or dug over
his trenches, he’d be polishing up his opening remarks or racking his brains for
a new and original take on the stock elements of the argument. As it happened,
this was a topic that had always appealed to me, in spite of its bone-crushing
banality. It was one of the few subjects in political theory that actually
interested me, but I tried my best not to let my enthusiasm get in the way of
my professionalism.
‘Well,’ said Coriscus (the out-of-towner, you may remember, and as such the only
man present who might conceivably have something new to say), ‘I reckon we’ve
got the balance just about right in... (damned if I can remember the name of the
place; it’s nothing but a pile of overgrown masonry now anyhow, after it got
under the feet of an advancing army in some war or other). ‘We believe that we
have the perfect blend of the three systems of government, monarchy, oligarchy
and democracy. It all happened quite by chance, of course, but we found long
since that there wasn’t really anything we could do to improve on what good
fortune had given us.’
‘Really?’ Memnides said. ‘This sounds interesting. What happened?’
Coriscus smiled. ‘A rockslide, would you believe,’ he said. ‘We built our
Council Chamber on the south-facing side of our Citadel Rock, our version of
your Acropolis, if you like. It’s a sort of miniature mountain right in the
middle of town with sheer cliffs on three sides, wonderful for defence and with
a natural spring on top. Unfortunately there was some sort of fault in the rock
where we built the Chamber, because one day, quite without warning, it fell off
the edge into the Basket-Weavers’ Market with the whole Council still in it.
Diogenes grinned. ‘You’re making this up,’ he said. ‘It sounds too good to be
true.’
‘You’d believe me if you could see the Citadel Rock,’ Coriscus replied. ‘Really,
we should have seen it coming, but we didn’t and that was that. Our entire
government was wiped out in under a minute, and there was nobody left with the
authority to hold elections or co-opt an inner council or nominate archons or
anything like that.
‘Well, once we’d hunted through the rubble and cleared up and buried the dead —
quite a lengthy business, I’m afraid, we specialise rather in basket-making — we
realised what a fix we were in. To make matters worse, we’ve always had
something of a history of infighting, ever since foundation times. Originally,
you see, the land all belonged to the descendants of the founding families, and
they didn’t let go without a fight. There were still enough of them left to form
a substantial and influential lobby for returning to the original constitution,
which was an oligarchy, of course.’
‘I trust you didn’t, though,’ someone interrupted. ‘That’d have been a
retrograde step, surely.’
Coriscus nodded. ‘Oh, we couldn’t have had that,’ he replied. ‘The Geomoroi —
that’s what we called the founding families — were so unpopular with the trading
community, we’d have had civil war. We do a lot of trade, being up there on the
Black Sea , so there were enough merchants to make a difference.’
‘So what did you decide?’ Memnides prompted.
Coriscus held out his cup for a refill. ‘I was coming to that,’ he said. ‘But
first I’d better just mention how we arrived at our decision. After all, it has
some bearing on what we decided, and proper scientific method—’
‘Yes, yes,’ someone interrupted. ‘Get on with it. This sounds interesting.’
Memnides’ young nephew took the empty cup over to the mixing-bowl and filled it
up. When he’d returned with it, Coriscus carried on.
‘Pretty well everybody was on the scene by this time,’ he said, ‘so the few of
us who were still thinking straight sneaked round with the red ropes—’
‘Oh, you did that too?’ Aristotle broke in, scrabbling in his sleeve for those
tablets of his, which go with him everywhere. ‘That’s interesting.’
(They were referring to the long ropes dipped in red paint which the Athenian
city watch used to stretch
across the market-place and then slowly carry forward
just before Assembly time, to herd people out of the market square and into
Assembly. Anybody who was dilatory about going to do his duty as a citizen got a
broad red stripe across his backside and had to endure the wit of his friends
and acquaintances until the paint wore off. In the old days, democracy in Athens
was compulsory; in fact, once when we’d just come out of a pretty nasty minor
civil war, the Council decreed that anybody who hadn’t supported either faction
in the recent bloodbath should be heavily fined and deprived of his rights as a
citizen. Apathy, you see, just isn’t our way.)
‘Anyway,’ Coriscus continued, trying not to be vexed at the interruption, ‘once
everybody was all together, one of the priests of Dionysus — he was the nearest
thing we had to a figure of authority —got up and said that we were all going to
stay where we were until we agreed by an overwhelming majority on adopting a new
form of constitution. And to encourage our deliberations, he was going to post
six of his temple guards round the well; anybody attempting to draw water from
it before the debate closed would be thrown down it, by order of the god.
‘It was a hot day, and the temple guards looked like they meant business; so it
was a singularly constructive and orderly debate.
‘I won’t bore you with the order of speeches or the detailed arguments — or at
least I will, but not now; I’m going to write them all down one of these days,
because some of them were pretty good. Suffice it to say, we took a vote just
after mid-afternoon and got the necessary majority, and this is what we decided.
‘The first proposal was for a monarchy. Nobody wanted that at first, but some of
the arguments in favour — continuity, consistency, a legislature that was above
party squabbling or private or factional interests — were hard to deny. It was
agreed that it would be nice to incorporate the good features of monarchy,
provided we could dispose of the drawbacks.
‘Next, someone proposed democracy; full democracy, Athenian style. This was a
very popular suggestion at first, until we started hearing the downside;
ill-informed decisions based on the whim of the mob, irrational mood-swings, the
Alexander at the Worlds End Tom Holt Page 10
