Stealing Athena

by Karen Essex

  Mary had been lost in her thoughts about Emma—for how long, she did not know, but it had been long enough for Elgin and Sir William to have segued into the subject that Elgin had intended to raise. Apparently Elgin had found a way of bringing up his Athens mission, because Sir William was at this moment extolling the superiority of Greek art over the Roman. “Greece was the great mistress of the arts. In Rome, all but the most admired buildings were merely imitations of the Grecian originals. What an opportunity you have before you, Elgin,” Sir William said. “The great works of Pericles and Pheidias lay for ages buried in its ruins, but from those ruins they may, Phoenix-like, receive a second birth. And through your efforts.”

  “I have been trying to explain the urgency of the mission to Lady Elgin,” her husband said.

  “My dear Lady Elgin,” Sir William began patiently, “Cicero himself said that nothing more perfect in kind exists than the statues made by the hands of Pheidias. And as for the Parthenon, which houses them, no pen has adequately described nor pencil faithfully depicted its beauty. It was dedicated in the year four hundred thirty-eight in the era before the birth of Our Lord, and still has no architectural rival.”

  “Imagine!” Mary replied, trying to muster an amount of enthusiasm to match that of the men.

  “But now it is in a ruinous state. When the Romans subdued Greece they became enamored of its architecture and arts. Not so the Turks. They call the ruins old stones and don’t care a fig for their preservation. Lord Elgin, if he proceeds with his ambition to make casts of what is left of the masterpieces atop the Acropolis, will be a national hero for his contribution to British arts. Indeed, he will be performing a service to Art itself, and to History!”

  “I intend to support my husband’s every ambition and decision, Sir William,” she said.

  “Sir William has a splendid suggestion, Mary,” Elgin said.

  “Yes, you must make a trip to Messina to meet with Giovanni Battista Lusieri. He is a superb artist, one of the finest in Italy. He served for many years as court painter in Naples. He is the perfect man to head your Athens project.”

  “It is a rigorous journey, is it not?” Mary asked. How many days could she, in her condition, endure the crawl over Sicily’s sweltering hills? “And would it not be expensive to hire so illustrious a painter for the two years in which we will require his services?”

  “Lady Hamilton and I will be delighted to host you if you do not wish to accompany Lord Elgin to Messina.”

  Elgin knew how Mary felt about staying under Lady Hamilton’s roof, but his eyes were twinkling with enthusiasm. If he thought he would be able to hire a competent artist to head his Athenian project, he would happily leave Mary in the hands of the whapper.

  “My place is with my husband, Sir William, though I do appreciate your kind offer.”

  “My dear, have you studied Life of Pericles?”

  “Plutarch’s version?” Mary asked. “I have not.”

  “Then I entreat you to accept my copy of the translation by Mr. Dryden. I think you will find it most illuminating. You must do all that you can to apprehend the meaning of the monuments built by Athens’s great statesman Pericles and his friend, the genius Pheidias.”

  Mary took the book from Sir William. It appeared to be more than one hundred years old, though he assured her that it was a more recent copy of the original edition. He must have read and reread it a thousand times. The leather cover was crackled and worn. Mary flipped through the pages, turning her nose away at the musty smell they released.

  “I shall read it with great enthusiasm and great care,” she said. After Sir William had listed with pride Emma Hamilton’s contributions to his career as an envoy, it would not do for him to think that Mary Elgin would be any less enthusiastic or deft in supporting her husband’s every endeavor.

  “You might find the stories of Pericles and his mistress Aspasia quite interesting.”

  “Aspasia? I am not familiar with the lady.”

  “Lady!” Elgin exclaimed. “She was his courtesan.” Mary could see that Elgin regretted his words and wished that he could retract the faux pas. They were, after all, in the home of a courtesan, or a former courtesan, before Sir William had made her his wife.

  “What was her relation to the man who presided over Athens’s Golden Age?” Mary asked.

  “Plutarch says that Aspasia was courted by Pericles because of her knowledge of politics and rhetoric. Socrates was her friend, and a frequent guest at her dinner soirées.”

  “Then why have I not heard of her?”

  “She sounds like one of the characters in a lady’s romance, Mary,” said Elgin. “That she was Pericles’ adviser and Socrates’ friend is probably the invention of some ancient gossipmonger or weaver of romantic tales—an ancient Greek version of our Mrs. Burney or Mrs. Radcliffe. For I am sure that there have always been women to craft stories that appeal to the darker regions of ladies’ imaginations. You would do well to overlook the more gossipy elements of Plutarch’s stories and stay the course of proper history.”

  But Elgin’s admonition did not deter Mary’s curiosity. Later that evening, when they had returned to their makeshift bedroom in the crumbling palazzo, while Elgin reviewed maps that showed the roads to the city of Messina, Mary opened Sir William’s copy of Plutarch’s Lives and began to read. She sped through the stories of Pericles’ younger days, searching for the name of Aspasia. Was the political efficacy of courtesans some theme in history that had escaped Mary’s attention? Did one have to be a fallen woman to participate openly in the civic world of men, from which women were traditionally barred? She would find out. She searched the pages for a mention of Aspasia, finally settling on her name. It was said, according to Plutarch, that she was from Miletus, a Greek city in Asia Minor, and that she modeled herself after the courtesan Thargelia, a beauty who influenced men of power in olden Ionian times. Another courtesan still!

  And there it was: Pericles fell in love with Aspasia because she was astute. And Socrates, the great philosopher and the wisest of all men, would sometimes spend time in her company. And yet Mary had never heard of the lady! How could that be?

  Mary turned the lamp key, carefully raising the flame, hoping the extra light would not attract Elgin’s attention. She did not wish to be disturbed, nor questioned about what she was reading.

  In the city of Athens, in the fourth year of the Thirty-Year Truce with Sparta

  I WANT YOU TO BEHAVE meekly, and not at all like yourself,” Alkibiades said, dragging me by the arm at a pace faster than my tall platform shoes would allow me to walk. “If Perikles sees what you are truly like, he will promptly rescind any offer to help us.”

  “Slow down! You are bringing me to him like a slave to market!” I protested.

  Though it was very early in the day, the marketplace was crowded. The vendors had already set up their stalls, and the slave women were negotiating loudly with them for fish, cheese, olives, and oil, disturbing the tranquility of the morning. One of the women smelled a length of sausage, throwing it back in the vendor’s face.

  “Everybody knows that you mix the offal of the cow with dog meat and try to pass it off as first-class sausage!” she cried. “My master demands high quality!” The man saw that I was an amused witness to this exchange, and he shook his head helplessly.

  Nearby, a black-robed sophist walked with alacrity, posing questions to the young boys who raced to keep up with him; they were shouting “Yes, master” and “No, master” to the questions he asked while flailing his arms about like an angry bat. I slowed down to listen to the lesson, but Alkibiades jerked me away, dodging the peripatetic classroom and crossing the square, where moneylenders sat under colorful tents doing their daily business amid other sellers of goods.

  For a hefty man, Alkibiades walked quickly, driven by his meanness and his desire to get me out of his household. How my sister tolerated him on top of her at night was beyond me. I knew that she complied; sleeping in the room
next to theirs, I often heard his heavy grunting, followed by the sigh of release that brought blessed silence. Now, his belly shook from side to side as we trudged along, crossing the western side of the agora, where the Council House and many of the government buildings were organized. Hundreds of men were lined up in the shade of the buildings’ colonnades.

  “Alkibiades! What are you doing with that tasty morsel? She’s not your wife.”

  I heard a bunch of my brother-in-law’s cronies cackling even before I turned around to see the smug faces and ever-present paunches of men his age. They were standing in the jury lines—the favorite daily pastime of interfering old men who had nothing better to do than pass judgment on their fellow Athenians. Perikles had passed a law that jurors had to be paid, and now the elders of the city fought for the privilege.

  “This is my sister-in-law, if you must know,” Alkibiades answered. “I am taking her to meet Perikles to see if he will take her off my hands.”

  “I’ll take her off your hands,” one of the men said. I looked down, not because I was shy, but because I had to prevent myself from cursing him.

  “I’d like to see a pretty little thing like that in my hands,” said another. “I need a young wife. The old one wore out and died on me!”

  This brought even more laughter.

  “She is an orphan with no dowry,” he said.

  “In that case, she is not so pretty,” the man replied.

  “And she is a metic—a foreigner—so you can’t marry her anyway,” Alkibiades snapped, rushing past them. “Good day, gentlemen. Can’t keep the ‘great man’ waiting.” He said it grudgingly, so that they would know that any groveling he was about to do before Perikles was a ruse. All the old men snickered, as if they shared his sentiment, and we sped away.

  We were to meet Perikles under the Painted Stoa, one of the many colonnades in the agora that protected the Athenians from the fierce July sun. I looked across the plateau to the Temple of Hephaestus, sun bouncing from its strong marble pillars, and then up to the Akropolis, where I could see men at work on the exterior of a temple to Athena Parthenos, at the moment a skeleton of marble columns that was supposed to become the most majestic building in Athens. I trembled to think that I was waiting to be introduced to the very man who was responsible for commissioning this grand monument.

  Kalliope, my sister, had braided ribbons into the crown of my long, light brown hair. I powdered my face to appear fairer, and I wore our mother’s hammered gold necklace and matching earrings with little pearlescent tortoises. I borrowed my sister’s platform sandals, since I knew that Perikles was tall and I wanted to appear statuesque rather than petite, with its implication of submissiveness. I had no aspiration of having him fall in love with me—far from it. My highest ambition for the meeting was to be seen as a woman who was too respectable to serve in a brothel.

  “Keep your head tilted nicely to the side and your eyes cast downward,” my brother-in-law instructed me. “Do not look Perikles straight in the face. That’s a clear sign of insubordination in a woman, and I don’t want you showing him your brazen ways.”

  My sister had met Alkibiades when he came to Miletus, where we were born; it was a coastal city in Ionia situated south of the great city of Ephesus, which had been fought over many times by Greeks and Persians. He had been exiled from Athens on a political charge and could not wait to return, Athens being the center of the world, as he liked to say, and the rest of it, her appendages. He always complained of my big appetite—for food and for conversation and could not wait to “unload” me on a husband, some Attic farmer “who could keep my mouth full.” While we traveled on the boat, leaving behind Miletus and everything we knew, he cautioned me to be quiet and soft-spoken while he shopped for a husband for me. He was worried that I would let on about my “knowing,” which would render me an unsuitable wife.

  “No man,” he explained to me, “wants the responsibility of maintaining a female relative, especially one such as you who is lousy at housework and who considers herself above drudgery. You’re useless in my household. In my opinion, you’d make a sorry wife, and an even sorrier slave. Pity the man I trick into marrying the likes of you.”

  No amount of cajoling by Kalliope would cause him to treat me nicely. He did not like women such as myself. After our mother died, my sister, named after a Muse, but having none of the characteristics of one, had assumed most of the domestic responsibilities, and I grew up with the freedom of a motherless child. My father was amused by my verbal abilities and allowed me to go to the marketplace and listen to the lectures of Thales the Sage, who was first in wisdom among all astronomers. He had studied the stars in Egypt with the priests of higher learning, who taught him how to predict solar eclipses, making him seem more magician than scientist, until he wrote down the formulas by which such things could be foretold. From Thales, I learned the equations of geometry, for he said that it was important to understand space because all was contained within it. He taught us how to know the height of things by measuring shadow. He believed that the gods were in everything, an inexplicable intelligence that animated all living things as well as the natural forces. He spent hours explaining that there was no difference between life and death—an argument that, at thirteen years old, I could not apprehend, and still cannot in any reasonable or practical way. It was my privilege to listen to his last lectures, as he was a very old man in those days. He died when I was fourteen, in the year of the fifty-eighth Olympiad, sitting in his chair watching an athletic competition. From him, I learned how to lay out an argument; how to reason my way through an incomprehensible, abstract thought with careful and persistent inquiry, allowing it to reveal itself to me slowly like a flower opening to the sun.

  “Your father let you run wild in the marketplace,” Alkibiades had said as we were crossing the sea to Athens. “He nearly ruined you for any man. Fortunately, you are pretty. That will go a long way toward getting someone to take you off my hands. And it shan’t be a moment too soon for either my pleasure or my pocketbook.”

  But when we arrived in Athens, we discovered that Perikles, in an effort to limit citizenship, had just passed a law making marriage between an Athenian citizen and a metic illegal. Alkibiades was furious, thinking he was stuck with me.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said. “I can always sell you into prostitution or concubinage.”

  My sister pleaded with him, shedding many tears over this threat. “Please, dear husband, I could not live if my sister was forced to submit to such a fate.”

  “If you can convince her to keep quiet and be a good girl, I will try to help her,” he said to Kalliope. But privately, he continued to threaten me with a life of prostitution. If he could prove that I had lost my virginity—he said he could establish this by raping me—under Athenian law he could sell me to a brothel and obtain a good sum of money.

  My sister continued to beseech him to seek a respectable situation for me, so he decided to take his complaint directly to Perikles, whose law had spoiled any plans to marry me off, and who had just divorced his wife. Perikles assured Alkibiades that he would not change a new law for the sake of one girl’s fate, but agreed to “take a look” at me to see if he had any ideas as to what might be done with or for me.

  “Just remember, Aspasia, you have no father and no dowry. Worse, you’re a glutton for food, and your education has made you a glutton for conversation. You are the very opposite of all that is desirable in a woman,” Alkibiades said as the Painted Stoa came into sight. “When you meet Perikles, you must act very sweetly to make up for your shortcomings.”

  Thales believed that men were better than women, and Greeks better than all barbarians. Athenians carried the philosophy one step further, believing that citizens of Athens were better than all other Greeks. Perikles, though a member of the democratic faction, had been born an aristocrat and was said to be more imperious than any of his conservative opponents. I was terrified to meet him. Busts and statues of him
appeared in public parks and buildings all over the city. He controlled the government, it was said, by the force of his personality, the breadth of his vision, and the power of his oratory, though the only office he held was that of general. Born into the nobility, he had changed the laws of governance so that common men might hold high offices. He was described as both grand and egalitarian. In his private life, he was parsimonious to the extent that the comic playwrights mocked his cheapness, but he spent public funds extravagantly. He was a paradoxical, enigmatic, and totally incomprehensible man. And I was to be at his mercy.

  Under the Painted Stoa, a gigantic pavilion with murals of the historical battles between the Greek people and their foreign enemies, I saw a head of dark, curly hair rising above a crowd of men. The owner of this hair stood quite still before the colossal painting of the Battle of Marathon, almost as if he belonged to the scene on the wall rather than with the men who vied for his attention. He was composed, appearing to listen to them, but with an air of detachment. The men were interrupting one another, gesticulating, laying out some sort of argument or perhaps issuing a request, but he merely shifted his eyes from one speaker to the next. Alkibiades waved at him, and he looked past his petitioners and met my eyes, staring at me for several moments. His face was inscrutable. He waved off the men who were making their appeal and walked toward us. He was a full head taller than me, even with my platform shoes. He had a long face, deep-set intense brown eyes, and a nose so straight it might have been drawn with a mathematician’s ruler. He walked with purpose. His beard was short, dark, and curly. The comic playwrights who called him Onion Head, making fun of his long face and big head, had exaggerated. I thought he was solemn and handsome.