The Laughter of Aphrodite

by Peter Green

  When I think of that bitter, grizzled old man, so pathetic in his drunkenness and his defeat, I am afraid for myself. Some of his guilt lies on my shoulders; I must share the responsibility for what he has become. He cried out to me in his distress, and I was too young, too cruel, too self-centred to understand or care. Condemnation is so easy—and so satisfying. To watch Agesilaïdas with Ismene is a hard lesson to my pride, even now.

  Must I always destroy—or be destroyed? Was the long spring and summer of my happiness an illusion? Dare I look back across the years?

  In the sunken garden there is a pleasant ornamental pool, with two shallow basins at its centre: water spouts sluggishly from the mouth of a cheerful little bronze fawn, who bears his verdigris patches and general air of neglect with apparent equanimity. Under waving weeds, through a dim green translucency, fish flicker and dart like flashes of fire. The garden is generally a little unkempt: hedges need clipping, weeds sprout between the stones, the cabbages have rocketed, and in the orchard plum- and apple-trees riot unpruned. The last of the roses scatter blown, waxy petals on the grass. I can see my mother itching to be at it all: to sweep, clean, burn, set in order. Bachelors, her expression says, all too clearly, can never be trusted to look after anything. Not even exile can diminish her passion for organizing the world’s universal incompetence.

  Agesilaïdas says apologetically: “I’m afraid things have got a little out of hand, Lady Cleïs. It was the best I could manage at short notice.” He runs one hand through his shock of dark, wavy, greying hair, and gives my mother a most disarming smile. Alcaeus has accompanied us on our tour of inspection: his obvious intimacy with Agesilaïdas is a little embarrassing. Now, from behind my mother, he flashes me the ghost of a wink, as though in complicity.

  My mother says: “On the contrary, it’s enchanting. We’re really most grateful to you.” This is her polite social voice, accentuated now by the sense of being under an obligation: it has, in the past, frozen lesser men, but Agesilaïdas merely raises one eyebrow a fraction, and continues to smile.

  “My dear, we couldn’t possibly have let you stay in that poky little place—”

  “Especially,” says my mother, when we have a local celebrity in the family.” Her skirts hiss, Medusa-like, over the flags.

  Agesilaïdas clearly thinks this is a remark best ignored. He takes her arm. “Perhaps you’d like to come and go over the domestic quarters with me—and you’d better be introduced to the steward, he’s a crotchety creature, but he does cheer up wonderfully when there’s a tenant in occupation—” Skilfully he walks her back to the house; Alcaeus and I are left staring into the deep green pool, watching the fishes come and go.

  He cocks his head on one side, appraises me. “Violet-tressed, holy, honey-smiling—Sappho,” he drawls: he has chosen three traditional epithets for Aphrodite. “You have a very goddesslike look in your eye, my dear. It terrifies me sometimes.”

  Then, in a different voice, looking away from me into the pool, he goes on: “There’s something I would like to tell you about. I don’t know how.” He spreads out his hands: there is a subtly defeated quality about the gesture. “You could help, if you wanted to. There’s no one else—”

  Silence. At last I say: “Tell me, then.”

  There is naked agony in his eyes.

  “I am ashamed to. I can’t—”

  My entire being shrinks from him: fear, contempt, embarrassment flood through me, make me cruel in self-defence.

  I hear myself say, in a cold, priggish voice: “If it were something decent, something honourable you wanted to tell me, you wouldn’t feel ashamed, you’d talk openly. But your eyes are like a sick dog’s, full of nastiness—”

  He gets up, with an abrupt, jerky gesture: his face is wiped clean, a cold expressionless mask.

  “Bitch,” he says, and the word is all the uglier for being pronounced without heat, with an air of tired indifference. “Cold, cruel bitch. You’re all the same. All of you.” Then he turns and walks swiftly back to the house. For so broad and solidly built a man the delicacy of his tread is astonishing: he might be a trained dancer.

  I stoop down beside the pool, and my reflection greets me: sunlight glints behind those dark eyes, fish move through the chambered greenness of that tremulous skull. I shiver faintly; but it is a warm day, a new poem has begun to take shape in my head, and under the pressure of that engrossing excitement all else is soon over-ridden and—for the time being at least—forgotten.

  Meg’s handwriting is like her personality: neat, well-controlled, but from time to time bursting out in wild emotional loops and flourishes. It is odd, still, to get a letter from her, a tangible reminder of her absence, to break the seals knowing that though Mytilene is no more than twenty miles away I cannot return there. Odd, and a little unreal. I have not yet, emotionally, accepted the fact of my exile.

  “Darling Sappho,” she writes, “it was wonderful seeing you, if only for a short time. We should be grateful to the Goddess, it was her festival after all. I wanted to stay longer—I mean, there’s no law against our coming to Pyrrha, is there?—but Mama said no, it would be most inadvisable, and when Mama talks like that there’s no arguing with her.”

  This is most interesting. The last thing one could call Aunt Helen, in the general way, is cautious. But she was, if not exactly cool with me during her visit, at least a little restrained: her natural warm spontaneity was damped down, she seemed to be giving some kind of public performance. Just what, I wonder, is she up to now?

  “The most extraordinary news—I forgot all about it when I was in Pyrrha, I was so excited at seeing you—is that Ismene, after all these years, has—guess what—had a son! Can you believe it? P nips, of course, is in a seventh heaven of delight, and has quite a new look in his eye, they tell me, when he rides round the estate.”

  (So he was luckier than the rest of us. Or did he, too, fail to keep the rendezvous that night? No, not Phanias. An anonymous warning, then? From whom? And for what ulterior motive? This is something I don’t want to think about.)

  “They have called the child Hippias, after Phanias’ father. All Mytilene came out to Three Winds for the name-day ceremony. I’ve never seen so many members of the government in one place at the same time. Myrsilus was there himself, and really, he seemed a nice enough man—a bit grey and negative, perhaps, but nothing worse.”

  (I remember, with ironic relish, what Pittacus once wrote me about Periander of Corinth: that he ate no children before breakfast )

  “I tried to hate him for your sake, darling—you know?—but it was difficult: there simply wasn’t anything to get hold of. Just like those small hard round nuts—you try and bite on him, and he’s gone, That smooth impenetrable surface—perhaps it’s the reason for his success, I don’t know.”

  There are times when I find Meg so irritating I could scream.

  “The only person who put him out of countenance at all was that rich young man who’s a friend of Alcaeus—Melanippus. Have you ever met him? Terribly aristocratic and in-bred, generations of first-cousin marriages there by the look of him, long nose, long hands, and that flat, straw-coloured hair. Myrsilus was talking to him about art, and saying how important it was for any government to encourage talent—something about the State taking over the responsibilities of noble patrons in a democracy, which was a little tactless when you think who he was talking to. “In that case,” Melanippus murmured, looking down his nose, “isn’t it a little perverse to exile your best artists?” I missed what Myrsilus said then, but he looked quite annoyed, for him.

  “Pittacus was there, of course, looking most impressive in his new robes of office, and hardly drinking at all—I suppose he feels he’s got to set a good example now. No, of course, you won’t have heard the news—he’s been elected joint-president with Myrsilus! This came as a great surprise—I mean, when you think about his past career it’s barely credible, is it?—but I gather the vote in Council was almost unanimous, and all the
guests at Three Winds were delighted, or said they were, and we had a lot of toasts and congratulatory speeches, and really, by the end you’d have thought it was Pittacus’s name-day—the poor little baby was very much left out of things. Still, Ismene could hardly take her eyes off it, even to be polite to important guests, so I don’t suppose it worried.

  “Mica was a great success—she’s suddenly grown up a lot (ex- Unordinary what a difference a year can make) and she spent hours in a corner talking painting with Melanippus, while all the mamas who had eligible daughters on hand sat and glowered—except our mama, of course, who was much too busy to notice where Telesippa and I were, she seems to have given up religion for politics (that does sound unkind!) and spent most of her time charming Myrsilus, of all people. She’s in a funny mood at the moment, I’m a bit worried about her.

  “There’s no other real news from here. Hermeas and Agenor and Telesippa send their love. We all miss you very much, Sappho darling. Mama says if you behave yourself, and keep out of bad company (what does she mean by that?) you may be allowed home quite soon. When I asked her how she knew, she just smiled and said: “Private information.” So please, darling, do be careful—I can’t wait for you to come back, it’s so lonely and empty here without you. All my love—Meg.”

  I find it hard, looking back over thirty years later, re-reading this letter with all the hindsight experience brings, to recapture the precise mood of black and angry misery into which it threw me. I cannot, I think, do better than set down, word for word, the entry I made in my journal at the time, adolescent hyperbole and all. It may at least help to explain some of my subsequent actions.

  “Despair clouds my mind: colour drains away from the world around me, grey houses lean in over my head as I walk. Numb tongue, a ringing in the ears, nausea. Will there be no end to these betrayals? Pittacus I can at least understand—a Thracian tradesman, clever, unprincipled, coarse, ambitious, a sensual man of vulgar appetites, selling what ideals he had for power. But Aunt Helen (I try to read some other meaning into Meg’s letter; it’s no good, the truth is there, inescapable), Aunt Helen whom I have adored and idolized and loved as I could never love my own mother—how could she do such a thing? Brightness and faith are tarnished, lost in a shabby morass of expedience, compromise, vanity, greed. Whatever happens, however hopeless the goal may seem, those of us who are left must, must hold fast to the truth. And truth, ultimately, is meaningless without action. For the first time, I am proud to be an exile.”

  All this I poured out—hurt, confused, angry, proud—to Antimenidas: there was no other person (my mother least of all) in whom. I dared confide, yet exile made such a sharing doubly imperative. Antimenidas heard me out with great patience, and then said: “So now you’re beginning to understand.”

  “I think so.” The fish flickered mindlessly in their pool: the sunken garden was an admirable place for privacy without scandal.

  “You can’t help admiring Pittacus, in a way. That’s the worst part of it.” Antimenidas flicked a pebble into the water and was silent for a moment as concentric rings spread out from the point of impact. “Did you hear about his dealings with King Alyattes of Lydia?”

  I shook my head. Antimenidas gave me his hard, craggy smile.

  “Well, Pittacus managed to extract two thousand gold pieces from him, no less; quite an achievement.”

  “In return for what?”

  “Oh, come, Sappho: Alyattes doesn’t like the idea of Myrsilus any more than we do. That money was to finance the revolution in Mytilene. I don’t doubt Pittacus promised Alyattes some profitable trade monopolies when the Council of Nobles was restored.”

  “And where is the money now?”

  “Why, in the treasury at Mytilene: where else? It provided Pittacus with what you might call his entrance fee to Myrsilus’ government”

  Despite myself, I giggled.

  “I know,” said Antimenidas, “I know: that’s what I mean. You can’t resist the old fox: he’s so outrageous.”

  I said: “But Alyattes won’t be quite as easily amused.”

  “Indeed not. His ambassador has already delivered a very stiff little note to Pittacus. Mark you, it had to be couched in rather general terms: no one likes to admit bribing the wrong party. But the upshot was plain enough to anyone with inside knowledge; Alyattes wanted his two thousand gold pieces back and hinted at all sorts of unmentionable consequences if he didn’t get them.”

  “What did Pittacus do?”

  “Told Alyattes, through his outraged ambassador, to go and eat onions and new bread.”

  “Onions—?”

  Antimenidas made a rude and expressive noise with his pursed lips.

  “Oh. I see.”

  “A nicely stage-managed incident, don’t you think? Pittacus badly needs to build up his popularity just now. This was a heaven-sent way of doing it on the cheap.”

  “But he took a frightful risk, surely?”

  “Risk? There was no risk at all, and he knew it Alyattes isn’t going to war over a mere insult, he’s got more sense. Besides, in a month or two some well-briefed envoy will travel very unobtrusively from Mytilene to Sardis and do his best to persuade Alyattes that Myrsilus is as good a source of trade as the Council of Nobles. Alyattes would grab at any straw that looked like recovering those two thousand gold pieces; so I fancy the process of persuasion should be quite easy.”

  “And Pittacus had all this worked out in advance?”

  “Not a doubt of it.”

  “But—”

  “Oh, I know what you’re going to say, Sappho. It’s shameful and vulgar and dishonest. It’s the end of virtue and good government. I agree. And because of that I shall go on fighting.”

  He fell silent for a moment: the lines and shadows in his prematurely aged face seemed to deepen. He said sombrely: “Perhaps to die fighting is all that remains for us.”

  “You can’t believe that. You mustn’t.”

  “Do you think I want to? Do you think it’s easy to face the possibility that our traditions and beliefs, our whole way of life are on the brink of destruction?” He stood up, fists hard-clenched. “When I look at Pittacus, I see”—he swallowed—”our world as it may be very soon: a world ruled by profit, not honour; a world where gold has more power than the sword, and oaths are made to be broken; a world of greasy bankers and base-born tradesmen and sordid, ignoble ambitions. If that is what the Gods have in store for us, I want no part of it.”

  I said: “Do you believe we have a chance? Honestly?”

  Our eyes held for a moment.

  “Yes,” Antimenidas said, “we have a chance.”

  “Then that is enough.”

  He nodded. He said: “Your world is threatened, too: you are right.”

  “My world is yours, Antimenidas.”

  “Perhaps. My brother’s, too, would you say?” His voice was tinged with irony. I flushed. “You mustn’t be so unkind to Alcaeus, you know. Especially now. He’s too—vulnerable.”

  “I’d really rather not discuss the subject.”

  “How hard you can sound at times: it’s a warning to the unwary. I told you last winter you were a ravening harpy, and I was right.” He smiled to draw the sting of that last remark. “But Alcaeus is desperately unhappy. He needs city life—public life—more than most of us. He’s drinking very heavily. His work is—well, he’s written almost nothing, and that—I know I’m not a judge, but—”

  “What are you asking me to do?”

  Antimenidas said: “He is my brother. I have some kind of—responsibility for him. His emotional problems are his own affair, I know. All the same—” He broke off, took a quick breath, and said: “I want you to stop hurting him. Just that. You hurt people more than you know, Sappho. You have a kind of hard, innocent cruelty that’s all the more frightening for being, so often, quite unconscious. I’m not asking you to help him—though you could, and at the moment I don’t think anyone else could. Just to leave him alone.”
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br />   “Please. I don’t want to talk about it. I’ll do what I can.”

  “That’s all I ask.”

  “And we have a chance? You mean that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then we must live in hope.”

  “It is our last chance,” Antimenidas said, and spat hard, on the marble pavement.

  So, one moonlit summer night, a group of aristocratic rebels stormed and captured the citadel of Mytilene. But they did not lay hands on Myrsilus or Pittacus, and they did not long hold what they had won. The townsfolk who should have flocked in thousands to their liberating banner were apathetic or actively hostile. By noon next day the attackers were besieged in the citadel, with little water and less food. At sunset Myrsilus offered them terms of conditional surrender. They could, at least, make the gesture of refusal. Myrsilus left them to their own thoughts for the night, and attacked with his toughest troops just before dawn.

  Cicis, Alcaeus’ brother, was impaled on the door of the council chamber with a javelin, and hung there for several hours, coughing away his life in slow agony. And Pliant as died fighting beside the best swordsmen of Pyrrha, cut down at last and hacked to pieces by a blood-crazed guardsman, against Myrsilus’ orders. They stuck his head on the city-gate and sent the battered trunk back to Three Winds for burial. But Alcaeus and Antimenidas and a dozen more surrendered; and presently, away in Pyrrha, we saw a detachment of Mytilenean troops come riding up to our house and knew they had come for us. The Council of Pyrrha made no protest: they dared not. Too many of their citizens lay dead among the defeated rebels.

  We had had our last chance.

  VIII

  Nothing has changed in the house: it is as though I had never left Mytilene. When I stepped through the front-door to the lobby, wrapped in my dark blue travelling-cloak, still hooded against the sharp autumn winds, Scylax gave me the same brief nod, the same monosyllabic greeting, as he does after my regular afternoon walk. Apollo twitched, gargled perfunctorily in his throat, and composed himself for sleep again. (As porter and watch-dog they make a ludicrous pair. But then, what have they to guard?) I hesitated at the end of the lobby, as though searching for something. The house was warm and well-aired; I could hear voices in the kitchen-quarters, and my nose caught—above the more immediate scents of beeswax, limewash, and dried lavender—the faint, delicate aroma of a slow-simmering, herb-filled stew.