The Laughter of Aphrodite
Page 29
XIV
The publicly known facts are simple enough and soon told. On a clear morning of late summer—records show that it was the second day following the great festival of Demeter—an escorted party, with horses, mules, and baggage-waggons, set out from Mytilene on the journey through the hills to Pyrrha. Since the travellers included the President and Joint-President of the Council, the escort was a full cavalry squadron, their armour specially polished, with banners flying, and much blowing of trumpets to clear lackadaisical cattle or country folk off the road ahead.
Myrsilus and Pittacus rode side by side near the front of the column, deep in some inaudible discussion: Myrsilus on his favourite black stallion, Pittacus astride a huge bay gelding that still seemed inadequate to support that massively dignified frame. Behind them came two mounted archers, and then what was euphemistically known as the Ladies’ Waggon—a large, hard, uncomfortable cart in which Aunt Helen, Aunt Xanthe, Andromeda, Cargo, Irana, and myself (not ideally suited travelling-compArions, to say the least of it) sat on inadequate cushions and tried to make polite conversation while being jolted by an endless succession of ruts, rocks, and pot-holes. The gay, purple-fringed canopy overhead was some consolation but not much. I felt furious with Aunt Helen, who had firmly vetoed the idea of travelling by mule as “unladylike,” and seemed quite impervious to the resultant discomfort. She chattered; Andromeda sulked; Irana, who was pregnant, showed signs of feeling unwell. The heat and tension and silent ill-will were quite unspeakable.
Behind our waggon—and suffering somewhat from the dust it kicked up—rode Ion and Pittacus’ surly son Tyrrhaeus, who, I was glad to see, seemed to like each other’s company as little as we did. Beyond them, again, were Cercylas and my uncle Draco, both of whom sounded irritatingly cheerful. My uncle’s high, whinnying laugh kept ringing out at regular intervals, till at last Aunt Helen remarked that if her brother wanted to be a mare, he ought to sleep with his backside facing the west wind—an unexpectedly coarse allusion, even for Aunt Helen, and no one quite knew whether to laugh or not. It struck me, with sudden surprise, that she was in a curious state of nervous excitement: but why?
The rest of the column consisted of grooms, cooks, stewards, valets, bakers (Myrsilus was fussy about his bread), and all the other hangers-on who attend upon travelling notabilities. We moved at the speed of the baggage-train, which was not remarkable.
Gorgo said to Andromeda: “Why in heaven’s name should anyone— least of all Agesilaïdas—invite an official visit of this sort? I mean, he’s not the ambitious type, is he, and even if he was, most people avoid it as long as they can and then try to look cheerful when the great man starts dropping heavy hints—” She broke off, conscious of Aunt Helen’s predatory, hooded eye on her: she had spoken quietly, but not quietly enough. “Oh—I’m sorry, Lady Helen—”
“My dear child,” Aunt Helen said, her voice full of sardonic amusement, “you haven’t shattered any girlish illusions in me, you know: the phenomenon you describe is familiar and, I’m afraid, from my end of it, rather entertaining.”
Luna, whose mulish taciturnity was punctuated, at irregular intervals, by indiscretions so breathtaking that no one could really believe them an accident (this, I imagine, was how Charaxus discovered about her legacy) now blurted out: “I suppose he wants a job for one of his old boy-friends: seems an expensive way of going about it, though.”
Aunt Helen raised her eyebrows a fraction at this, and said, very sweetly: “My dear, you must be worried by the heat: it’s bound to make you feel irritable in your condition.”
The waggon gave a particularly violent lurch, and liana turned an interesting greenish-white. Aunt Helen surveyed her with bland relish. “Your husband’s away on another of his trading-ventures, isn’t he? Of course you’re anxious: it’s only natural, especially with a first child—”
Irana leant over the side of the cart and vomited noisily. We all looked away and tried not to listen. I saw the road winding up ahead of us to the crest of the hill, white and dusty between woodlands, with patches of burnt brown scrub here and there, and one huge boulder tilted above an outcrop like a giant’s gravestone. There were pines along the skyline, and beyond the road ran easily down to Pyrrha and the Gulf. A small hawk hovered, wings spread against the blue.
I saw Pittacus bend forward and put one gloved hand to his horse’s snaffle, as though disentangling it: in doing so he dropped back a yard or two behind Myrsilus. We were just passing the first of the trees, in an eye-blinking dazzle of shadow and broken sunlight. A jay screamed: and then I heard something else, something like a sharp, hissing breath, abruptly cut off. Myrsilus jerked and twisted, arms outflung, the purple cloak falling away from his right shoulder: in the instant before he fell I saw the long, black-feathered Cretan arrow standing out just below his left breast.
As the column plunged to a noisy, chaotic halt, Pittacus gathered up his reins short in his left hand, drew his sword, and swung the big bay gelding hard across the track to the right, the direction from which the arrow had come. At the same moment Cercylas spurred forward, as though to protect Pittacus, his horse’s hooves crashing through brushwood, one hand lifted; and then that sharp, deadly sound came again, and I saw my husband clutch at his throat, blood pumping between a spread of fingers, and fall as Myrsilus had fallen.
No, I whispered, no, please no, as a child might do when some precious, irreplaceable toy lies shattered into fragments at its feet.
There was a great deal of shouting from the cavalry officers, but the words blurred in my ears. Half the troop crashed off through the trees, in useless pursuit of an enemy they had never even sighted. Mounted archers milled round our Waggon, yelling at us to get down. Gorgo and Aunt Xanthe were flat on the floor already; Andromeda crouched with her head in her hands; Aunt Helen sat quite still, face frozen, eyes staring straight in front of her. It was impossible to tell, from that dead, expressionless mask, what—if anything—she was feeling.
Irana had not moved, either: she still stood hunched miserably over the handrail, retching in long spasms, indifferent to danger, conscious only of her intolerable nausea. The sight started a bubble of hysterical laughter inside me. Then, as this forced its way up, knifing into my half-paralyzed senses, I began unexpectedly to feel queasy myself. I lurched forward, bells swarming in my head, and my eyes closed on whirling, light-shot blackness. By the time I had recovered consciousness the column was clear of the trees and in full retreat towards Mytilene.
Pittacus, everyone afterwards agreed, had handled the situation with exemplary promptness and courage. The column suffered no further losses, though one arrow was found afterwards protruding from a tree, and another imbedded deep in the side of our waggon. It was a pity, people said, that the murderers escaped through the woods, but there was no doubt who they were, of course, despite their elusiveness. As Cercylas’ widow I came in for a great deal of public sympathy—which increased still further when the fact of my pregnancy became common knowledge.
That same day, the moment news of the ambush reached Mytllene—or, according to some accounts, even earlier—a new drinking; song was heard in several waterfront taverns, which began:
Time to get drunk now, time for debauchery,
Women and wine, since death’s laid claim to Myrsilus—
and, once again, rumour had it that Alcaeus was the author. But within twenty-four hours Pittacus had convened the Council in emergency session, and persuaded them to vote him special powers for dealing with an armed rebellion, of which Antimenidas and Alcaeus were mentioned, by name, as the ringleaders.
Afterwards he walked out of the chamber, wearing full armour, and made a short speech to the nervous, excited crowd that had gathered at news of the debate. Everything was under control, he told them. They need have no fear. Steps had been taken to prevent any lawlessness or anarchy. The crowd cheered him to the echo. It was only later that people began to realize just how far-reaching those special powers were.
Three days later Antimenidas was trapped, at night, in the wild hill-country south of Pyrrha. He might have escaped, we heard, but for one of the Cretan archers who had come back with him from Babylon, and who—in a desperate effort to save his own skin—shot the rebel leader as he ran for the cover of the trees. So Antimenidas died at last, sprawled on a moonlit mountainside with a traitor’s arrow between his shoulder-blades, his manhood and honour all wasted, the dream he fought for still unfulfilled.
Pittacus had the archer’s head struck from his shoulders and impaled over the city-gate, as a warning to any others who might hope to win favour by betraying those to whom they had sworn friendship or allegiance. A gesture of this sort was just what was needed to restore public confidence: there had been ugly predictions of purges and mass-arrests, due, probably, to someone recalling Periander’s behaviour when he won supreme power.
Pittacus also made himself a good deal more popular by the clever way in which he dealt with Alcaeus. The poet was tried in open court (the public benches had seldom been so crammed), and a poker-faced captain of mercenaries gave evidence about his arrest. The accused, he said, had been at home in bed. The arrest took place late on the night of Myrsilus’ death—
Pittacus, stroking his beard in a lofty, Olympian manner, asked (what he must have known quite well) whether the accused was alone at the time.
“No, sir,” the captain said, in his loud, flat, military voice. “There was a young boy, and a drunk soldier asleep on the floor.”
“The boy was on the floor too?” Pittacus enquired.
“No, sir.”
“Then where was her
“In bed with the accused.”
There was some laughter at this from the public benches. Its tone seemed sympathetic rather than hostile.
“What,” Pittacus went on, “did the accused say when told he was under arrest?”
The captain intoned, more poker-faced than ever: “He said, lust give me time to do this little passion-flower first, you great peasant’” There was a loud guffaw from the back of the courtroom. “Sir,” the captain added, vaguely aware of some implied deficiency in his presentation. The laughter redoubled.
Having skilfully reduced Alcaeus to a lecherous figure of fun, Pittacus, as presiding judge, made a short speech. The accused, he said, was not a man of action. Losing his shield once had been enough, and even that, some might infer, was a mere literary conceit borrowed from an earlier poet. (Everyone caught the reference: this was the tough poet-soldier Archilochus, whom several old men still remembered, and whose character formed a piquant contrast with that of Alcaeus.) His weapons were words—and a bottle. The songs were more pot-valiant than their author. He, Pittacus, believed in suiting the punishment to the criminal. The brother of the accused had died, as he had lived, by violence. The accused himself merited a somewhat different fate. Since, alone, he had no strength to harm the city, he would be released with a reprimand—no execution, no renewal of exile—and abandoned to the scorn, obloquy, and contempt of his fellow- citizens. There was a good deal more in the same vein—absolute power tended to make Pittacus regrettably verbose—but this was his main point. Even at the time I wondered what lay behind it all.
After the prescribed mourning period and countless scandalous rumours, Aunt Helen actually did what the tavern wits had predicted: she married Pittacus. It was only then, I think, that the true pattern of these events became visible to me. Or was that, too, a mirage? When we peel the last layer from the onion, truth, what remains? Factitious tears; an emotional illusion.
But I must take the thread into the labyrinth.
I believe, now, that the death of Myrsilus was coldly planned by Pittacus and Aunt Helen in collusion. I believe they had never, in any real sense, ceased to be lovers; and that Aunt Helen married Myrsilus out of ambition indeed, but not quite in the way people assumed. She wanted, needed, to have his ear constantly, to worm all his secrets out of him. I believe the one false assumption she and Pittacus made was that Myrsilus would die in a reasonably short time of natural causes; and it seems very likely that Myrsilus himself spread this rumour by way of his personal physician, as a safeguard against political assassination. But somehow Aunt Helen found out the truth; and from that moment, I am convinced, Myrsilus’ death became a foregone conclusion.
I believe that the exiles, Antimenidas in particular, were granted an amnesty in the express hope that they would themselves—from very different motives—do what Aunt Helen and Pittacus desired. I strongly suspect that Pittacus had at least one secret meeting with Antimenidas, and somehow managed to convince him that once Myrsilus had been removed, he, Pittacus, would work to restore the old regime—had, in fact, been secretly doing so since his apparent defection. It sounds flimsy; but Pittacus was a persuasive man, and idealists such as Antimenidas are always fatally prone to believe what they most desire.
I am convinced that—to make assurance doubly sure—Pittacus suborned Antimenidas’ Cretan mercenaries. Even so, he must have had a bad moment on the road to Pyrrha, wondering whether the Cretans, with an easy target before them, might not decide to play for yet higher stakes, whether Antimenidas had not seen one further move ahead. I have no doubts, either, that the Cretan who shot Myrsilus down was privately offered a rich reward beforehand. Pittacus would not be the first ruler in Mytilene to gain virtuous credit by suppressing an awkward witness.
I wondered once whether Alcaeus did not betray his brother to Pittacus’ patrols in return for a promise of immunity; today I doubt it. Of all the participants in that small, momentous drama he did the least—and thus, perhaps, had the most to hide. Antimenidas knew him all too well, and never, I suspect, gave him any real information about the plot against Myrsilus. Among the revolutionaries Alcaeus’ role was that of the mere hired lampoonist: Pittacus court verdict, in fact, came humiliatingly near the truth.
It is easy—too easy—to reduce human actions to an illusive appearance of simplicity. We are all, poets especially, incurable patternmakers. Reading over what I have just written I am astonished at my own arrogance of judgment. I have drawn Pittacus as a devouringly ambitious tyrant and nothing else, as though man and function were identical. My strange interview with Periander should have taught me better—and of course, as every schoolboy knows, once Pittacus had attained supreme power he proceeded to defy all known copy-book maxims about “the typical tyrant”—all a mythical being whom I have yet to meet in the flesh.
Despite the way in which he acquired his authority, Pittacus was not corrupted by it. Nor did he become inordinately ambitious or cruel. He was not afflicted by delusions of grandeur. The worst that could be said about him was that in his old age he turned into the most terrible prosy bore, with an endless stock of Nestorian platitudes for the unwary.
He could be disconcerting too. One of his favourite aphorisms was “Know your opportunity.” What, people asked each other plaintively, did one say in reply to that? But he never minded poking fun at himself. He passed a law doubling the penalty for crimes committed under the influence of drink: the story went that he signed the decree in so wine-flown a state himself that he was incapable of reading it.
For ten years he ruled Mytilene wisely and well, with a singleminded devotion to justice that no one could have foreseen. At the end of that time, with the city’s laws and finances completely overhauled, he surprised everyone yet again by resigning from office and handing over the government to a democratically elected Council. The rest
of his life he spent pottering about the estate which was presented to him, on his retirement, by the grateful citizens over whom he had in theory “tyrannized.” They even pretended to like the dreadful didactic poems he composed for their benefit—a severe strain on anyone’s benevolence, especially since he insisted on reading them aloud.
Yet he was not, I think, a happy man. About a year before his retirement his son Tyrrhaeus was murdered by a blacksmith in Cyme; the fellow marched into the barber’s shop where Tyrrhaeus was being shaved and split his skull open with an axe. The public account of the affair claimed that this was a political assassination, committed by someone with the mistaken idea that Pittacus intended to found a family dynasty.
But no one really believed this. Tyrrhaeus, at least, lived up to the copy-book maxims; he was a typical tyrant’s son—vain, weak, surly, lecherous—and the story which came back from Cyme was, quite simply, that he had been making love to the blacksmith’s wife. Pittacus must have felt some deep sense of personal guilt over his son, because when the blacksmith was sent to him for punishment, he mumbled something about present forgiveness being better than future repentance, and turned his prisoner free.
Nor—and this, again, came as a surprise—did he have a happy relationship, ultimately, with Aunt Helen. Though she had been his mistress for so many years, her attitude to him was completely transformed after their marriage. She treated him with the sort of cold, haughty contempt that only an aristocrat can assume. She nagged, bullied, and scolded her husband till his only refuge was the winebottle. She made it quite clear that she had married beneath her. She encouraged Alcaeus privately to make rude lampoons about him, with vulgar allusions to his flat feet, his pot-belly, his untidiness, his disinclination to wash, his domestic cheeseparing (in later years he even grudged the oil for a lamp at dinner), and his swaggering conceit. Perhaps she had some cause for reasonable complaint; but what was it turned her into a mean, shrill, resentful virago? Poor Pittacus: in ways he paid dearly for his ambitions.