The Praise Singer

by Mary Renault

  My chorus men were awaiting me; a fine tall troop, picked for presence as well as voice. (Once, I’d have feared to be laughed at, stepping out before men like these; now I thought nothing of it, and nor did the Athenians.) They had made themselves as handsome as they could, borrowing good panoplies from their kin if they did not own them; one had hired his, paying a whole sheep just for the day. I thanked them all for doing me so much credit. Hipparchos turned at my words, and called out cheerfully, “Are your songbirds in good voice, Simonides?” I answered, “And in spring feathers, sir.” “So they are, as bright as jays. But for you they will sing like nightingales. Down there, please. My brother wants you to walk before the horsemen.”

  “That’s good,” I answered. “No one sings better for breathing cavalry dust.” How easy it is, I thought, when one can do it without thinking. But I shall have thought, next time. We went down towards the Kerameikos.

  I left my men standing outside the city gates till I had got Hippias’ own orders. He had a little platform, in the middle of the potters’ field. At times like these, he always tried to put on his father’s mantle, more from duty than pride; when anyone came up to him he would smile, though awkwardly; one could see him seeking a gracious word or two.

  All around him stood in their ranks the Athenian hoplites. The place was gay as a flower-bed with their painted shields, boars and hawks and bulls and lions and serpents, done black upon white or red or ochre, touched up with purple here and there. The flower-thorns were their bristling spears. Near me was the tribal band of the Gephyriots, in its front rank Harmodios and Aristogeiton side by side. Peaceful myrtle wreaths were bound about their spears; but their faces were so set, one might have thought them in the battle line, instead of at a festival. Sometimes, when Hipparchos raised his voice, it carried over to us, and I put it down to that.

  Hippias was busy, and I had to wait; but there was still plenty of time. The trumpet, which would signal the march to start, caught the light on the temple roof. Higher up the road, Bacchylides waved to me from his tripod.

  Just when I saw my chance, another man was before me. It was Charias the Alkmaionid about some business or other, which I hoped was brief. It seemed Hippias hoped so too; he made a signal to one of the bodyguard, who went over to make sure that his horse was ready. I began to fear it was too late to catch him; and he might well have forgotten all about me and my chorus. I pushed up nearer, thinking as I got close that in his panoply he looked a harder man than ever he did at court. After all, he had fought in most of his father’s wars.

  Charias had nearly done, when I was aware of movement in the rank near by. Two men in the Gephyriot troop had dropped their shields and spears, and were racing up the Sacred Way. From where I was now, I could not tell who they were, only that they were carrying green branches. People with messages were still running about, and I thought no more of it.

  This time, Hippias had beckoned someone, so I had to wait again. At last I managed to speak to him. He asked if my flautist would be loud enough to be heard above the horses—he was always full of these small worries—then told me to get my men into their place. I said they were ready, and I would join them now. I had barely started, when a man on horseback came clattering through the gates—he looked like a troop commander—rode straight to Hippias, shoving everyone aside, jumped uninvited on the dais, and spoke quietly in the Archon’s ear.

  Hippias fixed his eyes upon his face, and asked him two short questions; then stood a moment in silent thought. His face hardly changed; yet I thought again, Yes, he has been a soldier, a hard one too. My memory brought back to me that grey-haired Mede who had ridden into fallen Ephesos.

  Suddenly he beckoned up a trumpeter. The man mounted the platform, and blew the alert. The hum of talk from the hundreds of waiting men died like the hiss of beach pebbles when the wave has paused. Hippias signed for his horse, mounted, and rode over to the soldiers.

  I was too far to hear his orders, till the officers passed them on to where I was. They were to gather by tribal bands, and stack their arms. This they all did, except the Archon’s own bodyguard, which now moved up and closed around him. Now I saw them apart, I was surprised at how many they were.

  More delay, I thought; whatever fuss has he thought of now? He was pointing the citizens to a place some little way off, towards the Hill of Kolonos. Did he want to address them, or what? At this rate, everything would drag on into the midday heat.

  The men straggled off; inside the gate, the cavalry were getting restless. I had never seen such muddle at a public festival, even in a small town. Before going back to my chorus, I had better find out what we were supposed to be doing now.

  The men of Hippias’ guard had not followed the citizens, and nor had he. He kept some fifty round him, and pointed the rest towards the stacks of arms. These they gathered into one heap, over which a strong guard was posted. Then Hippias and the rest followed the Athenians.

  All this on a peaceful day of festival made me wonder if the Archon had gone stark mad. I wished I were near enough to hear his speech. A crowd of sightseers were standing about staring; strangers from other cities, old men and boys from our own. The old men were looking surprised; the rest just waited patiently for the show to start.

  I became aware that above, inside the gates, the cavalry horses were very noisy, and the men were shouting to each other. Horses quickly sense trouble from their masters. I thought, Those men know something I don’t. I took a few steps that way; and came slap into Bacchylides, running towards me. I remember my first thought was that he might have broken the kithara.

  He grabbed my arm, and stood still, gasping. His face was grey, sweaty dust upon white. I cried, “What is it?” as if he were not fighting for breath to tell me.

  “They’ve killed Hipparchos,” he said.

  I stood in silence, hardly feeling it yet, while all I had seen grew clear, from the moment when Hippias had had the news from the horseman. No wonder I’d remembered that he had been a soldier! I saw the whole pattern, the warp and weft of it—then my head grew light and cold, and my eyes felt empty of sight. I must have kept on my feet however, and just looked stupid; for Bacchylides said louder, as if to a child, “Uncle Sim! Hipparchos is dead.”

  I looked about me, as if I had just been put down in some foreign city. I was not so far wrong, at that. Presently I said, “Let us go home.”

  He took another look at me, lifted the kithara from my shoulder and hung it on his own. Then he put his hand under my arm. “Not now. They’re running crazy up there. Somewhere quiet. Come down to the stream.”

  He led me towards the Eridanos with its ancient tombs. “Did you hear who did it?” I said.

  “I saw it. Sit down somewhere and rest.”

  “I don’t need rest. Don’t treat me as if I were eighty.” (Yes, I remember that!)

  “Harmodios did it. He’s dead too, they killed him.”

  We reached the stream with its leaning old grave-steles cropping out like rocks among the weeds. He guided me to a cracked, tilting marble slab, the tomb of some old-time lord, brushed off some plane leaves and set me down on it, then dusted a place for the kithara with his tunic hem.

  As a man, well known to have witnessed the event, he is often asked for his account of it; it comes to me now in the voice of his manhood, not the hasty stammering of a shocked boy, though sometimes I hear that too in it, here and there. “I had been up in the dark to get my place, and then was disappointed with it, because I would not see the procession after it was formed. Hipparchos was standing just below, to halt each part as it came up and get it in order. It was him that I chiefly stared at, after all I’d heard. All I was near enough to see was that he performed his office very well.

  “The boys with the oil-jars had been looked over, and sent on up the road; then came the sacrificial oxen. But the first of them refused its fate; there was a struggle and some shouting; the man who led it got some help from the crowd. And I thought, That’s su
pposed to be a bad omen; but only perhaps when it happens at the altar. Well, it left an empty space around Hipparchos, and into this two men came running, with green branches in their hands. I supposed this was some rite I didn’t know of; I had been a child at the last Great Year. I even still thought so when I saw who the runners were. A youth with Harmodios’ beauty might always be singled out.”

  Here someone often interrupts to ask for a description, and he will say, “Like a young Apollo—but with the bow, not the lyre.

  “As they reached Hipparchos they threw their branches away. I stared in amazement as they seemed to strike him with their fists. Then I saw that as he struggled, blood was flowing. They had carried daggers, hidden in the leaves.

  “One of them must have struck quickly to the heart; he threw up his arms and fell. There was blood all over his face, from a gash upon his forehead … I had once seen a murdered corpse, when we were riding over the Isthmus. I had never seen murder done. I suppose the blood shocked me too; but I know that I thought, What dreadful faces. I dreamed of them for a long time after.”

  How easily men talk, how different is the acted deed. I recalled the man Charias, who had spoken to Hippias on his platform; the Alkmaionid who had exchanged a sign with Aristogeiton in the street. He must have been in the plot, and had seemed to be betraying it. So they resolved to do what they could, to make sure at least of Hipparchos, the author of their wrongs, instead of falling on Hippias first with their confederates, as they’d planned. Yet, from what I saw, I am sure he was not giving the Archon warning—more likely keeping him in talk to have him ready for them, but without telling them first what he would do. Few men can think such things through in the fearful time of action, or remember to expect the unexpected.

  Bacchylides said, “He was dead almost before I understood what was really happening. It was the same with everyone, the people round, even the guards. There were only one or two of them, not near him; they’d just been keeping the precinct clear of crowds. While everyone was still stunned, or milling about, Harmodios leaped on the block where Hipparchos had been standing, and cried out, ‘Athenians! Strike for freedom! Death to the tyrants!’ Aristogeiton took it up; but the people just stared, no one came forward; then the guards rushed to Harmodios and seized him.

  “You know, in war” (it is the man who is speaking now) “how they kill on the field, when the word is to give no quarter. They wrenched the blood-stained dagger out of his hand, pulled back his head by the hair and slit his throat. He had long, fair hair, and the scarlet blood poured into it. I stared in horror, and did not see how Aristogeiton got away. Someone in the crowd must have let him through, and after that he would be among people who knew nothing yet.”

  Thus the man. The pale-faced boy, sitting by me on the tomb, said, “But he avenged his honor. He did do that.” Then he flung himself down on the old green-stained marble, shaken with weeping. I offered what comfort I could till he had done.

  Yes, I thought; it was as Achilles’ heir that he must have seen himself; inheritor of the ancient laws, which say a man lives by his pride and shall defend it to the death: Harmodios son of Proxenos son of Harmodios, and so on back to some well-greaved Achaian at Troy. And Aristogeiton, to whom Bacchylides, concerned for his hero only, had paid so little heed? The youth had killed for pride, but the man for love: from anger at the hurt to his beloved, and that one man should have the power to do it; from fear that he had power to take the beloved away. I wondered if they had caught him yet, and guessed that Harmodios would prove more fortunate. I thought of Hippias’ face.

  I said to the boy, as his sobs quietened, “The anger of Achilles. Many brave men’s souls it flung to the house of Hades, and left the flesh of heroes to feast dogs and kites.”

  “That the will of Zeus might be fulfilled?” But I had no answer. Nor have I now.

  Great things came after; but the city I knew was already great. In all men is evil sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men. In Hippias that day there had been a great awakening. So Aristogeiton found in his hard dying. So the few men of his following found, down in the Kerameikos, when the guards had found they had had daggers as well as spears.

  Courage and love; it is well that they should be honored, even by men who have forgotten the truth, or never known it, or have lied about it to serve a cause. Those proud young oligarchs of my vanished city stand in the new one, cast in immortal bronze, and the democrats do them honor. Already people say that they set Athens free, though they threw her into a reign of fear, and only the Spartans and Alkmaionids broke it. They are even starting to say that Hipparchos was First Archon and Pisistratos’ heir; though it seems to me like yesterday that Hippias, all else failing him, crawled to the Medes to put him back in Athens as their governor, and was flung back from the gallant shore of Marathon, and crept off with the Medes to die.

  I sat by the boy, as he wiped away his tears and begged my pardon for them; I thought of the face of Hippias; and suddenly my roots were loosened from Athens’ walls. As at Keos, as at Ephesos, as at Samos, it was time to go. We are wanderers all.

  I said, “We must stay awhile, or the Archon will think we have some reason to run away. Let us go home now and sit in quiet. It’s no time to be running about the city.”

  I stood up. Bacchylides slung the kithara on his shoulder, giving it a long look. It was just coming home to him that the wrath of Achilles had sent us both into exile. Yes; but before Achilles’ anger had come the hubris of Agamemnon, King of Men. It is grief to see a hero go down to the house of Hades. It is bitter to lose a friend to evil, before one loses him to death.

  But I had the boy to think of just now. I said, “We shall come back again. All that I know of Athens tells me so. A city is not as great as its rulers only. It is as great as its gods. I have served them most; and I think the city knows it.”

  “And its heroes,” said the boy. “You have sung them too. Perhaps it was because of you that he died so bravely.” He was feeling better now, and wanted to give some comfort back to me, in return for mine to him. “You sang it, and he did it. Have you thought of that?”

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  IF THE LIVES OF Greek poets in the latter half of the sixth century are to be understood, we must be aware more of contrasts than of parallels with the condition of writers today.

  It was only on the very lowest level, that of the marketplace entertainer, that the singer or reciter made his living from a public audience. Circulation of the written word was still unknown, and compositions were committed to writing only for personal reference, if at all. Many surviving fragments of the century’s great lyric poets may have been recorded only after a long circulation by word of mouth. It is certain that the whole of Homer was so transmitted for some two centuries, and may incorporate material centuries older still, over a stretch of time during which the art of writing had entirely perished; Pisistratos’ collation came just in time to rescue him for a literate society. During the Dark Age, and into the dawn of the archaic renaissance, the libraries of the bards were contained entirely within their heads.

  Before the passing of the powerful aristocratic oligarchies, private means would assure both the poet’s independence and an audience of his peers: Sappho, Alkaios, Solon, had no need of patronage. This situation was changed by the advent of the “tyrants.”

  It is little understood today that nearly all the Greek tyrants were well to the left of the oligarchies they superseded, and, though invariably of aristocratic birth themselves, emerged as champions of underprivileged majorities. The term itself had originally a neutral connotation, like the word “dictator” in Rome. Its later meaning derived from the excesses of some tyrants, once all restraints on their exercise of power had been removed. The blanket generalization that “absolute power corrupts absolutely” is a historical absurdity (compare, for instance, Nero with Marcus Aurelius); and tyrants came in all shades of personality from benign father-figures to sadistic m
onsters. What they had in common was that they were all heads of state, in whom resided the poet’s only hope of public performance and recognition, even though he might be a man of property. Thus his situation was quite different from that of writers in other ages of patronage, such as Shakespeare or Samuel Johnson, who could pick up a living in time of need through the theater or the printing press.

  Prose composition, dependent wholly on writing, had not yet begun; and neither, therefore, had history or biography. Anyone trying to piece together the lives and characters of the archaic poets must turn to the researches of scholars, among whom the late Sir Maurice Bowra has pride of place, who have collected from all kinds of scattered sources the fragments of their work, and references or quotations by other, often much later, classical authors. Thus the record of their lives is skeletal when it is even that; and their treatment in fiction leaves the novelist with many more lacunae to fill in than when dealing with a much-chronicled figure such as Alexander the Great.

  Simonides is known to have been born in Keos (whose severe austerity laws are described by Strabo) and to have been so ugly that when he had composed a satire on the Corinthians, someone asked him how so ill-favored a man dared reproach a beautiful city. Nothing is known of his childhood, and I may have traduced a loving father who fostered his talent; but it seems that, once out of Keos, he felt no disposition to go back. It is not known whether he ever worked in Ionia before the Persian conquest, or in Samos either; but there is some evidence that at one time he lived in Euboia, before being invited to Athens by the Pisistratids.

  His father’s name is known; so are the names of his sister and her husband, because they were the parents of Bacchylides, himself a gifted poet, and his uncle’s pupil and companion up to the time of his death in Sicily, at the age of eighty-eight. Theasides son of Leoprepes appears in Herodotos as a man of high repute among both the Spartans and the Aiginetans, who was allowed to arbitrate in a dispute between them, and thus averted a war. Unluckily his native city is not given; but Leoprepes, the name of Simonides’ father, is an unusual one. I have made them brothers by pure guess.