Shadows of Athens

by J M Alvey

  Phrynichos is another writer who keeps himself clothed and fed by taking on day-to-day commissions while he pursues his true ambitions in the evenings and slack times. His heart’s desire is a winner’s garland for his poetry in competition at one of the pan-Hellenic games. Any of them will do: Olympic, Pythian, Nemean or Isthmian. He’s not proud.

  Today he was pointing me out to the young man standing beside him. Whoever this stranger was, he’d be worth a wager in a wrestling match at any of those games. Phrynichos is no short-arse, and this well-muscled lad was a full head taller than him.

  The stranger hurried towards me, shoving through the crowds, either not caring or not noticing the angry looks it earned him. I stood and waited, wondering what this was about.

  ‘You are Philocles Hestaiou Alopekethen?’

  ‘I am.’ And with that Ionian accent, this boy must be another Carian. My heart sank, even though I realised this was my chance to do my duty to the gods and to the dead man.

  ‘Did he find you? Xandyberis?’ He really was a big lad close up, with black hair curling in long locks though his beard was close-cropped like my own. He wore a homespun tunic and a faded grey cloak, the fabric taut across his broad shoulders.

  ‘No, but—’

  ‘We have the honour to serve the town council of Pargasa.’ He seized my hands in a fervent grasp, dark eyes glittering with intensity.

  ‘I have to tell you—’

  He still wasn’t listening. ‘We must make our case before the Archons now that the tributes are under review. We are poor people in Pargasa. All Caria suffered so greatly under Persian rule. Even now that peace has come, we struggle to scrape the barest living from our harsh and stony fields. Please, I beseech you, we need a speech to convince men accustomed to Athenian riches that our hardships are real. Our town is small and we have no one to teach us such rhetoric, not when we must stand before your Council.’

  ‘Wait, wait.’ I pulled my hands free. ‘What are you talking about?’

  He stared at me, bemused. ‘The tributes. We have brought our offering to Athena as agreed by treaty but we cannot raise the full sum demanded this year. Now that there is no need to raise armies and triremes to fight the Persians, we must get the levy reassessed—’

  ‘Forgive me, but the Great Panathenaia isn’t until next year,’ I told him with growing unease. ‘That’s when the Delian League’s business will be discussed, as it is every four years when all our allies assemble for that very purpose. This year’s City Panathenaia is only for Athens and Athenians. In any case, that festival isn’t for another four months, at the start of the new year at midsummer—’

  ‘There is to be a special reassessment at this year’s Dionysia.’ He shook his head, impatient. ‘Now, you will need to know all about Pargasa to make our case. We can meet after we’ve presented our tribute to honour Athena. That will happen the day after tomorrow.’

  ‘Yes, I know the ritual,’ I said, irritated. I didn’t need some Carian telling me how the Dionysia would proceed. ‘But I must tell you—’

  He brushed my words aside. ‘You must convince the Archons to reduce this levy. We have barely recovered from the Persians’ vengeance. Our fields and orchards were laid waste when Caria rebelled in my grandfather’s day—’

  I could believe that but it made no difference. I raised my voice to interrupt him. ‘If there was going to be any reassessment of tributes at this festival, or any time this year, the Archons would have posted an announcement in the agora.’ Even a blind man couldn’t have missed that. It would have been the talk of the city.

  The Carian shook his head in obstinate denial. ‘You’re lying. Who’s paying you to silence our pleas?’

  My sympathies for this lout evaporated like morning mist. If the dead man had been equally obnoxious, no wonder someone had cut his throat.

  ‘You Athenians are all the same!’ The young Carian clenched his fists. ‘You want to pick our pockets of every last coin. You spend our silver on your shining new temples and filling your bellies as you gorge at your festivals!’

  He flung out a hand. An instant too late, I realised he only meant to gesture towards the Acropolis, still crowned with half-built shrines. But I had already thrown up my own hand to ward off his fist, shoving him backwards for good measure. Caught unawares, he stumbled and fell down hard on his arse. Passers-by scattered, exclaiming. Some laughed, not knowing what was going on.

  He stared up at me, scarlet with humiliation and completely taken aback. I wondered when he’d last lost a fight. Men used to throwing their weight around never expect to end up on the ground. Well, it was time he learned that lesson.

  ‘Forgive me, I thought . . . Please, listen.’ I offered my hand to help him to his feet. ‘Your friend’s name was Xandyberis? I’m so sorry. I have grievous news. He was found dead last night—’

  ‘You lie!’ Smacking my hand away, he spat copiously on my feet.

  Bystanders oohed and aahed like a theatre audience. I could see several grinning in avid expectation of a fist fight. Fuck that. I had more important things to do. I took a step back and straightened my cloak, trying to ignore the foul slime oozing warm between my toes.

  ‘Your companion was found dead last night,’ I repeated crisply. ‘The Archons’ slaves took his body for safekeeping on the Polemarch’s behalf. Address all your questions to them.’

  As Athena was my witness, my duty to the dead man and to the Furies was done. The young lout was on his hands and knees now. I managed to lose myself in the crowd before he stood up. As I edged away, I saw him looking around wildly. He looked younger than I’d first thought, standing there with his mouth open and his expression dismayed as he realised he’d lost me.

  Forget him. I had a play rehearsal to get to, if the Fates didn’t waylay me with any more problems this morning. Though, by the time I reached the road to take me out of the agora, I was having second thoughts. After stopping at a fountain to wash the disgusting slime from my foot and my sandal, I decided I had better make another stop first.

  There was no telling if that arrogant young cock of a Carian knew where I lived. Kadous and Zosime needed to know not to open our gate if he turned up, keen to continue our quarrel.

  Chapter Four

  I doubled back across the agora and threaded my way through the narrow alleys of the Kerameikos district.

  ‘Looking for a fun time, handsome?’ A three-obol whore lounged against her curtained doorway.

  ‘Not today, thanks all the same.’ I spared her a smile regardless.

  I’d sampled such delights hereabouts most nights after I’d come back from Boeotia. Drinking rough wine and fucking a sweet girl were fine ways to forget the stink and fear of battle. But, Athena be thanked, such sour memories fade. When I met Zosime I was more than ready to abandon brothels for a loving embrace in my own bed.

  A few more turns and my destination lay ahead. The pottery’s door stood ajar and sounds of purposeful activity spilled into the rutted lane.

  As I entered, Zosime’s father didn’t raise his eyes from the pot he was carefully shaping. ‘Philocles.’

  ‘Good day to you.’ I walked over, nodding to the other potters at their wheels and the vase painters working at their benches around the walls. Everyone was well used to me dropping in by now.

  Menkaure lifted his hands away from his pot and let the wheel slow to a halt. Red clay was vivid on his fingers, his skin as dark as any I’ve ever seen from southern Egypt.

  He and I had got chatting when I’d visited this workshop to buy kitchen pots for my mother. We’d emptied several jugs of wine as he satisfied my curiosity about his remote, sandy homeland. Not that I was looking for some setting for a play: I wanted to know whatever he could tell me about the blood-soaked island in Egypt’s northern marshes where my brother Lysanias had died.

  It was only when Menkaure shared h
is own grief at the loss of his beloved wife that I realised his daughter was one of the girls painting pots in the back of the workshop. I don’t think he had been seeking a protector for her, in case some ill fate befell him, but when Zosime and I exchanged our first shy smiles, he’d made no objection.

  ‘That’s a fine piece.’ I nodded at the wine-mixing bowl he was shaping.

  ‘It will be, as long as Disculos doesn’t screw up when he decorates it.’ Menkaure raised his voice to make sure his fellow craftsman heard.

  The painter replied with a cheerfully obscene gesture without looking up from the olive garland he was drawing around a long-necked jug.

  ‘She told me what happened.’ Menkaure’s dark eyes fixed on me, unblinking, as he cleaned his fingers with an ochre-stained rag. ‘She said you were as restless as a pistachio on a griddle all last night.’

  ‘Are you surprised?’ I said with feeling.

  ‘Hardly,’ he assured me, ‘but if you don’t know who the dead man was, can you be so sure you have seen the end of this, just because the Scythians took the body away?’

  ‘It seems our dead man was a Carian looking for a speech writer. He just happened to hear my name. I met one of his travelling companions in the agora and I told him to claim the body from the Polemarch.’ I shrugged.

  ‘Good to know.’ Menkaure tossed the rag into an old chipped pot by his feet. ‘I’m glad you called by. Thallos says he wants to lock up early today. I was planning to leave at noon anyway. Some old friends are here from Memphis for the Festival, but Zosime isn’t interested in coming with me. Can you get word to Kadous to collect her earlier than we arranged?’

  I could see the sense in that. Official festivities might not start till tomorrow but this part of the city was already heaving with visitors looking for fun, trouble or both. ‘I’ll make sure she gets home safely.’

  Menkaure set his wheel spinning again as I walked to the back of the workshop. ‘I’m looking forward to finally seeing your chorus all dressed up,’ he called after me.

  ‘Just remember that masks and costumes aren’t everything,’ I said over my shoulder.

  ‘Shouldn’t you be supervising your rehearsal?’ Zosime looked up from the white oil flask she was decorating. ‘And what took you into the city so early?’

  I pulled up a stool and explained about Dexios and the leather deliveries. Then I shared what I’d just learned about our Carian corpse. ‘So his friends can claim his body from the Polemarch and if they come knocking on our gate, we ignore them. We’ve no idea who killed the poor bastard and I won’t risk getting dragged into some stranger’s quarrels. Now, your dad just told me everyone is leaving here early today.’

  She nodded. ‘Thallos has a horde of relatives coming in from the country. If he doesn’t get back to help his wife, she swears she’ll shut him out of her bedroom till midwinter.’

  She’d do it, too. She was a formidable woman, like so many I knew. People hear such exaggerated tales of women’s lives in Athens: how we shut our citizen-born wives and daughters away so that the only females ever seen on our streets will be slaves and whores. A few household tyrants might live like that, but I’ve never known a woman who would put up with it.

  That meant today’s work was as good as done. Thallos made these decisions as the most senior artisan in this workshop. It wasn’t a family business like the one bequeathed to me and my brothers. Resident foreigners share these premises with citizens from the lowest class; the men who row Athens’ triremes. They all work alongside each other, splitting the costs and profits.

  ‘If you’re nearly finished with that, you could come to the rehearsal with me?’ I suggested. ‘There’ll be someone there who can walk you home.’

  ‘Or I can wait until you’ve finished rehearsing and we can walk back together. I’m sure someone can take a message, to save Kadous a wasted trip into the city.’

  She laid down her brush and I admired the portrait she was painting. A youth reclined at the feet of a muse as she sat in a chair playing a lyre. ‘That’s beautiful.’

  ‘He loved music, so his father says.’ Zosime’s smile faded as she recalled the man’s sorrow.

  These slender white, black-footed flasks are only ever used for pouring gifts of oil or wine onto graves, to honour the gods below. They are Zosime’s speciality, so she’s always crafting some remembrance of a family’s loss. But she still prefers painting these personal, intimate pictures, instead of time-worn mythological scenes in black and red with their endlessly familiar cast of characters.

  She put the flask carefully at the back of her work bench. ‘Let me tidy up and I’ll come with you.’

  I looked idly around the workshop while she rinsed her brushes and gathered up the shards of broken vases she uses to practise a likeness, until the family paying for her skills are satisfied with the depiction of their loved one.

  Most of the other artisans were finishing up, too. They all had families eager for the festivities. The only man here for the next few days would be the aged Thessalian with hands too twisted with arthritis to do anything more than feed the kiln’s stoke hole and threaten would-be burglars with his hefty olivewood club. He had no one to go home to, so Zosime told me. The Persians had killed all his family in the wars.

  ‘Let me wash my hands.’ She went over to the ewers, which the Thessalian filled every morning, and poured a little into a basin. She’d spent enough of her childhood carrying water not to waste a drop.

  Satisfied she was free of paint, she smoothed her draped dress over the curve of her hips and turned to smile at me. ‘Ready?’

  ‘Did you wear a shawl this morning?’ Another layer of cloth between Zosime’s charms and some lecher’s groping hands wouldn’t go amiss in these crowds.

  ‘I did.’ She fetched her brown woollen wrap from a peg and swung it around her shoulders. ‘Shall we go?’

  I took her hand as we walked down the lane. ‘Your father said he was seeing some friends. If you join him, you won’t have to spend the day listening to me fretting.’ I tried to make a joke of it and failed.

  Zosime freed her hand from mine and slipped it through the crook of my arm to pull me close. ‘I’ll find a way to distract you. And, no, thanks all the same. Dad and his cronies will be drinking and talking about people and places I don’t even remember.’

  She had been barely ten years old when Menkaure and his wife had fled from Egypt to Crete to seek shelter with her mother’s family. He was wise enough to see which way the wind was blowing before the full might of the Persian army arrived to crush the Egyptians’ rebellion. A rebellion that Athens had been foolish enough to support, at the cost of so many deaths, including my lost brother and the firstborn son of my play’s patron.

  We were on our way to his house. The man whose substantial wealth was financing my comedy is called Aristarchos. He lives in that favoured district of Athens to the north of the Acropolis and to the east of the agora. This means his spacious and elegant residence is within easy walking distance of the courts and the Council Chamber as they flank the market place. It’s only a short stroll further to the People’s Assembly up on the Pnyx, or to the Areopagus for a murder trial in the court there. After all, wealthy men like him spend a great deal of their time on the people’s business, safeguarding the city’s interests.

  They safeguard their own wealth and households with tall walls and narrow, barred windows high enough to stop passers-by peering in or sneak thieves slipping through. It’s a world away from the neighbourhood I grew up in, with constant comings and goings amid bustling workshops and storehouses, with families living cheek by jowl.

  As Zosime and I made our way through the quiet streets, I could hear light lyre music floating through open shutters above my head. Women who marry men like Aristarchos have the leisure to enjoy artistic pastimes and to share such skills with their daughters. I’d grown up with the
sound of women’s laughter in the room overlooking the courtyard and my father’s workshop, punctuated by the muted thud of spindles dropping on floorboards as my mother and her slaves turned combed wool into yarn.

  When we turned the last corner, I saw somebody standing outside Aristarchos’s gate. I walked faster, dreading bad news from the mask maker. Perhaps some disaster had befallen our costumes. Messengers on the stage seldom herald anything good.

  Had my most hated rival discovered who would be performing my music? We’d done our best to keep that particular secret throughout our months of rehearsals, but there was always the risk that one of the chorus had let something slip while sharing a jug of wine. Had Euxenos sent his scene shifters to snap Hyanthidas’s double pipes over his head? No, that was a ridiculous notion.

  We drew closer as a young man came out through the gate, his back to us as he spoke to the first youth, who was kneeling to retie his shoe.

  ‘You know they want to see your father embarrassed. Why else foist an untried poet on him?’

  ‘He won a prize at the Lenaia last year,’ countered the lad having trouble with his laces. I realised it was Aristarchos’s son, Hipparchos.

  ‘Second prize,’ the disdainful one spat. ‘His first attempt at a play wasn’t even placed. They didn’t award him a chorus the year after that.’

  ‘My father—’

  ‘Regardless, the Lenaia is not the Dionysia,’ the arrogant prick continued. ‘Those plays merely brighten up winter’s gloom with a few cheap laughs for our own citizens. It doesn’t matter how feeble Philocles’s jokes are there. But the Dionysia’s great tradition of drama is as valuable as our city’s coin, honoured far and wide. These performances influence how all Hellas sees our city. This great festival’s reputation should not be tarnished by debased doggerel.’

  Now I recognised Hipparchos’s friend Nikandros. I wondered who he was mimicking, as brainless as a tame jackdaw. From what I’d seen, he wasn’t the type to study rhetoric and come up with phrases like that.