The Hidden

by Tobias Hill

  What are you so gobsmacked about? You look like you never sat across a table before.

  It had been an oddity for them back then, that momentary bewilderment. It had only been towards the end that such awkwardness had expanded to fill their lives. Then, their conversation would often descend into small talk and puzzling silences. They had come to move around one another like magnets laid North to North, all their old attraction turned to bafflement and repulsion.

  In the end they had met twice at the offices of a solicitors in Cowley–not Emine’s partnership but another, cheaper and neutral outfit–the room where they convened windowless and still somehow full of a wintery grey light that seemed to subdue Emine and the lawyers just as it did Ben himself. Neither meeting had gone well, and the second time he had left in a rage, shaking like an old man, palsied with anger. He had agreed to everything demanded of him all the same. Emine hadn’t asked for much. She had always avoided dealing with divorce law, and had seemed almost as innocent of the practicalities as he had himself. But she had never needed his money and whatever else it was she had once desired of him, she no longer wished to bind him to it. She had agreed to joint custody. There would be no annulment from the church, but the civil divorce would be done by the summer at the latest.

  He knew it was the opinion of the lawyers that he had come off well. Got off lightly, was how his own solicitor had put it. Relatively, you know. Could have been messy, with her like that. I mean religious. And in the business. A nice clean break, apart from the girl.

  Sometimes he would run into Emine at the Institute of Archaeology or at their college, with Foyt in tow or without. Somehow both places had become theirs. Somehow he had been dispossessed. And even after Emine had left, she would still be with him in the eyes of others, the ghost of a wife. There would be the sidelong glances, the conversations stopping as he entered a lecture hall or the common room. The unbearable English lulls and silences.

  He had considered giving up on Oxford, leaving it to Emine and Foyt and going home to whatever he could find in London. He had begun to drink, not for the enjoyment of it but with a savage, bottomless desire he had never felt before and which he recognised. His father had drunk in the same way. He had feared and hated it as a boy and loathed it all the more in himself. He had become aware of how fragile his normality had become. There was a delicacy to his sanity he had never acknowledged before. It was as frail as water tension.

  He couldn’t leave for good. He was not about to give up on so much. His life was too deeply rooted to break as cleanly as that. But he had left all the same. He had run away, like the coward he was.

  And who had he had run from, if not himself? As if that were possible. As if he could ever escape himself.

  Even when Nikos wasn’t there the meat grill could be dangerous. It wasn’t the trappings in themselves–the knives, the meat sat in its blood, the means and proof of harm–so much as having all that at hand in a place of tension. Tempers could flare up over the most insignificant things. An order misread could be a catalyst one day and a joke the next. A borrowed spoon might do it, or a pot of beans left unattended. Whenever it came, whatever it was, the wrong thing would be like a pinch of salt dropped into scalding water.

  The atmosphere was worse at lunchtimes when the construction workers crowded in, roughnecks from Vólos and Lárissa. Half of them worked graveyard shifts and would be tired and intemperate by two. Their orders would come all at once and if anything went wrong the kitchen could be overtaken by mayhem. When it happened Modest would talk too much and Florent too little, and Kostandin would mutter oaths under his breath, unspeakable storms of consonants that sometimes made the Albanians giggle like boys, but could also propel them all into anger, Modest standing over the charcoal with his teeth bared in a snarl, Ben screwing up botched orders, Florent turning from some task with an expression of such blind savagery on his face that they would all be reduced to silence.

  Nikos had lost interest in him, and Florent was not his problem. They were not his enemies but one another’s. The atmosphere between them was one into which he could walk without realising it until too late. It was there in the way the others would go quiet when they were in the same room. It was as if they were all counting the seconds after lightning.

  He considered bravery. He was not brave himself. There was one year, as a boy, when he had been sick, seriously ill, with double pneumonia. They had kept him in hospital for a fortnight. In the beds nearest him had been two boys and a girl. All three had been more obviously unwell than him. All had seemed to him brave.

  He had envied it in them. He remembered lying in the back of the van, on the way to hospital–the road veering under him, his mother’s face pallid above him–and the creeping realisation that he was, perhaps, in danger. He’d had no dignity after that.

  His mother had told him once that before the pneumonia he had been the kind of child you couldn’t take your eye off, an explorer, a talker to strangers. He had changed after the sickness, she had said. He had not disagreed with her, but he had wondered. Had he really changed? What had he had to be scared of, before that time?

  Maybe the sickness had only been his first taste of fear. Maybe, until then, he hadn’t had the imagination to understand that he was not the centre of the world. That he was not the motive force at the heart of things, the hero, beyond all harm. That anything might happen to anyone.

  Once he woke in the middle of the night with a feeling of claustrophobia so strong that it was like a fire alarm going off in his head. For minutes he sat there, the sheet clinging to his sweat, before he remembered where he was. The room, the basin, the calendar. The fryer leaning in its corner, the other men sleeping around him. He sank back down without relief.

  What keeps you here? Kostandin had said, and he had said Nothing. And that was true, surely, because how could it be otherwise? It was only the slightest of connections that had brought him to Metamorphosis. There was nothing there for him that was worth the violence Kostandin saw coming. He could go to Albania if he wished. He could go anywhere.

  Then Eberhard came to Metamorphosis, and Eberhard changed everything.

  III

  Notes Towards a Thesis

  Transcript, Doxiades lecture,

  ‘Spartan Gods: Spartan Monsters’,

  Eberhard Sauer, Oxford, 2003

  The fall of Sparta is one of the great mysteries of the ancient world. In the absence of Spartan writings there are as many theories for the city’s decline as for the extinction of the dinosaurs. At the time of Lycurgus there were said to be nine thousand Spartan men, and, two centuries later, the Great King of Persia was informed that there were eight thousand, just like those hundreds he had seen die at the Hot Gates. Yet only eighty years after Thermopylae, Sparta could muster no more than three thousand spears, and three decades later, when Sparta was defeated by Thebes at the Battle of Leuctra, there were only fifteen hundred remaining. One year after that loss, and for the first time since antiquity, Sparta’s enemies came within sight of the unwalled city itself.

  By contrast, the rise of Sparta is not mysterious at all. It was built on the backs of hoplites and helots.

  The hoplite was the archetypal Hellenic soldier. The name derived from the hoplon, the great round shield that he carried. He was armed with a spear of cornel wood and iron–ten foot long from spike to blade–and a short sword for nice work. His left side was shielded by his hoplon. His right was guarded by the man beside him. This was a spur to steadfastness: a hoplite who broke and ran could no longer defend himself, and condemned the man who fought beside him.

  A hoplite army fought as a phalanx, a massed force of spears, eight men deep and many men wide. A phalanx of five thousand would stretch for half a mile. As the fight approached the phalanx would utter a paean, or war-song. Only the Spartans came on without a battle cry.

  Every Spartan boy was raised to fight, and only to fight in this one way. At seven he left home and began instruction. At eighte
en the instruction was complete. At twenty he would become a hoplite. He would remain as such until he was sixty. All other ways of life were forbidden to him. He could not trade. He could not use money. He was born and bred only for war.

  The Spartan who fought with passion alone was not admired. Excellence was sought through unity. The hoplite who fought alone could not even defend himself: his strength lay in solidarity. Sparta’s victories were won through the discipline of the phalanx. The Spartan lines would charge and wheel, mock-retreating, regrouping.

  The word helot means captive. The first helots were peoples conquered by Sparta in what came to be their kingdom of Lacedaemonia, which today is called Laconia: to those would later be added all the people of Messenia, to the west. Their captivity would last beyond death. To be called helot by the Spartans was to be changed not only in life but after life. The descendants of the first helots were born into helotage. The lineages of the conquered were bound in perpetuity. Helot became a name that ran in the blood.

  The helot was not a slave. As a rule, the slaves of Greece were barbarians–aliens from the horse-tribes of the North or the deserts of Libya and Asia. The Spartans made helots of Hellenes. Nor was a helot a chattel, as a slave was. He could not be bought and sold. He was not an object, as a slave was. He was not considered inhuman. To kill a slave was not murder, any more than would be the breaking of a jar, or an overburdened axletree.

  (Tools, Aristotle wrote of slaves, may be animate as well as inanimate.)

  Thus, as the Spartan hoplite was more than a soldier, so the helot was more than a slave. He was an enemy defeated in war. He would forever be a captive foe. Each year Sparta would declare war again on its own helots, and in that way the laws allowed a helot to be killed, not as if he were a slave, but as if he were an enemy.

  They were the captives not of Spartans but of Sparta itself. They did as the state commanded. They were bound to the land they kept as firmly as the hoplite was bound to his shield and spear. They did everything that the hoplite did not, which is to say they did everything there was to do but fight. Without the helot to serve him, the Spartan hoplite could never have existed. Without the hoplite, the helot could never have been conquered.

  It is one of the longest wars in recorded history, that waged between Sparta and its own subjects. Nor is it only the duration of the status quo that is notable. More remarkable still is that Sparta should ever have been able to hold such power at all.

  At the height of Sparta’s strength there were nine thousand Spartan hoplites. With half that force and less, the city held dominion over Lacedaemonia and Messenia. With fewer than ten thousand men, Sparta held one hundred and eighty thousand helots captive for over three hundred years.

  It was a rulership that could never have been contrived by force of arms alone. For so many to be bound by so few, for so long, the helots had to believe in Sparta. To have so little faith in themselves, to have such scant hope of liberation, they had to think their rulers invincible. Sparta required their hopelessness. Its power relied on more than strength. Its system needed terror.

  The title of this evening’s talk makes mention of gods and monsters. I haven’t spoken yet of either, but I would like to do so now, since terror leads us neatly to them.

  It is said that to understand a people one must only comprehend its gods. To that I would append and monsters. The knowledge that the United States is predominantly a Christian nation goes only part-way to explain its history in this, our Age of Terror. An awareness of that country’s popular mythologies–of America’s monsters, from the Red Scare to the Enemy Within–brings us significantly closer to understanding its secular workings.

  When it comes to monsters, many of us take our native term from the Latin monstrum, meaning a warning. The Ancient Greek teras has this implication also, denoting not only a deviation from nature, but more generally a supernatural portent. We apply our modern usage to a familiar bestiary of terrors, even as we dispense with the subtleties of the ancient applications.

  In Hellenic archaeology monsters are found adorning everything from the potsherd to the death mask. How are we to interpret their prolific representation? How can we understand their terrorisation of those upon whom they are visited? East of the Hellenic world, the Abrahamic God would soon be sending angels as his messengers, yet the deities of the Greeks had no such benign intermediaries. Instead they appeared themselves, and when they did not, it was monsters that came in their place.

  Inarticulate and bestial, the monster seems a poor messenger, until one understands this: that the monster is the message. The will of the gods is embodied in the creature itself. The Gorgons who turn to stone those who look on them, the Sirens who destroy all who listen to them, the Minotaur born of excessive female sexual hunger; these entities are vehicles of punishment and thereby of warning. Their role is uniform: the monster chastises the one who wanders too far or wonders too much.

  Invention–exploration–these things are not rewarded. On the contrary, what is good for the gods proves fatal to mortals. It is when the hero ceases to abide by natural laws, when he emulates the ambitions of his divinities, that monsters are visited upon him.

  The message of the monster is that the behaviour of the gods is not to be aspired to. The monstrum, the warning-in-flesh of ancient text and oral mythology, is a jealous demonstration of fate or divine power. Monsters are the terrible punishments exacted on the errant inhabitants of the earth.

  What, then, can we learn of Sparta, from its mythologies?

  The Spartans worshipped monstrous gods. Their deities were terrors personified. All gods have their share of terror–I would suggest that no one would get down on their knees for less–yet the Spartans had a high threshold for awfulness. An unusual tolerance for dread. Their gods are more frightening than most. That is their common theme, that dense preponderance of fear.

  Are those who worship frightening gods frightening people? The opposite may also be true: that those who worship frightening gods pray to allay their fears. Were the Spartans fearful? One might ask what they–of all people–ever had to be frightened of.

  They were devout, and unusually so. Because of their gods the Spartans refused to fight battles they could only have won, or fought those they could only lose. Their generals would sacrifice and read the entrails of animals again and again–at each river crossing, at each battlefield, at each charge.

  The other Greeks did not understand them. The Athenians feared them and were shocked by them. The Spartans were Greeks, believed themselves Greeks, fought for the ideal of Greece…yet they made captives of Greeks, too. They were obsessed with their own privacy. They were alien to both those they defeated and those they led to war. They were set apart by gods and laws and mountains.

  Why even say they were Greek? What does it mean to be Greek if it can be so alien? Many of their gods, it is true, were worshipped throughout Hellas. Apollo was adored and feared. He was an ambiguous deity–Carneius and Lyceius and Smintheus; Apollo the Ram-Like, The Wolf-Like, The Mouse-Catcher–and the harsh god of plague and prophecy, predictable only in his vindictiveness, killing and cursing and flaying alive all those who challenged him.

  The Spartans loved Artemis, too, Apollo’s twin and female mirror. Keepers of the sun and moon, offspring of the goddess of night, they were ruthless siblings. The choice is significant. The Spartans could have prayed to kinder deities.

  What does it mean to say that Artemis was a god of the Greeks? How many goddesses were called Artemis for the sake of authorial convenience? There was the Artemis of Ephesus–an inhuman cascade of breasts, an Asian idol, fertile and benign–and the terrible Artemis of the Tauric Chersonese, to whom all shipwrecked strangers were sacrificed. There was the Artemis of Athens, who was The Best and The Good Advisor–and of Sparta, who was Cnagia–The Burning One–and Ambulia–Death-Delayer, and Derrhiatis and Aeginaea–Leather-Armoured and Armed with Javelins.

  She was the untamed, the destroyer, the matchless h
untress, fierce as a bear. She was the virgin watcher over childbirth. She was a bloody goddess, a woman’s goddess, the power of women made flesh. There was more than one kind of Artemis, which is to say–isn’t it?–that there was more than one kind of Greece. Or that there was barely such a thing at all.

  Then there were the ancestral gods. On a narrow plateau in the hills above Sparta stand some curious pyramidal ruins. Under and all around those stones are older structures, ruins buried under ruins, ruins already ancient when the Classical Sparta of the hoplites and helots was in its prime. There are palaces there that are Mycenaean, and graves and weapons that are older still, stone blades from the ages before the forge. In the travelling journals of Pausanias the place is called Therapne, and it is the citadel of Menelaus, the red-haired king who waged war on distant Troy for the return of his stolen wife. The pyramid marks the remains of three great limestone terraces. Atop them there once stood a shrine to the Mycenaean king and queen, a Classical monument, built three centuries after the last of their palaces were burned. It is still called the Menelaion, the Shrine of Menelaus, but others were worshipped there too, both Helen herself and her half-god brothers.

  Leda, Queen of Sparta, was raped by Zeus in the form of a swan. She gave birth to two eggs, one mortal, one divine. From the divine egg hatched Helen and Polydeuces, her immortal brother. From the mortal egg were born Castor and the murderous Clytemnestra.

  What did the Spartans worship in Helen? She was a goddess of vegetation, once, but her essence came to be her physical perfection. She was inhumanly beautiful. In Sparta, offspring born imperfect were taken by the state and left in the mountains to die. Imperfection equalled monstrosity. It was not vanity to pray for a perfect child.