The Mask of Apollo

by Mary Renault

  Now I knew my own heart, I felt at peace. It made sense that I should love him just for being; there was nothing he need do for me but be real. Beyond that, I would only ask the gods for a word with him now and then, to prove he still lived and walked the earth. In return I would do for him, if I could, whatever he needed done, like getting a prize for his kinsman’s play.

  I turned home, lifting my hand in salute to the horse-boy in the chariot. He had worked for it, and so must I.

  We left Delphi next day, to go on with our tour. None of the sponsors stood us as much as a drink. They did not care two straws about the theater, but would as soon have provided flute-girls if it pleased the delegates; in fact they did that too, so Gyllis of Thebes told me. However, we were paid in full, which one can’t always count on, so they were welcome to keep their wine.

  It was a good thing I had told Anaxis that Dion liked his work, for he never got asked up to the house. Of course Dion should have done so if he wanted to get the best from him; I had to cover it with some he or other. It had been his bad luck to be sober in the skeneroom when I was drunk; he had taken too much trouble, and Dion had written it down as sycophancy. There were people he was helpless with; rather than own it, he took refuge in his rank as in some high acropolis, out of their reach. All his life it made him enemies, and I suppose he must have known it; but he preferred this to showing weakness. That was the man.

  When we got home, we put both our names down again for the protagonists’ list at Athens. Before long, I heard that my name was on. Anaxis heard nothing, but he had very good roles, and if the play won would stand a better chance next year.

  We had done well for money on our tour, between Delphi, Corinth, Thebes and Megalopolis. I could live quite well till winter, when rehearsals for the Lenaia would begin. I went about, treating old friends who had treated me, buying plays for my library, taking exercise at the gymnasium, and so on. I went most often to the one at the Academy gardens, though it was a good way from my lodging, just in case Dion, instead of sailing straight home, might be staying with Plato first. Though he never appeared, I did not give up hope of him, knowing he was not a man who liked to be stared at in the streets.

  Plato’s school was not far from the gymnasium, behind a grove of plane trees. One saw his young men, freshly bathed, oiled and dressed, going off that way after exercise, talking and laughing, but no horseplay. Sometimes two would stop by the Eros statue in the grove and offer a handful of flowers plucked on their way, touching hands, which I found charming. Once or twice when there was laughter I walked near to learn the joke; but I could never make head or tail of it.

  They mostly dressed very well, some richly, though without ostentation. Those who were plainly dressed wore their clothes with an air, so one could not say if it was from poverty or choice.

  Among the second sort was a youth I saw often in the garden, though not in the gymnasium. His looks always caught my eye; he had a boy’s smooth chin, but a fine clear profile, too serious for his age. Meeting him one day in the path, I took the chance to ask if Dion was a guest there.

  “Not now.” He had a low pleasing voice, without the roughness of his years. “You’ve missed him by a month or two. He left with Plato, for Delphi, and went on home to Syracuse. Have you come to see him?”

  I passed this off, and to cover it asked some questions about the school. The boy had seemed shy, but this unlocked his tongue. “It’s not a school at all, in the sense you mean. We meet to work, and think, and discuss, and experiment; and the younger learn from the elder. From Plato, everyone learns; but anyone can disagree, if he can make it good. Join us! It will change your life. It did mine.”

  Plainly, he took me for a man of leisure. Before one has become known, one can hang one’s mask up and go anywhere, free as air; nobody knows one’s face. Even now I sometimes miss it

  I said, “I don’t suppose I could raise the fee. How much a year?” If he was not too high-born and rich, I was hoping to see more of him.

  “Why, nothing. I’ve never paid one drachma. As Plato says, Sokrates never charged; he said he liked to choose whom he conversed with.”

  I looked at the painted colonnades, flowers, and well-kept lawns. “But didn’t he spend all day in the streets and Agora? One can do that for nothing.”

  “True. Plato isn’t rich, though he has more than Sokrates had; but the school does accept endowments. Only from Academy men; he won’t be beholden to outsiders. Dion gave us the new library. But no one, ever, is accepted for what he owns—except here.” He tapped his brow. He had gray eyes, with an inner ring as dark as smoke. “Thank you for the pleasure of your conversation; I must go, or I shan’t get a good place for Plato’s lecture. This is his great one. He only gives it once every few years.”

  “Well, we may meet again here. What is the lecture?”

  “On the Nature of the One,” he said, as if surprised at my asking.

  When he had gone, I loitered on in the shade of the plane trees. All the young men from the school had gone in; the palaestra gave out a different noise, louder but hollower. The gardens and lawns were empty. I walked nearer. A dolphin fountain murmured softly; the buildings, though newish, seemed to be at home like an old olive tree. There was an open door, with men’s backs filling it. It seemed to me that one more would scarcely be noticed, and if Plato charged no fee one could not be defrauding him. I might learn what had made Dion the man he was.

  As I got closer, I could hear a voice I recognized. Great God, I thought, these amateurs. Why does he throw it all off the top of his mouth? A beautiful voice, half-wasted. The chest is there; he should be able to fill a theater; even now, if a good professional took him in hand … Nobody noticed me in the doorway. I could hear quite well; they could not have kept quieter for Theodoros in Antigone. Well, I listened for as long as it takes to sing an opening chorus, and for all I could make out of it, he might as well have been speaking Scythian.

  I slipped away, stopping for a last look at the house. There were words carved over the portico, and filled in with gold. But when I went up, all they said was NO ENTRY WITHOUT MATHEMATICS.

  The cobbler to his last, I thought. A wasted morning, except for those gray eyes. I went home to my exercises, and Hector’s Ransom, and took the air nearer home thereafter. It would have been different if the lad had ever shown himself in the gymnasium; but, clearly, he was all for the mind and the Nature of the One. It could only end in grief.

  However, one fine autumn day some weeks later, friends called me to come walking, and we found ourselves there. As we crossed the park, one of them nudged me, saying, “Niko, you dog, you said you would go anywhere, but you took care to steer us here. Where do you find such beauties? Don’t pretend you don’t see him looking. It would serve you right if we didn’t go away.”

  I got rid of them, before he saw what they were laughing at, and went to meet him. He greeted me, and said at once, “I know you now. I remembered as soon as you had gone last time. You are Nikeratos, the tragic actor.”

  I said yes, feeling pleased, as who would not, that he should have remembered my face from those few moments at the theater when one takes one’s bow.

  “I saw you,” he said, “as Alkestis, at the Piraeus. I’ve seen the play twice before, but the other two were sniveling and self-pitiful, compared with you. You made the whole transit of the Styx, lying there all alone with the mourners round you. I wept, but as one should, with the soul and not the belly.”

  There was not a hair on his face; he could hardly be more than fifteen then; his poise and assurance startled me. I said, “Then it’s not all mathematics here?”

  “Of course not. Why didn’t you join us, as I said?”

  “My dear boy, though one doesn’t pay, one still has to eat. But we can meet again, I hope?”

  “You could come and study when you’re not working.”

  “‘No entry without mathematics.’ I’d be a white crow in the flock, you know. Will you sup with me
this evening?”

  “Is it because you are an actor? Plato is not conventional. He paused in thought. “I believe he would even take a woman, if he thought her fit.”

  “You believe more than I can, then.”

  “So everyone told me. Yet here I am.”

  I opened my mouth to speak, and kept it open to gasp. Sure enough one could see under the man’s tunic, once one was looking, the shallow curve of breasts.

  “I am Axiothea from Phlios. At the Academy, everyone knows. I don’t dress like this as a disguise.”

  I could only stand blinking. If I had known from the first, no doubt I would have disapproved; as it was, I simply felt winded.

  “I could see,” she said, “it was becoming unkind not to tell you. I hope you are not angry.” Her smile, and her frankness, won me over. I could not be cross, perceiving she was the same sort of woman as I was a man. “Friends are friends,” I said. “May I take a friend’s privilege and ask your age?”

  “Nineteen. You thought me precocious.” We laughed, and I asked how she had begun all this. She said that when she was fifteen, she had won the girls’ race at Olympia. Plato had been there; she had seen him, and heard the Academy spoken of. “But,” she said, “I thought of it as one might of driving in the chariot race—splendid, but out of reach. I did the only thing I could—bought his books and read them. So I lived in my father’s house, a white crow in the flock, as you said just now, and suitors avoided me, which angered my father.” She had been through hard times; he had beaten her, and burned her books when he found them; those that were left, she had had to hide in the rocks and read by stealth. No one had spoken for her except her mother’s brother, a man who had studied at Phaedo’s school in Elis. But her mother was dead, so no one heeded him. Then suddenly her father died, and this man became her guardian. “Everyone, and I myself, was sure my father had disinherited me. But he had put it off, or changed his mind; and when this became known, suitors sprang up all round, like the Sown Warriors. My uncle, the best of men, not only understood my disgust but shared it. So we talked, and he granted me my wish. He would rather I’d gone to Phaedo; he said Plato was a man of dreams; but, he said, Plato was the likelier one to take me.”

  She had cropped her hair and worn men’s clothes to go to him, because she wanted her mind tested for what it was worth in itself, not as something remarkable in a woman. “But,” she said, “having put them on I found they fitted my soul. You, I expect, will understand.”

  “Yes,” I said. “The theater can give one that.”

  “So I came before him, as it seemed, in my true likeness, which I expect was why he was deceived, if you can call it so; at all events he questioned me, and said I should be welcome. But by then I felt such respect for him, I would no more have bed to him than to a god, so I told him everything. Truly, Nikeratos, he is a great-souled man. He might well have been angry, and thought I had meant to make a fool of him. But he said I had proved his thesis, that women can be taught philosophy if they are given to it by nature, and that I was welcome more than ever. As for my clothes, he said one must be true to the mind before the body.”

  “And he has really kept to it? He gives you equality with the rest?”

  She made a gesture so fierce and eloquent that I noted it in my mind to use at work. “Equality! I hope I need never sink so low. That poppy syrup! Does the soldier ask to be equal with every other? No, to prove himself. The philosopher? No, to know himself. I had rather be least of Plato’s school, knowing the good and taking my own measure by it, than run back to Phlios, where I could command what praise I chose. Equality! No, indeed, Plato doesn’t so insult me. People whom such things concern you’ll find at the schools of rhetoric. They don’t come here.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “An artist ought to have known better.” We sat down on a bank under an olive tree. Once one got used to her, I found her easier to talk to even than easygoing Gyllis of Thebes. The one could have furnished a regiment from her lovers; the other had virgin written all over her, but she was used to men’s companionship, friendly without brazenness and self-respecting without defiance. It seemed Plato had known his business.

  After we had talked a while longer, I told her I had met Dion at Delphi. Her face lit up, and she said, “He is our hope for all the world!”

  I had expected praise of him, but this was a good deal more. “You look surprised,” she said. “Have you read nothing of Plato’s, then, not even The Republic?” I confessed that this was so. “You will find it all,” she said, “in Books Four and Five, where he says mankind will never be free of evil till some great state comes under the control of a philosopher trained to kingship. Someone has to begin, before people will believe it works. He says most polities today are like ships being steered by a half-blind master. The crew know he’s off course, and plan to mutiny; but if they manage to seize the helm it will be no better, for none of them can navigate; they’ve not learned that such a science exists. If a real pilot came by and said, ‘Steer by Arcturus,’ they’d mock him for a star-struck zany. The philosopher is the pilot. He knows where the harbor is, and the reef; he knows the constant stars. But men still pursue illusions. Their prejudice will not be broken till such a man takes the helm and shows them. Once he has saved them from the rocks, that will be the end of guesswork. No man will drown if he sees the remedy, will he?”

  She paused for a feed-line, as philosophers do—just like comic actors, though one must not say so. I answered, “Surely not.”

  “So, then, when Dion gets his ship, a new age will begin.”

  “What?” I said startled. “Is Dion planning revolt then?”

  “No, how could you think such a thing? He is a friend of Plato’s. Plato has always taught that violence and treachery can beget nothing better than themselves. This was also the teaching of Pythagoras, the wisest of men.”

  “Then what does he hope for? It’s true, he is like a man the gods made for kingship. But Dionysios has an heir.”

  “One he despises.”

  “Blood is blood, when the last push comes.”

  “Sometimes pride talks louder. Dionysios didn’t build up the Syracusan power to bequeath it to the Carthaginians at his death.”

  “Is that what he thinks of his son?”

  “So everyone says. He has scared him since his childhood; now he despises him for a coward.”

  “Is he really one?”

  “Maybe. Maybe he just wants to keep alive the best way he can. Old Dionysios is brave enough in war; but he sees an assassin behind every chair. Did you know that even his own family can’t come in to see him till they’ve been searched down to the skin? Almost since his childhood, young Dionysios, the son, has lived in dread that his father may suspect him of some usurping plot, and decide to make away with him. He can’t be made to touch any sort of public business; he’ll scarcely offer a sacrifice at the Games, or dedicate a fountainhouse.”

  “Well, you can’t kill the cow and milk it too. What did his father expect?”

  “Who knows what an untrained mind will think? One thing is certain; he trusts Dion further than any other man alive. He is even let off the searching, because the tyrant knows him for what he is—incapable of treachery. He is kin by marriage, not by blood; he comes of the old nobility, while Dionysios is a nobody; he is an envoy other states respect and will do business with, when they’d not trust Dionysios across the street; a soldier proved in battle, whom his men would follow anywhere. He has not always even carried out his orders; where he was sent to strike terror and make examples, he has done justice and won respect. Yet the heir is searched, while he is not.”

  “I can believe all that. But only a philosopher, surely, would pass his own blood over and choose an heir for virtue.”

  “Oh, yes. We don’t expect it. But Dionysios has two sons by his other wife, Dion’s sister. They’re young yet, but he has helped bring them up; the elder thinks the world of him. Dionysios might decide to name him heir; a
nd then Dion would have the chance he needs. It’s not the show and pride of power he wants—only to change a city ruled by men to one ruled by laws.” I could tell, by the way she spoke these last words, that she was quoting, I suppose from Plato.

  “Which laws?” I asked. “Athenian?”

  “Oh, Nikeratos, how can we talk till you’ve read The Republic? Listen. Wait here. I’ll see if it’s free in the library. You’ll take good care of it? If it gets lost, I couldn’t afford to pay a copyist; I’d have to do it from the wax myself, and it would take a year.”

  “Is it so long?” I asked, alarmed. But then I thought of Dion and said, “Yes, I’ll keep it safe.”

  She was gone some time; at last I saw her hurrying through the trees, the dark curls ruffled on her brow. Certainly she had made her confession none too soon; I wondered if Plato had felt the same.

  “I am sorry,” she said, “it’s out. And then Speusippos, Plato’s nephew, kept me talking. But I’ve brought you this. It’s quite short, and of course you will like it better. I should have thought of it at first.”

  There was only one roll, not thick. I thanked her, perhaps too gratefully. “Is this about law too?”

  “No; love.”

  “I shall surely like it. Tomorrow I’ll meet you here to return it, at about this time.”

  “I will be here. Do you know, you are the first man to be my friend who has not been a philosopher? The rest have thought me a monster.”

  “That would come ill from an actor. When I put on a woman’s mask I am a woman; I could do nothing if I were not. There are two natures in most of us who serve the god.”

  “You will like this book. I’m glad I chose it.”

  “And I that we met.” And there was more in this than civility.

  I had meant to meet friends that evening; but it being too early, I untied the book and looked into it. It was called The Drinking Party, a cheerful start at least; and my interest quickened when I found it was supposed to take place at the house of Agathon the Tragedian after his first winning play. I had acted in his Antaeus, a charming piece, and the beginning of modern theater, for he got rid of the chorus from the action and enabled us to have plots which don’t assume the presence of fifty onlookers. Though to my disappointment there was no account of the production, the dialogue held me, and I kept reading. Presently they started a party game, a round of speeches in praise of love. The next thing I knew, it was getting too dark to see. I lit the lamp, and went back to the book, and did not move till it was done.