The Mask of Apollo

by Mary Renault

  We sat down near the table. On a trellis above the window was an old knotty vine just budding; its sharp shadows fell on the soft waxy shine of the wood, and his brown soldier’s hand which rested there.

  “The other actors, I hear, went back,” he said. “You, Nikeratos, faced the change of fate with your usual courage. And it would have prospered as you deserve. Your speaking of the Eulogy would certainly bring you offers, not only hereabouts but in many other cities. I tell you this in fairness. When one comes to a man for help, one should let him know what it will cost him.”

  He paused. I could find nothing to say. I feared I must be dreaming this. Had he really asked help of me?

  “As for the mere money,” he said, “of course I shall cover that. But a rising artist, still young, looks first for reputation. Don’t think me ignorant of this. I know what I ask. You must judge if the cause deserves it.”

  I said I would do anything. I could feel myself blushing like a boy, which seldom happened in my boyhood.

  “You are a man I trust,” he said, not making a speech of it. “When I heard you had been sent for here, it seemed like the hand of God. We have the business of the rites, and no one need know of any other.”

  He took from a writing box a letter folded small and sealed.

  “To you, Nikeratos, who have heard us share our thoughts, I can say more than just, ‘Get this out of Sicily to Plato.’ In the first place, you won’t fear its being seditious; you know our views on violence. No, the enterprise I urge him to is one of honor to us both. It can bring good beyond reckoning to our young Archon, to this city, even to the world. But of necessity I had to write with frankness, which might give offense and spoil our hopes. Perhaps you understand me?”

  I said I thought so.

  “If Plato comes, as I have urged him here to do, the thought must seem to Dionysios to be his own, or he will resent it. This is natural in a young man new to power, following such a father. But Plato’s welcome depends on this, and on his welcome, everything. As you too may have heard him say, philosophy is not a tool which can be passed about like a mason’s rule; it is a fire struck from the glow of minds in search of truth. Without that fire, it is nothing.”

  His voice, his face, took me straight back to that room at Delphi. The noble folly, the mad beauty of it struck me dumb. Twenty years, or thereabouts, since the golden lad in love brought his friend to Syracuse, to change the old tyrant with philosophy. (I thought of the square pug face in its bed of ice, the jaw clenched like a fist in death, the shrewd wary lines round the closed eyes.) And after everything—after that legendary clash of disparate prides, after the tricked parting, the slave market at Aigina, all these years of half-stolen meetings—now in this man of forty, a diplomat, a soldier, the flame revived when the coals were blown on; he was ready to try again.

  I must have been a long time answering. He said, “Yes, speak, Nikeratos. There are few here I can share my mind with. You have met Dionysios. What do you think?”

  After thinking how best to put it, I said, “Plato won’t stoop to flattery. Do you think it will matter less this time?”

  He smiled, and paused. Then he said, “I see you have the funeral speech there in your hand. Have you had time yet to run it over?”

  Since he preferred to change the subject, I answered, “Not much of it. Dionysios took me through a little.”

  “What do you think of it?”

  “Most of it is very good; he must have some of his father’s talent. There are one or two awkward passages; do you think he would notice a cut or two? This, for instance, adds nothing to the sense, and it doesn’t speak well.”

  “Where?” he asked. I showed him the place. He said, “I think you had better read that just as it stands. He put that in himself.”

  Our eyes met. I could not believe I had been such a fool as to need telling. When one thought, his signature was all over it.

  “And yet,” he said, “when you read this to him, didn’t you improve it as best you could?”

  “I daresay. He is only young; and he looked so anxious.”

  “You see, Nikeratos? You are not a servile man; you look for achievement, not for favor. Yet you flattered him. I am not servile either, yet I have done the same. As you see, he copied out the speech himself; by now he thinks he wrote it, but for a few hints here and there. Well, if you and I can feel for his untried hand and his unformed mind, don’t you think Plato will? If you had heard him teach, you would know his gentleness with a beginner feeling his way. The will to learn is all he asks. And he knows how to waken that.”

  I said I was sure of it. What else could I say?

  “You yourself have seen Dionysios’ hunger to excel. So far, the appearance is enough for him; we may blame his education, or rather lack of it. But as Plato always says, this is the beginning from which young men come to love excellence itself. Sokrates, he says, stamped these words on the souls of all who came to him: Be what you want to seem.”

  “That’s good advice,” I said. But I thought to myself, Of course it is. But like the long race, it needs staying power. In theater too, one picks out the stayers early on. If I were choosing a company, I doubt I would hire young Dionysios. However, fate did the casting; I suppose they can only direct him and hope for the best.

  Dion, who had been sitting in thought, said, “His father, in what concerned his own affairs, was a judge of men. He knew a son with his own qualities would have been his rival. He feared such a son, yet wished for one. Neither wish nor fear was realized. He admitted no regrets. Whether he felt them, whether the son guessed them, who can say?”

  I thought of Hector’s Ransom. Much was now explained.

  “One thing is beyond doubt; the young man wants to be something in himself. As yet, he cannot tell what. So it is now Plato must come. He must, Nikeratos.” He looked dog tired. I doubt if he had slept all night. I don’t suppose he would have talked like this to me at any other time. “He has a gift from the gods of catching souls. No god has given it me. I hope I do my duty to my city, to my kin, to heaven. Plato made me love honor, and I can say I have not betrayed it. But I cannot light fires in other men. It has been a grief to me.”

  “That is not true,” I said.

  I could not help myself. I could have bitten out my tongue next moment. Not for having said it—it would have done well enough as a courtesy—but for saying it with my heart.

  He had been looking at a golden lion he used to hold down his papers. Now he looked at me. He swallowed; I could see him thinking what one could say. I have made it sound like a painful moment; yet it was not, for through it all I saw him glad, not I daresay for the sake of the man who said it, but that someone should.

  He lifted the lion from its place, set it down, and with the soldier’s firmness he always turned to when he was shy, said, “Well, though I did not share your danger at Delphi, I was there to offer the honors of the field. That gives a bond, as it does in war.” He was a great gentleman. It rescued us both.

  He stood, and turned to a wall niche at the far end of the room. There was a bronze Apollo in it: a calm searching face, the two hands held out, in one the bow of death, in the other the cup of healing. “Surely,” he said, “the god you kept faith with then, whom Plato all his life has served, whom proportion pleases in men and cities—surely he led you here in the day of need.”

  “I won’t fail him,” I said. “Or you. Let him be witness.”

  A good exit line, but of course there was still the business of the rites, which took another hour. It was just as well; it made things easy between us.

  Before I left he paid me an advance on my fee for speaking the eulogy, more than I had expected for the whole. So, knowing I ought, I picked up my courage and took Menekrates to dinner at the theater tavern. At first the actors who were drinking there looked away, but I had known that would have to be faced. I went up to Stratokles and his friends, saying I should never forget I had them to thank for my good fortune; if th
ey had not entertained me here, Dionysios would never have known I was in Syracuse, and I hoped they would give me the pleasure of standing them all some wine. A few still looked sour, but no one left. In the end they all came round, and we spent a pleasant evening. I was glad to have done it; it seemed to me that Dion would have thought I should.

  All next day I was rehearsing for the funeral, which would take place the following evening. The shop of the royal robe-maker had been at work two days and a night upon my tragic robe. It was of black dipped in purple, with foot-deep borders crusted in bullion, amethyst, agate and pearl.

  The procession set forth at sunset, down from the palace through the fivefold gates of Ortygia, on through the old town and the new, then between lines of torches down into the plain again, where Timaios the skene-painter had prepared the pyre.

  First walked a men’s chorus, singing the Lament for Hector from the dead man’s play, to the music of double flutes; singers and flute-players wore dead-black robes, and cypress garlands. After these came a troop of soldiers, dragging their spears, their helmets under their left arms. Then a car shaped like a warship, draped in black, with an effigy of the Spirit of Syracuse, in a pose of mourning, twice life size. Then fifty boys, singing the Women’s Chorus for Hector’s wake. After these, the priests of Dionysos, the dead man’s name-god, with their sacred emblems. Then torch-bearers, their torches made up with precious incense, for the kindling of the pyre. After that, walking before the corpse, came the male kindred, young Dionysios, and his half-brothers by Aristomache, Dion’s sister, and Dion himself.

  The funeral car stood fifteen feet high, and was drawn by an elephant, taken from the Carthaginians in war. They are most fearful beasts, left over as it seems from the Titans’ age, as high as two men, gray, hairless, wrinkled, with a tail at both ends, the bigger before; one can tell the head by the great ears. It pulled patiently, guided by a man upon its neck. On a bier draped with black and purple, Dionysios lay clothed in white and wreathed with gold. In spite of the ice, he was starting to go off by this time; I got the whiff of him all the way. I walked just behind, in my tragic robe and a wreath of gilded laurel, carrying his prize vase from Athens. It was of course the usual kind, painted with a chorus and the god; against the other grave-goods it looked as simple as a kitchen pot. But it had arrived before he lost his senses; and till his eyes closed for good he never let it out of his sight.

  After me came the women of the household, keening; then a great catafalque with his arms and ensigns and trophies of war. His war horse, and the other victims to be sacrificed before the pyre, were led by Gaulish warriors. Here was a glimpse of the chains of adamant; but the murmuring never got very loud. I suppose it was true that even the poor, whose children scratched in the middens while he ate off gold, preferred a hungry lifetime within his walls to one night of sack by the Carthaginians. I had heard things, by now, which made me understand it.

  It was now nearly dark, with just a deep red glow where the sun had set under the sea; but the space around the pyre was lit with cressets whose flames rose six feet high, making it almost as bright as noon.

  I should like to have seen Timaios’ designs for Hector’s Ransom. They must have been worth looking at. However, he had spent himself on the pyre instead, and they talk of it to this day. It was so high, the onlookers’ necks were cricked from watching the dead man hoisted. The gilded bier-stand would have served to throne a Pharaoh, the offerings to equip a banquet hall; the sides of the pyre, which sloped inward like a pyramid’s, were boarded flat and painted all over with pictures of Dionysios’ victories. Sicilians love paint. They cover their houses with it, their chariots, even their carts. These battle scenes were framed in every land of scroll and flourish, touched up with gold. To an Athenian it looked gaudy beyond words, but the Syracusans were squealing and groaning with admiration, and it has found its way into the histories as a major work of art. It was certainly remarkable, and I should think would have kept the poor of the whole city in bread and oil for a year. At all events, they settled the old man up there among the pitch and terebinth and scented oil and tinder. There he lay, waiting to hear my piece before they sent him off to meet Judge Rhadamanthos. I mounted the rostrum before the pyre. I had been rather nervous; but now the silence was so unlike grief, so like the theater, that I felt quite at home.

  While he lived, you would not have found me speaking praise of a man like Dionysios, whoever wrote it. But at a funeral it is proper to remember only the good, or one offends the gods below, and calls the angry ghost to vengeance. Dion’s lines were quite honest, as far as they went. He gave him credit as a soldier and defender of the city, and used most of the speech on that. He said also that, though entrusted with supreme power by the Syracusans (as he really had been, in the beginning), he had outraged no household in the city through incontinence or vice. People assured me afterwards that this was no more than the truth, and was probably the secret of his long reign. As Hipparchos found in Athens, wronged kin and lovers are far more dangerous than demagogues; they will kill at the cost of their lives. The old man had learned from history; besides, he had been a demagogue himself.

  I had worked hard over his son’s little pieces in the epitaph to make them sound like something beside Dion’s fine prose. The young man had to be kept sweet, to send for Plato.

  At the close, I heard the deep murmur which is applause on such occasions. Then the victims were sacrificed; more offerings were flung; the kindred took their torches and kindled the pyre. At once huge rushing flames leaped up and hid the body, driving the crowd back with their heat. I stood with a scorched face, sweating in my tragic robe, watching Timaios’ pretty pictures curl and blacken. Then everyone went home. I remembered my father’s poor simple burial, and how we had sat round afterwards thinking, What next?

  In due course I was paid, very handsomely. Dion had booked me a passage on a ship sailing next day. I had said goodbye to all my friends, except Menekrates, who was coming to see me off. I felt as good as gone, when a palace messenger came, saying that Dionysios wished to see me.

  This time all the gates opened for me easily; but, once inside the palace, I was led by a different way. Presently we came to a door without pretensions, the office of some functionary, I supposed. My usher knocked, and opened. There was a pleasant smell of wood and paint, like a carpenter’s shop. Which is just what it was—and at the bench sat Dionysios the Younger, with a toy chariot before him, and a tiny brush in his hand, painting on scroll work. This time he had really done me honor. He had let me into his sanctuary.

  “I was very pleased, Nikeratos,” he said, “with your speaking of the Epitaph. I have sent to Timaios’ workshop for a copy of his Siege of Motya, one of his paintings for the pyre. You may have it, in memory of the day.”

  He waved his brush at it. It was on an easel against the wall, more garish than ever, seen close to, and too large to ship home without a great deal of trouble. I thanked him as if he had fulfilled my dearest wish. Dion had been quite right. It was like giving sweets to an eager child.

  He invited me to go up and inspect the brushwork, which I did. But the table beside it drew my eye; I could not keep from looking. It was full of small toys—chariots and horses, carts and asses and mules, a war galley fully rigged—all painted up Sicilian style, and perfect as real things shrunk by magic. One longed to touch. All these years, when his father had been watching him like a mousing cat for some twitch of dangerous capacity, he had indulged himself with doing one thing well.

  Since he would hardly have asked me here if he did not want it noticed, I praised the fineness of the work. I was curious to hear what he would say. I got more than I bargained for. He jumped up and came over to the table. He must have talked for at least an hour. He told me what woods he used, and how, and why; he showed me his gouges, chisels and glue, and his lava dust for smoothing; he pointed out the racing chariots, and the processional. His face grew lively, firm and keen; he looked a different man. Sudd
enly I pictured him in some nice clean shop in a good street, advising a client about the design of a chair or bed-head, successful, esteemed, content, a happy craftsman, doing the one thing he had in him.

  Neither of us, I thought, is perfect casting for a philosophic king. I’m the lucky one; I need not try.

  He asked me which of the models I liked best. It was hard to choose, but I pointed out a state chariot with gilded wreaths, which must have cost him most trouble. “Take it,” he said. “It’s yours. Not many people notice the finer points. I gave one not unlike it to my son, but he broke it within the day; small children don’t feel for fragile things.” The news that he was a father gave me such a start, I nearly dropped the chariot. Of course he was quite old enough, but it seemed absurd.

  “I shall have less leisure for pastimes now,” he said, the sureness in his face changing to a weak conceit. “Come back, Nikeratos, when the time of mourning is over, and give us a taste of your art. Then you can sample the pleasures Syracuse affords. Our girls deserve their reputation.” The greed in his eye showed something new and none too pleasing. I remembered stories in the wineshops.

  Soon after, I left, with the chariot in my hands. The last I saw of him, he was back at his workbench, peering with his weak eyes at his little tools.

  8

  THE FOLLOWING DAY I SET SAIL FOR HOME, BY way of Tarentum. Dion sent for me again before I left, to give me a letter for Archytas, the chief man of the city, and leader of the Pythagoreans there. It was to urge him, Dion said, to join in persuading Plato, his guest-friend of long standing. I undertook to deliver it without fail. Something in Dion’s face assured me it was a forceful letter, and told me, too, that there lived on within the statesman, general and scholar a beautiful lordly boy who was not used to hearing no.