The Mask of Apollo

by Mary Renault

  “Only look, Nikeratos,” he said, his fine face lit with eagerness, “at the world around us. Look what men as they are have brought it to. War, tyranny, revenge, anarchy, injustice everywhere. Somewhere, somewhere one must begin.”

  At these words, my feet seemed to feel firm ground. I said, “That is true. Then why, seeing Dionysios is eating out of Plato’s hand, doesn’t he seize his chance, and get the Syracusans a proper constitution? Soon it will be too late; even I can see that. Why is the city as full of mercenaries as ever? The tyranny goes on, while you all scratch circles in the sand—” His face reminded me, if my own sense had not, that I was speaking to the first minister. I said, “I go too far. But we were talking about justice.”

  “We were,” he said after a pause, “so I will tell you why. You have been very sick this year. When the fever had left you, could you get up at once, and go about your business? Or did you need an arm to lean on? Well, Syracuse has been sick for almost forty years. A whole generation, reared in sickness … even to the highest.”

  “And so,” I said, “you must begin with the child at nurse, with the schoolboy at the theater. And Dionysios—he must begin with mathematics.”

  He clenched his hand on the desk, as if begging the gods for patience. “Nikeratos, don’t make me angry. Don’t treat me like a child, and Plato like a fool. He was learning politics at first hand before I was born; and so was I, before you were. If you think you know your own business best, give us some credit for knowing ours.”

  I was ashamed, and begged his pardon. He only put up with me out of gratitude, and because I had shown him my heart.

  “Try to see you are not in Athens now. This is Sicily. Beyond the River Halys are the lands of Carthage. The enemy stands with his foot in the door, pushing as soon as our shoulder slackens. What use is it to pay off the mercenaries, and pull down the walls of Ortygia, and set the people by the ears with a new regime, before we have made a man to lead them? They are better off as they are than as slaves in Africa, or nailed on crosses, or spitted over fires, and they have always known it. Dionysios has no root of greatness”—he had forgotten in his deep earnestness even to drop his voice—“he cannot lead men nor make them love him. But he can still save Syracuse, if he can only be taught to think.”

  “Yes,” I said. “All this is true, if you had time. How long do you think you have?”

  He began to answer, then asked sharply what I meant.

  “Only what you have surely seen yourself—that Dionysios is working at his geometry not because he likes it, but because he is in love.”

  “In love?” He frowned to himself, looking for a joke. Like many good men, he had not much sense of humor. Plato had far more.

  “You are not serious,” he said. “Plato could be his father.”

  “True indeed. He should know himself better. He is in love all the same. Youth worships the mask of love; that is his Eros, a powerful god. Didn’t you once know him?”

  “No. Our play was real.”

  “How the gods loved you. Do you think all men have such fortune? That poor little man in the palace has had to be his own poet. His father wrote plays, he lives them. He has got right into his part, too; don’t you see what it is? A young aristocrat, brilliant, dissolute, charming, reckless, called to the good life by a philosophic lover?”

  For once he laughed aloud. “Alkibiades! Come, this is a serious matter.”

  “It is to him. He is rather short of beauty and charm, but, as he sees it, he can still improve upon his model, that bright falling star. He will be true to Sokrates’ teaching, and deserve his love.”

  “You cannot mean this. Plato’s conduct has been in every way correct.”

  “How not? Yet the young man’s devotion touches him, and he is kind. After all, Sokrates mastered his desires; do you think Dionysios wants to know the difference? All he wants is to be the beloved disciple, to know that he comes first. If something seems to stand in his way, will he prefer to blame Plato’s coldness, or an old rival who won’t stand out of the light?”

  “My dear Nikeratos! This is not one of your tragedies.” He was brisk, yet not quite at ease.

  “Maybe not,” I said, “but it’s theater all the same. I don’t know much of politics, as people are always telling me; but at least an actor knows jealousy when he sees it. You should watch his eyes.”

  He paused, biting his lip. “That is nothing new. I was proving myself among men, fighting battles, leading embassies, while his father kept him shut up like a woman.” He did not add, though he must have known it, that it was he who had Alkibiades’ lifelong beauty. “Envy is natural.”

  “Well, this is one thing more. You can load so much on a donkey, then he won’t go. How long do you count on? A generation? From what I saw today, I’d not lay two obols on it to last a year.”

  He gazed at me, only half his mind on the matter. He was wondering, as I could tell, how it had come to pass that I could take such liberties. A just man, he blamed himself and would not punish me. Maybe he still liked me a little; it was time to go, while this held good. But there was something I had forgotten to mention.

  “I think,” I said, “that it would be as well if Plato’s friends warned him not to walk alone about Ortygia. The soldiers want to cut his throat.”

  “What? Who told you this?”

  “They did. I heard it at every gatehouse. They all say he’s working to get them turned off.”

  Aroused at last, he struck the desk with his hand and cursed as if he were in the field. “The young fool! He will talk—like a barber, a bawd, a midwife. He leaks like a cracked water jar. He cannot be kept from talking.”

  No need to ask whom he meant. “Then Plato didn’t advise it?”

  “Plato has fought in war! Of course he counsels it, but as the goal, not the means. When the new laws are established; when the citizens are trained in public business, content, and loyal; when the ruined cities, which the Carthaginians wasted, are resettled and could fight beside us. Who but a madman would strip the city now?”

  “Now I understand. Dionysios proclaimed his good intentions? He’s always wanting to be crowned before the race.”

  “You may as well know, Nikeratos, what it seems has become known all over Ortygia. Not long ago was his name day, and the usual sacrifices were offered. The priest made the accustomed prayer, composed in his father’s lifetime, to the appropriate gods that they might preserve the Archon in his power. In the middle of the prayer, he flung up his hand and cried, “No! Don’t invoke a curse on us!’ Then he looked at Plato, expecting praise.”

  I forget what I said. Anything would do, except what I was thinking: Why, in the name of every god, do you keep this mountebank playing lead, instead of taking the role yourself?

  I might not, as he had told me, know much about affairs. But I was not such a fool as to suppose that if I said this aloud, I could enter his door again. If I could think of it, so could he; there must have been times when he could think of nothing else but that, and his honor; and as fiercely as he had thrust aside temptation, so he would thrust me. So I covered my thought; but it burned within like a banked-down fire. From these unspoken words till I took my leave, there is no more of our talk that I remember.

  10

  I ENJOYED MY TOUR WITH MENEKRATES. WE worked well together, though I had been warned of him, behind his back, as a man who would not give. Theater in Syracuse is full of malice. Maybe he did not like being put upon, having had plenty of that at home, but as I never tried it I cannot say. After running through a few scenes with him I knew that he was sound, so chose plays with strong second roles, and never had to regret it.

  It was at his suggestion that we put into our repertoire a modern comedy by Alexis. He is such an innovator, tragedians might as well play him as old-style comedians. Not only has he got away from all the topical satire and scolding which stale as quickly as cheap wine; he has even dared to put away that poor old prop the phallos, too tired these man
y years to pleasure the goddess Thalia much. Alexis has real men and women in real scrapes, natural masks for the juveniles and the sympathetic characters, and, between the jokes, much kindness for mankind. Menekrates said he liked to think, when he took off his mask, that maybe someone in front had gone home less ready to beat his children. This was about as near as he got to talking about his boyhood. It was a pity, I thought, that he and Dion would never understand each other.

  We had both started young and poor and slept hungry in old straw; we laughed over it together, sharing our pleasure in good food at clean inns. Often we improved even on this, for Sicilians are theater-mad, and lords with land to the horizon would not only ask us to supper, but put us up. The backstage gossip of Athens or Corinth was all they asked; if one felt like giving an excerpt from some success not yet on tour, then nothing was too good for one. As for the peasants, they would walk all night to see a play, when the grind of their lives would let them. At Leontini, Tauromenion, Akragas and Gela, even in the little towns, the audiences were splendid and took all the finer points. The skies were blue, the fruit trees blossomed, thyme and sage scented the hills; and we had, as Menekrates had foretold, no competition. The leading men of Syracuse feared to lose status by doing local tours, and were holding out in the city for better times and then, when they did not come, going off to Italy. Our own third actor and extra were much better men than we would have had when things were easy. We made good money, and lingered in the pleasant places.

  No one we met believed for a moment that theater could stop in Syracuse. People laughed or shrugged, saying young Dionysios had run through a dozen crackpot whims already; we should get back to find him learning the kithara. Hadn’t we seen for ourselves that all Sicilians had theater in their blood? At this the company would all cheer up, and I myself along with them; then I would think of Dion, trying to shift from its foundations a forty-year load of tyranny, and would be at odds with myself, not knowing what to feel.

  We were playing Heloros, which is about twenty miles south of Syracuse, when we heard of bandits in the hills. By now we were carrying a good deal of silver, from smaller towns which could not give us bankers’ letters. I showed the company the accounts; it was agreed I should go over to the city and get the surplus takings safely banked.

  I did this business without trouble, and went to look about me. The theater tavern I avoided; by now it would be a desert of old men and embittered failures. I chose a wineshop where the gentlemen resorted; it had a cool shady courtyard with a vine. I had hardly sat down and given my order, when a voice cried, “Niko! What are you doing here?” It was Speusippos, Plato’s nephew.

  He came over to my table, as usual well dressed and barbered; yet I thought at once that he was not as young as I had supposed, the wrong side of thirty. Lines showed in his face, and his mouth looked drawn.

  I offered him a drink—which he refused, saying he had just been drinking with some Syracusans—and asked how long he had been in Syracuse. He said he had come out shortly after Plato, who was in need of help with his work and correspondence from someone he could trust.

  I had always liked Speusippos. In spite of his hot temper, he was not the man to pick a quarrel, or drag it on. Though he was agreed to have one of the best minds at the Academy, and was an expert on the growth and properties of plants, he also studied girls and horses and the theater, and found no trouble in talking with common men. I would have been pleased to see him, but for his look of having had bad news.

  He asked about the tour; I told him, since Plato had better know, how rooted the theater was in Sicily. He nodded, but I saw this was the least of his troubles. So I asked outright whether Dionysios was making good progress.

  He ran his hands through his dark hair, upsetting the barber’s curls. “Progress! You met him, I believe. The progress a boy makes with his book, while someone is showing him a cockfight.”

  I looked round; I had been in Sicily long enough for that. But he was no fool; the near tables were empty. “Philistos?” I asked.

  “You know the man?” He had sharpened, as if eager for any scrap of knowledge about a dangerous enemy. I said I had barely seen him, but had heard things before I left.

  “You’ll hear more now. And mostly praise. Can you believe it, Niko? That venal, greedy old lecher, who did as much as anyone to set up the tyranny! Now they call him a sound statesman because he wants the city kept in chains, and a good fellow because he wants to make the man whose slaves they are the slave of his own appetites.”

  “Well,” I said, as one Athenian to another, “they were bred up without justice, like bats without light. It must hurt their eyes.”

  “We all come from the light, Niko. The soul can remember, or forget.” For all his easy manners, he was Academy through and through.

  “How much,” I asked, “does Dionysios’ soul remember?”

  He gave a short laugh, then answered seriously, “Enough to open his eyes. If that were all.”

  “He won’t work for it,” I said, “and wants to blame someone else?”

  “You must know him well.”

  “No, I’ve known actors like him. Yet Plato is still in favor?”

  “He won’t hear of his leaving. Of course all Greece would know, and say the son had followed the father. But I don’t think it’s only that.”

  “Nor I. So he loves him still?”

  He looked down his high-bred nose. As a youth he must have been striking. Perhaps he had had some share in Plato’s love.

  “You may call it that; or you can say he would like to be Plato’s best student, without working. Of course he would like to be Philistos’ best student, too. He has rolled by this time in enough logic for some to stick; he knows when two propositions exclude each other, but …”

  “But he feels,” I said, “right down in his soul, that logic should make an exception just for him.”

  He propped his chin in his palm and looked at me. “You are mocking us,” he said.

  “What am I, to do that? A phantom in a mask, a voice of illusion.”

  “You too, Niko, even you.”

  A harsh Sicilian sunbeam stabbed down through the vine, picking out the lines of thought and pleasure in his face, deepened by weariness. He had meant it; in his trouble even I had power to cast him down.

  “Forgive me,” I said. “‘He who mocks sorrow shall weep alone.’ But if you think me sour, talk to some Syracusan actors, and I’ll seem like honey.”

  “It is your life,” he said wearily. “I know it. But somewhere the surgeon’s knife must cut, or the patient dies.”

  “Artists are few among many; that I understand. But bear this in mind, Speusippos: while you, sitting in front, are watching our illusion, we are looking at reality. While you see four men, we see fifteen thousand. Twenty years I’ve played to them. One learns a little.”

  He said harshly, “What do you mean? That they won’t forego the theater? Or something more?”

  “Well, both. What is it you Academics say of Plato? Like his master Sokrates, he won’t sell his teaching, he’ll choose his audience. Does he think he can do that here? He must make do with what comes, just like an actor.”

  “Plato was born among great affairs, and has lived with them ever since.”

  Here’s another, I thought, who loves him still. I said, “Once at the Dionysia, someone in the skeneroom fell down deathly sick, and they fetched a doctor. The good man came running, took the wrong door in his haste, and found himself upstage center, standing next to Medea. Hasn’t Plato seen yet where he is?”

  He fetched a deep sigh. “Oh, Niko. I think I will have that drink you offered me.”

  I called the boy. When we were alone again, he said, “What do you think I was doing here before you came? I’m about the city all day, scraping acquaintance, joining hetairas’ evening parties, talking to bathmen and barbers, to learn the temper of the people. It’s the best I can do for Plato; that, and staying away from the Palace. The Archon tho
ught we were too close; he was getting to hate me nearly as much as Dion.”

  “Hate!” I said, shocked. “Has it come to that?”

  “Hush,” he said, as the boy came with the wine. Then, “On your life, Niko, keep that quiet. Every day that doesn’t bring it out in daylight is something gained. So far it’s only slights, coldness and pinpricks. If it comes into the open, what can Plato do? Honor, truth, the pieties of friendship, are his very soul. To put it as low as you can, he is a gentleman. He can’t be neutral. It would be the end of this whole great mission.”

  “Nearly two months ago,” I said, “I tried to tell Dion this.”

  “It is hard,” he said slowly, “for a lover of truth, who lives in a corrupted polis, not to become rather unbending. He has seen too much base compromise; any accommodation scratches his integrity. With his looks, he must have come young to that.” He frowned into his cup, and drained it. I lifted the flask from its bed of snow, and poured again.

  “At the Academy,” he said, “we think that truth, being man’s highest good, should be sought like joy, not endured as children take a purge. From that faith comes all philosophy … Don’t look so anxious, Niko, I won’t engage you in elenchos. I mean it’s no shame to make persuasion pleasing. If you want clear water, don’t tease the squid. Plato is forever saying that to Xenokrates—a kind man, if he would own it to himself—who charmed you so by likening actors to whores. ‘Sacrifice to the Graces,’ Plato says; I told him once I’d build them an altar in the garden. Well, not long ago I heard him say it again; but to someone else.”

  “You mean Dion?” The blood stirred round my heart. I slammed my cup down on the table. “He need not sacrifice. He has the graces of a king. Why should he use a courtier’s? Do you know what I think, Speusippos? If it comes to an open break, so much the better. Then he will be free to take his rights.”

  Speusippos’ face changed. He laid his hand over mine; it looked affectionate, but his nails dented my flesh. I took their message and was silent. He leaned forward and dropped his voice discreetly, but not quite enough. “Of course, my dear, if they quarrel you shall be the first to know. That is, if you really want to court this boy? But I warn you, he’s spoiled, as mercenary as he’s pretty, and tells more lies than a Cretan.”