The Mask of Apollo: A Novel

by Mary Renault

  The Assembly field had been cleared overnight of stalls, sheep pens, cockpits and so forth. A tall rostrum in the center was hung with white, instead of purple. Menekrates had joined the citizens; from the roof of the smith I heard trumpets sound and the clank of armor. In marched about half a regiment, lining the middle of the square two or three deep. The Syracusans seemed to think nothing of it. They waited, chattering and shouldering, as women do for some spectacle others have prepared for them. I understood Menekrates’ smile.

  Through a lane of soldiers the new Archon rode to the rostrum, and mounted the steps without grace. My eyes strayed to Dion, who had gone up with royal dignity behind him, and stood there with a few other men of the family. Him I would have known anywhere by his bearing and his height. As for young Dionysios, the soldiers had raised a dust, and it was too far to see faces well. But as one knows in the theater, the whole body speaks. He was thinnish, and held himself like a man with a stoop who had never before pulled back his shoulders. Sometimes he forgot, and let his neck poke forward. You could have told at a mile that he had neither looks nor charm.

  He started speaking, coughing now and again from the dust. His voice matched his deportment: forced, anxious, and striving for effect, which only brought out its faults. His speech seemed empty and formal stuff, probably written by someone else. From what I could hear of it, he praised the departed, deplored his own loss and the city’s, and asked for the people’s loyalty. There was some acclamation, such as you might expect with all those soldiers standing about. I missed a good deal, since the smith had had no notion of leaving his slaves to idle while he was gone, and the bursts of clattering from the workshop often killed all other sound. It seemed no great loss.

  After one such din, I found he was speaking of his father’s obsequies, which were to be worthy of Syracuse’s greatest man. The people brightened at news of a show, and there was some real applause. At this the young man picked up a little life, like a nervous actor with a good house. He stopped peeping at his notes, without which he would not have gone far till now, and, with a sudden burst of eloquence, spoke of his father’s poetic talents, the fruit of nights with the lamp while other men were reveling. (I am told this was quite true.) The hammers began again downstairs, after which I caught something about the gifted artist who should have painted the skene being at work upon a funeral pyre of no less splendor. You could tell, from the jerks and pauses, that he was now speaking extempore. After some more hammering, the loudest yet, I pulled my fingers out of my ears in time to hear “… will be spoken by the protagonist.”

  Protagonist? I thought. What’s this?

  Dion had been standing up there like a statue all this while. Now, even at this distance, I saw him start and look about. I knew then I had heard right.

  I suppose the speech finished somehow. Menekrates met me at the door. He had been quite near the rostrum and heard everything. I was to speak the funeral oration.

  “My dear,” I said, “we must both be dreaming. It should be Dionysios himself.”

  “Of course it should. He can’t be such a fool as he looks. He couldn’t do it, as we’ve seen; he’s a stick; he loses his lines, he fluffs; he barely got through. At a state funeral, people expect something. The whole audience would have walked home saying, ‘Now Dion would have been worth hearing.’”

  “You must be right,” I answered. “Nothing else makes sense.”

  “If he’d hired an orator—and Demodoros must be spitting blood—everyone would know why. But this is a tribute to the old man’s last achievement. You could call it clever. He was gagging, you know. It came to him on stage; he was playing to the audience. By the dog, Niko, your guardian god looks after you.”

  “He sent me a friend,” I answered. Indeed, I was lucky in Menekrates. He was generous by nature; not a rival, being still a second-roles actor; happy enough as my host to share the event and spread the news. Some artists would have been so jealous, especially of a foreigner, that I should have had to move out.

  We returned to the lodging, so that I could be found. Just after siesta-time, when the sun was leaving the courtyard, the palace messenger arrived with my summons to Ortygia. I was to go next morning.

  At the hour, therefore, when the market opens, I put on a plain white robe, since I was going to a house of mourning, and walked in the cool sunrise towards the sea. Menekrates saw me halfway. He said it was against nature, for a Syracusan, to linger before Ortygia.

  There was a thick-walled fort to pass through, before one even set foot upon the causeway. The swarthy Iberian mercenaries who manned it looked at my summons, and opened the triple gates. Any one of them would have done by itself for a small town. I came out on a cobbled square by the Little Harbor, with the causeway still to cross.

  I never saw at one time so many ships of war. Here I had my first sight of a quinquereme, as high as a two-floored house. Strange engines were mounted on the decks, for flinging fire, or stones, or dropping weights from mast-height to sink the enemy. Their beaks glared with huge painted eyes. There was an eye on the pennants, too; it was Dionysios’ house flag. The barracks of the galley slaves, with their walls and guards, seemed to stretch for miles.

  A thirty-foot gate tower closed the landward end of the causeway. Its roof was manned by Nubian archers, polished black men with ox-hide cuirasses and thick horn bows. In front of the gate below, fair as the men above were dark, stood eight towering Gauls.

  They wore Greek armor, for show, because they were on guard. I had heard a good deal about these troops, mainly from soldiers who had run away from them. It was old Dionysios’ rule that his mercenaries should fight in the panoplies of their homelands, which they felt at ease with; and the Gauls, as these men assured me, used to go into combat stark naked, singing paeans like the yowling of cat-a-mountains, tossing and catching their swords as they came on. They charged with wide, fixed blue eyes, seemingly insensible to pain and strange to the name of fear. A Gaul under six feet was reckoned a runt; altogether, one man told me, it was like facing a battle line of insane gods. Afterwards they would cut off the heads of the dead for trophies. Some said they ate the brains.

  Now here they were, just as described: shaved chins and long mustaches, braided ropes of yellow hair down to their waists and bound with scarlet, long swords with curiously wrought hilts, neck and arm rings of plaited gold. I had not much time to stare; the captain shouted to me, without leaving his place by the gate, and asked my business. Just getting the drift of his vile Greek, I went up and told him. He must have topped me by a head, and I am not short. I showed him my letter; he waved it off, as if it were my fault he could not read, and in their lilting tongue ordered a man inside to ask. At last the portcullis went up. A new Gaul beckoned me. We crossed the causeway, passing between the great catapults I had seen from afar and their piles of throwing-stones. At the far end was another gateway, more Nubians on top, more Gauls below. My Gaul gave a password. This gate opened at once. I was inside Ortygia.

  I had not entered a fort, but a hidden city. In fact, this had been the first Syracuse, the colonists from Corinth having perceived its strength at sight. They had held it against assault both from sea and land, till the city had burst its bounds and overflowed across to the rise upon the mainland. Dionysios had enclosed all of that in his defense walls; then for his own benefit he had cleared Ortygia of all its ordinary citizens. Each man in this teeming town was in the Archon’s personal service. It was self-sufficient; all trades needed to maintain it in peace or war were established here. I saw a street of armorers; a great clattering forge; a tannery, with a leather works as big as a small market; potters’ and fullers’ shops; and as for timber-yards, I passed three, not counting the shipwrights’.

  The ground rose; going up steep cobbled streets and steps, we came to the barrack quarter. It was more like a soldiers’ town, with a street for each race: Greeks, Gauls, Campanians, Iberians, Nubians, Egyptians. We went through that of the Spartans, whose offic
ers would not let them mix with their fellow Greeks for fear they should be corrupted. They stared from their doorways, haughty and stupid, and looking quite little beside the Gaul, which made me laugh. Now we were higher, I could make out the towers of a huge castle, jutting into the sea at the island’s toe. I asked the Gaul if that was Dionysios’ house: but he said it was the grain store. It was clear that this place could hold out forever, if it had ships to command the sea.

  At last we came into a much wider street, all one side of which was a great high wall studded with watchtowers. The Gaul knocked at a postern and spoke into a grille. The oak door opened. Sun sifted through green shade; there was bird song; water plashed and tinkled. We were in a garden. I don’t know what I had expected—anything but this. It had seemed the core of Ortygia must be solid iron.

  It was really a royal park; scattered among the lawns and groves were handsome houses, belonging to people of rank and office. There were a good many statues, modern ones, fluent and suave; the old man must have gone on collecting to the last. It was hard to believe in the Ortygia outside. At a fountain under a marble porch, women were drawing water in polished jars. Then I began to hear the shrilling of professional mourners, and knew we must be near the palace.

  A tall portico, gilded and painted, was flanked with seated lions of red Samian marble. A guard of Gauls stood outside; but otherwise it was a palace, not a fort. So at least it seemed; but as I went through (the Gaul had passed me to a Greek chamberlain) I saw there was an inner wall fully six feet thick, before one got to the royal rooms. Outside its door of gilded bronze stood eight Gauls, the tallest yet. When they let me through, I was led into a place for all the world like the changing-room in an expensive bathhouse. There were clothes stands, shoe racks, all full—even a mirror. Two of the guards had come in with me. Up from a chair got a fat Egyptian eunuch, bowed, and started without a word to undo my girdle. I was just about to hit him over the ear, when I remembered. This little ceremony had quite slipped my mind.

  The eunuch stripped me, shook out my clothes, looked at both sides of my sandals, and hung them up. Then he fitted me out from head to foot from the stands beside him. Some of the robes here were quite splendid; the one I got, second or third class I suppose, was better than my own. While he dressed me, the guards never took their eyes off him. Being used to putting on what I am given to wear, I suppose I minded less than most people.

  When I was ready, the chamberlain scratched at the further door, listened, threw it open, and announced, “My lord: Nikeratos, the Athenian actor.”

  I entered the presence chamber.

  But, after all this, there was nothing royal about it. It was just a rich man’s room, and new-rich at that, overfilled with valuables, statues, murals, enamel inlays from Egypt, an easel with a Zeuxis on it. The excess, though vulgar, had yet a certain air of sincerity; this was not bought taste; good and gaudy were one man’s choice. By the window was the best piece in the room, a massive green marble table standing on gilded Sphinxes, Corinthian of the best period. I remember admiring it, before I really noticed who was sitting at it.

  Perhaps old Dionysios was still loitering about somewhere; he can’t have been one to let go easily. At all events, the young man at his desk seemed like some clerk who would get up and ask me to wait. Luckily I have been taught how to come through doors, so these thoughts did not betray themselves. I bowed.

  I can’t remember how he greeted me, or told me what I was wanted for. He was not, as you will have understood, a man of memorable words. One’s mind was inclined to wander. I reflected that this was no doubt the desk at which his father had written Hector’s Ransom, and that he himself was ill at ease here, having some homely lair of his own where he would rather be. When I looked at the room, it seemed natural he should keep me standing; when I looked at him, I remembered I was a prize protagonist of Athens, and thought I should have had a chair. I said what was proper—that I was honored, and so on—adding something about his father’s work and the loss to the theater.

  “Well,” he answered, fidgeting with a scroll before him, “his last wish, almost, was to hear you in his play, so I hope it may please him to hear you speak his eulogy—at least, if the dead know anything, which we cannot tell.” He said this last like a man who liked to sound up-to-date. “Here it is; may I hear you read some?”

  What’s this, I thought, an audition? But I suppose he thinks it due to him.

  As I was unrolling it, he said, “I hope you can read my writing. I worked late, and there has been no time to get it copied.”

  It was quite clear, and I said I wished my theater scripts were always as good. His face brightened like a child’s. I asked which passage he wanted.

  “Let me see,” he said, and fumbled through it head down, like a dog in long grass. He was nearsighted. “This part,” he said.

  I read a paragraph about the building of the walls of Syracuse. To my surprise the prose was excellent—an Attic style, restrained yet forceful, with beautiful speaking cadences. It almost spoke itself. Looking up, I saw him eyeing me anxiously under a front of judicial calm. Of course, I thought, I should have guessed; he did not want to test me but to hear how his own work sounded. I had met such authors before. So when I came to a passage which was muddled and fidgety and without much shape, I gave it a pleasing contour, as one can if one learns the knack.

  A very good piece came next, but he held up his hand and said, “Thank you, Nikeratos. That was excellent. Do bring up that chair there; then we can talk.”

  He could not wait while I did it, but ran on, “I had heard you were in Syracuse. Among all my concerns—my father’s death, my own accession—it must have stuck in my mind. For while I was addressing the Assembly, having prepared nothing at all upon the matter, it came to me as if sent by a god. I just spoke as my thoughts formed themselves. Is not that strange?”

  I said nobody would have guessed it; and that is strange, if you like. I have never liked fawners, and can’t imagine that I would have flattered his father so. But in the presence of this gangling youth (for with his awkward rawness he seemed no more)—lank-haired, his mourning crop showing his pink scalp here and there, sitting fidgeting with a writing tablet, digging his nail into the wax, picking out bits and rolling them like a schoolboy, clutching at dignity, while his eyes begged like a dog’s for notice—with him it seemed trivial to stand upon one’s status rather than help him out. So I soothed him as well as I could without being familiar, since it was clear he must dread being taken lightly. In the end, he called for some sweets, which I hate at such an hour, but which he himself ate greedily, and started talking theater, bringing out truisms about the classic tragedies as if no one had thought of them before. He dug down among the stuffed dates and candied rose-leaves, holding forth about the comedy element in Alkestis; and all the while my mind’s eye retraced my steps that morning: the fort, the Iberians, the drawbridge and portcullis, the Nubians, the Gauls, the causeway with the catapults; the quinqueremes and triremes and pentekonters; the armament shops, the barracks, the walls, the grilles, the searching room. Here we sat talking banalities about Euripides, while around us the greatest power machine in Hellas—or the world—idled along by its own momentum, beside its dead engineer, its quivering levers awaiting the new master’s hand, this damp pale hand with bitten nails, rolling wax along the table.

  Presently he said I would no doubt wish to pay my respects in the death chamber before I left, and clapped his hands for the chamberlain. When I had changed into my own clothes, I was led towards the wailing. Old Dionysios was lying in the banquet hall, on a catafalque hung with black and purple, in a chest lined with lead. They had packed him round with ice from Etna, to keep him fresh for the funeral. As it melted it ran into a tank below; there was a steady come and go of slaves, bringing fresh ice and emptying the tank with buckets. It had kept him from stinking; I saw his square fighting face, his black stubbly chin, his short pug nose. The hired mourners had got into the swin
g of it, howling and pummeling their breasts in a drugged rhythm. But at the head of the bier were others who were clearly kindred. One, who had a square face like the dead man’s, and the same dark brows, I thought must be his daughter, maybe the one who was Dion’s wife.

  I took the shears on the offering table, and cut off a lock of my hair and laid it on the pile, which was big enough to stuff a mattress. I was on my way out with the chamberlain when, in the outer courtyard, a man who looked like an upper servant came up and said, “If this gentleman is Nikeratos, the tragedian of Athens, my master would like to see him about the rites.”

  I followed him into the park, past the fountain, and down to a grassy terrace. Beyond was a house, not very large but perfectly proportioned, with a herm in front of it that looked like a Praxiteles. I had expected the lodging of some official; but even before I was inside, I knew. Everything spoke—the good lines, the plainness, the splendor of the few adornments.

  The servant brought me to a white-walled study lined with shelves of scrolls. At a table of polished pine, by the open window, Dion was sitting. I stepped forward. “Good day,” he said, as if to a stranger. I was shocked stupid, and just stood there. I’m not sure I even replied. He dismissed the servant; then at once his whole face changed.

  “My dear Nikeratos.” He got up and grasped my hand. “Forgive me that cold greeting. One moment.” He flung open the door, but the passage was empty. “I have had my man ten years; but doubtful times, doubtful men, as they say. Sit down, and let us have some wine; I have been busy since dawn, and you too, I daresay.”

  He went over to a side table, where a mixer stood in a big krater packed with snow. Having poured for us both, he offered me fresh bread to dip. Nothing could have surpassed the dignity with which he did these simple services. It had a charm too, like that of a well-bred boy looking after his father’s guests.