by Tom Holt
The next thing that happened was that the Athenian navy turned up under the walls of their cities looking extremely hostile and demanding to know what had become of that year’s gesture of solidarity. When the islanders tried to explain that the war was over, the Athenians were greatly amused and replied that on the contrary, unless the Tribute (as the small contribution was now called) was paid at once, plus the incidental expenses of besieging the island and a substantial Loyalty Premium, the war would begin immediately. Now an island, being entirely surrounded by water, is particularly vulnerable to overwhelming sea power, and the islanders realised that there was nothing for it but to pay or be killed. So they paid, and with the money so obtained the Athenians built more warships and hired yet more oarsmen.
Thus was formed the Great Athenian Empire, previously known as the Anti-Persian League, and for a while it seemed as if there was nothing that anyone could do about it. The Athenians were able to buy all the imported grain they needed, and there were no political difficulties since the City was a democracy and enough of the citizens were on the payroll to constitute a majority. In addition, the professional oarsmen mostly lived in or near the City, while those Athenians who had wanted nothing to do with the idea and were struggling to get their land back into cultivation tended to live out in the villages of Attica and were usually far too busy tilling the soil to spare a whole day every few weeks to attend Assembly. When there was no serious rowing to be done, the oarsmen were able to get on with the work of reclaiming and planting out their own land, which was not too difficult with their navy pay to tide them over while the vines and olives matured, and in this way the Athenian democracy took on its unique and unmistakable form. Power lay with the poorest and most numerous section of the population, who naturally enough voted for the system that provided for them. Anyone who wanted to succeed in politics had to make friends with the oarsmen and buy their favour with appropriate measures, entertain them with clever speeches, or both. Short of giving away free wheat on the steps of the Propylaea, the scope for buying favour was limited to a few well-tried and unsubtle methods which anyone could use, and so making and listening to political speeches became the national pastime and obsession of the Athenian people. The oarsmen had plenty of leisure when there was no naval action in hand, since most of them by definition had only small holdings of land to work (if they had more than a few acres they would qualify for the Heavy Infantry or Cavalry class, who are far too grand to live off the proceeds of State piracy) and there is no better way known to man of spending an idle afternoon than sitting in Assembly with a jar of dried figs listening to clever speeches and then voting to annex a few more cities.
This new style of politics called for a new breed of politicians. There was no longer much point in striving for the high offices of State now that the real power lay with Assembly. But in theory at least, any Athenian citizen was allowed to address Assembly and propose a measure, and it soon became obvious that the way to get on in politics was to make speeches and propose measures, as often and as loudly as possible. It was also open to any Athenian citizen to prosecute any other Athenian citizen in the law courts, and Athens has a great wealth of un-Athenian Activities legislation specifically designed to be useful to politicians. By this time we Athenians had already developed our wonderful judicial system, whereby all trials are heard by mass juries of several hundred citizens; all that remained to perfect the system was the introduction of a living wage for jury service. Thus was created the Athenian professional juryman, who gets up before dawn to stand in line for a place on the jury. If he gets there early enough he is assured of entertainment of the very highest quality from the speechmakers plus a day’s wages at the end of the performance. This way of life is particularly attractive to older and less active men who can neither dig nor row, and they are extremely careful to convict anyone who threatens to destroy their livelihood by proposing political reforms. On the other hand, they are always grateful to people who do a lot of prosecuting, since for every prosecution there has to be a jury, and these people are very rarely convicted of anything, even if they are genuinely guilty.
And that, more or less, is how Athens came to have the most pure and perfect democracy the world has ever seen, in which every man had a right to be heard, the law was open to all, and nobody need go hungry if he was not too proud to play his part in the oppression of his fellow Greeks and the judicial murder of inconvenient statesmen. The by-products of the system included the perfection of oratory and a universal love among all classes of society of the spoken word in its most delicate and refined forms. No wonder we are a nation of aesthetes.
The only problem was Sparta. Ever since Zeus, whose sense of humour is not particularly attractive to us mortals, put Athens and Sparta on the same strip of land, there has been war between the two cities. Asking Athens and Sparta to live together without fighting is like expecting night to marry day, or winter to form an offensive and defensive alliance with summer. Having unquestionably the best land army in the world, the Spartans generally had the best of these wars; but since the population of Sparta was small and spent most of its time reminding its own empire in the south of Greece about the merits of absolute loyalty, it had never been able to take any lasting measures against Athens, such as burning it to the ground and sowing salt on the ashes.
Sparta had been the nominal leader of the League during the war, but as soon as it became clear that the Persians could only be defeated at sea the real leadership passed to Athens, and since the Spartans were busy with violent internal politics as soon as the war ended, there was nothing they could do to stop us building our empire in the way I have just described. As soon as they were clear of their local problems, however, they began to get seriously worried, for it was obvious that as soon as the Athenian Empire was strong enough, it would use every ounce of its new strength to stamp Sparta flat, liberate the subject races, and remove the one serious obstacle to Athenian supremacy in Greece. So, with a degree of hypocrisy remarkable even for them, the Spartans set themselves up as the champions of the oppressed and enslaved and demanded that we stop extorting tribute from our allies and disband the fleet.
And that is how Athens came to be at war with Sparta, eleven years after I was born. One of the first Athenians to be killed was my father, who went with the expeditionary force to Potidaea. By that stage, Themistocles had proved beyond question that he was the wisest and cleverest man in the whole of Athens, and had paid the inevitable penalty. As I recall, he escaped with his life and immediately went to the court of the Great King of Persia, who gave him a city to govern, and if he had managed to conceal his cleverness a little better he might have lived to be an old man. But he contrived to avoid being killed, for he took his own life by drinking bull’s blood, stylish to the very end. A number of marginally less clever Athenians took his place in turn, in particular the glorious but profoundly stupid Cimon, who actually believed that the purpose of the League was to fight the Persians, until the celebrated Pericles came to power, just as the Spartan situation was beginning to come to a head.
In fact, it was this same Pericles who gave me my first set of armour. You see, in those days it was the law that when a man’s father was killed on active service, the State provided his son with a suit of armour absolutely free, which is a very generous gesture in view of the price of bronze, if not exactly tactful. There is a touching little ceremony, and the General for the year makes a speech before handing each bewildered infant his breastplate, shield and helmet. Now in those days the General was elected, and Pericles’ power depended on his being elected General every year — it was the one great office of State that still retained even vestiges of actual power — so it was natural enough that he should make as much as possible of this great speech of his, in front of the whole population of the City. Since I was already a budding dramatist I was extremely excited about the coming performance and looked forward to it with the greatest possible anticipation. For I would be placed r
ight up close to the Great Man, in an ideal position to make mental notes of all his mannerisms and personal peculiarities, all of which I would lovingly reproduce in dramatic form.
You remember I told you about that little general who wrote that incredibly dull and pompous history of the war, the one who thought he’d had the plague? Well, I came across a copy of the first part of his book the other day; I had bought some cheese and someone had used the immortal work to wrap it in, which shows the degree of aesthetic judgement our Attic cheesemongers have.
Before putting it on the fire I looked up a few things in it, and to my amazement I found that the little general had included the speech Pericles made that day. In fact, he had made a great fuss of it, using it as a convenient place to stuff in all the things he thought Pericles would have said if he had been half as clever as the little general, and by the time he’d finished with it the speech bore no relation at all to what I remembered Pericles saying; and I think I ought to know, since I was actually there, in the front row, studying the whole thing with the greatest possible care for the reasons I have just given you. But then again, my memory is not what it was. Still, I feel I ought to put down just a little bit of what I remember Pericles saying, just to set the record straight; and then if anyone else who was actually there reads it, he can either confirm that I am right or go around telling his friends that Eupolis of Pallene is a silly old fool, which may be the truth.
I remember that we all walked out to the public cemetery, which actually lies outside the walls of the City, and that it was a remarkably warm day for the time of year. Now I had been dressed up in my smartest clothes and had some sort of foul sweet-smelling oil daubed all over my hair, and I was feeling distinctly uncomfortable — the oil on my head seemed to be frying my brains — and the whole thing seemed entirely unlike the way a funeral should be. On the one hand there were plenty of women howling away and gouging their cheeks with their nails until they bled, the way women do at funerals; but the men seemed to regard the whole thing as a party of some sort, for a lot of them had brought little flasks of wine and jars of olives and figs, and were chattering away as if it were market-day. There were sausage-sellers hovering around the edges of the crowd, and the very sight of them made me feel hungry (I love sausages) but of course I wasn’t allowed to have one since I was supposed to be mourning my dead. As it happens, I didn’t feel particularly grief-stricken, since I couldn’t associate all this fuss and performance with my father’s death, and the thought that his body was in one of the big cypress wood trunks trundling along on the carriers carts seemed distinctly improbable. Still, I think I would have been able to make a reasonable job of looking solemn if it hadn’t been for the flies. The smelly stuff on my hair seemed to have drawn out every fly in Greece, and I defy anyone to look serious and dignified if he can’t see where he’s going for a thick cloud of flies. I tried my best, but in the end I had to start swatting at them, and that was it as far as I was concerned.
It’s a strange feeling being part of a huge crowd of moving people, and I don’t suppose I had ever seen so many human beings congregated together in one place before. It wasn’t the same as the Theatre, where the people don’t all arrive at once. It was as if the whole world was crowded into one small space, with some of them feeling miserable and others feeling happy, and most of them feeling slightly bored and wishing they were doing something else, just as you’d expect. As we came near the cemetery it occurred to me that I was going to have to step out in front of all these people to collect a suit of armour, and I knew in my liver that I was bound to make a fool of myself— drop the helmet or send the shield rolling off on its rim into the crowd like a hoop — and for a while I was paralysed with fear in the way that only a small and self-conscious child can be.
At last it was time for Pericles to make his speech, and the crowd divided to let him through. It was the first time I had seen him close to, and it was rather a shock. I had been expecting a tall, important-looking man with plenty of presence and bearing, and sure enough that was what I saw. I followed this figure with my eyes, dazzled by the dignity of the man; he was wearing a suit of burnished bronze armour that shone like gold and his back was as straight as a column. Trotting along beside him was a chubby little fellow with a strange-shaped head and rather thin legs, who I took to be his secretary, since he was carrying a scroll of paper. These two made their way to the side of the coffins, and the glorious fellow stopped. I held my breath, waiting for him to start speaking, but he just stood there, while the little chubby man climbed up on to the small wooden stage and cleared his throat, rather like a sheep in the early morning. Everyone immediately stopped wailing and chattering, and I realised that the man who I had taken to be the secretary was Pericles himself.
Once he started to speak, of course, there was no mistaking him, and when I began listening to that rich, elegant voice the man himself seemed to grow a head taller and lose about a stone in weight in front of my very eyes. It’s extraordinary the difference a person’s voice makes to the way you perceive him. I remember when I was in the army in Sicily there was a huge man with a head of hair like a lion’s mane, but with the silliest little voice you’ve ever heard in your life. Before I heard him speak, I had always taken care to be near him in the line, since he looked like a useful person to be near in the event of fighting. As soon as he opened his mouth I revised this opinion and kept well clear of him, since it is well known that freaks tend to come to a bad end.
Where was I? Oh yes. Pericles cleared his throat and began to speak, and for the first few minutes everyone was spellbound. But after a while, I began to feel strangely uncomfortable with this wonderful speech. He was speaking tremendously well, even I could tell that; but he didn’t actually seem to be saying anything. The words just sort of bubbled out of him, like one of those beautiful little springs you see in the mountains after the rain, which then soak away without leaving any trace of moisture behind. I particularly remember this bit, which doesn’t appear anywhere in the little general’s version. See what you make of it.
‘Men of Athens,’ said Pericles, ‘when we say that these glorious heroes died for liberty, what exactly do we mean by liberty? Is it the liberty of the individual, to do what he pleases when he pleases? Can this be the sort of liberty for which brave men would selflessly lay down their lives? Is that rather not a form of lawlessness and self-indulgence? No, surely we mean the liberty of our great and imperishable City, which will still be here, in one form or another, when we are all long since dead and buried. For no man can be free while his fellow citizen is in chains, and no one man can claim to live in a free city when his brother Athenian is not every bit as free as he is. It is precisely this, men of Athens, which these comrades of ours shed their priceless blood for, and that same liberty shall be their memorial when all the temples of the Gods have fallen into dust and the statues of famous men are buried by the sands of Time.’
I wanted to interrupt at this point, for the celebrated Pericles had just said that the City would always be here, and now he was saying that the temples would one day fall down and the statues in the Market Square would get covered up with sand. In short, I was feeling terribly confused and I didn’t think much of a public speaker who allowed his audience to lose the thread of what he was saying. But everyone else in the audience was standing there with his mouth open, as if this was some message from the Gods, and I remember thinking how stupid I must be to have missed the point of it all.
Then the great speech came to a splendid but largely obscure end, and it was time for the presentation of the armour. We children were formed up in an orderly queue, with me somewhere towards the end, and a large cart full of trussed-up breastplates, shields, helmets and leg-guards was backed carefully into the space by the rostrum. A couple of men let down the tail-gate and started unloading suits of armour and reading off the names, and the recipients walked forwards, were embraced by Pericles (who seemed to have shrunk back into a chubby little fe
llow once again) and clanked off into the crowd to be fussed over by their mothers. After what seemed like years I heard my name, and so I took a deep breath, prayed to Dionysus for luck, and plodded across to the rostrum. By this stage the two men who were unloading the armour were feeling tired and thirsty, and they bundled the great mass of metalwork into my arms and virtually shoved me at Pericles, who tried to embrace me and nearly lacerated his arm on the sharp rim of the brand-new shield. Without altering the expression of dignified grandeur on his face he whispered, ‘Watch out, you clumsy little toad, you nearly had my arm off,’ then he dragged me towards him, gave me a token squeeze, and pushed me away. I was so intent on keeping hold of all that armour that I bumped into the next child on his way up to the rostrum and knocked him clean off his feet. After a journey that seemed longer than all the wanderings of Odysseus put together I found my way back to my place in the crowd, breathed a deep sigh of relief, and let go of the armour. Of course it all fell to the ground with the most almighty clang, and everyone in the crowd seemed to turn round and stare at me. I hated that suit of armour from that day forward, and it didn’t bring me a great deal of good luck, as you will see in due course.
Well, a year or so later Pericles was dead, as I have told you. I suppose as a Historian I should consider myself lucky to have met such an important and significant man, but I don’t. I think it would have been much better if my father hadn’t been killed and I had never received a suit of public armour. My excuse for this deplorable attitude is that although I am a Historian now, I Wasn’t one at the time — in fact, I’m not sure that the writing of History had been invented then — and so my impression of the whole business was formed without the benefit of the Historian’s instinct. As for Pericles himself, I have managed in a quite extraordinary way not to let my meeting with him influence the vaguely superhuman image of him that I have .to this day. The dumpy little man with the funny head, I argue, can’t have been the glorious leader who led the City in the days before the war, and neither can he have been the spectacular monster of depravity that springs to mind whenever I hear one of my contemporaries singing a passage from a play by Cratinus after a good night out. Those two beings had, and still have, a life of their own, and it’s enough to make you believe in all that nonsense you hear these days from the men who hang around talking in the Gymnasium about the Immortality of the Soul and the Existence of the Essential Forms.
