by Tom Holt
In fact, all this remembering the past has got me confused, and I find it difficult sometimes to come to terms with the fact that I was there in those days and mixed up in all those great events which are now thought worthy of being recorded. There’s a bit in the Odyssey that’s quite like this strange sensation. Odysseus has been shipwrecked on some benighted island miles from anywhere, with all his ships lost and his men drowned, and nobody has the faintest idea who he is. But he’s sitting there in the King’s hall, eating his porridge and minding his own business, and the minstrel starts singing a tale of ancient valour, all about the legendary hero Odysseus and the fall of Troy. For a moment our hero thinks of standing up and saying ‘That’s me’, but he doesn’t bother; after all, it’s a hero they’re singing about and not him at all, and he never did the wonderful deeds that are being attributed to him.
Come now, Eupolis, return to your story while you are still within a long bowshot of coherence. Pericles’ policy for fighting the Great War was nothing if not simple; he reckoned that since any major land battle between Athens and Sparta would be bound to result in a decisive Spartan victory, it would be a shrewd move on his part to delete major land battles from his programme of events. Instead, he crowded the population of Attica into the City whenever so much as the toe of a Spartan sandal crossed the border, and sent out the fleet to cause legitimised mayhem up and down the coast of the Spartan possessions in the Pelopennese. The Spartan army came bounding into Attica like a dog after a cat, only to find that the cat climbed up a tree and refused to come down to fight. So the Spartans amused themselves as best they could by chopping down our newly matured olive trees and rooting up our vines like a lot of wild pigs, and then went home again, having achieved nothing that a really good thunderstorm couldn’t have done twice as thoroughly in half the time. With the tribute-money pouring in and the grain ships jostling each other for space in the Piraeus we were none the worst off for the annual burning of our crops — indeed, some of the people who think that agriculture is a science and not a lottery declared that the annual destructions prevented us from overworking the soil as we have been doing for generations and would result in bumper harvests once the war was over. Now this was an exaggeration, needless to say, and it stands to reason that the plague would have been far less serious had the City not been crammed to bursting-point with human beings. But by and large the policy of Pericles would have worked if we had had the patience to persevere with it, and if Pericles had survived.
Which is much the same as saying that we could grow far more to the acre if only it rained more often. One of the hallmarks of an Athenian is his impatience and his restlessness, and when you coop all the Athenians in the world up inside a walled city, this characteristic becomes more marked than ever. Another thing that happens is that all these Athenians will go to Assembly and vote for things just to pass the time. For the first time in history, the ideal on which our democracy is based was being put into action; all the citizens of Athens did go to Assembly and listen to the speeches, and of course the result was absolute chaos. Simple-minded straightforward men from the back end of Attica suddenly found out how their State was being run, and of course they wanted to play too. Even Pericles couldn’t have kept control of fifty-odd thousand thinking Athenians for very long.
By God, though, it made the City an interesting place to live in (though decidedly squalid), having all those people hanging around with nothing at all to do except talk. It may just be the exaggeration of childhood memory, but I’ll swear the City hummed just like a beehive, so that wherever you went you weren’t far from the sound of human voices. With no work to do and not much money to spend, the only available pleasure was the pleasure of words. If ever there was a time and a place to be an aspiring Comic poet, that was it; because, with a few minor exceptions, the one topic of conversation was politics and the war, which of course is what all Comedy has to be about.
When the Spartans had had enough of smashing up our crops and went away again, and the fleet came back from doing roughly similar things in Messenia and Laconia, we all trooped off home to see what had been burnt or chopped down this year and plant out our winter barley. It’s an extraordinary thing, but we always did plough and plant out vine-cuttings, in the hope that there would be no invasion next year. I think it goes to show that none of us ever dreamed that we could possibly lose the war, and that the worst that could happen is that we would all meet up in the City next year to continue our conversations and discussions. But in those days, we Athenians knew that there was nothing that we could not achieve and no limit to our realisable ambitions; not only were we bound to conquer all the nations of the earth sooner or later, but we were all on the point of pinning down the answers to every question that anyone could ask, and that anything could be solved or explained if you thought and talked about it for long enough. In short, there was always something to be busy with and something new and wonderful to look forward to, and the fact that in the meantime we all had to get on with the business of scratching a living from the same little scraps of land that our fathers had worked themselves to death over before us tended to be overlooked in the general excitement. I remember once an exile from the court of some Scythian chieftain came to Athens at a time when the City was full of people — and this was many years before the war, on just an ordinary market-day — and he couldn’t believe all the things that he heard people saying. He heard them talking about how once the Persians had been dealt with we would be able to get on with conquering Egypt, and how it should be perfectly easy to work out whether the Soul survived the moment of death by making comparisons with things like fire and the attunement of musical instruments, and finally he could restrain himself no longer and burst out laughing in the middle of the Market Square. Of course his hosts were terribly embarrassed and didn’t know where to look, and the barbarian at once apologised for his extraordinary behaviour.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘but I just can’t help laughing. You Athenians are all so incredibly perverse.’
‘Why?’ said his hosts, puzzled. ‘What do you find so peculiar about us?’
‘Well,’ said the Scythian, ‘here you all are busily dividing up the world between you and neatly explaining the heavens and making excuses for the immortal Gods, and yet you still empty your chamber-pots on to each other’s heads first thing in the morning. So while you’re walking about with your heads in the air and your undying Souls are flying through the ether, your feet are up to their ankles in someone else’s shit, and all it takes is a shower of rain to make this glorious city of yours utterly intolerable. In my country we may have no intention whatever of annexing the valley next to ours, and none of us has the faintest idea about whether rain is caused by the action of the sun on the ocean or not, but at least we carry all our excrement to a place outside the camp and dump it there where it isn’t a nuisance to anybody.’
I used to know what the Athenians replied; I expect it was very brilliant, because the whole point of the story is to show that we are superior to all other races on earth. But there’s a sequel to the story which verges on relevance, and since I feel in the mood for telling stories you will have to bear with me a little longer.
This same Scythian, while he was in Athens, had an affair with the wife of a citizen. Her name was Myrrhine, and her husband was a man called Euergetes; he was a very upright, pious sort of man and probably quite unbearable at home, so it’s not too hard to forgive his wife for seeking a little fleeting entertainment.
Anyway, one day the Scythian came to call, confident that Euergetes would be out at Assembly until well into the afternoon. He brought a little jar of expensive Syrian perfume with him as a present, and had just got his cloak and tunic off and was struggling with the laces of his sandals when Euergetes pushed open the front door and walked in. Assembly had been cancelled because of a bad omen — something to do with a polecat giving birth under the altar in the Temple of Hephaestus — and he had hurried home to make p
ropitiatory sacrifices.
He was rather startled to see a large, naked stranger standing in his house, and probably expressed himself rather forcefully. But the Scythian was a quick-witted man and had heard all about Euergetes’ piety from Myrrhine. So he drew himself up to his full height (these Scythians are often quite tall, and this one was taller than most by all accounts), scowled hideously and shouted, ‘How dare you come bursting in like this?’
Euergetes was puzzled, and for a moment he wondered whether he had come to the right house. But the next moment he saw his wife standing beside the stranger and trying to do up her brooch, and so he knew he was right.
‘I like that,’ he said. ‘Just who do you think you are, God Almighty?’
The Scythian was just scrabbling about in the back of his mind for something to say when these words of his antagonist provided the necessary inspiration. ‘Yes,’ he replied.
Euergetes blinked. ‘What was that?’ he said.
‘Are you blind as well as impious?’ said the Scythian. ‘Can’t you see that I am Zeus?’
It took Euergetes a moment to come to terms with this, but as soon as his mind had managed to choke the concept down he believed it implicitly. After all, in the legends Zeus is always slipping in between some human’s sheets, with such results as Sarpedon, Perseus and the glorious Heracles. To a naïve and trusting man like Euergetes it must have seemed far more probable that his lifetime of piety was being rewarded by a visit from the Great Adulterer than that his wife could possibly think so little of him as to have taken a lover. He hesitated for about a seventy-fifth of a second and fell on his knees in a stupor of religious awe.
Now Myrrhine was a sensible girl and she knew that this fortunate state couldn’t last. After all, if the God was a God he would now perform some miracle, such as filling the room with flowers or making a spring rise from the floor, and he certainly wouldn’t put on his tunic and cloak and just walk out into the street. Then she happened to notice the little jar of perfume. While her husband was busily praying to the Scythian, she crept up behind him and hit him on the head with the jar as hard as she could. Of course Euergetes went out like a lamp in a gale, and the Scythian flung his clothes on and fled. A few minutes later, Euergetes came round and sat up, holding his head and moaning. There was blood, mixed with expensive Syrian perfume, all over his face and he was distinctly disorientated.
‘What happened?’ he asked.
‘You idiot,’ said his wife, ‘you got struck by lightning.’
‘Did I?’ asked Euergetes. Then he remembered. ‘Was the God really here, then?’
‘He was,’ said Myrrhine. ‘And you insulted him, so he hit you with a thunderbolt. I was terrified.’
Euergetes drew in a deep breath and of course he smelt the perfume. ‘What’s that funny smell?’ he said.
‘A God has been in our house and you ask me that,’ replied Myrrhine.
At once Euergetes staggered off to make preparations for a sacrifice, and to his dying day he swore that he had seen the God. And when, nine months later, his wife bore a son; there was no prouder man in the whole of Athens. He named the boy Diogenes (which means ‘Son of Zeus’) and had a mural of Leda and the Swan painted on the wall of the inner room, with Leda looking just like Myrrhine. Unfortunately the blow on his head did some sort of lasting damage and he died not long afterwards, but that was probably no bad thing; for his son turned out most unZeuslike, and the family fortunes declined from that moment on, so that Diogenes’ children had been reduced to rowing in the fleet and sitting on juries by the time that I made the acquaintance of one of them. Nevertheless, parts of the commemorative shrine that Euergetes built on his land just outside Pallene can still be seen to this day; indeed, it was quite a well-known landmark when I was a boy. But the roof blew off in a storm a few years ago and then people started taking the stones to build walls and barns with, and all that’s left now is the sacred enclosure and the altar itself.
CHAPTER FOUR
There are some people, I know, who can’t enjoy a poem or a story unless they’re told what the hero looks like. I suppose this is due to some deficiency in their imaginative powers that I ought really not to encourage; but I can sympathise, since I was exactly the same when I was a boy and attending that miserable little establishment, the School of Stratocles.
The professed purpose of this organisation was to teach the sons of gentlemen to recite Homer — in my day, it was universally believed that the only skill a young man needed to acquire before he was launched into the world was the ability to recite the Iliad and Odyssey off by heart, like one of those rather sad-looking old men who make their living that way on the edges of fairs — and for all my aspirations to being a literary man and an aesthete I couldn’t be doing with it. For a start I don’t like Homer (I know this is like saying that I don’t like sunlight, but I can’t help that) and at that age my patience with things I didn’t hold with was far shorter than it is now. However, the schoolmasters at the School of Stratocles were all bigger than me (I think it was probably the only qualification Stratocles looked for when buying staff at the slave-market) and so I was compelled to find some way of tricking my mind into accepting the endless passages of galumphing hexameters that I had to commit to memory each day. I eventually hit on the idea of identifying each of the protagonists in the epics with someone I knew; I could thus picture a familiar figure doing and saying the absurd things they got up to in the Heroic age, and my task became marginally easier.
For instance, Achilles, who I have always heartily despised, became Menesicrates the sausage-seller, a strikingly handsome man with a violent temper who sold rather gristly sausages outside the Archon’s Court. Agamemnon, being boastful, cruel, cowardly and stupid, merged seamlessly with Stratocles himself, while Agamemnon’s fatuous brother Menelaus will now always remind me of the young slave Lysicles, who was one of my teachers. The school’s clerk Typhon suited the part of the slimy and scheming Odysseus perfectly — that’s Odysseus in the Iliad, of course; Odysseus in the Odyssey is a different proposition, and I must confess that I rather liked him. So he came more and more to look like my father, which inevitably made me Odysseus’ son, the handsome but intellectually negligible Prince Telemachus, who waits for his glorious sire to return from the war. As for Hector — well, I reckon that all the small boys of Attica had the same picture of Hector in those days: a man in early middle age, but looking rather younger, with a careworn face forced into an encouraging smile and a strangely shaped head that Homer somehow forgets to mention; in other words, Pericles. In fact, this Hector-Pericles even survived my friendship with Cratinus and my meeting with the man himself, and has lasted to this day.
All this gratuitous reminiscence is simply an excuse for putting off for a little longer the unpleasant task of describing myself. I have justified this omission thus far in my story on the grounds that there would be no point in describing what I looked like as a boy — all children under the age of ten are exactly identical, and don’t let anyone ever tell you otherwise — besides which, the plague altered my appearance drastically.
The loss of a finger wasn’t the only scar that I was left with. Something unpleasant and permanent happened to the muscles in the left side of my face; I think they must have withered, or at least stopped developing. Ever since, I have gone around with a permanent grin on my face, which is appropriate for a Comic poet but profoundly irritating to everyone I have ever met. My hair, which was formerly thick and very curly, started falling out in handfuls like a punctured cushion, so that by the time I reached thirteen I was as bald as marble. Also, I never grew to full stature, so that now I am a full head shorter than most men. My arms, chest and shoulders never filled out or became round and attractive, and I look much weaker and feebler than I actually am. In fact, I can do a full day’s work as well as the next man, even if I do have arms like a girl; but I have never been what you might call handsome, and so I never had the swarm of admirers that most boys acqu
ire when they are on the verge of maturity. Nobody gave me little presents of apples or pears on my way home from school or ogled me at the baths, and no vases with ‘Eupolis is beautiful’ painted on them ever came my way. Nor, for that matter, did anyone ever sing songs outside my window at night or scratch obscene compliments on our doorposts —except once, and that, I do believe, was my dear cousin Callicrates, who didn’t want me to feel utterly left out.
Now the invariable rule is that all Athenians are beautiful, and only beautiful people can be good or well born or clever or anything at all. This is why we call the upper classes, the Cavalry and the Heavy Infantry, ‘the beautiful and good’, while the oarsmen and landless classes are described as ‘the ugly men’ and ‘the snub-noses’. There is, of course, a degree of logic behind this, since in order to be good-looking you have to be healthy and have plenty to eat, while unsightly complaints such as rickets and eczema are largely caused by malnutrition. Since I was palpably not beautiful, it stood to reason that for all my acres I must have the soul of a slave, and not many people were prepared to waste time on me. But I soon learned that human beings can be induced to disregard even ugliness if they can be made to laugh. Naturally, you will never have so many true friends as you would if you looked right, but it’s better than nothing, and I made the best of the talent that Dionysus had given me. I soon came to realise that when two people meet together they will sooner or later start criticising a third; and if a fourth joins them who can make himself unbearably amusing at the absent party’s expense, they will accept him into their fellowship, if only temporarily, and may even invite him to a relevant dinner party.
