by Tom Holt
After the plague had subsided, there was a remarkable feeling of euphoria in Athens, and indeed the whole of Attica. If the war was not going well for us, it was not going particularly badly, and although the Spartans continued to visit us once a year, we had come to tolerate them as just another of the hazards of agriculture. For my part, I hardly thought about them at all; I had wonderful things to see and do.
It seemed as if there was no limit to my domains, or to the number of men and women who called me master (at least to my face). I expect that if I had been born to it I wouldn’t have taken very much notice; I’d have been far too busy eating my heart out with envy whenever I saw anyone who had two more acres or a better plough. It’s a curious thing, but I’ve always found that the wealthier a man becomes, the more obsessed he is with the idea of wealth, until he gets to thinking that nobody but he should be allowed to own anything at all. Then of course he goes into politics, and ends up crawling on his belly to the oarsmen in Assembly, licking their sandal-straps and pretending to take an interest in food distribution and rural poverty. I suppose it’s Zeus’ way of keeping the extremely fortunate under control.
One such man, indeed, was Pericles’ successor as Leader of Athens; a man called Cleon. Oddly enough, I can justify including a few words about him at this point since this Cleon’s wealth was in part derived from a tanner’s yard which should by rights have belonged to me. I won’t bore you with the details; my grandfather had taken a share in it many years before, and had promptly forgotten all about it, and when my grandfather died my uncle Philodemus briefly considered going to law to get the share back for me. But, quite understandably, he didn’t bother, since at the time Cleon was not the sort of man you took to law for any reason whatsoever, unless you wanted an excuse for travelling the world for the next ten years.
It was Cleon’s father who owned the other share in the tanner’s yard, and despite (or because of) his partner’s lack of interest in the business it did tremendously well. At the time there was a great demand for quality leather for making shields and other military necessities, and since Cleon’s father didn’t fool about with the running of the thing but left it to a competent manager the yard got its fair share of business. But when his father handed over the yard to him as part of his marriage settlement, Cleon took a great interest in the leather industry — he was the sort of person who just can’t leave well alone — and had soon made it twice or three times as profitable as it had been before, so that it represented the most valuable part of his possessions and the stench of tanning could be smelt from the Propylaea to the Pnyx.
Now had he stuck to tanning and the management of his land, I doubt whether Cleon would have had a single enemy in the world, apart from the people who happened to live next to the yard. He was a quiet, sensitive man by nature, who liked nothing more than a couch in a friendly house, a cup or two of good wine, and a few friends to join him in singing the Harmodius. But he had this restless streak in him that drove him to try and improve things; he couldn’t bear the sight of inefficiency, muddle or wasted opportunities. In addition, the Gods had cursed him with a very loud voice and an innate ability with words, and at some stage some idiot must have told him that if he could run a tanner’s yard so well he could probably run Athens. So Cleon goes ahead and takes up politics; and since he has this terrible need to make a success of everything he does (typically Athenian, you see) he sets about politics as he set about the leather trade, by cutting out the middleman and selling direct to the mass market. He doesn’t waste his time standing for election to any of the great offices of State, as Pericles had done; he simply stands up and speaks (or shouts) his mind at Assembly. Now it turns out that his mind is perpetually filled with new and more exciting ways of enriching the voters, or else defending them by way of prosecutions in the Courts from the largely undefined but extremely threatening and dangerous activities of his rival politicians. As a result, he quickly becomes the most powerful man in Athens.
Shame on me for a sentimental, soft-hearted old democrat, but I find it hard to be savage about Cleon, for he was a much-maligned man. I’m not saying that he was a good man, or even a well-meaning one; on the contrary, he was a self-centred megalomaniac who did untold damage to Athens. But the same can be said for all the great statesmen in our long and glorious history, so that after a while one takes it for granted. Cleon at least brought a touch of style to an otherwise sordid and unedifying spectacle, and if he hadn’t done it someone less entertaining undoubtedly would. What I cannot forgive Cleon for was more of a crime against the God than against the City; he prosecuted a Comic poet.
When I say Comic poet I mean Aristophanes, the most talentless man ever to be granted a Chorus by an overindulgent nation; and Cleon was undoubtedly provoked beyond endurance. I don’t mean by what Aristophanes said about him in the Theatre; he could appreciate a joke, even a bad and endlessly reiterated joke about the size and appearance of his reproductive organs, as well as the next man. Indeed, I watched him in the audience during a play of Aristophanes’ which was entirely devoted to personal attacks on him, and I believe he enjoyed it much more than I did. No, what aggravated Cleon so much was what Aristophanes said about him behind his back, at parties and sacrifices and in the Market Square. For some reason which I have never been able to understand, people believe things that Aristophanes tells them, although anyone who knows him half as well as I do wouldn’t believe him if he told them they had two ears.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that Cleon prosecuted Aristophanes the poet on a charge of slandering the City in the presence of foreigners. This is a terrible crime to be accused of, although nobody has yet got around to defining it, and Aristophanes was duly tried and convicted. He escaped with his life but was very heavily fined, and from that day onwards not only Aristophanes but every other Comic poet in Athens marked Cleon down as a prime target. Not only did they attack him (which was only to be expected and therefore quite innocuous); they also refrained from attacking his enemies, which is a rather more serious matter. You see, nobody had ever before thought of challenging the Comic poet’s right to say exactly what he wanted about who he wanted, from the Generals and the Gods down to the street-corner bird seller who sells him a diseased hoopoe and refuses to give him his money back when it dies. It is a matter of principle, and although I would be hard put to it to name a Comic poet who wouldn’t spend the next week celebrating if he heard that one of his fellow poets had just been sentenced to death, a threat to the freedom of the poet is a threat to all poets. It was just like the Persian invasions, in fact; we all stopped fighting each other and united against a common enemy.
Naturally, Cleon never tried anything so stupid ever again, and next year it was business as usual. The only difference was that whereas before his conviction Aristophanes was just another hack Comic poet, for ever afterwards he was the man Cleon tried to muzzle, and accordingly anything by Aristophanes had to be good. This is the only explanation, apart from a total lack of taste and discrimination on the part of the Athenian public, for Aristophanes’ brilliant record of winning prizes in the Festivals.
Now, about Aristophanes. He’s seven or eight years older than me, and he started young. His first play, The Banqueters, was put on years before he was legally old enough to be given a Chorus, and so he had to go through the charade of pretending that his uncle had written it; although as soon as the Chorus had been allotted he wasted no time in setting the record straight. But by then it was too late to stop him having his Chorus, since the Committee on Plays and Warships had already appointed him a producer, and in those days nobody would even have considered trying to back out of their duty to finance a Chorus. It was a splendid system, all told; the Committee assessed the means of all the citizens and drew up a list of those wealthy enough to equip a trireme warship for the fleet and to pay the production expenses of a play. Rich men were actually proud to be appointed (it was a sure way of letting the whole world know how rich they were) and by
and large the system worked. It was a good way of doing these things, and considerably better than the way we do it now.
I suppose that if I had met Aristophanes in the Market Square or at some literary gathering I might conceivably have got on well with him, and the whole course of my life would have been different. But I first set eyes on him among the goats above Pallene, although then, of course, I hadn’t the faintest idea who he was. I was eight at the time, so he must have been about fifteen or sixteen, and probably writing his first play. His father had a strip of maybe two and a half acres in our part of Pallene; most of their land was over in the south-east of Attica, and they had various properties on Aegina. Anyway, Aristophanes occasionally had to tear himself away from the City to do a little half-hearted agriculture, and to relieve the tedium of this he would play tricks on his neighbours.
One day, then, I was on Hymettus with my goats, sheltering from the sun under a stunted little fig tree, which was all that was left of some desperate individual’s attempt to farm in that miserable region. In fact, there’s a story attached to that attempt, and since it’s a Pisistratus story I think I’m justified in putting it in here under the general heading of Athenian history. Pisistratus, as you know, was the dictator of Athens well over a hundred years ago; he was the first man to coin silver money, and he used State revenues to set up many poor landless people in small farms. In his day, every cultivable acre was pioneered and reclaimed, and he carried on his programme of subsidy long after there was nothing left but bare rock. He has a bad reputation these days because he ruled without the People and imposed taxes on citizens; but I have taken the trouble to find out about him over the years and my belief is that without him Athens would now be a little village surrounded by a wooden fence.
Be that entirely as it may, one day Pisistratus came up to this steading on Hymettus, and saw the crazy fool who was trying to turn it into a farm. He was ploughing, but all he succeeded in doing was turning over a few of the smaller boulders. Pisistratus was impressed, for this was a man after his own heart, and so he strolled over and started talking with the man.
‘That looks like hard work,’ said the dictator, amiably.
‘Yes,’ said the man, ‘it is.’
‘So you’re taking advantage of this new scheme, are you?’ said Pisistratus encouragingly. ‘What sort of thing do you grow up here?’
‘Blisters, mostly,’ said the man, ‘together with a little pain and suffering, of which that bastard Pisistratus takes five per cent. Well, all I can say is that he’s welcome to it.’
As soon as he got back to Athens, Pisistratus abated the tax on the pioneers, and that was the beginning of his downfall. In order to cover the shortfall, he increased the tax on everyone else to ten per cent, and everyone who mattered was so livid with him that he met with nothing but obstruction and bad feeling until the day he died.
It was on this historic spot, then, that I met Aristophanes the son of Philip for the first time. I was lying on my back with my eyes closed, thinking how nice it would be if only I didn’t have to herd goats, when I was woken by a sharp kick on my collar-bone. I woke up and reached for my staff, and there was this tall man standing over me.
‘Right then,’ he said, ‘on your feet.’ He had a City voice, high-pitched and sharp, and I took against him at once. ‘Who’s your father and what’s his deme?’
‘Euchorus,’ I replied, rubbing my collar-bone, ‘of Pallene. Who wants to know?’
‘Shut up,’ replied the stranger. ‘I’m charging Euchorus of Pallene with goat-rustling.’
Now I started to feel suspicious of the stranger, since I knew my father would never do a thing like that. He knew every animal he owned by sight and had names for them all, and even when someone else’s stray got into his flock he would go out of his way to try and find out who it belonged to, and if he couldn’t he would sacrifice it to the Gods and hold a party for the neighbours.
‘Are you sure about that?’ I said. ‘Name your witnesses.’
This shook him, I think, since he hadn’t expected a child to be so well up on criminal procedure. Not that I was, of course; it just so happened that the words were a catch-phrase in our family, and I think they must have slipped out without my thinking. Anyway, the stranger looked around, as if seeking inspiration, and he happened to catch sight of the old white billy-goat, who was destined one day to be my chairman of judges.
‘For a start,’ he said, ‘I hereby cite as chief witness for the prosecution Goat son of Goat, of the steading of Pisistratus. That goat there, which belongs to me.’
‘No, you’re wrong,’ I said. ‘It belongs to my father.’
‘Be quiet, you little heathen,’ said the stranger, ‘or I’ll have you for receiving.’ Then he seemed to be torn by some inner conflict, which made him want to relent. ‘Tell you what I’ll do,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to go to all the trouble of a lawsuit; they can drag on for days and they cause bad feeling between neighbours. I’ll just take back what’s mine and you can tell your father what a narrow escape he’s had. How does that sound?’
‘I think that’s really nice and Athenian of you,’ I said humbly. ‘And since he’s your goat you’ll know all about his habits.’
‘Habits?’ said the stranger. ‘Yes, of course I do. I reared this goat from a kid, and I’ve rescued it from wolves more than once with my own hands.’
So he advanced on that old white goat, shooing it with his hands and the hem of his cloak. Now I knew he would do that, just as surely as I knew that that was one thing our old white billy couldn’t abide; after all, it was a Goat King and had rights. It lowered its head, made a noise like a disappointed audience, and charged straight at the stranger, butting him in the pit of his stomach and knocking him over. He fell awkwardly, bumped his head on a stone, and swore. The goat gave him a look of pure contempt, nodded his beard like a councillor, and trotted off to join his flock.
‘To the charge of goat-rustling,’ said the stranger, dabbing the blood elegantly from the side of his head with the hem of his cloak, ‘I shall add a charge of witchcraft tending to cause a breach of the peace. Your father, who has evidently been to Persia and is almost certainly a collaborator, has cast a Babylonian spell on my poor goat and turned him into a savage, man-slaying monster. It is my sacred duty as a Greek to kill that goat and appease the anger of the Gods.’ He rose painfully to his feet, wrapped his cloak around his left arm and drew his sword with his right. As he did so I saw that he was wearing a little Hecate charm round his neck to ward off evil spirits, and that told me that he was superstitious. That was all I needed to know.
‘You’re clever as well as brave, stranger,’ I said. ‘Not many people would have noticed that. What gave it away? Was it the split hoof on the offside front leg?’
The stranger paused for a moment, and his hand may instinctively have moved towards that charm I was telling you about just now.
‘Split hoof,’ he repeated.
‘It’s not a Median spell, though,’ I continued brightly. ‘I think it’s Thessalian, or something like that. It’s been really dreadful, ever since Father came back from Thessaly. None of the neighbours will talk to us any more, and I think they’ve put a dead cat down our well.’
‘Your father’s been to Thessaly, has he?’ said the stranger.
‘Oh yes,’ I said, trying to sound miserable. ‘That’s where he brought that thing back from. It’s really horrible, making those awful noises all night. And we haven’t had a fresh drop of milk in the house since it came.’
‘What thing?’ said the stranger.
‘That goat over there,’ I said, pointing to a big black goat with a twisted horn, which had raised its head and was staring at the stranger, the way goats do sometimes.
‘Eurymenes in our village says it’s a witch and they tried to burn it the other day, but it wouldn’t burn, even when they poured pitch all over it. Then it went trotting through their houses setting all the hangings alight. They were goi
ng to take Father to Court but they were too frightened.’ I stopped and gazed at the stranger as if he were a Hero come to deliver us. ‘Will you really prosecute my father for witchcraft?’ I said. ‘We’d be ever so grateful.’
‘Of course,’ said the stranger, backing away, with his eyes fixed on the black goat. ‘In fact, I’ll go straight to the Archon this very day.’
Then he turned round and walked away terribly quickly. I managed to keep myself from laughing until he was out of sight, and told my father the whole story as soon as I got home. Of course he thought I was making the whole thing up and made me learn fifty lines of Hesiod as a punishment.
Well, that was the first time I met Aristophanes. The second time was over seven years later; but I recognised him at once and he recognised me.
My cousin Callicrates and I were returning from a quiet dinner party with some boring friends of his, where we had drunk very abstemiously and discussed the nature of Justice. It was as dark as a bag in the streets, and Callicrates and I had our hands on our sword-hilts all the way. We were nearly home and safe when we rounded a corner and saw the one sight that the traveller by night fears above all others: a Serenade.
Perhaps you have never been to Athens, and the young men in your city are rather better behaved; so I will tell you what a Serenade involves. A group of young men, probably Cavalry class, meet at a party which they find uninspiring. So they appropriate what’s left of the wine and the better-looking of the flute-girls, light torches and set off to find a better party. In their search for the Perfect Party they spare no pains and leave no flat stone unturned; they surge out into the Market Square and run in and out of the Painted Cloister, then they throw up outside the Cloister of the Herms, cross the Square, and work their devastating way uphill from house to house like a Spartan army, to the sound of flutes and singing. There are, of course, the inevitable casualties by the way; some of them fall over and go to sleep, and others who find themselves passing under their girlfriends’ windows stop to sing a Locked-Out song until they get the slops in their faces. Generally, however, they stick closely together, like heavy infantry in enemy territory, for while the Serenade itself is vaguely sacred to Aphrodite and Dionysus, any straggler can be picked up by the Constables or charged with assault by a citizen. The general objective of most Serenades is to capture the Acropolis and overthrow the Democracy; but since in the history of the City no Serenade has ever managed to stay together long enough to get much further than the Mint, little substantial political change has ever come out of one of these affairs.
