The Walled Orchard

by Tom Holt

  Nicias son of Niceratus was formally appointed as my producer, and I worked out the costings for the production and took them over to him. He was virtually a neighbour, and he lived in one of the best houses in the whole of Athens. His wealth came mostly from the mines, which made some people look down on him, but there was nothing of the silver-king about Nicias. He didn’t smell of money, like so many people who make their own fortune; in fact, he didn’t smell of anything much. Of all the men I have met in my life, I can think of few that I have admired more and liked less; for Nicias was without question the most boring man in Athens.

  He was the sort of man who thinks everything through, slowly, sensibly, carefully, and does nothing until he has satisfied himself that it is prudent (and morally right) to do this particular thing in this particular way. You could see him going through a sort of checklist in his mind, and he was a terror for long, thoughtful silences. Of course, he was a martyr to kidney trouble, but he never let his illness get in the way of his responsibilities (everything in his life was a Responsibility); and although he was obviously in a great deal of pain, he never mentioned it unless he felt it his duty to confess that he would not be capable of doing such and such properly, because of his infirmity. He regarded the production of Comedy (which he could not begin to understand, and found generally distasteful) as a religious as well as a civic duty, and since he firmly believed that he held the bulk of his personal wealth as a trustee for the Athenian people — I am convinced that he enjoyed paying taxes, in so far as he ever enjoyed anything — he was determined that no expense should be spared, and that my Chorus should be equipped and trained to the highest possible standard. But then his prudence and sensibleness came into play; there must be no stinting or false economy, but there must be no waste. Waste is an affront to the Gods, who provide for us. Waste is morally wrong.

  The result was that my triremes had genuine Tyrian purple cloaks; but when the cloaks were made, he sent a slave round to gather up all the off-cuts and sell them in the market. The Chorus was rehearsed over and over again, on full pay; but his instructions were that anyone who was late was to be fined one obol, and the accumulated fines used to pay for a sacrifice to Dionysus on the eve of the play. As for the actors; the rules said that they were to be paid by the hour, and so every rehearsal was timed with a water-clock, which was stopped as soon as the rehearsal was finished, and the water left in the clock was carefully measured to work out what each man was owed, down to the last obol.

  This was insufferable enough, and caused more bad feeling among the company than the usual miserliness and late payment would have done. But Nicias held that his responsibility to the production did not end with regular disbursements of silver. Although he hated speaking in public, he felt it was his duty to make regular speeches of encouragement (with the water-clock running, of course). These speeches never lasted more than a few minutes, and he had a good, polished turn of phrase; but I have never been so bored in all my life.

  I can picture him to this day, standing by the altar in the middle of the stage, leaning on a stick, since making speeches always made him feel ill. He would clear his throat, wait for silence, and then tell us how we should always strive to do our best for our City, since between Athens and ourselves there was a perfect harmony of interest. In helping Athens, he would say (over and over again) we were acting both altruistically and selfishly —which, of course, is morally right; a man must do what is good but must also always do what is prudent, so long as he observes that Godlike balance of moderation in both. And he would always end by saying that it is men who make up a city, not walls and houses and temples, and that without good men, all the silver and triremes in the world are nothing but trouble and sorrow. He would then turn quietly away and walk painfully home, leaving us, thoroughly depressed, to try and rehearse a Comedy.

  A marked contrast to Nicias’ homilies were the addresses of Philonides, which the company dreaded even more. I have heard Sicilian gang-masters, and the foremen in the stone quarries and the silver mines, but even they do not speak to slaves in the way that Philonides spoke to the free citizens of Athens who made up my Chorus. The actors had all worked with him before, but that did not stop them bursting into tears at times and even running out of the Theatre; but when I begged him to stop for fear of jeopardising the whole production, he didn’t seem to hear me. During those rehearsals, everything about the play — not least the words themselves — seemed to fill him with unbearable physical pain. Yet when I went to see him at his house after a particularly agonising day in the Theatre, he would smile and pour me wine, and assure me that it was the best play ever written, and that it would be a crime against Dionysus to alter a single word, and how was my lentil crop coming on in Phrearrhos now that I had taken to using seaweed as fertiliser?

  During our rehearsals, the doors to the Theatre were firmly barred and slaves with wooden clubs were stationed outside to make sure that nobody got in. But some people did manage to slip past, pretending that they Were messengers from Nicias come to count the oil-lamps, or even guests of the author. It was generally known, too, that the other playwrights had their spies in the Chorus, while there was nothing that anyone could do to stop the actors selling whole speeches. I firmly believe they did it more out of hatred of Philonides than for the money; but whatever the reason, I became aware that my rivals, and Aristophanes in particular, were taking a considerable interest in the production.

  All playwrights do their best to sabotage the work of their rivals. It is a mark of respect, if you choose to see it in that way, and I do it myself. Even the great Aeschylus used to try and get his rivals’ actors drunk on the day of the performance, and everyone knows the story of how Euripides kidnapped the actor Gnatho when he was waiting for his cue in Agathon’s Perseus, and how Gnatho escaped by wriggling through a hole in the floorboards of Euripides’ house, and ran back through the streets in his Tragedy boots, and entered on his cue as if nothing had happened. But somehow, during the rehearsals for The General, I had got it into my head that nothing like that would ever happen to me. Of course, Philonides dealt with most of the attempts to disrupt the play, and retaliated with all his characteristic ferocity. It was Philonides who ordered the attack on the poet Phrynichus, which left him with a broken collar-bone; while he nearly killed one of our actors with his own hands for trying to set light to the costumes. But he didn’t tell me any of this, of course, and what I heard from other people I dismissed as silly rumours.

  But I really should have begun to suspect something was up when Phaedra seemed to undergo a sort of transformation. At first, it was nothing more than a smile instead of a glare when I went home in the evenings, and I was probably too preoccupied to notice. But then the statue of Clytemnestra disappeared, and in its place was a fat leather purse full of coined silver; she knew how I hated it, she told me, and Philander’s wife had liked it so much. The pet monkey had a mysterious accident at about the same time, and Phaedra began to talk quite seriously about coming to Pallene with me, since, deep down, she felt more at home in the country. She also definitely confirmed that making my will could wait for as long as I liked.

  Being young and foolish, I rationalised all this as being just another aspect of my good luck, which appeared for the moment to be unstoppable. Also, Phaedra was shrewd and careful, or perhaps the strain was too much for her; anyway, we continued to have spectacular battles over nothing in particular, only rather less frequently. For my part, I was beginning to feel, at the back of my mind, that it would be no bad thing if they stopped altogether. It was becoming steadily harder for me to work up a good froth of hatred towards her, and in my soul I was afraid that our contests in future might be a little one-sided.

  Then she started asking me about how the play was going. This really did shock me, for if she had ever mentioned it before, she spat the name out as if it were a bad olive. At first, it was only a casual, slightly scornful enquiry, just as you might ask a small child how its pet
worm was doing, or if it had made any more of those little frogs out of mud and pomegranate-rind. But then she wanted to hear about the costumes for the Chorus (if my Chorus could have purple, why the hell couldn’t she?), and was it true that I was saying horrible things about Cleon, who was the only honest man in Athens? From there it was only a short step to asking me to recite some of the speeches; and although she pretended to fall asleep, I could see that her eyes were ever so slightly open, and following me about the room as I went through the moves. In the end, I promised to take her to next week’s rehearsal, and she said that would be nice, since she had just been sent a copy of the Thebaid by her father and when else was she going to find time to read it, with all the housework she had to do?

  As we walked home from the Theatre, I asked her what she had thought of it. She wrinkled her nose, as if she could smell rancid oil.

  ‘What’s it supposed to be about?’ she asked.

  I ignored her. ‘What did you think of the Chorus costumes?’ I asked.

  ‘I was going to talk to you about that,’ she said. ‘I thought you said they were meant to be triremes. Or is that another Chorus which comes on later?’

  I smiled affectionately. ‘I think it’s Semonides,’ I said, ‘who says—I think it’s in his Malignity of Women—that there’s no greater gift a man can have than a stupid wife. Did you like their little wheels? That was a stroke of genius, if you ask me.’

  ‘How long will it be before they can stand up without them?’ Phaedra replied. ‘Once you’ve taken those off, they might look quite realistic.’

  I stopped and kissed her. ‘You’ve been eating parsley again,’ I said. ‘If you want to drink in the afternoons, you go right ahead. I can smell it through the parsley, so you needn’t bother in future.’

  ‘I wouldn’t drink that wine from Pallene if I was dying of thirst in Egypt,’ Phaedra said, and she breathed heavily into my face as she kissed me back. ‘No wonder people don’t come to our house any more. I heard that Amyntas was ill for a week the last time he came to see me.’

  ‘So you’re still seeing Amyntas, are you, even though he stole your Phoenician mirror with the ivory handle?’ I shook my head sadly. ‘And after it cost you so much to get it back from his boyfriend. You’re such a bad judge of people, Phaedra, I don’t know what’s to become of you.’

  ‘Actually,’ she said, ‘I haven’t seen Amyntas for weeks, or anyone else for that matter. Can we go home now?’ She yawned. ‘I had a good sleep during your play, but I’m still quite tired.’

  ‘It’s drinking in the afternoons that does it,’ I replied. ‘If you’re a good girl, I’ll show you where I keep the proper wine.

  ‘Under the figs in the storeroom, and most of it’s turned to vinegar,’ she said drowsily. ‘One of these days I’ll get my brother to show you how to seal a jar properly.’

  I have just been reading over what I have written, and I notice to my horror that I have been so carried away with my own story that I have said nothing at all about what had been happening in the war. If I were a conscientious man, instead of being naturally frivolous, I would tear the roll across and start all over again. But if I am to be honest for once, I must confess that I remember that part of the war no better than any other Athenian; as a nation we have remarkably poor memories for things that have happened in our own lifetime. We are rather better at the deeds of our fathers and grandfathers; but since we get our information about those times from men who were equally negligent and forgetful in their own day, it stands to reason that if any part of our historical tradition is accurate, this can only be by pure chance, or because we have asked men from other cities what they can remember.

  But you have been counting through the years on your fingers, and are sitting there like men at Assembly waiting for the good news about whitebait prices, in the hope that I will say something about Mitylene and Pylos. So I had better say something about that, or you will despair of me and my History, and sell my book to the men who scrape down paper to be used again. Very well, then.

  Actually, I did go to Assembly when they debated Mytilene; the first day, that is, not the second, when they changed their minds. I hadn’t meant to go; in fact I was standing in the Market Square haggling with a man for a bundle of sheepskins, which I wanted to use as blankets in Pallene. I was so busy trying to save myself a few obols that I didn’t see that the constables were coming through the Market Square with the rope dipped in red paint, which is how they used to drive people with nothing to do up to Assembly in my day. The fleece-seller suddenly ducked behind his bales, and when I looked round there was the red rope, heading straight for me. I just managed to get up to the Pnyx before they caught up with me, and so avoided the chant of ‘Redleg!’ which always greets the last arrivals.

  It was there that I heard Cleon speak in public for the first time, and you can imagine the impression it made on me. He was a truly awe-inspiring figure when he had worked himself up into a fury, and although I felt it my duty as a Comic poet to hate him, I found it very difficult.

  You probably know more about the Mitylenean crisis than I do, but the basic situation was this. Our subjects in Mitylene, the largest city in Lesbos, had rebelled, and after a lot of trouble we broke the rebellion and regained control of the city. The motion before Assembly, therefore, was what we should do with the Mityleneans, and most of us, at least before Cleon started to speak, would have given the same answer; kill or exile the ringleaders, double the taxes, and leave a garrison. But Cleon, typically, had a much better, idea. He wanted to turn an episode which did not, broadly speaking, do us much credit into an opportunity for ‘clear thinking and radical action’, to use a favourite phrase of his. He wanted us to put to death every adult male in Mitylene, regardless of any plea or excuse. That way, he argued, he would demonstrate not only how dangerous it was to play games with the Athenians, but also how totally unlike other cities we were.

  ‘Who else in the whole of Greece,’ he said, in that wonderful, horrible voice of his, ‘would dare to contemplate such a dreadful act, the destruction of an entire people? Never mind who else could do it — although there are very few who could; who else would do such a thing? Who would dare?’

  Here he paused, and looked around slowly, as if daring someone to interrupt him. ‘But you would, Men of Athens, if you have courage to match your position. And why? Because you are a democracy, the only true democracy in the history of the world. For a democracy which is a true democracy can do anything it pleases, and no constraint of expediency or morality can restrain it. Because the People have no permanent identity, because they are immortal and are influenced by no factor other than their own benefit, the only limit to what they can do is the physical limit of what they can get away with, what they can actually start and complete without interruption or being bodily prevented by others. It is this that gives us Athenians the ability, and the right, to be the servants of none and the masters of others.

  ‘But, I hear some of you muttering, just because we, alone of all men, can put the Mityleneans to death, surely that doesn’t mean that we must? On the contrary, Men of Athens. Because we have this unique power, we must exercise it; we must be ruthless in exercising it, or else it will float away from us, like a dream on waking. Otherwise we will create for ourselves mental restraints more deadly than physical ones; we will begin to say, “We dare not do this”, not, “We cannot do this”, which would be like binding ourselves in chains because no other man is able to bind us.

  ‘No; if it seems true to us that the best way to preserve our empire in the future is to set it such a terrifying example that no man would ever dare to rebel again, we have no real option other than to set that example, and show the world that Athens will stop at nothing to get what it wants. For you all know the rest. If we lose our subject-states, then we lose our whole way of life, which is that of the landlords of Greece. At present, no man in any of our cities can plough his land or promise his daughter in marriage or buy flour i
n the market, except by the consent of Athens. I do not mean that we authorise all these things, or that each man must receive a licence written in wax before he does anything; but he knows that he is the property of Athens, just as your chattels are the property of each one of you.

  ‘Supposing Nicias or Callias the son of Hipponicus, who each has hundreds of slaves, had one slave in particular who not only ran away but incited his fellows to do the same, and cut their master’s throat into the bargain. Nicias and Callias are honest, pious men; but would they hesitate to have that slave whipped and tortured to death? Of course not. They are rich enough to bear the loss, and if they did not do so, they would be positively encouraging their other slaves to run away too, and asking to be murdered themselves. And you, fellow Athenians, you have more slaves than anyone else. You can afford the loss, but you cannot afford to give treason a precedent. So if you value your empire and your democracy and your very lives, vote for my proposal. But if you do not, and if you are prepared to hand over your true and only wealth to the Spartans and the Corinthians, then vote against it.

  Of course, we all voted for him, and cheered him until our throats were dry, and went home to tell anyone unlucky enough not to have been present what a feast of oratory and good sense they had missed. But we are Athenians, and so the next day when someone demanded that we reconsider the resolution, we did, and overruled it, too. The general view seemed to be that since we had voted both for and against the motion, we must have got it right either the first or the second time, which was very clever of us.

  So Cleon didn’t get his way over Mitylene. But this defeat did him no harm at all, no more than all the attacks in the Comedies. The real test of his abilities came much later, at about the time I married Phaedra and went to Samos.