The Walled Orchard

by Tom Holt

  It all started when Demosthenes, a brilliant, dashing and quite remarkably lucky general of ours, made rather a mess of an important and fairly straightforward campaign in Aetolia. He was far too frightened to come home, since he would have been exiled or put to death, and so he hung around in Naupactus waiting for his luck to change. And change it did. Before he knew quite what was happening, he had won a notable victory in Messenia and was able to come home safely.

  But Demosthenes never knew when to leave well alone, and so he persuaded the Athenians to give him forty first-class warships, to use at his absolute discretion in and around the Peloponnese. For he had seen a place on the Messenian coast called Pylos; once the home of the fabulous King Nestor, but now a god-forsaken place with nothing much to it except a certain shape, which Demosthenes but no one else could see. His fellow generals told him not to be so damned stupid and come and join them in a little recreational crop-burning; but Demosthenes would not be diverted from his arcane purpose. Since he could not openly dissent from the opinion of his fellow generals, he sat down in Pylos and read Homer, and his colleagues washed their hands of him and got on with the war. But Demosthenes’ soldiers, either from boredom or because they had had the idea planted in their heads, set about fortifying Pylos with whatever materials came to hand.

  King Agis of Sparta, on his way home from burning the best crop of early beans I have ever managed to produce, heard about what was going on at Pylos, and nearly had a stroke. Apparently, he too had seen that natural shape at Pylos, and had been meaning to do something about it for some time. Perhaps my early beans got in his way; certainly he recognised that once a force of determined men got dug in at Pylos, there was nothing on earth that could get them out. He marched as fast as he could, hoping to take Demosthenes by surprise.

  Lying next to Pylos is a wooded and uninhabited island called Sphacteria, on to which Agis transferred the flower of the Spartan army, with some idea of using it as a base for attacking Demosthenes without having to risk a sea-battle. The main point about Sphacteria is that there is no water on the island; but this seemed irrelevant, since the Spartans did not intend to stay there for more than a day or so.

  Just then, a large Athenian fleet, which Demosthenes had sent for, arrived unexpectedly, and there was a messy battle between the Athenians and Agis’s forces on the mainland, both by land and sea. Despite the efforts of a certain Spartan captain called Brasidas, the Athenians won, and the Spartans drew out feeling hard done by. Except, of course, for their best troops, who were cooped up on Sphacteria with no ships and no water.

  Demosthenes realised that his position, although it looked good for the moment, was untenable. Unless he thought of something quickly, the Spartans would overcome their profound respect for him and come back, and even his luck was unlikely to hold out much longer. There was no way of knowing how long the reserves of water on Sphacteria would last, and even though he had swept the sea clear of Peloponnesian warships, it would be impossible to stop small fishing-boats slipping out by night and supplying the Spartans on the island.

  So he made a deal, which under the circumstances was the best he could do. In return for being allowed to send food and water in to Sphacteria, the Spartans were to hand over all the ships they had in the area as securities (to be returned if the truce was observed) and keep well away while they sent an embassy to Athens to discuss peace terms. The Spartans sent their embassy, which Cleon, who was then under considerable pressure from the moderate faction, sent away again. Accordingly, Demosthenes stopped the food shipments, but claimed some minor infringement of the truce and refused to return the ships. The Spartans attacked at once by land, and Demosthenes, despite reinforcements from Athens, didn’t know what to do next. He could see no hope of taking Sphacteria by storm, and if he let the men on the island die of hunger and thirst, he would lose his hostages and with them the best opportunity Athens had yet had of ending the war. In addition, he was running short of food and water himself, in spite of now having seventy first-class warships to fetch and carry for him, and since the Spartans were managing to get some supplies through to Sphacteria, it looked as if the whole thing could still end in disaster. So he sent a full account of his position to Athens and asked for any sensible suggestions.

  Cleon, who had turned away the Spartan ambassadors, was now in deep trouble, and all he could think of was to accuse Demosthenes’ messengers of lying. It was therefore proposed — I think as a joke — that he be sent out to have a look for himself, and the proposal was overwhelmingly accepted. But Cleon kept his nerve and counter-proposed that Nicias son of Niceratus, who was one of the generals that year, should be sent out with reinforcements to help Demosthenes.

  Nicias, being Nicias, stood there like a thoughtful sheep and said that although it was a great honour to be chosen for such an important mission, his infirmity was such that he could not accept it. At this, Cleon tried to be rather too clever. He said that Nicias was nothing special, and neither was Demosthenes, whom everyone was calling the best thing since fried whitebait. Any fool, he said, could have those Spartans off that island and back in Athens in a couple of days. Why, even he could do it.

  Nicias, who had been sitting there fretting about failing to do his duty in his city’s hour of need, suddenly brightened up and said that that was a wonderful idea, and everyone started agreeing with him and cheering at the tops of their voices. Cleon, who knew about as much about the arts of war as I do about sponge-diving, went a ghastly shade of white and started to talk very fast. But nobody would listen to him; the more he gabbled, the more they cheered, until he realised that there was no way out.

  So he stood up and held up his hand for silence, and everyone stopped laughing and shouting, to hear what. this clever man would say next. Cleon started by saying that he was moved and honoured by his fellow citizens’ confidence in him, which was a generous reward for the few small services he had done the Athenians, but which he could not help feeling was misplaced. He had never held a military command before, and although nothing would please him more than to go, he felt he could not risk the lives of his fellow Athenians in this venture. Instead, he said, raising his voice so as to be heard above the groundswell of rude noises coming from his beloved fellow citizens, he would take with him only the few allied heavy infantry who were stationed in Athens, and a force of light infantry and archers, also allies. Then he took a deep breath and shut his eyes, and promised that if he wasn’t back, mission accomplished, within twenty days, they could duck him in one of his own tanning-vats and cut him up for sandals. The Athenians roared with laughter and cheered so loudly that they could be heard all over the City; for even if Cleon couldn’t hope to deliver, it had been great fun listening to him, and there would be more fun still, first when he made his excuses, and later at his trial.

  Twenty days later, he was back; and with him were the Spartans from the island, including one hundred and twenty Spartiate noblemen, in chains. There was a different sort of cheering after that, and although Aristophanes’ next play, which was entirely devoted to the most vicious attacks on Cleon, won first prize, that was little more than an Athenian way of telling him how much they loved him, just as they had loved Pericles and Themistocles before him.

  In fact, it wasn’t fool’s luck, as everyone said afterwards. Because Cleon wasn’t a soldier, he didn’t think like a soldier. He saw that heavy infantry, the heart and soul of any Greek army, are never much more than a liability, and since the object of the exercise was to take as many Spartan heavy infantrymen alive as possible, he couldn’t use Athenian heavy troops against them. So he used his brains instead. First he set fire to the woods which cover Sphacteria — Demosthenes had been too clever to think of anything so simple — and when the Spartans came dashing out, like hares out of barley when it’s being cut, he harried them with his light infantry and archers until, out of a mixture of exhaustion and frustration at not being able to come to grips with their tormentors, they threw down their s
hields and surrendered quietly. It was all totally new and barbaric, but it worked, with minimal losses to them and virtually none to us.

  That, then, was Cleon, perhaps the most typically Athenian of the City’s leaders during my lifetime. It’s wrong to think of him as being in the same class as Themistocles or even Pericles, since those men left Athens stronger than they had found her. But in a way they can be compared; for each one of them taught the world new tricks. It was my duty as a Comic poet to hate Cleon, and I did my best. But I met him many times and could not help liking the man.

  I once saw a crowd of people down at Piraeus watching a hawk killing a dove. The foreigners wanted the dove to escape, since it was weaker and more beautiful; but the Athenians were cheering on the hawk. Then, when the hawk had killed the dove and was pulling its head off with its talons, a man stepped forward with a sling-shot and the Athenians started betting on whether he could kill the hawk, since the range was quite long and a hawk is a tough sort of a bird. The slinger had bet three obols on himself, so he put forth all his skill and a moment later the hawk was lying on its back, stone dead, with a great chunk of dove-meat still in its beak. The cheering that greeted the shot reminded me of the cheering that greeted Cleon’s return from Pylos, and also the announcement of his death at Amphipolis, rather bravely in battle, against the invincible Spartan general Brasidas, a month or so after my play was performed. He had been trying to repeat his previous stunning success, but this time he had overreached himself, and the defeat at Amphipolis cancelled out everything that he had achieved at Pylos.

  I believe Aristophanes went into deep mourning for his death, just as Cratinus had done for Pericles. But unlike Cratinus he continued attacking him in his Comedies for years afterwards, and I remember sitting through a particularly dreary play of his, all about Dionysus going down to Hell to bring back a poet or some such nonsense, and a foreigner sitting next to me asking, ‘Who is this Cleon he keeps going on about?’ I closed my eyes for a moment, and wondered how I could possibly explain; about Pylos, and the informers, and the Brotherhood of the Three Obols.

  ‘Search me,’ I replied. ‘Never heard of him.’

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Phaedra took to coming to rehearsals with me regularly. So as not to scandalise the company, who were all very superstitious, she dressed up in a boy’s going-to-school clothes and sat there with her tablets on her lap, while I told everyone who asked that she was a cousin up from the country.

  A week before the Festival, someone took a hammer to the little statue of Hermes outside my house, and pushed a cock with its head and spurs cut off under my door. This didn’t worry me at all; I replaced the old Hermes with a new one by a leading sculptor, and we had the cock, stewed in wine, for dinner. I was rather more concerned by the rumours going round that Phrynichus, who had the third Chorus that year, had got hold of one of the big speeches in the Contest Scene, and had adapted it to fit into his play. If his play was called on before mine, they told me, he was going to use that speech instead of his own, so that mine would be jeered off the stage. I consulted Philonides, who said that it had been done before, and so sat down, with a headache and three rolls of scrubbed Egyptian paper, to try and compose a substitute speech. Eventually I got one written, and gave it to the actor to learn. If Phrynichus tried it on, I would be ready for him.

  The Tragedies that year included Agathon’s Electra, Euripides’ Teucer, and something by Melanthius — there was a scene in it where the hero went off-stage and came back transformed by a God into a pig, with a dainty little pig’s mask and trotters, which got a bigger laugh than anything in any of the Comedies, but I can’t remember anything else about it. The Comedies were mine, Phrynichus’ Garlic-Eaters, and Aristophanes’ Veterans of Marathon. He had two plays that year, for he got a Chorus for his Wasps at the Lenaea, which did depressingly well.

  Phrynichus was called on the first day. I was told the result of the ballot just before dawn, and sent Doron over to tell Philonides. Of course, I still had no idea whether I would be called on the second or the third day, and I sat through that day’s Tragedies in a fever of impatience. For some reason I kept wishing I had Phaedra with me (she was sitting with the other women, of course, on the other side of the Theatre) and at one stage I absent-mindedly reached out for the hand of the man sitting next to me. Luckily he was too wrapped up in the play to notice, since he wasn’t my type at all. As Aegisthus or Diomedes or whoever it was droned his way through his cosmic passion, it suddenly struck me that my feelings for Phaedra had undergone an unhealthy change. Instead of wishing she had never been born, I realised, I could feel a sort of smile wriggling on to my face whenever I thought of her, and a warm sensation all over my body. This was only when she wasn’t there, of course; it took only a few minutes in her company for all the old, familiar feelings of exasperation and fury to come flooding back. But that was an overstatement too. I felt that we were like two ageing boxers who work in one of those travelling fairs that sometimes pass through the country districts. Every day of their lives, they have to fight each other and put on a show of pain and violence, but if you watch closely they don’t hit each other at all; and when the people have all gone, the older one, who isn’t married, takes his tunic round to the younger one’s tent so that his wife can darn it for him.

  Yet all we seemed to have in common, apart from bad luck in having been married to each other, was an unending baffle. You know how young husbands and wives are always stretching their minds to think up little treats and surprises for each other — a pretty, old-fashioned grasshopper brooch, or a new way of preparing anchovies; well, we seemed to spend just as much time and effort thinking up new snubs and insults and ways of inflicting annoyance, but never anything that hurt too much. If I heard a fishmonger make some particularly unflattering comment on the appearance of one of his women customers, I would say it over and over to myself under my breath as I walked home, for fear of forgetting it; and whenever a book arrived for me from the copyists, Phaedra would always go through it first and put a little charcoal mark beside any passage concerning Clytemnestra or Medea, or any other heroines who killed or injured their husbands. At night, we rarely did anything but sleep, and when we climbed into bed together we would lie on our sides, each grimly facing the wall on either side. But by the morning it often happened that we had turned to face each other, and usually she was lying on my arm, so that I was woken up by the numbness in it. Then we would start to bicker, still half asleep, until one of us jumped out in a rage and went to wash. And on those few occasions when one of us had the itch, the other never refused, but preferred to make nasty remarks or pretend to be asleep until the clumsy process was over. I was fairly certain that Phaedra had stopped seeing other men (although she denied it vehemently), while I could never see any point in chasing after flute-girls and housemaids, who never wash and are forever pestering you for money.

  All this passed through my mind as I sat there, and I quite forgot about the hardness of the seat (I had forgotten to bring a cushion) or the dreariness of the play, or even my fear of Phrynichus. In fact, by the time I came round, the King (or whoever it was) had been killed, or blinded, or turned into whatever he was turned into, and the Chorus were into their second round of lamentation. I dismissed all thoughts of Phaedra from my mind, and started surveying the audience.

  It’s probably my imagination, but I believe that I can tell just by looking at them whether an enemy line is going to stand or run, or whether an audience is likely to be friendly or not. With audiences, you can work out a great deal beforehand. If it’s been a bad year or the enemy have burnt their crops, they will be anxious to be pleased, and will roar with laughter at anything that resembles a joke. But if the vintage has gone off well, or news has just come in of a naval victory, they’ll sit there like a jury at the trial of a politician, just waiting for some little flaw or slip. If the play is good they show no mercy to the actors, and if the acting is good, it stands to reason that the
play is weak and the costumes were cobbled together at the last minute out of old cloaks and sailcloth. It’s the other way round with Tragedy, of course. People like nothing better than blood and death when they’ve been gorging themselves on freshly made cheese and new wine; but if there’s been a food shortage, or the list of casualties has been read out, the prancing and howling of actors will irritate them beyond measure. This is why, when the fleet sails, the Tragedians go down to Piraeus and offer sacrifices for its safe return, while the Comic poets say a silent prayer to Poseidon for a violent thunderstorm.

  But this year had been neither bad nor good; there had been as many victories as defeats in the war (or so we assured ourselves) and if the Spartans had burnt most of the barley, they had missed more than usual. So a great deal would depend on the plays, Comedies and Tragedies, that came on before mine. If an audience falls in love with the first Comedy in the Festival, they don’t give the others a fair chance. But if not, then they tend to give the benefit of the doubt to the play which is called on last. If the Tragedies have bored them, they enjoy the Comedies more; but if they are still talking about the Tragedies when the Comedy is called on, they’re quite capable of chatting away throughout the opening scene and then blaming the author for not explaining the situation properly.

  Of course, the reaction of the audience is not what really matters. ‘What every playwright has nightmares about is the twelve judges. It’s a remarkable effect. A play can be booed off the stage, and the actors barely escape with their lives. But if it’s subsequently awarded the prize, then by the next day everyone is quoting it as they work in the fields, and declaring it the funniest thing ever, while the play that comes third is universally ridiculed, even if while the Chorus was on stage the audience was choking with laughter and yelling for reprises. And then, of course, there are always those people — I tend to find myself standing behind them in queues — who always disagree with the judges, praising the play that came third and saying that if the prize-winner gets a Chorus next year they’ll stay at home and make vine-props.