by Tom Holt
It was hard getting many words out of them as we rode to Larissa; they certainly weren’t interested in the Theatre, or in anything much except sheep and Thessalian politics. The latter, I gathered, consisted almost entirely of assassinations among the ruling families. One of our escort told me a bit about what was going on, but I soon lost track, since most Thessalian chieftains seem to have the same names, and when I heard my instructor say, ‘And after that, Perdiccas son of Scopadas killed Perdiccas son of Perdiccas, which left Scopadas the son of Thettalus at the mercy of Perdiccas son of Cersebleptes,’ I gave .up and started counting birds instead. But there was something reliable and straightforward about the Thessalians which made up for their shortcomings as conversationalists, and they had that slow dignity which you often get with unintelligent people. They were the sort of men who don’t mind if you say nothing at all for half an hour, and there aren’t many like that in Attica.
When we reached Larissa I took it for a village at first. It had walls, and gates, and was really quite large, and the people in the streets, particularly the women, were all well (if curiously) dressed. But it had that small-town feel about it that some people like and others don’t. Theorus plainly didn’t — he’s one of those people who feel uncomfortable if they can’t reach out their hands and touch marble — but I admit that I did; if I was ever exiled, I thought, I could find worse places to live than this. Naturally, Strato, the third member of the party, was visibly drooling, but he’d been doing that ever since we’d met up with our escort. I don’t think he got very far with any of them.
I expected our hosts the princes to be like their cavalrymen; but they weren’t, not at all. When we reached the palace — a large, rectangular building, like an oversized trireme-shed — they came out to meet us, two very fat men in their late twenties. I had expected them to be older, but then I remembered what my friend the cavalryman had been telling me about Thessalian politics, and realised that not many chieftains live much longer than twenty-nine.
There’s nothing like meeting foreigners to make you think hard about your own people. Alexander and Jason were dressed in what would have been the height of fashion in Athens among, say, Alcibiades’ circle about eight months ago, except that Alcibiades and his friends would never have worn so much heavy gold jewellery. For a start, they couldn’t have afforded it, and even if they had managed to get together as much gold as Jason had hanging round his chins, they’d have used it to bribe a jury with instead of having it made into a massive great necklace. When he spoke, Jason used Attic Greek, except that he didn’t quite understand where he should change T to 5, and his voice was almost but not quite a City voice. Theorus shuddered when he heard him, and I don’t think even Strato fancied him much. Alexander wasn’t much better; his Attic was almost perfect, but he kept putting on a lisp — more mimicry of Alcibiades, I suppose — and it was rather disconcerting when he forgot to do it. Also, Strato lisps naturally, and I think Alexander thought he was trying to be funny.
The princes, although they were extremely talkative, seemed reluctant to discuss such tiresome matters as cavalrymen and money, although Theorus, who was now sulking and generally behaving very badly, kept trying to drag the conversation round. But Alexander was clearly not going to be cheated of his ration of spoken Attic; and when Theorus asked him bluntly when we were going to start talking business, he waved his hand in a very affected way and said that tomorrow, or the next day, we might have some preliminary discussions. Meanwhile, he said, he had such a nice surprise for us, and we weren’t to spoil it by talking about silly old cavalrymen. That seemed to be the last straw as far as Theorus was concerned. He put his feet up on his couch and pretended to go to sleep.
After what seemed like a very long time, we were able to escape, on the pretext of changing our clothes, and we were led off down a long corridor that formed part of the wall of the town. After what seemed like a day’s march, we were each shown into a house-sized room crowded with heavily carved furniture and silverware. I put on my best tunic and cloak, looked at my face in a big bronze mixing-bowl (what it was doing there I could not imagine), and knocked on Strato’s door to find out what was going to happen next.
‘What do you think the surprise will be?’ I asked.
‘Something dire,’ he replied. ‘Belly-dancers, human sacrifice, gladiatorial display, poetry reading, you can never tell with these people. Sometimes it’s like being at a really boring party, sometimes it’s like something out of the adventures of Odysseus. Whatever it is, keep a straight face and smile a lot.’
The main hall of the palace was how I’d always imagined a palace to be, with long tables and benches, just like in Homer, and a fireplace running the length of the room. The roof was high and black with smoke, and they were roasting pigs and deer on spits; I’d never seen so much meat before in my life. The benches were filled with huge, fierce-looking men wearing coarse woollen clothes and enormous quantities of gold jewellery, and they were making an extraordinary amount of noise. Most of them looked like Greeks, but there were men wearing trousers like Persians, or Phrygian felt caps and tiaras, and some of them had breastplates on, for reasons best known to themselves. It all seemed very strange and intimidating to me, but my two companions merely found it distasteful, and muttered that there must be easier ways to earn a living, such as digging coal.
As guests of honour we sat with the princes, and were soon being overwhelmed with food. Among the beautiful and good of Thessaly the belief seems to be that if it moves, it can also be eaten, and if it doesn’t, it can’t, for the only vegetable I could see was leeks, boiled into a sort of mush and slopped out of a huge silver cauldron. We got wine to drink — lovely stuff from Rhodes and Chios, served neat in hollowed-out buffalo horns — but the Thessalians seemed to prefer a sort of sticky black stuff which they apparently make from rotten honey. No one offered us any, which was a great relief. If this was the lovely surprise, I thought as I started on my third helping of roast venison, it could be worse. But it seemed a terrible waste somehow, and I wished I could find some way of hiding some of the roast meat inside my tunic and taking it back to Athens with me.
Eventually the stripped ribcages were cleared away, and the entertainment began. I think the Thessalian nobles seated below us were dreading it almost as much as we were — in Thessaly, I am told, they like to while away the evenings by grabbing hold of the smallest person present, tying him to a pillar, and throwing bones at him. Anyway, Prince Jason called for silence by hammering on the table with his goblet, and the roar of voices dwindled away like water out of a punctured skin.
‘Men of Thessaly,’ shouted Jason — and I was amused to see that he used his proper voice for addressing his peers —’today we feast three honoured guests from Athens in Attica.’ Loud cheering and much banging of tables. ‘They come to seek our aid in their war against the Spartans of Laconia. They, who are invincible by sea and excellent above all men for their armoured infantry, beseech us as friends to send them cavalry. What is your opinion?’
More cheering, banging on tables, waving of arms, throwing of bones. While all this was going on, I leaned over to Theorus and asked what Jason meant by our war with the Spartans. Hadn’t they heard about the Peace?
‘Don’t be an idiot,’ he whispered back. ‘The princes know all right, but obviously they haven’t told this lot. I don’t think most of them would understand the meaning of the word, and those that do probably don’t hold with it.’
‘I thank you, men of Thessaly,’ said Jason. ‘Now, to celebrate the presence amongst us of three such noble guests, I command you all to assemble in the Field of Zeus tomorrow three hours after sunrise. That is all.’
He sat down; muted cheering, no banging of tables. ‘Savages,’ muttered Jason under his breath, and picked up a roast rabbit that everyone else had overlooked. ‘You can’t imagine, my dears,’ he said through a mouthful of rabbit, ‘what a trial it can be living among these barbarians. How I long to see Athen
s again — the Market Square, the Necropolis…’
Alexander giggled. ‘You mean the Acropolis, silly.’
‘Just my little joke,’ Jason replied irritably. ‘You’re the silly, for not spotting it. And of course,’ he said, turning his head and looking straight at me, ‘the Theatre. You can have no idea how I long for the Theatre.’
Strato kicked my ankle under the table. ‘You’re interested in plays, then?’ I asked.
‘I live for the Drama,’ replied Jason, and to emphasise his sincerity he stopped eating for a moment. ‘Which is why today is the happiest day of my life. To have, under my roof, the great Eupolis, greatest poet of his age — well, if I died tonight it would be like the answer to a prayer.’
To judge by the way Alexander was looking at him, his prayers could easily have been answered. I took a long pull at my wine, and thanked him for his kind words. Jason stood up and bowed, and then sat down again, and started firing questions at me — did Euripides really not believe in the Gods, and was Moschus as brilliant as everyone seemed to think, and what was Theognis going to do next, and could we expect anything more from Sophocles, and what was Agathon really like, and was Phrynichus (who Jason had obviously got confused with the old Tragedian of the same name) ever going to give us an Oedipus? I replied as best I could, but for the most part I had to make it up as I went along; for Theorus and Strato really did know all these people, and were bound to tell them what I had said as soon as we got home.
‘And now,’ said Alexander, after Jason had choked on a mouthful of roast pork and so fallen silent for a moment, ‘do tell us all about the Comedy, which is what we’re really interested in. I mean, the Tragedy is all very well, in its way, but…
So I had to go through the same procedure all over again with Ameipsias and Plato and Cratinus and Aristomenes and Aristophanes — I didn’t mention Phrynichus, so as not to upset Jason — until my voice was hoarse and my head was dizzy with nodding. By the time the princes were drunk enough to be carried away, I had had enough of the Theatre to last me a lifetime. But they lasted long enough to demand a précis of the plot of my own next play, and I had to improvise furiously.
I slept well that night, despite having the feeling that I had got myself locked into the treasury of a temple, and when we were summoned next day I felt relatively restored, which was just as well.
The Thessalians don’t eat much during the day, but as Athenians we were expected to be starving hungry as soon as we opened our eyes; so there was roast venison and boiled beef to be got through before we could proceed to the surprise at the Field of Zeus. Theorus managed to get hold of one of the skin-and-bone dogs that are everywhere in Thessaly, and we fed most of the food to it, but it couldn’t eat it all.
The Field of Zeus is about an hour’s ride north of Larissa, and it has a spectacular view of Olympus. To get there, however, we rode through what our escort told us was typical Thessaly: rocky, bleak and miserable, and populated by starving people who are effectively the slaves of the ruling families. Just as I had never seen such wealth as I saw in Larissa, I have never seen poverty like that of these Penestae, who are of the same race as their masters, and theoretically citizens. They would run up to us as we rode past begging for food (I don’t think they knew about money), and the cavalrymen would knock them aside with the flats of their sabres. The cavalryman next to me said that there was quite an art to it and offered to teach me if we ran into any more of them, but I said I had a pulled muscle in my shoulder.
The first thing we saw when we arrived was a sort of horseshoe-shaped earthwork. Whatever it was, it wasn’t quite finished, because there were men scurrying about with baskets of earth on their shoulders and other men, on horseback, shouting at them and hitting them with olive branches. Then Alexander and Jason rode up, on enormous white stallions, and welcomed us to the Theatre.
I nearly fell off my horse.
‘Next year,’ said Jason, ‘we shall line it with stone, and then it will be just like the Theatre of Dionysus.’
I doubted that somehow, but I remembered that I was here to further the interests of Athens, and said on the contrary, it would be better. ‘In fact,’ I went on, ‘I wish that I could put on a play here. ‘It’s so …’ I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I waved my hand in the air instead.
Then Jason giggled, sounding just like one of the conduits at Nine Fountains when it gets blocked with leaves, and I felt a terrible sense of foreboding.
‘Then your wish is about to be fulfilled,’ Jason said. ‘If you would care to take your seat, we’ll see what we can do.’
I got slowly off my horse and followed him down into his earthwork — I refuse, even now, to call that overgrown sump a Theatre. Alexander was already sitting there, in a great big carved oak throne. He was obviously livid that the Theatre wasn’t ready yet, and there was a man on his knees in front of him, who I took to be the overseer of the work.
‘This miserable dog,’ growled Alexander in his own Thessalian voice, ‘has betrayed his trust. He swore by the head of Poseidon that all would be ready, and he has broken his oath. Very well, then; his blood shall—’
‘No, don’t do that,’ said Theorus suavely. ‘It’s terribly unlucky, you know. Isn’t it, Eupolis?’
‘Terribly,’ I said.
Alexander shrugged his shoulders and became all Athenian again. ‘But it’s so terribly naughty of him,’ he whined. ‘He knew we were expecting honoured guests, and just look at it.’
‘It’s perfect,’ I assured him. ‘Don’t change a thing.’
‘Well, if you think it’s right, it must be right,’ chirped Jason. ‘So why don’t we all sit down and let the revels commence?’
The Thessalian lords who had been at the feast last night were filing in and saluting the princes; they looked as miserable as I felt. Finally Alexander called for silence and warbled out, ‘Eupolis, bring on your Chorus!’
I once saw a play by Cratinus which was a burlesque on the blinding of Oedipus, and although I enjoyed it, I wondered what Oedipus himself would have made of having his Tragic sorrow made into a Comic travesty. By the end of the opening scene of my General, as performed by members of the flower of Thessalian youth, I knew the answer; he would have loved it. To start with, I didn’t know where to look; I was so embarrassed, especially with Theorus and Strato sitting there looking like a couple of owls, that I would gladly have cut my own throat if I could have borrowed a razor. But when the actors started forgetting their lines and I had to prompt them, I actually started to enjoy myself. It helped that the entire company, Chorus as well as actors, hadn’t the faintest idea what any of it meant, and so recited their parts with a sort of Tragic profundity. They had tried their best to make trireme costumes out of old goatskins and the staves of buckets, but the people wearing them had no idea what they were meant to be, and apparently nobody had thought it wise to tell them; so they must have assumed that they were some sort of sacred vestments, and moved accordingly. As the play went on, I could see exactly what was wrong with it; why the dialogue was so flat, and why the Choruses had failed so utterly. There was, quite simply, too much of everything; twenty years of wanting to be a Comic poet jammed into one little play. That was why the jokes had flown over everyone’s heads; like Xerxes’ arrows, they had blotted out the sun. As for the choruses, they were far too complicated for anyone short of Athena herself to follow at first hearing. Written down, of course, and read slowly at leisure, it quite probably seemed to coruscate with wit. On stage, it was a meaningless torrent of words.
So, when the Chorus had floated gracefully off, there was real feeling in my voice when I thanked the princes.
‘It was marvellous, really,’ I said. ‘You don’t know how much pleasure that gave me.’
Jason seemed rather taken aback — I think he had prepared a little speech of apology — but Alexander beamed, and said that it was an honour. I replied that no, it was an honour for me, and I think we’d be there yet if Jason hadn�
��t got bored and suggested we eat something.
I had a Thessalian appetite for my food, but my mind was full of Comedy again; it was as if some God had inspired me, and all I wanted to do was sit down somewhere quiet and start composing. It didn’t matter that I had no plot or theme or characters — mere details. What mattered was that the cloud of the General had been lifted from my shoulders. And then, as if a second God had joined the first, I remembered what Cleonymus had said when I spoke to him in Pallene; he could get me a Chorus, and then everything would be all right.
Don’t ask me to remember how much we paid for the cavalry in the end — it was something like four obols a day and one talent, and we got past the Assembly on our return without too much trouble. The next thing I can remember is sitting under my fig tree at Pallene, with half an opening scene in my head searching frantically for a name, and someone in the fields above the house calling out the name of my steward, who was called Maricas. Not long after, I took three rolls of Egyptian paper to the Archon, and was granted a Chorus.
Maricas won first prize at the City Dionysia in the year that Ameipsias came second with his Wineskins. Aristophanes won third prize with The Two Brothers.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I hadn’t expected to win first prize with Maricas, and so I hadn’t thought of a suitable place to hold my Victory party. The true horror of my situation only dawned on me at the Cast party, immediately after the performance (I had been called on last), and for a while I sat with my head in my hands, trying to think of some way out of the mess. As I saw it, I had three options: not to hold a Victory party at all (which was unthinkable, like fighting a battle and not raising a trophy afterwards, or growing corn and not harvesting it); to hold it at Phaedra’s house; or to find somewhere else. I had just decided to beg the backer — a cumin-seed-splitting, parsimonious old fool called Antimachus — for the loan of his pottery warehouse in Piraeus, when a messenger came looking for me. It was Phaedra’s slave Doron.
