by Tom Holt
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Right,’ said the old man. ‘Entertain us.’
He stretched out the word entertain as if it was a piece of dough for a honey-cake and for the life of me I couldn’t understand what he meant by it, although some horrible alternatives went through my mind. But the other Sicilians seemed to approve of this idea, and the smith, who was clearly the nearest Thing that village had to a First Citizen, told the cluster of boys to run and fetch their parents.
‘I know you Athenians think we’re just a lot of animals and Cyclopses,’ the smith said, ‘but we’re not. We like the finer things in life, when we can get them. Tell you what we’ll do; you give us a good show and we’ll give you … He considered for a moment. ‘We’ll give you five staters each and a jar of wheat-flour and maybe a few onions. And we’ll let you keep your horse. But if we. don’t like you, we’ll sell you to the bosses at the stone quarries. They aren’t fussy about the quality of their labour, since it mostly ups and dies on them after a week or so. We’ll get maybe thirty staters a head. So are you gonna give us a show or not?’
I still couldn’t see what he was driving at. ‘What sort of a show?’ I asked. The Sicilians laughed.
‘We don’t care, do we, lads?’ said the smith. ‘Just so long as it’s Euripides.’
Then, suddenly, as if the sun had just risen, I remembered that fat Sicilian who had sat next to me in the Theatre at the performance of The General, my first (and worst) play. He had said that the Sicilians were obsessed with drama, and although I had assumed he was exaggerating, as all idiots do, perhaps I had been wrong.
‘Euripides?’
‘Yeah, of course Euripides. Who else is there worth a dead pig?’
‘You wouldn’t rather have some Comedy?’ I said. ‘I know plenty of Eupolis.’
‘Never heard of him,’ said the large man. ‘Aristophanes, yes, I’ve heard of him. But not who you just said.’
Aristophanes stepped forward; he hadn’t opened his mouth up till then.
‘It so happens,’ he said grandly, ‘that I am Aristophanes the poet.’
‘You?’
‘Me.’
‘Well,’ said the large man, ‘I think your plays stink. Especially the way you bad-mouth Euripides. Euripides is an artist.’
‘As it happens,’ I said quickly, ‘I know Euripides quite well. I think he’s our greatest living playwright, and I would be delighted to recite a few lines from his very latest play.’
This was a stupid thing to say, since I knew nothing by Euripides at all, except a few of the really silly bits that every Comic playwright has to know for the purposes of parody. But I knew for a fact that Aristophanes can’t keep a speech in his mind for five minutes (unless it’s one of his own), so I resolved to try my luck as a Tragic poet, for the first time in my life. As you know, I can improvise verse, and Tragic parody is easier than Comic verse, if anything; if you get into difficulties you just lament, or invoke the Gods, or say that dying is good, but not being born in the first place really beats cock-fighting. These sentiments generally come in ready-to-use units, and while you’re getting those past the gate of your teeth your mind is concocting the next few lines.
‘What play would that be?’ asked the smith.
‘Thersites,’ I said. ‘You’ll love it, it’s a honey.’
‘Never heard of it,’ said the bald man. ‘When was it on?’
‘Last Lenaea,’ I replied desperately. ‘That’s why, I suppose. Best thing he’s ever done.’
Aristophanes stared at me but I kept myself from meeting his eyes and tried to herd together a few suitable Euripidean clichés. The smithy was full of people now, and there were others hurrying out into the street. When I reckoned that there was no space for any more I gave a signal for silence and stood up.
‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ I said, ‘I would like to perform for you now—’
‘Speak up, will you?’ shouted someone from the back. ‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ I yelled, ‘I would like to perform for you now the debate between Odysseus and Thersites from Euripides’ Thersites, as it was recently performed in the Theatre of Dionysus in Athens.’
I took a deep breath and plunged in. I was horribly aware that I was composing for my life — I had heard rumours about the stone quarries of Syracuse, and I didn’t want to find out whether they were true or not —and that I was by no means qualified to impersonate the celebrated Euripides. To get a little divine assistance, which I felt badly in need of, I started off with a full-blooded invocation by Odysseus to Lord Dionysus. This was difficult; in Comedy you have to be rude about Dionysus, but in Tragedy you have to be terribly polite about all the Gods. Also, I had somehow to stop myself drifting absent-mindedly into Tragic parody. Even a Comedy caesura would give me away, or a misplaced spondee (which you never get in a Tragic line); yet these metrical devices were second nature to me, and I tended to use them without thinking.
I didn’t dare look at the audience. If I was laying an egg, the first I wanted to know about it was the blacksmith putting the fetters round my ankles. I just pressed remorselessly on, trying to act the lines as well as say them (I was supposed to be acting another man’s work, remember), and kept my eyes rolling and my head moving, like the really hammy actors do in the Theatre. I guessed the Syracusans would like that.
The theme of my debate was Mercy versus Expediency. Odysseus wants to kill a group of Trojan prisoners, to terrify the Trojans. Thersites objects; it may be a really good idea, tactically and politically, to chop one’s fellow man now and again, but it’s not the sort of thing that pleases the Gods. Since the Gods order our affairs and are quick to punish the wrongdoer, surely Mercy is the true expediency? To which Odysseus replied that by stealing Helen the Trojans have made themselves into the enemies of the Gods, so ripping open a few Trojans would surely not offend them. Thersites then embarks on that old Euripidean nonsense about Helen not being stolen at all; in fact she was spirited away to Egypt, and a replica shaped out of cloud accompanied Paris to Troy. The Gods have punished the Trojans already, making them suffer the horrors of war for the sake of a handful of vapour; and they are punishing the Greeks in the same way for being so warlike as to launch the biggest armada ever seen on the pretext of recapturing Helen but really to carve out an empire for themselves. Well, now both Greeks and Trojans have had a rough time of it, and surely the killing ought to stop.
Well, as you can see this was all blatantly topical stuff, directly designed to speak to the hearts and minds of my audience; then the horrible thought struck me that this Thersites of Euripides was supposed to have been written at a time when the Sicilian campaign was no more than a warped little notion at the back of Alcibiades’ mind. I changed tack quickly, and started giving Odysseus some clever things to say, all about the integrity of the Gods (dramatic irony) and the nature of Truth. Finally, after several false starts, I managed to find a convincing way to round the thing off, and drew the debate to a close. My mouth was as dry as paper, and I was trembling like a bad case of fever.
Now all authors love applause; there’s nothing like it in the whole world. It’s a strange thing, the effect it has on you. You can be a dyed-in-the-wool oligarch like that fool Pisander and regard the People as utter scum; or you can be aloof and intellectual — Agathon, say, or Theognis — and pronounce that the man in the street has no culture whatever and is entirely incapable of understanding the brilliance of your work; but the only approbation or praise you value is that of all the oarsmen and sausage-merchants and bath-attendants and carpenters and stone-masons and itinerant harvesters and olive-pickers packed on to the benches in the Theatre. You don’t know — or care — what it was they liked; it could have been the costumes, for all you know, or the way the actors delivered their lines (not at one of my plays, probably). But that applause is the thing; that’s better than all the compliments in the world from the young men at the baths or the old men at parties. You wouldn’t reckon much to your average fish
monger or barber or caged-bird-seller as a dramatic critic; but when his hands join in clapping or he laughs at your joke about the eels, which you’ve been up all night fiddling with and still don’t think is right, then you value his opinion above that of Cratinus himself. And what all this is leading up to is that those swinish Sicilian peasants applauded — how they applauded! — and I can’t think I ever tasted anything so sweet. They jumped up and down, and they whistled, and they shouted, and I forgot entirely about the stone quarries and just flowed. Which was odd, considering that Tragedy is not my thing at all and that my performance was not even particularly good Tragedy, now I come to think of it.
The smith belted his anvil a couple of times with a lump-hammer to restore order, and silence fell over the smithy.
‘Not bad,’ said the smith. ‘Now let’s have some Euripides, or it’s the stone quarries for you.’
I never met a more perceptive man in my life. I could see from his face that he wasn’t bluffable; and I couldn’t think of any way out of it. So I said, ‘I don’t know any Euripides. Sorry.’
Aristophanes let out a sort of wailing noise and buried his head in his hands. ‘You cretin,’ he said. ‘You had to be clever, didn’t you?’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘you give them some Euripides, if you’re so damned smart.’ Just then, I thought of Little Zeus, and his Persians and his other extracts from The Poets. If anyone could have saved us here it would have been him. That depressed me even more, but I couldn’t help smiling, as I always did when I thought of that dear idiot.
‘What are you grinning at?’ said the smith. He gave me an idea. I straightened my back and resolved to make one last effort.
‘You,’ I said.
‘Me?’
‘Yes, you,’ I replied, ‘the whole lot of you. You don’t know you’re born. Here you have, delivered into your hands by an overgenerous God, the two greatest Comic dramatists Athens has ever known. .
‘Who are you then?’ asked the little old man.
‘I,’ I said, ‘am Eupolis. Now you haven’t heard of me, I know, but that can only be because you’ve got enough wax in your ears to make candles for the whole of Sicily. I can see it from here, actually. Don’t you ever wash?’
That got a good laugh, and I could see I was in with a chance. I took another deep breath and went on.
‘You have here,’ I said, ‘not only the immoral — sorry immortal — Aristophanes but the even more immortal (and immoral) Eupolis, whose name will be remembered in Athens when the works of Euripides and Aeschylus— —and, of course, Aristophanes — have long since been scraped over to make paper for a fishmonger’s accounts. You have these two giants of Comedy at your disposal; you may command them to be as funny as humanly possible, or you’ll send them to the stone mines. And what do you want them to do? You want them to recite you Tragedy. Gentlemen — I use the term loosely — would you try and squeeze oil out of grapes? Would you milk a stallion? Let us make you laugh.’
There was a cheer you could have heard in Naxos, and I let it run for a moment. Then I held up my hand for silence.
‘Well, blacksmith?’ I asked. ‘What about it?’
‘Go ahead,’ he said equably. ‘Make me laugh.’
‘No problem,’ I said, and cleared my throat. Unfortunately, that was when my mind went completely blank. I couldn’t have scanned an anapaest to save my life. You may judge of my desperation from the fact that I grabbed Aristophanes by the cloak and pulled him on to his feet.
Now Aristophanes is very much a wax-and-stylus dramatist; he thinks by writing, and he’s hopeless at improvisation. But I think he realised that this was absolutely our last chance, because he started straight into a dialogue scene. I recognised it as a bit out of his Two Blind Men, which is in my opinion the biggest load of tripe ever foisted on a long-suffering audience. Still, words were being said, and my mind slowly started to work. When it came to what I judged was my cue, I was able to nip in with a couple of lines with a joke in them, followed by a rough paraphrase of what I vaguely remembered the character in the play saying. I must have got it completely wrong, because Aristophanes gave me a startled look and for one dreadful moment I thought he was going to dry up; but he threw me back another joke that more or less scanned, and I could see he was improvising too. I had another two or three lines ready and we started to gather a little momentum. There was a slight problem, of course, since each of us wanted the other to be the straight-man; and there was a sort of wrestling-match for the feed which I eventually won.
I can quote you every line from that dialogue, word for word. It was between Aeschylus and Euripides, about which of them was the better poet. They go through all the old chestnuts about each other’s works, and then they fight it out on points of metre and prosody. This was to both our advantages, since when we felt ourselves drying up we could quote a snippet or two of the original plays, which gave us a chance to think up the next joke. It tickled the audience, too, since it made them feel immensely erudite, and they followed all the technical stuff like schoolboys — which shows that they really did know their Tragedy, at that. The finale, like the rest of it, was my idea; Aeschylus would have it that Euripides’ iambics are so lazily composed that you could fit any old phrase, like ‘lost his oil-bottle’, into them at any point. Euripides is furious, and starts firing off his best-known quotable lines, the sort of lines that people fire at you in support of the thesis that they don’t write ‘em like that any more. I was Euripides and Aristophanes was Aeschylus, so all he had to do was fit in ‘lost his oil-bottle’ at the appropriate point. My job was to find immortal lines from Euripides that could be subjected to this indignity, and this was not easy, since the charge of sloppy versitying was — is —totally unfounded. Still, I managed it somehow, and we got the biggest laugh that can ever have been heard in Sicily outside of a human sacrifice.
Does that sound familiar, by the way? If it doesn’t, it certainly should. That scene, word for word, was reproduced by my dear friend Aristophanes son of Philip as his own unaided and original work in his most successful play The Frogs, together with a garbled recollection of our (mostly my) wisecracks on the subject of who should ride the horse, which he served up, boiled and hashed, as his opening scene between Dionysus and Xanthias. Our wonderful Greek language has many synonyms for the phrase ‘thieving bastard’, but none of them seems quite adequate to describe the depths to which that man is capable of sinking, so I shall leave the facts with you and allow you to find your own form of words.
When the laughter had died away and those incapacitated by it had been led away to be calmed down with hot wine and cold water, I turned to the smith and said, ‘Well?’
He thought for a minute and then said, ‘Me, I’d rather have had some Euripides, but I guess that’ll do.’ Why does everyone want to be a comedian?
We must have made a hit, because there was actual competition among those Sicilian peasants — who wouldn’t normally give you the dandruff from their collars — as to who would give us a bed for the night, a decent meal, fodder for the horse, food for the journey, and even —incredibly — money. Aristophanes got extremely drunk and made quite a nuisance of himself with our host’s daughter, so we were very nearly killed after all; but I was too exhausted to do more than eat and smile gratefully, and then sleep. I was certainly too tired to be frightened any more, stone quarries or no stone quarries.
Just before I went to sleep my host came to see me. After spelling out in graphic detail what he would do to both of us if Aristophanes laid another finger on his daughter, he told me that a neighbour of his had just come in from the Elorine road, and had passed a certain farm with a large orchard. He had stopped to ask what was going on there, and he was told that there had been a great battle between the Athenians and the Syracusans. Not that it had been much of a baffle, he had been told. Nearly twenty thousand Athenians had gone into the orchard, but only six thousand had come out on their feet; and all of those were now in chains,
together with their general Demosthenes, waiting to be marched on to the slate quarries, where Demosthenes would be beheaded and the rest would be kept until they were sold or died. They had taken all the money from these men, and it had filled four shields. Then the army had moved on to deal in the same way with the other Athenian army, under the celebrated Nicias.
I thought of Jason of Cholleidae, and wondered if he was still alive. If so, he hadn’t managed to keep my money after all. Then I thought of what Callicrates had been saying, just before he died.
‘Why did they stop shooting and take prisoners?’ I asked. ‘Did the man say?’
‘They ran out of arrows,’ replied my host. ‘Otherwise they’d have killed them all. Sleep well.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
The next morning, fairly early, we set off again. Aristophanes said that, since he had a hangover and was in great pain, he should ride the horse, but I persuaded him that this would not be a good idea by kicking him in the head, which seemed to satisfy him, because he didn’t raise the subject again for at least an hour.
Our host had advised me that the best way to keep out of sight would be to ride along the side of the mountains about half-way up (which is what we had been doing up till then); that way we wouldn’t come across the farmers in the fields or the shepherds up on the top, and so long as we stayed well away from the Acrae side we should be more or less safe. Considering Aristophanes’ conduct with regard to this man’s daughter I was in two minds as to whether we should take his advice, but I couldn’t think of an alternative, so we did. He said we should make Catana in three days, or less if we got a move on and didn’t get lost. We had been given more than enough food to last three days, and just over twelve staters in small coin; mostly Syracusan Arethusas, which are acceptable all over Sicily. Somehow this good fortune worried me; apart from our brief brush with the stone quarrying industry, things were going rather too easily.
