by Tom Holt
‘Oh, you’re pathetic,’ she said. ‘You deserve to get killed.’ She let go of me, marched furiously into the inner room, and bolted the door.
‘Phaedra,’ I called after her.
‘Later!’ she shouted back through the door. ‘When you’ve sobered up.’
I sat down by the fire and tried to think of something. But my options were limited. I tried putting myself in Aristophanes’ shoes. It was a safe bet that he would get a similar visit from Demeas if I wasn’t on Demeas’ front step first thing tomorrow morning clamouring to give evidence. Now, would Aristophanes be put off by the fact that I actually had been a witness, and could presumably give a more convincing account of that night’s activities as a result? Probably not, for the reason that Phaedra had given. Since he had been there, he could paint an equally evocative verbal picture, and since he was the accuser and I was the accused, the Athenian public would be bound to believe him. There is a theory that we have several different laws in Athens, each one dealing with a separate offence. This is not true. Whenever a man appears in the dock, nobody bothers to listen to the charge the official reads out. They know that the accused is really charged with being guilty, and that is one charge on which they will always convict. And in Athens, the sentence for being guilty is usually death by consumption of hemlock.
Which left only one alternative: flight. It is pathetically easy for an accused person to escape from Athens. This is not sheer fecklessness but deliberate policy, since it confirms the fugitive’s guilt without wasting valuable jury time which would be better employed in the more important task of convicting the innocent. It also means that the Public Confiscator can step in quickly to seize the criminal’s property; there is a lamentable tendency among people nowadays to spin out their trials in order to give their relatives time to get the bulk of their fortunes safely over the border.
So I could run for it, if I chose to do so. Where would I go? I would be faced with the horrible prospect of earning a living for myself, in Megara or Boeotia or somewhere like that. It’s all very well for the Alcibiadeses of this world to jump ship and escape; they can take their pick of major cities and royal palaces, all competing to provide shelter and a pension for life to a useful and well-informed traitor. When a nobody like you or me has to escape from his city, he has to take what work he can; and unless he has a valuable skill or craft, this is likely to mean something unpleasant, probably connected with the care and upkeep of pigs or the harvesting of arable produce. We Athenians are not liked in Greece as a whole; we find it hard to get work. Now my only skill is the composition of plays, and the market for what I produce is limited to one city. Beyond that, I would be lucky to get seasonal work picking olives or grapes, and that is not my idea of life. Things have changed, and I know I’m old-fashioned, but I still believe (and everybody thought so then) that a man who has to depend on another man for his living, whether you call him a servant or an employee or whatever, is in reality nothing more than a slave, taking orders and doing what he is told. A man without land is a man without freedom, and without freedom there is no point in being alive. Even when I was on the run in Sicily, I had freedom; that was all I had.
So I wasn’t going to run, and if I stayed I would have to inform on Aristophanes or die. Now I called on my soul for a little good advice, but that usually eloquent spirit pretended not to hear me, and I was on my own. After a lot of thought, I saw what I had to do, and it seemed to make a sort of sense.
There had to be a reason why the God had chosen to save me, out of all those men, in the plague and the battle. I knew what that reason was; to protect the son of Philip, for as long as I lived. Now the God had so arranged matters that I had to die in order to keep him alive; but that at least explained why I had survived the plague and the battle, and in an illogical world you tend to cling to whatever explanations you can find. Now we were talking about that clever fellow Euripides a moment ago. By and large I detest his work, which is brash and modern and clever for the sake of being clever; but there is one scene of his which I must confess I like.
It’s in his Hercules, and it comes at the point in the play where the hero, having just wiped out his family because the Goddess Hera has driven him mad in order to spite Zeus, is being comforted by his friend Theseus. Now Theseus says that Hercules has nothing to feel guilty about; the blame lies with the Gods, who made him do it. After all, says Theseus, the Gods have no moral code; they cheat and rob each other, even bind each other in chains. Hercules is furious at this, and turns on his friend. No, he says, I don’t believe that the Gods bind each other in chains, or are capable of any evil; they are pure and holy, and everything they do is for the best.
So, then; whatever Dionysus was up to with me, it was for the best. This took all the weight off my shoulders — isn’t that what Gods are for? It helped me to put aside my feelings of guilt at abandoning Phaedra and my son to a life of misery, for the duty a man owes to the Gods is greater than any mortal duty, and besides, the God would now have an obligation to look after Phaedra and Eutychides, for that is how the system works. I turned this solution over in my mind, and I could find no flaw in it; my only regret was that I had discovered my talent for working out the designs of the Gods too late in life to be able to make a name for myself as a Tragic poet.
As I sat there and stared into the fire, delighted with my own cleverness, Phaedra opened the door of the inner room.
‘Feeling better now?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ I replied.
‘So you’ve changed your mind?’
‘No.’
‘I see.’ She breathed out sharply. ‘Because of the God?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re quite mad, you realise,’ she said. ‘I mean, your brain has actually gone.’
‘If you say so.’
She sat down beside me, and neither of us said anything for a while.
‘What did happen in Sicily?’ she said.
I frowned. ‘Is this quite the time for reminiscences?’ I asked. ‘Shouldn’t we be discussing how to get as much of my money out of the country as we can before they send in the Confiscator?’
‘That can wait,’ she said. ‘What did happen in Sicily?’ So I told her. It took a long time — well, you can understand why, if you’ve actually read this far and aren’t just skipping through looking for the speeches. I found it easy to tell her, now that I had reached my decision, and she listened carefully, not interrupting except when she couldn’t follow what I was saying. Occasionally I would stop, for some reason or other, and she would give me a hug and tell me to go on. It was then that I realised that I had made the right decision in accepting her, although it seemed that that decision would not turn out to be terribly important after all. When I told her about the walled orchard and the God, perhaps she understood, I don’t know. When I had finished, she sat quietly for a while, picking at the hem of her dress.
‘Well?’ I asked.
‘Well what?’
‘Does it make any difference, hearing all that stuff?’
She considered this for a moment. ‘It depends what you mean,’ she said.
‘That’s a strange answer.’
‘Yes, it makes a difference,’ she said. ‘No, it doesn’t make a difference where a difference would help. I still don’t understand why you can’t inform on Aristophanes.’
‘Weren’t you listening, then? Would you like me to go back over it?’
She shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, ‘maybe you did see the God, or maybe you thought you did; the effect would be the same. Maybe you made yourself see the God.’
‘I don’t follow.’
Phaedra thought for a moment and then said, ‘Maybe you needed to see the God. You couldn’t understand what was going on. If you didn’t find an explanation for all that death and destruction you’d go mad or die. Like when you were a boy in the plague. Your soul needed some way to force you to save yourself when you’d given up and become resigne
d to dying; so it made you see the God. And in Sicily, it was pretty well the same thing. If you were going to survive when everyone else was dying, you had to see the God. You had to be different — special, even. There had to be a credible reason why the God should spare you and not the others. When you were a boy, that reason was that when you grew up, you knew you were going to be a great poet; that was reason enough for the God to want to save you when everyone else died. Then, in Sicily, you tried the same thing; only now you were a great poet, or as great as you were ever likely to get. It wouldn’t work so well. It worked well enough to get you out of the walled orchard, but it wasn’t going to sustain you across half of Sicily. And then Aristophanes turns up, and your inventive Athenian mind said yes, of course, that’s it. My reason for being alive is to look after the son of Philip.’
‘Clever,’ I said. ‘Socratic, almost. But that doesn’t explain away the other time I saw Him; in the Theatre, after my play flopped. I wasn’t in any danger then.’
‘Oh, you just imagined it that time,’ said Phaedra. ‘Over-excitement, hot sun, not much sleep the night before.’
‘All right then,’ I said. ‘How come the God was able to predict his own reappearances? How come my soul when I was a boy was able to see that one day I’d have a play flop and end up in a walled orchard?’
Phaedra shrugged. ‘Simple,’ she said. ‘Mental revision. You’ve rewritten your own memory. You’ve scraped off what was there before and put in something else, like the officials do when they’re cheating the naval accounts.’
‘You won’t starve,’ I said. ‘You can be the first woman philosopher.’
‘I thought you’d be too stupid to understand,’ she said. ‘Never mind, it can’t be helped.’
She put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me. ‘So what do you think we ought to do?’ I asked. She considered this for a moment.
‘I think we should go to bed,’ she said. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m dead to the world. Sorry, that was tactless of me. Very tired, I should have said.’
‘I meant, what should we do about this Demeas business?’
‘Well,’ she said, ‘if I were you, I’d write the funniest speech you’ve ever written in your life and use it as your defence at the trial. It’s the only hope you’ve got.’ Suddenly she threw her arms around me, nearly crushing my windpipe (for she was a strong woman, though you wouldn’t know it to look at her). ‘Eupolis, you idiot,’ she said, ‘I don’t want you to be killed.’ Then she started to cry. That nearly broke my heart, and I tried to comfort her.
‘Phaedra,’ I said, ‘don’t worry, everything will be all right. Your father will look after you and the boy, I know he will. He hasn’t got a male heir, so Eutychides will be provided for. And there’s plenty of time to get some of the money out; you know how long trials are taking…’
‘Oh, you’re horrible,’ she sobbed. ‘You’re going to die, and all you think about is money. That’s absolutely typical. You just don’t think, do you?’
She wrenched herself out of my arms, fled into the inner room, and bolted the door again.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The nice thing about being under sentence of death is that you stop worrying about the trivial things in life; and if, like me, you’re prone to worrying, this is a great advantage.
It’s all right, you haven’t dropped a scroll out of the book; we haven’t got to the trial yet. I was speaking figuratively. I only felt as if I was under sentence of death. Now you will say I’m exaggerating, trying to make my story more dramatic. Well, perhaps you’re right. We shall see.
I went round to Aristophanes’ house the next morning. I don’t know what I expected to achieve, but it would have been worth trying if I had managed to see him. But the slave who answered the door said he was out of the City on business and would not be expected back for a week at the earliest. Now at first I wondered if the son of Philip had panicked and fled; this would solve everybody’s problems, and I began to feel cautiously optimistic. But, to make sure, I set my slave Thrax to watch Aristophanes’ house, and sure enough he reported back not long after to say that he had seen Aristophanes go out and come back half an hour later with two partridges, a sea bass and a Copaic eel. Evidently the prospect of informing on the man who had saved his life was not having a harmful effect on his appetite.
So off I went again; and again the slave told me that Aristophanes was out. He can’t have remembered me from my earlier visit, since this time he told me that his master had gone off to Eleusis for a fortnight to attend the Mysteries. I asked him whether he was sure, and he said, yes, why shouldn’t he be; and then I asked him if he liked sea bass. He said no. Then I gave it up as a bad job and came home.
Phaedra said I should go and see Demeas. She reckoned that I could double-cross him, by promising to give evidence on his behalf; and then, when he called me at the trial, I could swear blind that Aristophanes was as innocent as the day was long, and that Demeas had offered me money to give false evidence against him. The Athenian public love treachery but hate traitors, as the saying goes, and they might just have swallowed that and killed Demeas instead; but obviously it was too late to do that, now that Aristophanes had so clearly done a deal with Demeas, and all I could say to Phaedra was that it was a great pity she hadn’t thought of that last night, when it might have done some good. Not that it would have, of course; Demeas was far too experienced at that sort of thing to be caught out so easily, and it would probably have brought about the death of both Aristophanes and me.
In spite of Phaedra’s protests, I set about getting some of my money out of Athens. There were two problems. One was how to realise my assets; the other was where to send them once they were realised. There was no earthly point in sending money to any part of the Athenian Empire, since it could be recovered from there with no trouble at all by the Public Confiscator. But there was similarly no point at all in sending it into some enemy country, since then Phaedra wouldn’t be able to get it back and the Spartans would probably get it and fritter it away on warships or some such nonsense. Then, when we were going through Phaedra’s jewellery, we came across the pendant (gaudy but not cheap) which the Thessalian princes had given me when I went on my embassy there. We looked at each other and said, ‘Well …’ but neither of us could think of a better idea; so I sent out Thrax again to ask an acquaintance of mine who was a Councillor if Alexander and Jason were still alive and in power. The answer came back that Alexander had murdered Jason and was ruling on his own. So I sat down and wrote Alexander a letter. I reminded him of our visit and thanked him once again for the performance of my General, crammed in as much theatrical gossip as I could remember or invent, and added my love and best wishes. Then, as a sort of postscript, I said that I was sending with the letter a small sum of money; if he would look after it for me until either my wife or her agent came and collected it, I would be ever so obliged to him and terribly, terribly grateful. Then, in a moment of inspiration, I said that as a tiny mark of my esteem I was sending him the original manuscript of two of my plays and a copy of the collected works of Aeschylus —luckily I had one by me, quite legibly copied and sturdily boxed up. I think it must have been those two manuscripts of mine, or maybe the Aeschylus, that did the trick, because when the time came, Alexander paid up virtually in full, and added a pair of gold earrings and an iron brooch in the form of a dung-beetle, as a present.
There was still the problem of a trustworthy messenger; but Phaedra suggested my steward from Pallene. You may remember that I had used his name for the hero of my Maricas. He was devoted to me, I knew, but getting on in years and not up to a long and dangerous journey. But he had a son, Philochorus (named in my honour), who was young and strong and had been on trading expeditions, so I sent for him.
Now it sounds easy enough to talk of realising assets, but of course it wasn’t as simple as that, not by a long way. I had sixty-eight acres of land, almost as much as Alcibiades himself, although mine was of co
urse more widely spread, and a fair amount of it was bare rock. Still, it was a huge estate, and there was no point even trying to sell it, as a whole or in parts. Things are very different now, of course, but in my day people simply didn’t sell land, unless they were destitute or didn’t have enough to live on and wanted to buy a ship or something. The best I could do was mortgage it or grant long leases, and I only managed to dispose of about eight acres that way. I could only get a fraction of its value, too; not only did the people I was trying to do business with have a fairly shrewd idea of what I was about, but the market was by now well and truly flooded, what with the confiscations and so many estates being masterless after the Sicilian campaign. I was due for my fair share of that, by the way; two cousins of mine, who I had never met, were killed in the War, and I was their nearest male relative. It seemed ironic at the time; there I was about to add nearly eighteen acres to my already quite considerable fortune, and I wouldn’t live to fight the lawsuit. I assigned it in writing to my son, but without any prospect of his ever coming to contest the case.
What I could dispose of was my various other interests. I had never really appreciated how valuable they were — things like shares in ships and mines and factories aren’t like land; you don’t cherish every little bit of them, and show them off to your son, you just leave them to the people who know about such things and go over the receipts once a year to make sure you aren’t being cheated. But when it comes to raising money in a hurry, there’s nothing to compare with such things. What with the War and the disturbed state of everything, of course, nobody was wildly enthusiastic to buy, but I was able to get rid of some of them by lowering my price sufficiently. Finally, of course, there was my actual reserve of coined silver; that wasn’t to be sneezed at, when all was said and done. My uncle Philodemus had brought me up to keep at least a talent in ready money at all times, and I have always done this, if possible. Not for the first time, I was grateful to him. In addition to this, Callicrates’ widow sent me a loan of half a talent, from the reserve Callicrates had also maintained. I really didn’t want to accept it, but she insisted; it was what he would have done, she said, if he had been alive, and to please me she accepted a mortgage on some of my land in Pallene as security.
