The Walled Orchard

by Tom Holt

  Aristophanes was there, of course, and his demeanour throughout was rather amusing. He was acting the part of a public-spirited citizen who was doing his painful duty, and apart from making a formal denial of his allegations I let him get on with it. His account of what happened that night ran as follows: he had been walking home after a farewell party for a friend of his; he couldn’t produce witnesses for this, since the friend and the other people at the party had conveniently died in Sicily. He had been passing my house when he saw me and a group of others whom he didn’t recognise smashing up the statues with swords and calling on Hecate to confound the Sicilian Expedition. He tried to remonstrate with me, but I threatened to kill him and he fled. He had not brought this evidence forward until now since we had been in the War together and he had saved my life on a number of occasions; but Demeas had convinced him that it was his duty to the City to say what he knew.

  Apart from him, I didn’t recognise any of the other witnesses who swore that they had seen me that night. Since an Athenian jury loves the evidence of slaves extracted by torture (they enjoy hearing about the red-hot irons and so forth), Demeas had borrowed a job lot of broken-down old Thracians and Syrians from a friend of his who had a silver-mining concession, and these specimens were particularly eloquent for men who knew very little Greek. I think they had rather enjoyed being tortured, as a change from working in the mines; anyway, they had been so well rehearsed in their lines that they almost convinced me that they were telling the truth. And yet I am usually a very sceptical man, and find it hard to credit that a slave is more likely to give truthful evidence simply because a public official has been beating him up. A slave is like any other witness; either you believe him or you don’t. But Solon (or whoever it was) has ordained that a slave can’t testify unless he’s been hung upside down and flogged within an inch of his life, and I suppose you can’t pick and choose which of Solon’s laws you’re going to adopt. If you want the intelligent laws about wills and intestate succession, you have to put up with the code of evidence and hope that when it comes to your case, the slave in question will take the same reasonable view.

  When I got home, Phaedra had a bowl of spiced wine and a basket of wheat bread waiting for me, and I peeled off my sandals and collapsed in front of the fire. I didn’t want to talk, and so she didn’t ask me what had happened; there was no point, since if there had been anything to report I would have told her as soon as I came through the door. Instead, we sat and looked at each other in silence for a while.

  ‘Well?’ Phaedra said at last. ‘You’re going through with it?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘As far as I can see, it’s the only real chance.’

  She breathed in deeply and shook her head. ‘It’s your life,’ she said. ‘You know what I think about it.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ I said irritably. ‘You really know how to give a man confidence.’

  ‘You asked me what I thought of the idea,’ she replied, ‘and I gave you my honest opinion. What did you want me to do, say it was brilliant and let you get on with it?’

  ‘It’s too late to change it now,’ I said firmly. ‘Once you start trying to amend pleadings, you might as well hang yourself and save the State the jury pay. And there was never any point in trying to make a case out of perjured witnesses and the like; that’s Demeas’ trade, and he’s better at it than me.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ she said reluctantly. ‘I mean, in theory it’s a good idea. It’s just putting it into practice that strikes me as dangerous. There’s so many what-ifs.’

  ‘Not nearly so many as there would have been if I’d tried to do it the other way,’ I replied. ‘This way, there’s just one big what-if; what if they don’t like it? And I’ve been dealing with that in the Theatre all my life.’

  She shrugged. ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘like you said, it’s too late now. Don’t worry, I’m not going to go all sulky on you now.’

  I leaned over and took her hand. ‘That’s a good girl,’ I said.

  ‘I hate that expression,’ she said. ‘Patronising, don’t you think? As if I was about twelve years old and I’d just managed to make the soup without burning it. Tired?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘Then eat your bread and get an early night. You’ve got work to do tomorrow.’ She got up and poured me a cup of the spiced wine. ‘Don’t sit up all night, you won’t be able to think properly.’

  After she had gone to bed, I sat there in the dark and tried to get an opening line for my speech. I always believe that if you can get an opening line — for anything: chorus, speech, lyric, whatever — the rest will follow of its own accord. Now the beginning of a defence speech is crucial and very difficult to get right; in fact, the beginning is matched in complexity and importance only by the middle and the end. But try as I might, I couldn’t get the form of words I wanted; it was either too colloquial or too formal, and I couldn’t picture myself standing up in Court and actually saying it. Then the answer suddenly came to me. My problem was that I was trying to compose prose, which was something I had never tried before. All I had to do was compose it in verse and then say it like prose, and perhaps mess about with some of the words to stop it sounding too much like verse when I said it. As soon as I tried doing that, it started to flow like water from a spring. I had just rounded the thing off to my entire satisfaction when Phaedra came stumbling out of the inner room.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ she yawned, ‘it’s the middle of the night. Leave it.’

  ‘It’s all right,’ I said, ‘I’ve got it. Go to bed, I’ll be through in a moment.’

  She blinked. ‘You’ve got it?’ she said. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘My speech,’ I replied impatiently. ‘It’s finished.’

  ‘Oh.’ She frowned. ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it any good?’

  ‘Do you want to hear it?’

  ‘No.’ She yawned again. ‘I mean, if it’s good now, it’ll still be good in the morning.’

  I had expected a little more enthusiasm, but I could see she was tired. ‘All right then,’ I said, ‘I’m coming.

  ‘Good,’ she replied.

  I know it’s a classic; but I don’t like the Odyssey. In particular, I don’t like the opening. Now I know it’s all very clever, the way Homer keeps back the first appearance of Odysseus until the poem is well under way; this is designed to create suspense and intrigue the reader. But I can’t be doing with suspense. My attention lapses. I start thinking of something else. Then, when I rejoin the poem or the play or whatever it is, I find I’ve missed an important bit and can’t get back into it. So I won’t try and build up the tension any more, although it would be easy enough to do; instead, we’ll go forward to the day of the trial itself.

  We left the house just before dawn and walked slowly down towards the Court. On the way, I bumped into a friend of mine called Leagoras, a neighbour at Pallene. He asked where I was going, and I told him that I was on my way to stand my trial. He asked what the charge was, and when I told him he was most surprised, and said that, since he had no business in the City that day that could not wait, he would come with me, and take a message back to Pallene when he went home should that be necessary. I thanked him, and we went on together to the Odeon.

  The first case of the day was just starting, and we sat down on the benches outside to wait. It had turned out a sunny, drowsy sort of a day, the kind of day I love to spend in the country, when there is not much that needs doing. It was hard to make my mind work properly, and both Phaedra and Leagoras were no help at all; Phaedra didn’t want to talk, and Leagoras was full of the news from Pallene — whose vines were doing well, who was suing who for trespass and moving boundary-stones, who had got whose daughter pregnant and so on; and although as a general rule I like listening to this sort of gossip, at least when I’m in the City, I couldn’t give it the attention it needed if I was to take an interest in it. To tell you the truth, my mind was as nearly
blank as it ever can be (for I am a restless man by nature) and I felt a great wave of lassitude creeping up from my feet and infiltrating every part of me. Very soon, I knew, I would fall asleep; and falling asleep in the sun does me no good at all. I wake up with a sore neck and a headache, which I generally don’t lose until nightfall. This of course was the worst possible thing that could happen to a man who is about to stand his trial, with the exception of toothache or diarrhoea, and I was on the point of getting up and going for a walk to wake myself up when I saw a familiar figure walking up the street towards me.

  It was no surprise to see Socrates the son of Sophroniscus hanging about the Law Courts; although he fervently denies it, he can generally be found somewhere in the neighbourhood of a good, juicy trial. He is not, strictly speaking, one of the speech-writers, like Python; but he makes a lot of money from what he calls his thinking lessons, which are little more than preparatory courses for litigants, and is always on the lookout for new clients. Since the disgrace and exile of his most prestigious pupil, the celebrated Alcibiades, business had been rather slack, and I hadn’t heard his name quite so often in the Market Square or the Baths.

  Phaedra and Leagoras obviously wanted to avoid him, for they tried to snuggle down inside their clothes and disappear; but I regarded Socrates’ arrival as an omen from the Gods, like an eagle or an owl flying over my head. So I called out and waved to him; and sure enough he came bounding over, like a hungry dog who hears the sound of a plate on the kitchen floor.

  ‘Good morning, Eupolis,’ he said through one of those enormous grins of his. ‘You’re rather out of your way here, aren’t you? Shouldn’t you be down in the Market Square, nosing out some bits of gossip for a play?’

  I smiled in such a way as to communicate lack of amusement. ‘And shouldn’t you be at the Lyceum?’ I replied. ‘You don’t want to lose your pitch if there are gullible young men about, with money in their pockets.’

  Socrates laughed, displaying his fine collection of yellow teeth. He never cleans them, even when he eats onions and garlic, since he purports to regard such practices as effete and not worthy of an ascetic. For an ascetic though, he’s merciless on stuffed quails. ‘You know better than that, son of Euchorus,’ he said. ‘You’ll get me into trouble, saying things like that. You’ve been watching too many of your own plays.’

  ‘Are you busy?’ I asked, making room for him on the bench. ‘I have an hour or so to kill, waiting for my case to come on, and I know you’re always ready for a chat.’

  ‘I certainly am,’ he replied. ‘Free of charge, seeing it’s you. Only you must promise not to pirate any of my material in your lawsuit. Are you prosecuting or defending?’

  ‘Defending,’ I replied.

  He nodded. ‘A serious charge?’

  ‘Fairly serious,’ I replied. ‘They say I was one of the men who damaged the statues.’

  Socrates raised his eyebrows. ‘Is that so?’ he said, and sat down next to me. ‘And did you?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I was in bed at the time with my wife here. But of course she can’t give evidence, being a woman, and I can produce no one else who saw me. And that’s a point that intrigues me, Socrates. Perhaps you and I could clarify it between us, if you have nothing better to do. Why is it that a woman should be forbidden to give evidence in a court of law, when men and even slaves, if tortured, are acceptable as witnesses?’ I scratched my nose, then continued. ‘After all, they have the same five senses as we do, and minds just like men. We listen to the evidence of men with doubtful characters, don’t we, and trust ourselves to be able to assess its weight. Why can’t we accept the evidence of women?’

  Socrates leaned back in his seat, with his hands clasped around his left knee. ‘So you are saying that there is no difference between men and women?’

  ‘Certainly there is a difference,’ I replied, ‘just as there’s a difference between Greeks and foreigners, and Athenians and other Greeks. But this difference doesn’t make such a great difference that we should refuse to accept anything they say as the truth. I mean, when you ask your wife what’s for dinner and she says dried fish, you believe her, don’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Socrates, settling himself more comfortably in his seat. ‘Invariably.’

  ‘And when you ask her what she did while you were out and she says she mended the hole in your tunic, you take her word, don’t you? In the absence of contrary evidence, such as the smell of wine on her breath, or the bedclothes being ruffled up?’

  ‘Indeed I do, Eupolis.’

  ‘And yet,’ I said, ‘Xanthippe isn’t an unnaturally truthful woman, is she? She’s not under some curse, like that woman in the old story who cheated Apollo and was cursed with the inability to lie?’

  ‘She’s the same as other women in that respect,’ said Socrates, plainly wondering where all this was leading. ‘I couldn’t say for sure.’

  ‘But if there was a prosecution and she was a witness, she couldn’t give evidence,’ I said. ‘Tell me why that is, I’d like to know. Then I might be able to persuade the Court to let Phaedra testify, and perhaps I wouldn’t have to die after all.’

  Socrates furrowed his brow for a moment. ‘What is the difference, would you say,’ he said, ‘between women and men? The main difference, I mean, not just the obvious anatomical differences. We can take those for granted.’

  It was my turn to frown. ‘I suppose,’ I said, ‘it’s that women stay in the house all day while men go out to work in the fields.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Socrates, and he let go of his knee and sat upright. ‘Now, have you ever seen a rabbit?’

  ‘Often, Socrates, often.’

  ‘And aren’t rabbits hard to see, because of their grey fur?’

  ‘Well,’ I said, ‘it’s not easy to see them, unless you know what to look for.’

  ‘And the first time you saw a rabbit,’ Socrates continued, ‘did you identify it for yourself, or did someone point it out to you?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I replied, thinking hard for a moment. ‘I believe someone said, “Look, there’s a rabbit” and I said, “Where?” and he pointed, and I saw it.’

  ‘So he saw the rabbit first, and showed you what to look for?’

  ‘As far as I can remember, yes.’

  ‘And you had been looking in that direction,’ said Socrates, ‘and saw the same things as he did, but because you didn’t know how to pick out a rabbit against a background of grey rocks, you hadn’t identified it as a rabbit?’

  ‘That’s pretty much what happened,’ I said, folding my arms in front of me, ‘so far as I can recall. It was a long time ago, you understand.’

  ‘Oh, of course,’ said Socrates. ‘Now, supposing you had never had a friend who knew what a rabbit looked like, do you suppose it’s possible that you could have gone through life looking at stone outcrops and never known that there were rabbits all around you?’

  ‘Perfectly possible,’ I said, and scratched my ear.

  ‘Or take speedwell,’ Socrates went on. ‘You know what speedwell looks like, of course.’

  ‘I should say I do, Socrates,’ I replied. ‘I was brought up in the mountains, you know. It has a long, thin stalk and blue flowers.’

  ‘But if no one had ever told you what it was,’ said Socrates, looking me straight in the eye, ‘if you had been abandoned on the hillside at birth and brought up by wolves, like the child in the story, you wouldn’t know that the blue flower was speedwell, would you?’

  ‘Come to think of it,’ I replied, ‘I don’t suppose I would.’

  ‘Now let us suppose you are walking in the hills and you look up at the sky and see black clouds. What would you expect?’

  I knew the answer to that. ‘Rain,’ I replied.

  ‘And why precisely would you expect rain? Because someone had told you that it rains from black clouds?’

  ‘Yes indeed.’

  ‘Or perhaps you found it out for yourself, by experience,’ said Socrates, l
eaning his chin thoughtfully on the back of his hand. ‘You worked out that every storm of rain you could remember was preceded by black clouds, and your mind, being rational, rejected the explanation that this was a mere coincidence.’

  I nodded profoundly. ‘That’s what a rational mind would do,’ I agreed.

  ‘Well then,’ said Socrates brightly, ‘now that we’ve established these preliminary points, we can return to your original enquiry, about women and the Courts. Suppose there was a lawsuit, and it was vital to the evidence whether there had been a rabbit, or a sprig of speedwell, in a particular place. Would a person who couldn’t identify a rabbit at sight or tell speedwell from soldanella be able to give good evidence?’

  ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘Exactly,’ said Socrates, grinning. ‘There might well have been a rabbit or a speedwell plant there, but this person would have looked straight at it and not recognised it, and would in all honesty tell the jury that he hadn’t seen a rabbit or a speedwell plant. And then the jury would think that the defendant, who had just claimed there was a rabbit or a speedwell in the place in question, was a liar and not to be believed on any matter, and vote to have him put to death. Whereas if the ignorant witness had not been allowed to testify, admittedly the defendant’s evidence would not be corroborated, but at least his own credit as a witness would be unimpaired. Am I right?’