by Tom Holt
‘At least one child has been born in Athens today. He’s going to grow up a citizen of the greatest democracy the world has ever seen. If he doesn’t get killed in the War or by the juries, he’ll live to see the end of democracy in this city — there’ll be an end to it, although it’ll cost a lot of people their lives, and probably be replaced by something worse. But while it lasts, the democracy will carry on the way it’s always carried on. Now you all know about the mythical monsters, with the heads of lions, the bodies of goats, the backsides of gryphons and the feet of camels, who got killed by heroes in the old days. The man who overthrows democracy in Athens will kill a monster made up as follows:
‘First, it has a hundred ears, all on the left side of its head. This enables it to overhear what it’s not supposed to hear, and that’s what it believes. It can’t hear what people tell it, but then, it wouldn’t do that if it could hear it. It’s got ten thousand mouths, which all speak at once and which must all be fed three times a day. They often speak with their mouths full, for example when they vote for free corn distributions, which the City can’t afford but which win votes. In these mouths are many long, sharp teeth, which are like the teeth of an adder; very good for biting and killing people, but useless for digesting food and chewing over the facts. The head has no eyes but a very keen sense of smell; as a result, the monster can’t see where it’s going or where it’s being led, can’t recognise its friends or avoid its enemies; but it can smell a conspiracy at a thousand yards, when the wind is in the opposite direction.
‘This remarkable head is perched on the end of an enormous neck, which is permanently bent backwards at an angle. This makes it possible for the monster to see what everyone else is doing, and to stop them doing it, but it means that the monster can’t see what it’s doing itself. The neck ends in a pair of broad shoulders, on to which a lot of unscrupulous individuals have tied some very heavy baskets full of their own interests. These baskets are full of warships, arrows and suits of armour, and the weight of these baskets is slowly distorting the monster’s spine, so that it can no longer breathe properly, and will eventually break its neck.
‘Next to the shoulders is the monster’s enormous belly. All the produce of the world goes into that belly; but it has no digestive organs, so all the good things that go in through the ten thousand mouths go straight out again through the vast arse, and do nobody any good at all. Because of this, the monster has permanent indigestion, which sours its temper. Next to the belly is the most enormous arse you’ve ever seen, which ends in a long, straggly tail. The monster spends a lot of time standing on this tail, which means that however much energy it expends in trying to go forward, it usually stays exactly where it is.
‘The immense weight of this monster is supported by two spindly little legs called the Long Walls, with razor-sharp claws on the end of them. These claws are called the Assembly and the Law Courts, and the monster uses them to catch its prey. However, because of the problems the monster has in moving about, it can never move fast enough to catch anything, and so it has only two sources of food. One is a large, rancid stew, left over from the time when a man called Cimon hunted a herd of Persians across Asia Minor, let them get away, and started catching Greeks instead. He put all the Greeks he caught into the stew, and the monster has been eating them ever since. But this stew isn’t enough to keep the monster going, so to supplement its diet it carves off lumps of its own flesh and eats them. For this purpose it sometimes uses the claw called Assembly, and sometimes the claw called Law Courts. The wounds which it makes by doing this don’t usually heal.
‘This monster is in the middle of a long and complicated food-chain, which depends on it for its continued existence. For example, the monster is crawling with parasites; informers, politicians, mercenary soldiers, foreign governments and a good many fleas. There are also many scavengers who follow the monster about, picking out the undigested goodies from its shit. Among these we may number the Spartans, the Persians and most of the other Greek states — those of them who weren’t put into the stew by the celebrated Cimon.
‘Because of its peculiar biology — I can’t say life-cycle, because this thing doesn’t breed, it eats all its own children — this creature has a harmful effect on its environment. For example, it poisons, tramples and lays waste good agricultural land all over the world, but particularly in Attica. It also pollutes the sea by discharging into it many hundreds of warships, which sail up and down burning cities, discouraging merchant trade, and then getting sunk by hostile nations. The smell of unburied bodies, rotting food, unjust accusations and fermenting rumours that hangs around the monster is so offensive that it reaches the noses of the Gods themselves, and from time to time they send a plague to try and kill it off, or sink its fleet, or wipe out its army. But the monster is very hard to kill by these methods, and until it eats up the last scraps of Cimon’s stew or gets gangrene from its self-inflicted wounds it won’t starve or die of disease. The greatest threat to its own survival is therefore itself, for the time being; but if a man were to be born who didn’t believe all the terrifying stories about the monster’s invincibility — a Sicilian, for example — he could kill it quite easily by feeding it a great fat cheese poisoned with lies, or by sailing up its arse with all the ships he’d captured from it during the war. And although the monster is very good at damaging things in general, it has no defensive armour except two long walls that serve it as legs and link it to the sea. Once those are broken down, the monster will no longer be able to stand up and will die of starvation, neglect and despair. Its fat will rot away, and when all the flesh has been stripped off its bones by the flocks of Peloponnesian and Asiatic crows which always circle over it, it’s possible that a few hardworking Attic farmers may creep under the shade of its rib cage to build nests and try and grow some barley. But whether they’ll succeed or not I couldn’t say; because although nobody’s worked the land around for years it may be poisoned by all the blood, silver and shit that’s been soaking out of the monster’s pores these last hundred years or so, and so be quite incapable of producing anything.
‘There is, of course, another way of dealing with this thing. We, the men of Attica, could sacrifice the monster to whichever of the Gods is sufficiently demoralised to accept such an offering, cut up its carcase and divide it up among the demes, so much fat to each one. We could then live on this fat until our vines and olives are productive again. This system could work; it worked once before, in Pisistratus’ time. But then it took a dictator to overcome the monster; and although he thought he’d killed it, and could hand on the carcase to his sons to dismember in peace, the beast wasn’t actually dead at all; it lifted its head and snapped up the dictator’s sons in two sharp little mouths called Harmodius and Aristogeiton, and a man called Cleisthenes sewed all the bits back together again. Besides, the dictator kept back most of the meat for himself and his cronies. If you, men of Athens, were to slaughter the beast and take away its flesh to your villages in the country, that would be an end of it, and we could all live happily ever after.
‘But of course you won’t do anything of the sort, will you? No, you’ll vote guilty, as you always do; then you’ll go home and sleep soundly and dream untroubled dreams, as you always do; then you’ll wake up next day and go to Assembly, as you always do; and you’ll listen to some speech proposing that you send a fleet to conquer the moon, as you always do; and that fleet will be destroyed, and thirty thousand men with it, as it always is; and then you’ll execute some innocent little man because he coughed during the Sacred Hymn, as you always do; and then you’ll wonder why the Gods hate you worse than Styx, as you always do; and you’ll execute somebody else for making the Gods angry, as you always do and always will, until the King of Sparta or the Great King of Persia comes and takes all your dangerous toys away from you. And then, when you’re old and crippled, you’ll tell your grandchildren that once there was a democracy in Athens, and in those days honey flowed down the middle
of the streets in a great sticky torrent, and all you had to do was grab a chunk of bread and go out and mop it up. You’ll have forgotten about the informers, and the riots, and the war, and the plague, and the trials of innocent men, and the inordinate quantity of blood you could buy for three obols. Then the poets and the writers of history will say that in the Golden Age of Athens there was a democracy the like of which men shall never see again, when all men were equal and worked together selflessly for the good of the State. And what will happen then, do you suppose? Why, for ever and ever there will be fools who wish they could have a democracy as perfect as the democracy they once had in Athens in Attica, and they’ll fight civil wars and kill each other and paint the walls of their cities black with their blood in the name of democracy, and liberty, and the inalienable rights of man. As they always do, men of Athens, as they always will, unless someone stands up and stops the nonsense, once and for ever.
‘Once upon a time there was a dictator in Athens, and his name was Pisistratus. He seized power in a coup, and abolished democracy. He levied a tax, and with the money he paid for Attica to be planted out with vines and olives, so that in future the Athenian people would have crops to sell and would be able to buy the flour they couldn’t grow for themselves. And for a while everyone was happy, and the Dictator died. And his sons succeeded him, and they tried to carry on his work; but the people of Athens had food now, and they wanted entertainment. So they grew tired of the sons of Pisistratus and wanted to get rid of them; but they were too cowardly to take up arms. And one of the Dictator’s sons fancied a pretty boy called Aristogeiton; but Aristogeiton had a boyfriend called Harmodius, who was pathologically jealous. So together Harmodius and Aristogeiton murdered the Dictator’s son, in a particularly cowardly way: they waited until the Festival, and hid swords in their laurel-wreaths, and when the Dictator’s son went by they killed him. Then, when the dangerous work had been done for them, love of liberty burnt in the blood of the Athenian people, and they shook off the yoke of tyranny. The first thing they did was set up a statue to the celebrated Harmodius and the celebrated Aristogeiton, whom we honour today as the Tyrannicides. That is how we honour men who set us free by accident, prompted by an unworthy motive. How should we honour men whose sole purpose is to set us free?
‘Well, well, the water-clock just burped at me and told me to get stuck into my closing remarks, and I haven’t even begun my defence yet. So I think the only thing I can do in the time available to me is to change my plea to guilty. Yes, men of Athens, I confess. I did smash the statues, just as Demeas and Aristophanes the son of Philip say I did (although between you and me, it’s pure coincidence). I smashed the statues, and I did it in a cold-blooded and calculated attempt to overthrow the democracy, because I want to be remembered as the true Harmodius, the man who set Athens free and gave her laws that are equal for all men. Because, like Harmodius, I will never wholly die, but live for ever in the Islands of the Blessed. Isn’t that what the song says, men of Athens, the one song that every Athenian knows? I want you to convict me, I beg you to convict me; please, please vote guilty, so that I can become a martyr and have a statue in the Market Square and a drinking-song all of my very own. Please, please send me to the prison, where I can drink the hemlock that better men than I have drunk in far worse causes. I implore you, men of Athens, not for my sake only but for the sake of my wife and my little son, vote guilty and condemn me to death, because if you do you’ll be condemning not only yourselves and your children but all the democrats in Attica, and then I will need no avenging Furies with torches and fancy costumes, like an Aeschylean chorus. So cast your votes, men of Athens; vote guilty, just like Demeas said. And remember: any one of you who votes innocent is no true Athenian but an enemy of our democracy and everything that it stands for.’
And that was my speech.
When I finished speaking, there was dead silence, and the only sound was the gurgling of the water-clock. Then everyone started muttering and shaking their heads, as if something very peculiar had just happened and nobody could decide whether it was a miracle or an abomination. The herald, who was looking very puzzled indeed, rose slowly to his feet and instructed the jury to cast their votes.
Now usually there’s a stampede to get to the urns, with everyone pushing and shoving, and toes being trodden on and pebbles being dropped; but this time it seemed as if nobody wanted to be the first to vote; everyone was waiting for somebody else, and the herald lost patience and repeated the announcement. Then the old man I told you about earlier hoisted himself up on his walking-stick and hobbled over to the urns. There was a trickling sound and a faint plonk, as his pebble went down, and in his case at least there was no difficulty about knowing what his vote had been. The sound of a pebble going down a spout seemed to break the spell, and the jurors started casting their votes, until the Court was filled with the sound of falling pebbles, like rain on a flat roof.
For some reason, I wasn’t a bit nervous. Don’t imagine that I was in any way confident about the result; I had no clue whether my gamble had paid off or not. I had put my faith in the Comic dramatist’s oldest gag, violent abuse of the audience; but I had seen that gag fall flat often enough to know that it’s about as safe as a country bridge. Yet I was feeling perfectly calm, and the only way I can explain it is by saying that I didn’t care, one way or the other. But it wasn’t that carelessness I had felt in Sicily, or during the plague; that feeling that I was going to live for ever. I believe that at that moment I had lost that feeling at last. No, it was rather a feeling that I had done what I had set out to do; I had made the Big Joke, and I was satisfied with it and knew it was good, and it didn’t actually matter all that much whether anyone laughed or not. Inside me, I was laughing, being a man who rarely laughs at jokes and never at his own jokes. This moment was, so to speak, the punch-line of my life, and I had delivered it to the best of my ability. If the audience failed to get the point, that was their fault for being stupid.
The votes were all cast now, and the counters were hard at work. They counted; and then they counted again; and then they conferred with the Arch on, who told them to count a third time. And now I began to laugh out loud, because the immortal Gods were obviously joining in on my joke and adding a little touch of their own, to make it superlatively funny. Finally, the Archon was satisfied, and nodded to the herald, who cleared his throat and stood up.
‘The votes cast,’ he said, ‘are as follows. For Guilty, two hundred and fifty votes; for Not Guilty, two hundred and fifty-one votes. The prisoner is therefore discharged.’
Stunned silence; then a gabble such as you only hear when there’s been a serious accident, or someone has murdered somebody in the street. For my part, I nodded to the jury, said ‘Thank you very much’, and started to walk out of the Court, feeling rather subdued. But when I was nearly at the gate, a familiar figure stood up and barred my way. For a moment I panicked and looked round for a way to escape, but my soul told me not to be stupid, and I turned and faced the man. It was the lawyer Python, the one who had offered to write me a speech.
‘Eupolis son of Euchorus,’ he said in a loud voice, ‘I hereby summon you in the presence of witnesses to answer at your trial for the sum of five drachmas, plus two obols interest at the usual rate, being the price of professional services rendered to you, and which you have failed on reasonable notice to pay. If you do not pay this just debt plus the interest aforesaid within five days of this day, I summon you to stand your trial at the Court of Debts at the old and new moon. I name Strephocles son of Xenocles and Pythias son of Conon, both of the deme of Cholleidae, as my witnesses that this summons was truly served.’
I borrowed five drachmas and two obols from someone and paid him; then I started laughing hysterically and had to be taken home.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
If you can remember back that far, you may recall that this was supposed to be the history of my times, written so that the deeds of great men might not be wholly
forgotten, or some such brilliant idea. Perhaps I’m just unendurably self-centred, because it seems to me that what I’ve written is the history of my life, with particular reference to me. Now you’ve probably read more of this sort of thing than I have, and so you’ll know better than I do where a History is supposed to stop; or perhaps you’ve read this far in the ever-diminishing hope that sooner or later I’d break down and start recording all the speeches and battles and votes that took place during the period I’ve been covering — if so, I’d better tell you now that I’m not going to, and you can take the book back to my friend Dexitheus and explain that there’s been a misunderstanding, and I expect he’ll give you your drachma back, so long as you haven’t spilt milk all over it or torn any of the rolls. But if this is going to be the history of my life, then it stands to reason that I can’t possibly finish it until my life is over and I know what happened to me in the end; and then, of course, I won’t be able to write about it, because I’ll be dead. I know that sounds a bit Socratic, but there’s a serious point in there somewhere. For all I know the great tragic events of my life, the truly worthy subjects for dramatic treatment, all lie ahead of me, so that everything I’ve covered so far — my part in the War, my trial and my acquittal — will all be notes in the margin, put in by the copier to explain references in the main text. But I want to believe that the Gods don’t need me as a witness to any more remarkable events. For my part, I’m sick of writing this book; it’s made me remember things I wish I had forgotten completely, and reminded me that I was just as much a fool in my youth as I am now.
