by Tom Holt
So I was tempted when I started work this morning to make the moment of my acquittal the last scene in this drama, taking it as a good cue for the final chorus, a little dance by a soloist, and then straight off to the party. Certainly it seemed like one at the time, particularly to a man like myself who has an innate sense of dramatic structure. It seemed to me as I walked home that day that everything appeared to fit into place; all the actors had had the right amount to say, all their exits and entrances and changes of costume and mask had worked out all right in the end, every theme introduced could be justified in terms of the play’s overall effect. Quite often, when I’ve written a play, I’m sitting there feeling complacent when the herald calls on my chorus and I suddenly think of the perfect joke or the perfect line of dialogue that would round off a scene or thatch over a gap; and then, of course, there’s nothing I can do about it, and the poor thing is doomed to be incomplete for ever. But I had no such feeling that evening, when I peeled my sandals off my unusually damp feet and fell on to the couch in my own familiar house. The funny story about Eupolis of Pallene seemed to be over, and its protagonist appeared to be free to go.
But of course it didn’t work out like that; it never does, and that’s where your great poets go wrong. One day, I want to write a great big long epic poem about what happened to all the heroes of Troy after they finally got home, regained their thrones, hung up their shields in the rafters and settled down to do a little farming. I want to make all those tired old men jump through a few more hoops, just when they thought they could change into their old clothes and have a rest. I want to make Odysseus come out of retirement to deal with a catastrophic outbreak of sheep-blight in Ithaca, or to try and get the island’s council to find the money to get the harbour properly repaired and the roads put in order. I want Menelaus to have to get up off his backside and do something about the shortage of seasonal labour in the Spartan olive-growing industry; though it may just be an excuse on his part to get out of the house and away from Helen, who has got very fat since she returned from Troy, and is always on at him to redecorate the inner room. I want Neoptolemus to wake up one morning to find that some bastard has stolen his best plough and left the gate of the sheep-fold open.
After my trial, the first thing I did, apart from getting a good night’s sleep and eating far too much breakfast, was make an attempt to straighten out my affairs, which were in a dreadful state. The bulk of my movable fortune was up in Thessaly, and for all I knew had been spent by the delightful Alexander on chariot-races for the local chieftains. I had a number of disastrous mortgages and leases to try and wriggle out of somehow, and in addition quite a few inheritances to dispute — several distant relatives of mine had died in Sicily leaving no heirs, and my claim to their property was as good as anyone else’s. In fact, when at last everything was sorted out and the best part of the money I had sent to Thessaly had quite remarkably been returned to me, I found I was better off than before, because of these inheritances. It only goes to show that the best way to get rich in a city like Athens is to live longer than anyone else.
But it all took time, and I couldn’t count on any help or co-operation from anyone. The nature of my escape from Demeas made me an object of great suspicion in Athens for a while, and when I think about it, it was a miracle that I wasn’t had up all over again on any one of a vast number of charges. After all, I had quite clearly recommended the overthrow of democracy in a public speech, and men have died just for hinting at less. But I reckon that saying it all in such an outspoken manner was such a grotesque and incredible thing to do that nobody could really believe that I had done it. And that’s something I’ve noticed about communities such as ours; if you have courage, or what looks like courage, people don’t like tangling with you. If you let them see you’re afraid of them they’ll have you; but if you make yourself look bigger than you are, they’ll leave you in peace and pick on someone else. Nevertheless, it was obvious that I shouldn’t push my luck. The best thing so far as I was concerned would be if the name Eupolis was completely forgotten, at least for a while.
Of course, this meant that anything so conspicuous as presenting a play was out of the question. Whatever I put in the anapaests, however innocuous, would be regarded as an incitement to civil war, and Demeas or someone like him would be after me like a dog after a lame hare. But this self-imposed exile from the Theatre turned out to be less of a hardship for me than I had anticipated, at least to begin with. I found that there was very little I wanted to say, and the urge to write Comedy had left me. At first I was surprised; I couldn’t imagine being Eupolis and not wanting to compose verses. But it left a larger gap in my life than I had ever dreamed it would.
For example, as a general rule, when I can’t get to sleep I don’t count sheep or make lists of the names of cities beginning with each letter of the alphabet, as other men do; I compose speeches and choruses. When I’m working out of doors, I keep from getting bored by thrashing out anapaests. Even when I’m walking down the street, I tend to walk to an iambic rhythm, with a loud clop of the right foot for a spondee and a little pause to mark the caesura. Again, I find it hard to pattern my days if I haven’t got a play in progress. Under normal conditions, you see, life is a battle to carve out a few uninterrupted hours for serious work from the rocky wastes of meaningless chores that surround me on all sides; without the excuse of a play to fiddle with, I have no excuse for not taking part in all those hundreds of pointless activities which all the other members of my species seem to regard as necessary and I abhor. I suppose politicians have the same trouble when they’re in exile, or blacksmiths or pirates when they get too old to work.
But, for a while at least, I was happy not writing; in fact, I was happy doing nothing, which anyone who knows me would regard as a contradiction in terms. I am the sort of man who is capable of doing any amount of work, just so long as it doesn’t feel like work. Anything that I’ve got to do makes me feel like I’m wearing lead boots. But after my acquittal, I did nothing at all, until Phaedra got quite sick of the sight of me in a chair and told me to go away and write something. But there was nothing for me to write, and I can no more write when I don’t feel like it than I can be sick when I don’t feel ill. I came to the conclusion that Athens was not the place for me to be, and so, four months after the trial, Phaedra and I set off for Pallene. There is, I told her, always something for a man who still has the use of his arms and legs to do in the country, and once I was in Pallene 1 would soon snap out of it.
I was wrong. Instead, there proved to be far more nothing for me to do. If I tried working in the fields, I would end up leaning on my mattock gazing at the hillside, until my steward politely asked me to go away because I was setting the slaves a bad example. If I went out with the goats it was even worse, and someone would have to be sent out after me to stop them straying and getting taken in and rebranded by an unscrupulous neighbour. There was one dreadful occasion, I remember, when I was entrusted with a load of figs and told to go and sell them in the market. I got the cart most of the way down the mountain; but then the axle broke, and the whole load went everywhere, with a tremendous smashing of jars and cascading of figs; and instead of swearing terribly and jumping down to see to it, I just sat there on the box of the broken cart thinking how funny it was, until someone else came up behind me and yelled at me to unblock the road so that he could get his cart through. In the end I got everything sorted out; but by then it was too late to go to market so I went back home again, and everyone was extremely surprised to see me.
One thing I did do that was constructive and useful was to spend a little more time with my son. This in itself was frowned on — it’s not a father’s place to go interfering with his child’s upbringing before the child has reached an age where a father’s influence is valuable. But those around me reckoned that, given the state I was in, I could do less damage to the efficient running of the household if I took the child up on to the hill and sat watching him crawl
about. I say it was constructive and useful; I’m not meaning to imply it was constructive and useful to the boy, who probably didn’t recognise me. But I enjoyed it. I’d never greatly cared for children before then — anyone you can’t discuss Comic poetry with, I had always thought, is largely a waste of time. But there’s nothing like spending some time with a prattling child for putting your life in perspective. To a child, you see, everything is so terribly immediate; present discomforts are insufferable, present wants and ambitions are all-important, and the most distant future imaginable is sunset. Now I was in the middle of trying to work out what I really wanted out of my life — though I didn’t realise it at the time — and this new way of looking at time was a useful comparison. The way you measure time depends on what you do and who you are. A child, as I have just said, measures time by the day. A farmer thinks in three-year blocks; one year’s produce in the field and two years’ supplies laid up in the barn. Landless casual workers and Comic poets measure time by the year; either where this year’s work is going to be, or what he’s going to show at this year’s Festivals. This annual approach is marginally better than the child’s, but it doesn’t make for stability. The other way of looking at things, which I couldn’t help doing, was the way a man uses time when he’s unexpectedly alive after resigning himself to dying, and that’s by the minute, or the second.
But the main factor in the great rearrangement of my life was Phaedra. Almost incidentally, in the tremendous disturbances that Demeas brought into my life, I had discovered that Phaedra and I could, if we were careful, not only endure but enjoy living together. I wanted to make use of this discovery and put it to the test. For her part, Phaedra seemed mainly to want to get on with sorting out the store-cupboard or making a coverlet for the bed, and regarded all my attempts at sitting down and talking things through as irritating interruptions in her daily routine. But I persevered; and although we never had the grand debate about the nature of married life that one of those semi-philosophical writers would have inserted into the story at this point, we seemed to come to a sort of unspoken settlement; we both agreed to accept the change in our attitudes towards each other, so long as neither of us ever mentioned it out loud.
It was about this time, when I was in Pallene getting under everyone’s feet, that the political situation began to change, subtly but in such a way that even I began to feel distinctly nervous. Now the last thing in the world that I want to suggest is that my speech had anything to do with it; but perhaps my acquittal was a symptom that something was changing. At any rate, the first thing that I couldn’t help but notice was the institution of a wholly new arm of the legislature: a Council of Ten, set up to ‘advise’ the main Council. These ten men were elected, as democratically as possible, but it stands to reason that when you put a certain number of men, be it ten or a thousand, in a position of authority for any length of time, they will soon have little in common with their original mandate. One thing that amused me about the business was the fact that one of the Ten was the celebrated Sophocles, the playwright. He was well into his eighties by now, virtually blind and completely senile. He knew what he was doing, of course; he wasn’t legally incapable, as he proved at a trial about this time, when his family wanted to get control of his property and he made his defence by reading out the play he had just been writing and demanding to know whether a senile man could have written that. But he no longer lived in, or even appreciably near, the real world, and he had got it into his mind that Athens was in the grip of some great tragic cycle, such as he might write a trilogy about; and that since nothing could be done to save the old place, the kindest thing would be to hasten it towards its inevitable destruction, and so precipitate its rebirth. The other nine Councillors dealt with more mundane things, such as public order and the water supply.
It was about this time, too, that the revolt in Chios began to be taken seriously, and a large force was sent to deal with it. Now I can’t remember how long all this took; and in my desire to get to the end of this story, perhaps I’m rushing forward by months or even years. To tell you the truth, I have only the vaguest recollection of the sequence of events after my trial, since I was out of them, more or less, and took little notice of what people told me. But I do remember that the institution of the Ten and the rebellion in Chios — or was it the other one, in Samos? — had a lot to do with the rise of that extraordinary fellow Pisander. I always get Pisander muddled up with Phrynichus (not Phrynichus the Comic poet, Phrynichus the General), but to be honest with you, the main characters don’t matter all that much. What mattered was the change in the way people thought, and that was quite startling.
For years there had been rumours of an oligarchical tendency in Athens; young, rich men with lots of time on their hands who wanted to overthrow the democracy and seize power. This had started as a conspiracy rumour, and nobody took any notice of it unless they needed it for an impeachment or a Comic play. Now I don’t know which came first, the rumour or the actual tendency, but by this time the dream was starting to take shape, and a very unpleasant shape it was, too. Up till now, oligarchs had been like giants or centaurs — you believed in them up to a point, and you knew someone whose uncle had seen one, but you never expected to meet one yourself. But now, you began to suspect that the peculiar people whose names you heard so much about, if you were the sort of person who listened to that sort of talk, might indeed be oligarchs, and you began to worry about the greatest single issue of the day, the return of the lost leader, Alcibiades.
I have deliberately not said much about Alcibiades; partly because I didn’t know him well enough to talk about him, and partly because I think his importance has been vastly exaggerated. To hear some people talk, you would think the fellow was a one-man city, with fleets and armies and money of his own. Not a bit of it; he was a rather glamorous individual who spent his exile from Athens amusing himself with peripheral intrigues at the courts of Sparta and the Persian governor Tissaphernes. He may have made a great many suggestions to influential men among our enemies; but I doubt whether he put a single new idea into their heads. We Athenians, believing with absolute sincerity that only Athenians can achieve things in this world, need an Athenian to be the cause of what happened next; and since Alcibiades was in the area at the time, we naturally assume that the Spartan—Persian pact, which finally did for us in the War, was something to do with some grand design or policy of the celebrated Alcibiades.
But if Alcibiades himself was of little importance, his name was another thing altogether. Wherever two or three Athenians met together to talk, his name would inevitably be mentioned; and out of that three, one would be pro-Alcibiades. Probably just to be perverse; now that it was permissible to think and talk about such things, those Athenians who loved to debate and argue (which means all Athenians) were starting to talk about and debate a change of constitution. Would an oligarchy actually be a good idea, they asked themselves? What could be said in favour of it, and what against? Now once Athenians start to talk about something, you can be sure that sooner or later they’ll try doing it, particularly if it’s something that hasn’t been done before. In fact the greatest thing in favour of the idea of oligarchy was its novelty, coupled with a certain air of secrecy, wickedness and danger. Add to this the continued feeling of doom and despair because of Sicily, and a degree of revulsion from the excesses of the first reaction to the disaster, and you have a fine hot stew on which to feed and make yourself thoroughly ill.
Of course my name was linked with the nebulous conspiracy right from the start, because of what I had said at the trial, and as a result of this I was probably right to keep as much out of sight as I did (although, as I have explained, this was hardly policy on my part). But I’m sure the Tendency looked upon me as One of Us, and the democrats whispered about me as being One of Them. Everything in Athens is either One of Us or One of Them, and the only things that change are the definitions of Us and Them. These change regularly and out of all recognition, b
ut nobody ever seems to notice this. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to have lived out my life in some more normal city, like one of those orderly little places you hear about in Crete or Euboea, where things never change and nobody takes any interest in what their city is doing because their city never does anything beyond a little unobtrusive road-mending. In a way, it would be heavenly, but I expect I should have gone mad within ten years, unless I had been born there and known no other way of life.
As it was, even in my self-imposed retirement in Pallene, I started to feel that tingling sensation that an Athenian gets when something is about to happen in politics. In my case, this sensation manifests itself most strongly in those parts of the body and the soul concerned with the composition of anapaests. Now I’ve never wanted to change the way people think; but I do like writing anapaests. It makes you feel involved. And you will remember that just before my trial I had thought up that marvellous idea for a play, with all the various Demes of Attica coming on as a Chorus, and all the great Leaders of the past coming back from the Other World to give advice. I think what sparked it off was that scene Aristophanes and I put together in the smithy in Syracuse, where we brought Aeschylus back to life to debate poetry with Euripides. In any case, I started thinking more and more about it when my mind was empty, and the thing seemed to gather a momentum of its own. I had made a deliberate decision not to write anything more for a long time, but the play was taking shape in my mind, like an unmarried girl’s pregnancy, and there was nothing I could do about it. If Athens was in a crisis, I would have to write something, and that something would have to be relevant.
