by Tom Holt
It was Phaedra who made me break my vow. One evening we were sitting together in my house in Pallene. She was sewing away at something, and I was staring at the hearth with my mouth open, an occupation which was rapidly becoming my profession and career. It certainly irritated my wife who tried not to look at me when I was doing it. On this particular evening, however, she seemed to lose patience with me altogether.
‘What’s got into you?’ she said. ‘If you don’t close your mouth soon, a spider will come and weave a web over it.’
‘Stop moaning,’ I replied. ‘There’s nothing needs doing, is there?’
Phaedra looked at me for a moment. ‘There’s something the matter with you,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what it is, but the sooner you get rid of it the better. You’re beginning to make me feel uncomfortable.’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said, and I put my feet up on the couch and pretended to go to sleep.
‘I know what you remind me of,’ she said after a while. ‘Do you remember that man who used to live near the fountain, the one who had the two white dogs?’
‘Vaguely,’ I said. ‘Was his name Euthycritus?’
‘I couldn’t say,’ Phaedra replied, ‘and anyway, that’s beside the point. You remember that he had a stroke?’
‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘so he did.’
‘And you remember,’ Phaedra went on, ‘how he couldn’t move or talk, but his eyes were just the same as they had been. And his wife used to get the slaves to carry him in his chair to the front door and park him there so that he could watch the people going up and down.’
‘And everyone used to look the other way,’ I said, ‘because they couldn’t look him in the eyes without cringing. I remember. Wasn’t he once an athlete or something like that?’
‘Possibly,’ Phaedra said, biting through her cotton and putting her work down. ‘Anyway, that’s who you’ve been reminding me of these last few weeks.’
I didn’t think that was funny at all. ‘You do say the most ill-omened things,’ I said to her. ‘Fancy comparing me to a cripple.’
‘Well, it’s true,’ she said. ‘I think you’d be perfectly happy sitting in a doorway watching the shoppers.’
This startled me, because it was quite probably true.
‘Have I been as bad as that?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ replied my wife, ‘or worse. You’d sit there even if there weren’t any shoppers. What do you think about, for God’s sake? Are you working out geometrical theories or just counting birds?’
‘I’m not thinking about anything,’ I said, ‘except occasionally how glad I am to be alive.’
‘That’s odd,’ she said. ‘You’re behaving just like a corpse. And a docile corpse, at that.’
‘Aren’t wives supposed to pray for inactive husbands?’ I said. ‘You never used to like it when I was always dashing about doing things.’
‘And all that nonsense you’ve been talking lately,’ she went on, ‘about our relationship and so on. What sort of talk is that for a husband and his wife? You sound like a philosopher talking to his boyfriend.’
I frowned. ‘I just wanted to get things straight,’ I said.
‘Things are naturally straight,’ she said, ‘unless you fiddle with them. You should just get on with life instead of thinking about it.
‘That’s a very solemn remark,’ I said, smiling mockingly at her. She frowned disapprovingly.
‘You know what I mean,’ she said. ‘Don’t start being all Chorus-like and commenting on everything I do as if I were Clytemnestra or somebody. You do a lot of that, I’ve noticed.’
‘A lot of what?’
‘Observing,’ she said. ‘You look at people, and listen to them, as if you were a judge at a fair. Nobody wants your assessment, thank you very much.’
‘I know,’ I said, ‘but I can’t help it, I do it naturally.’
‘What you need to do,’ Phaedra said, standing up and collecting her sewing things, ‘is to find something to do. Otherwise you’ll turn into a god or a lump of rock or something.’
‘Explain,’ I said.
‘Well,’ she said, sitting down again, ‘you’re just like that sometimes; a god on a mountain, or a boulder, or a tree. You just stand or sit there and watch, as if the world was a play put on for your benefit. Now when you used to write plays, this was more or less justifiable, because you made some sort of use of it all. You needed to catch how people speak and act, and make some sort of judgement for your anapaests. But now you just seem to do it for your own entertainment, and it’s not natural. Either snap out of it or start writing again.’
‘You’re odd, too,’ I said. ‘I never really know whether you approve of me writing or not. You never seem to take any interest while I’m composing something. You always give the impression of being a patient wife allowing her husband to pursue his childish hobby, as if I collected seashells or carved miniature ships on scraps of ivory.’
Phaedra shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’re particularly clever, if that’s what you mean, just because you can compose lines that scan. And I’m not a Comedy enthusiast, like some people are; I prefer Tragedy, personally, and I’m not a very literary person when you come right down to it. Most women aren’t, actually. But I suppose you do it as well as anybody,’ she said fairly, ‘and probably better than most. And you’ve got to do something, so you might as well do this.’
I sat up and put my hands round my knees. ‘So you think I ought to write a play, do you?’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘For my sake if not for yours. Then people won’t point to me in the street and say, “There goes that woman who’s married to a corpse.” I really can’t stand much more of this godlike stuff, you know. It was different after you got back from the War, when the trial was on; you had a purpose in life then all right, and I rather liked you. But now…’
‘All right,’ I said, ‘I get the message. You can’t stand the sight of me just sitting here peacefully. You want me to be busy.’
‘Only because it’s your nature to be busy,’ she replied.
‘At the moment you don’t really seem to exist, and that’s unnerving for a girl. I-never know when you’re going to start walking through walls or slowly disappearing, like a dream in a poem.’
So the next day, I took the plough out over the fallow, and instead of getting to the end of the furrow and then stopping, as I had done the last time I tried it, I went straight on and did a day’s work, without knowing it. When I got home, I had an opening speech fully fledged in my mind, and it was the best I had ever composed. Now one thing that always worries me is whether what I’m doing now is as good as what I’ve done before. This is quite an obsession with me, and I end up hating things I’ve written because I can’t seem to do as well any more. This time, though, I knew it was good. The lines seemed to have a crispness and a crackle about them, and instead of ending a line off with a conventional jingle, I had tried my best to find something new and startling, the way you do when you’re just starting out in the Theatre and every word is important to you.
Shall I tell you all about the play? I’ve been very good so far, and not bored you with little synopses of my various brilliant dramas, so I think I’ll allow myself the indulgence, just this once. The story was as follows. The Athenian State is in a crisis, because it hasn’t been able to think of anything new to do since it sent a fleet to conquer the moon. So worrying is this mental sterility that our hero takes it upon himself to go down to the underworld, like Odysseus, to ask the opinions of the glorious dead.
Once he has made the journey, the first person he meets is the celebrated Myronides, the general who led Athens to victory at Tanagra, the battle I told you about which ended the previous war with Sparta in my grandfather’s time. I picked on him because he seems to represent, to my generation at least, the last honest citizen and competent general of the old school. In fact he was just as much of a rogue as all those w
ho came before and after him, but I was not concerned with absolute historical truth. No Athenian is, or we wouldn’t celebrate Marathon as a victory. Anyway, Myronides acts as our hero’s guide and takes him to see all the great statesmen of our history, from the immortal Solon to Pericles, and each of these gives his considered opinion about what should be done. To put each of these towering figures in his place, I made my Chorus up of the demes of Attica, with Pallene as Chorus-leader; because, when all is said and done, it is the demes and not the city which make up Athens.
I had set out to write a play, and as good a play as I possibly could; but the more I wrote, the more serious this Comedy of mine became. As you can see from what I’ve told you, it was a very political play; and I don’t suppose I would ever have written such a work at any other time. I had set out with no clear message in my mind; but as the play progressed and I tried to think what advice Solon might actually give us in our present situation, I found a strong theme emerging and did my best to do it justice. It wasn’t at all what I thought myself; but that’s not really a poet’s job. Aristophanes, for example, has consistently attacked the War and demanded an end to it from the moment he started to write; but he has nothing personal against the War, and at least until he went to Sicily thought very little about it. But his characters are mainly heavy-infantry farmers, and such people naturally disapprove of the War; so in order to write what he wants to write and make the sort of jokes he likes, Aristophanes must present himself as a peace-lover and a countryman, which could hardly be further from the truth. Similarly, in my case, having appointed myself the spokesman of our great political leaders, I was virtually forced to make an impassioned plea on behalf of the democracy. But, to be fair to myself, I argued for the good parts of our constitution, the parts that Solon envisaged and Themistocles and Pericles didn’t manage to spoil between them. I argued that what Athens needed now was the sort of democracy where everyone was entitled to be heard so long as he spoke sense; where the majority should not oppress the minority in the way that the Few had oppressed the Many in Solon’s time. Obviously (I said) you can’t create that sort of system by legislation or the creation of new institutions. A democracy is the most vulnerable system of all. Furthermore, a democracy more than any other form of government tends naturally to incline towards repression, intolerance and violence, because it is the form that imposes the least restraint upon human nature. But a democracy where men restrain themselves, thereby doing to themselves what nobody else either can or should do to them, is potentially the best of all forms of government, so long as it is based on mutual tolerance and consideration and a general intention to do what is best for all, and above everything, what is possible in the circumstances.
Well, that’s what I said in the play. As you know, I don’t believe a word of it. I don’t believe that any state the size of Athens can govern itself, whatever form of government it chooses, without causing immeasurable damage to the people who live in it. But I honestly believe that in my play I gave the City the best advice that I could, and I am proud of what I wrote then. It came out of my own experience in the way that no Comedy has ever come out of experience before, because instead of attacking and making fun of what was being done, it suggested what should be done; and instead of being hurtful to a few for the sake of pleasing many, it was designed to say what the author thought — or at least what the composite creature representing the author would have thought had such a person ever existed. And in one respect it did reflect my own personal opinion; that the demes, the villages and regions of Attica are what matter, and that the great men and their political factions and movements are the servants of the demes and should never forget it.
‘There now,’ you are saying, ‘that was very clever of you, Eupolis, but what happened next?’ Well, I wrote the play, completing it fairly quickly by my standards, and sent it to be copied. It had occupied my attention fully all the time I had been composing it, and apart from political gossip I had taken no notice of anything else. But, as any playwright will tell you, writing the thing is the easy, relaxing part. The hard work would be getting it accepted and produced.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Obviously, the first thing I had to do was go and see Philonides. Now he hadn’t had anything to do with the Theatre or the training of Choruses since the Sicilian disaster —I don’t know if there was any deep meaning behind that, or whether it was just coincidence — and when I told him that I had a new play which I wanted to put on at the Festivals he didn’t seem to want to know. He argued that he was getting old (which was true enough) and that he wasn’t interested in that sort of thing any more; but I bullied him and wheedled away at him, and finally, more to get rid of me than for any other reason, he agreed to hear the play and look at a copy of the written version.
I was so confident about the play that I never had any doubts that once he saw it he would be won over completely, and as it happens I was right. As soon as he heard the entry of the Chorus, he was hooked; for unlike so many of the people who have tried to emulate him, he knew that he was first and foremost what his title said he was, a trainer of Choruses. To him, as to me, the Chorus was the heart of a play, and its costumes, movements, singing, verse-speaking and general effect were his primary concern and greatest love. He excelled at marshalling and controlling men en bloc and in Sparta they would have made him a general. It was because he was so good with Choruses that he was able to control and manipulate individual actors; as he himself used to say, if you can reduce a whole Chorus to tears with a single tirade, you should never have any problem imposing your will on just one man. Now Philonides could see that my Chorus of demes, if properly handled and appropriately costumed, could be the most spectacular and effective Chorus he had ever seen led out, and the temptation was too strong for him. He put up a good fight, right up to the last minute, but in the end he gave way and agreed to train this as his last and best Chorus.
The next thing was to go and see the Archon to apply for a Chorus for the Dionysia, and I must confess that I was not at all sure that I would be able to get past this obstacle. I’m convinced that I wouldn’t have succeeded without Philonides’ backing; as it was, I had a terrible time before I finally won through.
To start with, there was the problem of the play having been written by me. As I said just now, I was pretty thoroughly identified in the public mind with the oligarchs, because of my defence speech, and so it was natural enough for the Archon to feel that choosing a play by Eupolis was tantamount to declaring himself an oligarchic sympathiser. On the other hand, the play itself was patently for the democracy, and it was a brave man in that climate who identified himself in any way with such an outspoken statement in support of either side. There was a general feeling in the City that the mysterious leaders of the planned oligarchic coup —nobody knew who they were supposed to be, but everyone was convinced that they existed — were going around and preparing lists of diehard democrats who would have to be liquidated come the Glorious Day, and nobody wanted to be on those lists, for understandable reasons. So it was asking a lot of the Archon to demand that he choose a play that denounced oligarchy. I can only suppose that he came to the conclusion that my supposed oligarchic sympathies and my outspoken democratic views in the play cancelled each other out, and that by endorsing the play he was hedging his bets.
But those two factors weren’t the only things against me. For one thing, it was a while since I had asked for a Chorus, and unless he submits work very regularly, like Aristophanes always has, it doesn’t take very long for a poet, however strong his reputation has been in the past, to be forgotten about or supplanted by some up-and-coming young pretender. Just then, there were several men who were being talked about as the New Generation of Comic poets, and there had been many applications for Choruses. Suffice to say that I was forced, for the first time, to submit to the indignity of a series of postponed decisions, and to be chosen last out of the three competitors. In fact it was a very close thing at t
he end, since the Archon very nearly gave the Chorus to a young man who has never been heard of since, who had put together an entirely innocuous, if not particularly good, piece of nonsense about Hercules and a cauldron of lentil soup.
But in the end I got the Chorus, and the next difficulty was putting together a cast. Now since I had been given my Chorus last, and only after a long delay, all the good actors had been snapped up by the other poets and I was left with the no-hopers and the young apprentices, who had to be trained virtually from scratch. To make matters worse, Philonides, who was getting more and more enthusiastic about the project every day, had thought up some of the most fiendishly intricate and difficult dance routines and bits of business ever seen on the Attic stage, and with not enough time to rehearse and an inexperienced and generally feckless cast, I was all for watering these masterpieces down to make sure we had at least something to show the audience come the day. But Philonides would have none of it; instead, he set out to train every actor and Chorus-member as if he had never been anywhere near the Theatre in his life. This used up huge quantities of time, money and patience, all three of which were soon in short supply, and Philonides took to venting his fury and frustration on me, which I found rather unfair. But in the end he won through, as I knew he would. There is nothing Philonides can’t make a Chorus or a cast of actors do, if he’s determined that they’ll do it. I believe that if the Council had given Philonides a Chorus and told him to use it to sack Sparta, he’d have pulled it off, and ahead of schedule.
As I said just now, money was a considerable problem. It was just my luck to have appointed as my producer a certain Promachus, notoriously the meanest and most humourless man in Athens. For a start, he hated the very idea of being made to finance a Comic play, since he disapproved of Comedy on principle and my play in particular. It would have been difficult enough if it had been an ordinary sort of play; but with Philonides calling for the best of everything for his Chorus, and new and expensive machinery for special effects, Promachus soon declared that he was going to deposit twelve hundred drachmas with me, and that was all that could be expected from him. So in the end I found myself paying for most of the expensive things, and I didn’t enjoy that particular experience at all. Of course, when the time came, Promachus took all the credit, as a producer would be entitled to do under normal circumstances, and set up a magnificent votive statue recording how much had been spent on the production (two thousand drachmas). He didn’t say how much of that money had been provided by me, of course; in fact, I don’t think he mentioned my name at all.
