by Tom Holt
What with him, and Philonides’ regular outbursts, I didn’t have much time to worry about anything else, such as whether the play was really as good as I believed it was. Still, I managed to spare a few hours’ anxiety for the activities of my old comrade-in-arms the son of Philip. I hadn’t actually set eyes on him since the trial, but as soon as I emerged from my slumbers and started work again, I started to hear rumours that he was furiously angry with me for having been acquitted after he had given evidence against me, with all the damage to his reputation that inevitably ensued, and that he had sworn to have his revenge on me, come what may. I heard from a fairly reliable source that he had done his best to persuade the Archon to reject the play, and also that he had tried to dissuade Philonides from taking it on. I confess that I found this behaviour rather excessive, coming from a man whom I had no great cause to respect, but I didn’t dare try any form of retaliation in case it made things worse. I know a man is supposed to help his friends and harm his enemies, but I couldn’t be bothered just then.
I also heard that Aristophanes had got mixed up very deeply with the oligarchs, and although you could find some such rumour about anyone you cared to name at that time, I was inclined to believe it in this instance. The gist of the rumour was that he was terribly friendly with the celebrated Phrynichus, the General, and this is actually borne out by various things he says in some of his plays, for what that’s worth. He was also supposed to be doing his best to ingratiate himself with Pisander, the other main ringleader; but apparently Pisander couldn’t take him at any price and refused to have anything to do with him. That I can well believe, for whatever his faults Pisander wasn’t without a measure of common sense, and the son of Philip would be a definite hindrance to any cause to which he attached himself. But it seems, if the rumour had anything to it, that Aristophanes was quite serious about the oligarchic cause, and wasn’t just in it for the fun and the mischief. He saw himself as part of the ruling faction, up there with the best of them, and presumably once there in a position to settle some old scores, such as me. Now I can honestly say that that particular prospect didn’t lose me any sleep; but I was rather concerned in case he should try anything nasty against my play. Good-natured sabotage, as I’m sure you remember, is all part of the fun of being a poet, but the whole climate in Athens at the time was such as to make you wonder what a vindictive person might not try and do. Everything seemed just that tiny bit more dangerous than ever before; it was as if the Athenian Game had got rather out of hand, and people were taking things a touch further than they would have before. This was true in everything, not just the Theatre; I don’t really know how to describe it to you. You know how a game of catch can sometimes turn nasty, with the players deliberately throwing the ball at each other when they lost their tempers; well, I suppose it was like that, in a way.
Of course, violence and other forms of extreme behaviour were nothing new; but all the light heartedness seemed to have gone out of politics and the other forms of public life in Athens, and I think this was because, as a City, we had rather lost our nerve after Sicily. Before, we were all that bit more prepared to take risks, and accept the consequences if we failed — I suppose because we were certain in our hearts that we couldn’t fail, and so there would be no consequences to take. But now, Athens seemed to have become old and sour instead of young and exciting, and the endless search for novelty wasn’t so much a quest for new sensations and fresh objectives as a sort of desperation, because nothing seemed to be going right any more. All the old energy was still there of course, but it was the furious energy of someone who knows he’s losing, rather than the vigour of ambition. For example: we built a new fleet in next to no time, and won a few quick victories with it, which made us all feel elated and safe for a while. But we could do nothing about the revolts in our subject cities, and still less about the Spartan fortress at Deceleia on our borders, which was very slowly grinding us down. The fortress made me think back to the old days my grandfather used to talk about, before the Persians came, when the Athenians could not rest easy at nights for the thought of Aegina being still unconquered, and Themistocles urging them every day to wipe out the ‘eyesore of the Piraeus’. The thought of a Spartan fortress on Attic soil would have been intolerable to the Athenians of his time, but we seemed to be able to put it to the back of our minds and get on with something else. In the meantime, to divert our attention, we thought more and more about domestic matters, including the constitution; and this sort of brooding was definitely bad for us. Hence this sourness that I’ve been describing. All the old, typically Athenian characteristics were still there, of course: the energy, the love of words and novelty, the random cruelty. But they were like those warships of ours which had been captured by the Syracusans; they were ours, but they were being used against us, to do us harm.
I guess it wasn’t the best time to be putting on such a very political play; but I had written the thing, and it was topical, and I wanted to see it staged. But there was more to it than that; I suppose because, since my speech in my defence, I too had been thinking rather more than usual about that sort of thing. Now do you see what I mean? At the time when this story starts, your average Athenian would no more have been rethinking the democracy than he would have been rethinking the sky; the democracy was just there, and it was impossible for it to change. I may not have liked the democracy very much, ever since I was old enough to consider these things, but it simply wasn’t one of the things that a man could expect to do anything about; just as, if he doesn’t get on well with his family, he can’t expect to be able to resign from it and join another. You can’t deliberately divorce yourself from your City; your City can banish you, but even that is a most extreme measure, in many ways as drastic or more so than putting you to death. No, if something big was happening to the political system of Athens, even I couldn’t stop myself from having my say.
Rehearsals became more and more frantic as Festival time drew closer, what with Philonides shouting and the actors not yet knowing their words and the fullers accidentally dyeing a whole batch of costumes purple instead of red; and the fury in the Theatre seemed to be matched by the frenzied activity outside it so that, after so many years, I can no longer separate them in my mind. I say ‘activity’ deliberately; nothing substantial appeared to be happening, but a great amount of energy was being expended by a great many people; and when so much heat is produced in such a small space, something, sooner or later, is likely to be broken or at least melted down. The situation in the War was no less exciting, but that seemed like a peripheral issue to us in the City, and we regarded it as little more than a source of new and rich debating-points — how would the oligarchs react to such and such, or what would the Old Guard make of the developments in Persia? This was very short-sighted of us, because we were in grave danger of losing control of our most productive subject-states. The Spartans were starting to think like sensible, rational human beings at last, instead of Homeric heroes, and they were getting ever closer to making a treaty against us with the greatest of all enemies, the King of Persia. If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in the preparations for the play, I’m sure I could record a great many matters of interest to generations yet unborn about those truly fascinating few months before the Dionysia in March; as it was, I had only a vague idea of what was going on outside the City and in the War, and if I were to give you a detailed account it would be mostly hearsay, and Athenian hearsay at that. But I can tell you a little about that year’s Dionysia, if that will do instead.
The main — or only — talking-point was the extraordinary set of plays that Euripides was supposed to be presenting. He was keeping very quiet about them himself, and this only fuelled the furious speculation. For at least one of them was (apparently) going to revolutionise our entire approach to Tragic drama, the Gods, and pretty well everything else. We knew that one of these plays was going to be about Helen, and that Euripides had taken his old hobby-horse, the story in Stesichorus that Hel
en never went to Troy but was spirited away to Egypt while Paris was left with a replica made of cloud, and used it to create some vast metaphysical question to which there was no immediately obvious answer. Then another play was going to be about Andromeda, dealing with the story in a roughly similar way; and both plays were to have happy endings and be closer in many respects to Comedy than Tragedy. Now I belong to the school of thought that many of Euripides’ plays are unintentionally Comic, and so I couldn’t wait to see what would happen if Euripides tried to be deliberately funny; I expected the entire audience to be in floods of tears before the entry of the Chorus. Several of the Comic poets, Aristophanes included, were desperately trying to get advance copies of these plays, by bribing the Archon’s slaves or getting the actors drunk, so as to be able to include snippets of parody in their next Comedies; and even I felt a vague irritation, because Euripides hadn’t had the decency to put on these grotesque farces of his in time for me to use them in my masterpiece. I had been reduced to having another go at the Telephus, which was the one weakness that I could think of in the whole play.
Of course, you will be thoroughly familiar with those two boils on Tragedy’s backside, Euripides’ Helen and Andromeda, and you’ll be wondering what all this fuss was about. But there were some very curious things in those plays, particularly in the Helen, when you think of what I’ve been telling you about the situation at the time. For example, in the Helen, there’s no end of praise for Sparta, mostly dragged in without any perceptible justification from the plot or the characters. If Euripides’ intention was to shock the audience he certainly succeeded, and there were quite a few normally intelligent people who were very impressed. Then there was that extraordinary line about how even the most widely travelled men can’t tell the difference between true gods and false ones and things which are half-divine and half-mortal. Now when a man has a reputation for obscure profundity, such as Euripides has, he can get away with saying anything at all, and people will do their very best to read something wonderful into it; and there was no shortage of idiots who took this to be a highly intelligent comment about the statues that were smashed and the expedition to Sicily. In fact I remember having the whole thing explained to me, in detail, by a barber while he was trimming my beard about a week after the Festival, and I was unable to argue with him for fear of moving my chin too much and getting my throat cut. At the time I was thoroughly convinced by what he said, as it happens; but I’m afraid I can’t remember a word of it after all this time.
What with the Euripides scandal and politics and the War, therefore, nobody seemed particularly anxious to find out in advance what Eupolis was going to put on that year; in fact, the general opinion as I heard it was that Eupolis was well over the hill, hadn’t written anything worth bothering with since Maricas, and should retire gracefully and let one of the newcomers have a chance. This sort of talk just made me all the more determined to show them all that I still had something to say, and I started making rather a nuisance of myself at rehearsals, just when Philonides and the cast had reached an uneasy truce. As a result of my interference, which consisted mainly of wholly unreasonable demands that the Chorus-numbers be made even more spectacular and that the actors learn whole new speeches with less than a week before the Festivals began, we very nearly didn’t have a play to put on at all. But Philonides triumphed over adversity, and just when I was ready to give up, we had a last rehearsal at which virtually everything worked. I remember walking home after that final run-through and going straight past my house because I was saying Solon’s speech over to myself in my head, and I hadn’t finished it by the time I reached the door.
At last the time came for the official preview, two days before the start of the Festival proper. In those days we did it slightly differently; the poets, producers, Choruses and actors went down to the Odeon (you can imagine my feelings on revisiting the place) with costumes but without masks, and the poet had to get up on a platform and announce the title of his play, with a brief summary of the plot. Naturally, nobody ever said what the play was actually about — that would have been a disastrous mistake; instead, we would put together a sort of Delphic riddle to inflame interest. I had never enjoyed this stage in the proceedings before, since I used to have no great confidence in my ability to project my voice. But, after my trial in that very building, I knew all about the acoustics in the Odeon, and it was a positive pleasure to stand up on the platform where I had made my defence and announce my Comedy. It was really a sort of declaration of defiance on my part, and to mark the occasion I had written rather a good little piece. I was well into this, and getting a very healthy reception from the audience, when a couple of men at the back of the hall started shouting and throwing olives at me. I recognised them as some of Aristophanes’ regular hangers-on, who he paid to clap and shout ‘Encore!’ during his plays (some of them had been with him for fifteen years, and were as well known in Athens as the actors themselves). This, I reckoned, was a bit hard. It’s not uncommon for a poet to organise little riots during the play itself, as I seem to remember telling you before somewhere; and I recall with great pleasure the time Cratinus got his supporters to start making a noise during one of Euripides’ early efforts — he had heard that Euripides had included a speech in praise of money, and he got his people to object to this on moral grounds, with the result that the poet jumped out of his seat, ran down on to the stage and begged them to hear the rest of the play and see what a bad end the money-loving character came to. But to organise a disturbance at the preview was something entirely new; and what made it worse was that Aristophanes had somehow found out what the plot and best scenes of my play were going to be, and had told his men to shout this secret information out at the tops of their voices. But Philonides had apparently suspected something of the sort (although he hadn’t seen fit to share his suspicions with me) and had hired a mob of his own. These men jumped up and started yelling that Aristophanes was part of the oligarchic conspiracy and ought to be taken to the top of the old tower in the Potters’ Quarter and thrown off. So in the end Aristophanes’ trick backfired on him, because Phionides’ riot got far more laughs and the son of Philip was so frightened that he ran home and hid under the bed for the rest of the day.
The lots were drawn: I was to come on the second day, following Euripides’ Tragedies. I was in two minds about this. On the one hand, you could be sure that the Theatre would be packed as tight as whitebait in a jar; on the other hand, the audience might be so worked up about the Tragedies that my Comedy would be virtually ignored. I’d seen that happen many times; the audience are still talking about the Tragedy, usually at the tops of their voices, when the Comic Chorus makes its entrance. Nobody has heard the opening speech, and so they haven’t the faintest idea of what’s going on. On balance, I decided, it would be a good thing. Nobody, not even a foreigner, would be able to ignore the opening scene of my play, with Athena coming down from Olympus on the machine.
On the first day of the Festival, I was awake long before dawn; and Phaedra and I were among the first people in the streets waiting for the procession to go by. Now not even the strange atmosphere in the city could spoil the opening day of the Dionysia. It’s all different now; but in those days there was nothing like it in the world. Bear with me while I describe it; for my own satisfaction, if you like. It was very much the best side of Athens’ character, and after all the terrible things I’ve been saying about her, I reckon it’s only fair that I should give her a chance to be seen in a better light.
Shortly after dawn all the prisoners in the gaol, except for the dangerous ones, were brought out under guard to watch the procession, and the girls who had been chosen as basket-bearers were scurrying about showing off their new outfits while there was still time, before they had to take their places. The procession was always late starting; but when it came out everyone always declared, every year without fail, that it was the best one yet. The statue of the God would go by, and the basket-bearers, and
then the young men chosen to sing the satirical songs and shout vulgar abuse at anyone famous they recognised in the crowd — because now the God was in charge of the City, and mere mortals, however important, had to be made to recognise that fact. Then one of the sacrificial animals — usually a large and savage bull — would always manage to escape and gore someone or other in the crowd, and there were fights and robberies and people fainting and getting trampled, and all the other ingredients of a good day out.
Then came the solemn, rather boring part, with the singing of the dithyrambs by massed choirs and everybody trying to look serious and devout and doing their level best not to cough in the wrong places. I don’t know why it is, but even the most brilliant poet, when called upon to compose a dithyramb, inevitably turns out twenty minutes’ worth of the most turgid rubbish you ever heard in your life, the sort of stuff that would be hissed off the stage without a moment’s hesitation if it was put in a play. But, because it’s the dithyramb and somehow sacred and privileged, the entire audience pretends it’s the most marvellous poetry since Hesiod, and nobody says a word or throws so much as a pine-cone. But everybody is very relieved when it’s over at last, and the real fun can begin.
