by Tom Holt
I was completely opposed to this idea, but Philonides ignored me and sent a slave off to the wine-shop to bring him a jar of the strongest, roughest Attic wine he could find. The slave dashed away like a frightened hare, and came back with a jar covered in cobwebs and marked with the double chalk cross that usually means ‘Not for sale’: so I imagine he had gone somewhere where Philonides’ reputation as a hard man with a bottle was properly respected. He then went off to get some water to mix with it, but he was wasting his time. Philonides just put his thumb through the wax, lifted the jar to his face, and poured. Wine went sploshing down all over his tunic, but a fair quantity of it ended up in his mouth, and he kept on gulping until I thought he must surely burst. Then he put the jar down, wiped his lips with the back of his hand, and smiled broadly. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Lead me to it. Someone bring that jar, I may need it again.’
We packed up the costumes, counted the Chorus to make sure everyone was there, and set off for the Theatre. When we arrived, we found we were only just in time; the Chorus of the Helen was just going off, to rather patchy applause, and the audience was starting to talk about what it had just seen, very loudly. I hurried over to the seat reserved for me as a competitor (the Theatre was more full than I had ever seen it before, because of the Euripides plays), evicted the foreigner and his three small children who had occupied it in my absence, and sat down to catch my breath. Just down the row from me, I could see Aristophanes son of Philip, who was staring at me as if I had at least two extra heads. I waved at him and smiled, and offered up a little prayer to Dionysus. If he got me out of this mess in one piece, I said, I would most certainly give up the Theatre for ever and never try his patience again. Then, as if the God had answered me, I felt something under my foot; it was a broken wine-flask, and it gave me a happy idea. I stooped down, picked up one of the shards, and took the brooch out of my cloak. With the point of it I scratched a few words on the bit of broken flask and asked my neighbour to pass it down to Aristophanes. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote, but it had its effect; because as soon as he read it he dropped the apple he’d been eating, gave me a look of pure hatred, and hastily left the Theatre. Now I come to think of it, I believe what I wrote was something to the effect that just before leaving home I had sent a few slaves and friends over to his house to set fire to it, and if he hurried he might be in time to stop them. The foreigner and his children took Aristophanes’ seat, and since it wasn’t reserved he couldn’t get back into it when he returned from his fool’s errand, which meant he had to watch the little of my play he eventually got to see standing at the back among the slaves and the drunks.
Philonides didn’t come on until well into the first scene; so if he had still got that jar with him he had plenty of time even now to get hopelessly drunk. Although I was desperately proud of my opening dialogue I couldn’t bear to watch, and if the audience laughed at all I didn’t hear them. And yet there is no sensation as sweet to me as the sound of people laughing at my lines in the Theatre, so that when I hear it I can think of nothing else; so you can judge for yourself how nervous I was. But I heard Philonides’ cue loud and clear, and I opened my eyes and stared at the entrance he was due to come through. For about the time it takes for an olive to fall from a tree he didn’t appear; and in that brief instant I formed two mental pictures of him; one of him lying on the floor with an empty jar beside him burbling like an idiot, and another of him cowering down behind the backdrop and refusing to budge, while the slaves kicked him and called him names. Then he strode on to the stage, looking like King Theseus himself, and the audience suddenly fell silent. He seemed to hesitate for a fraction of a second, and then he launched himself into his opening speech, which is one of the best things I have ever written. His voice welled up from the stage like a spring from a split rock, making him seem twice as tall as he was, and for a while the audience were too overawed to laugh. Then the first big joke came crashing through, like a wave of the sea when there’s a great storm, and the sound of laughter made the earth shake. For me it was like the first lungful of air to a suffocating man. I sucked that laughter in through every pore in my skin, and held it inside me. It seemed to do something to Philonides, too. Just for a moment he seemed frightened, as if he had been suddenly made aware that he was not alone in the Theatre. Then it was as if he had swallowed all that enormous volume of sound and digested it, all in the time it takes to move a finger, for he thundered out the rest of the speech as if he were a god delivering a prophecy. I have never seen an audience take to an actor as they took to Philonides, and I’ve never ever seen an actor respond so well to a good audience. They clapped and cheered and whistled and shouted, and he got better and better. It was a long speech, that first speech of his, but time seemed to stop running while he was delivering it.
In other words, the play was a success. When the Chorus came on, there was a moment when you could have heard a coin drop, while the audience all looked twice to see if their eyes were playing tricks on them. Then they seemed to go mad, and there was such a stamping of feet that the Spartans at Deceleia must have thought that a huge army was coming to get them. But it wasn’t the noise that impressed me so much as the silence when the big speeches were being delivered. Usually there’s at least one idiot or drunk who talks or sings during the speeches; not this time. Except for sporadic waves of laughter or cheering, there was total quiet, and you could hear the heels of the actors’ boots grinding on the floor of the stage. I have heard louder applause for a play in my time and louder laughter for a joke, but I’ve never heard such attentive silence in all my life. For they weren’t just laughing, they were also listening, and that was what made me feel happier than I had ever felt in my entire life.
I don’t remember anything about what happened after the play, or during the rest of the Festival; let alone at the Victory party after I was awarded first prize by a unanimous vote of the twelve judges. I’ve heard that Philonides and I got completely drunk and went all round the City reciting the speeches from the play, and wherever we went people came out of their houses and cheered us, and that we were finally carried home on the shoulders of complete strangers, fast asleep. All I remember is waking up afterwards with a murderous hangover and vowing never to get in such a state again as long as I lived. I’ve kept that vow, and I’ve also kept my vow to Dionysus never to write another play. After the Demes, there seemed to be no point, for I could never have another triumph as great as that one. I did start to write a play about three years later, but the words just wouldn’t flow and I gave up after the first few speeches. The desire to write Comedy had left me, and it has never come back. Shortly afterwards, of course, things were so different in Athens that I wouldn’t have written anything even if I could; so, all in all, it was just as well that I wrote my last play when I did, and that Philonides overcame his nerves enough to play the leading part.
Shortly before he died, not many years later, I asked Philonides how he managed to go on, considering how unwilling he had been to do it. Had he drunk the rest of the wine, I asked him, or was it his soul telling him to be strong? He said it was neither of those things. In fact, just before the time for his cue he got such a bad attack of panic that he started taking off his mask and boots. But then (he said) he thought he saw a large man with a black beard standing behind him, looking at him with such utter contempt that he was shamed into putting the mask back on. When he looked round again, the man had disappeared and Philonides swore blind that there was nowhere he could have got to; he must just have vanished into thin air. Now at the time Philonides was suffering very badly from the fever that finally carried him off, so this may just have been his mind wandering at the end. Or perhaps it was a hallucination he’d had at the time, caused by fear and residual alcohol. But it’s perfectly true that there are very few places a person can disappear into at the back of the Theatre of Dionysus, so perhaps he was telling the truth after all.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Towards the
end of April next year, the democracy was overthrown. It was a relatively peaceful way for the world to end; four hundred leading oligarchs held a meeting outside the City at Colonus and then marched in, threw the Council out of the Council Chamber with the help of a gang of young bloods (who probably mistook the whole thing for a drinking-party), and declared that there had been a return to something they called the Ancestral Constitution. This meant, in theory, that the franchise was limited to five thousand citizens who had the necessary property qualification, but since these five thousand good and honest citizens were never actually named and nobody had the faintest idea who they were, this clearly didn’t mean very much. The essence of the situation as it emerged over the next few days was that four hundred men now controlled Athens absolutely, drawing their mandate from a couple of gangs of large, taciturn men with clubs and swords. The leaders of the coup were Pisander, Phrynichus, the politician Theramenes, and Antiphon, a man who wrote speeches for the Courts (rather like my old friend Python). Apart from a few routine murders of generally unpopular people, they did very little that any reasonable man could object to, at least to start with; but that was not the point.
At the time the main Athenian army was in Samos. When they heard what was going on, they were all for sailing straight home and killing the oligarchs there and then. But before they were ready to leave, who should turn up but the celebrated Alcibiades, who had been roughing it at the court of the Persian governor, Tissaphernes the Magnificent, waiting for an opportunity to make his comeback in suitable style. He sailed in on a handsomely decorated Persian yacht, made a speech or two, persuaded the army to stay put, and sent a blood-curdling letter to the oligarchs demanding that they publish the names of the mysterious five thousand good and honest citizens who were to be the twin anchor of the ship of state. As it happens, no list was ever received by the army at Samos, but the messenger service was notoriously slow at that time of year, what with the winds and the great oar-blade shortage, and after a while the soldiers forgot all about the list and concentrated their energies on pampering their newly restored Lost Leader.
Meanwhile, the oligarchs were working flat out to cobble up some sort of end to the War, so that they could get the backing of the Spartans and the Persians for their new régime. In order to demonstrate that this was not in fact what they were doing, they set about fortifying the entrance to the Piraeus. This fooled nobody, of course; even the most innocent of us could see that their real intention was to make it possible for them to cut off the City from its grain supplies. But there was nothing we could do about it, so we let it happen. There was a wonderful feeling of helplessness in the City, something that none of us had ever known before. Things were happening and we were totally unable to interfere, we could only be passive and wait to see what would happen; and meanwhile, it was nothing to do with us, not our problem. It was a sort of euphoria, I suppose, and as such obviously impermanent. But I reckon most of us hadn’t realised what was really happening — we thought it was just a weird sort of holiday, and that soon it would all be over and we could go back to being democrats again.
Sure enough, the rule of the Four Hundred ended as quickly and as effortlessly as it had started. Phrynichus was stabbed to death in the Market Square on his way to buy fish one morning, the men who were fortifying the Piraeus took this as a signal for a general holiday-cum-riot, and the oligarchs called out their supporters, in arms, into the streets. But before any serious fighting could be done, the Spartan fleet appeared off the Piraeus, apparently intending to come in and storm the City. This was obviously no coincidence; the oligarchs must have sensed a week or so before that they couldn’t hold power without outside help, and sent for them. As soon as the news of the Spartan attack reached the City, the oligarchs’ armed supporters manned the walls and launched our fleet, the Spartans retreated, and we chased after them. Our fleet was seriously mangled off Euboea, as it happens, but that was Foreign News, and nobody seemed to care. They were far more interested in the situation at home, which was becoming decidedly lively. For after the Spartans had gone away, a good old-fashioned (and thus illegal) Assembly was held on the Pnyx, the Four Hundred were formally deposed, and the clever lawyer Antiphon was condemned to death. And that, apparently, was that. Business as usual. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
Wrong. The Assembly didn’t vote for the restoration of the democracy; they voted for Alcibiades. In a sense, this was a wise move, since Alcibiades had our army in the palm of his hand over on Samos, and nobody, not even the most dedicated seekers after new experiences, wanted a real full-scale civil war, with Alcibiades storming the City and anointing himself King Alcibiades the First. So what they voted for was his immediate return to Athens and the establishment of — believe it or not — the rule of the five thousand good and honest citizens, which was what Alcibiades had called for when he went over to the army on Samos.
Alcibiades was understandably confused, and he stayed abroad with his army and his fleet (they were decidedly his, not ours, by this stage) while we, apparently sincerely believing that what his lordship wanted was the rule of the Good and Honest, set about making it possible. We actually appointed a Five Thousand (who in the end came to about six thousand five hundred or so, but that’s Athens for you) and waited patiently for instructions. And that, not the great and mysterious coup d’état,, was the end of democracy in Athens. People at the time blamed the odious Theramenes, who wriggled out of his involvement in the coup with a speed and dexterity that won him universal admiration, and set himself up as Alcibiades’ vicar on earth; but I don’t think his part in it was particularly significant. I honestly believe that the Athenians unconsciously realised that they didn’t want the democracy any more. Since they didn’t know what they did want, they made Alcibiades a god and left the whole mess up to him to solve. Alcibiades obligingly responded in a truly godlike fashion by not turning up when invoked and turning a deaf ear to their prayers, and everybody was, for the moment at least, happy. They turned their attention away from politics and started interesting themselves in the War again, to find that it had got wholly out of hand and that we were losing.
So ended the greatest and most perfect democracy the world has ever known, the ideal which generations yet unborn will strive in vain to emulate. Actually, there’s more to it than that; the democracy was restored briefly, before the end of the War, amid the most horrible bloodletting that Athens has ever seen, until the Spartans disposed of it when they finally took over the City. But the monster that Cleophon and his fellow butchers created then had nothing really in common with the old democracy as it had been; it bore as much relation to the complicated organism originally spawned by Solon as my parodies do to the plays of Euripides. And I don’t want to think about what happened then, because it makes me sick just to think of it. My story ends here.
So I’ll just tie up a few loose ends, and then we’ll call it a day. For instance; did Phionides and I ever get round to killing Aristophanes for getting our leading actor drunk, or was it just another empty promise? Well, by the time we had slept off our hangovers and regained the use of all our limbs after the Victory party, we found that our grudge against the son of Philip had faded rather. After all, not only had I won the prize for Comic drama but Philonides had won the prize for best actor — there had been a little trouble about that, since Philonides hadn’t formally been entered, but it was smoothed over and he got the prize in the end — and all this good fortune was due, in a roundabout sort of way, to Aristophanes. So we let him off his beating for the time being, and decided to think up a more subtle punishment at our leisure. Then, what with one thing and another, we never got around to it, and so I suppose the matter lapsed, like an old mortgage. Later, during all the unpleasantness of the following year, when there was actual physical danger attached to any show of resistance to the new régime, Aristophanes did a couple of truly noble and courageous things, and we nearly forgave him.
Shortly before the actua
l coup, when the atmosphere in Athens was becoming very unpleasant and several outspoken people had been murdered in the street, there was talk of cancelling the Comic plays, since political comment was out of the question. But Aristophanes went marching into the Archon’s office (there was still an archon, though he bore about as much relation to a proper archon as I do to Zeus the Thunderer) and demanded that he be given Choruses for both the Lenaea and the Great Dionysia. Since he still had a degree of standing in oligarchic circles, and it would have been a nuisance to have such a relatively prominent person killed, the archon agreed, and so there was a Lenaea and a Dionysia after all. And the plays that Aristophanes wrote that year were decidedly clever, too, though I wouldn’t go so far as to say they were good.
He recognised that any sort of overt criticism would be impossible, so he put his mind to it and came up with a rather neat answer. There was a common joke throughout Athens at that time that the oligarchic experiment was so extreme that, when it failed, the only logical progression would be to turn the government of the State over to the women, as being marginally more bizarre even than the rule of Antiphon. Aristophanes took up this joke and based his two plays around it; but he disguised them thinly, one as literary criticism, the other as a general plea for peace. But in both plays the women take over part of the function of the State, and the way they act is remarkably close to the way the oligarchs were conducting themselves. In one play they even capture the Acropolis, as the celebrated Cylon had done several hundred years ago, when he tried to set up a dictatorship; and there are all sorts of veiled references — to citizens being arbitrarily arrested by the police, to secret conspiracies and negotiations with the enemy to end the war at any price, to puppet magistrates and to the previous coup by the Whitefeet, who seized Leipsydrion. This was pretty outspoken stuff in the circumstances, but the oligarchs either wouldn’t or couldn’t be bothered to do anything about it. They pretended to take both plays at their face value, and let Aristophanes have his brief moment of glory. Since the coup went ahead as planned, I don’t think many people actually did get the point of those two plays; or if they did, they ignored it.
