The Wreckage of Agathon

by John Gardner

  6 Peeker:

  We still don’t know what the charge is, and the old man’s still done nothing about defending himself. It’s all insane. What’s the matter with him? The ephors aren’t fools. They know his value to the state. Why don’t they talk to us then, come hear our side? Lykourgos is a just man—even righteous, in fact; Agathon says so himself. I keep asking myself, What’s happening? What’s happening? and I kick the walls and pound on my head with my fists, but I know the answer: Nothing’s happening. There’s an execution almost every night, but Agathon just babbles on. The crazy old bastard will let us both be executed and he won’t even lift a damn finger! Who can I get to come listen, give us justice? We’re needed, now more than ever—the endless wars in the north and west, the rumble of revolution all around us.…

  I don’t know why it is—the muggy heat after yesterday’s rain, or the queasy feeling I always get when I eat too much cabbage, or the way my poor master’s flibbertigibbeting mashes my brains—but I feel more confused, more unreal, more hopeless every day. Again and again it strikes me: This is serious! They’re going to kill us! It’s as clear as a vision, clear as a white duck in a dark-green pool. I turn to Agathon, scared shitless, and he does something crazy—some moron joke, or a bump and a grind—and I’m disoriented, like a man cast out of Time. Have we all been fooled? I wonder. Is he merely insane? He teases the guard unmercifully, like some impudent, fat nine-year-old, and he teases me, teases himself. My mother would be laying plans. Is he doing that, behind a facade of clowning? When someone is driving a cart for my mother, she does everything the driver does, a little ahead of him. Her shoulders go “whoa,” though her hands are folded in her lap; she pulls the team to the left or right with reins invisibly rising from between her locked thumbs. “Zeus helps those that helps theirselves,” my mother says. Who helps those that help Zeus?

  Nothing I do can make him admit the seriousness of things. I was sitting at the table, trying to write—Agathon writing across from me—and I said, “Master, what is Lykourgos planning?”

  He said, “My boy, let me ask a more significant question. Why are we sitting here writing when we could be gathering beautiful icicles to save up for summer?”

  “In Apollo’s name—”

  “No no, my boy, I’m in deadly earnest. Why are we writing?”

  “Because they give us parchment,” I said.

  “And why do they give us parchment? The stuff’s expensive.”

  “God only knows.”

  The old man deliberated, then shook his head. “No, we must think this out more soberly. Do they read what we write?” I had no answer, so he answered himself. “It seems unlikely, yet every three or four days they come and take what we’ve written.—But do they read it?” he asked himself again, and answered, “Probably not.” The dialogue amused him and he began to throw himself into it, turning his head one way for one voice, the other way for the other, like a rhapsode.

  “They will preserve it, for the record?

  “Doubtful. Their poetry is oral. They have lost the art of writing music down. Their communism dispenses with the need for public records, so they say. They do not even write down their laws, on Lykourgos’s theory that when laws are written, men abandon the sense for the letter.

  “Then why do they give you parchment?

  “God only knows. Because I used to be a scribe?”

  “You must do better than that.”

  “Master,” I said. But he was engaged. He began wagging his finger at himself, lecturing himself pedantically.

  “Perhaps they do it for their scornful amusement, using you as they occasionally use the Helots. They seize some Helot in the marketplace and take him to a house and give him wine, and they force him to drink it, like it or not, until he can barely stand. Then they lead him lurching and staggering to the eating hall where all the young Spartans and their older advisers are seated at their tables, brotherhood by brotherhood, and they make the drunken Helot dance and sing and struggle to play the flute. He kicks up his heels and clumsily lifts his filth-smudged, wine-bespattered skirt, showing his crooked, hairy legs, and he blunders into tables where the young men throw pieces of food at him or cover his head with a messy iron pot or reach out to trip him or slyly, as if lovingly, seize hold of his private particulars. They applaud his antics and give him more wine until he vomits and passes out, and then, roaring with scornful laughter like a wolf pack’s growl, they strip him of his clothes and hurl him like a grain sack through the window into the street. The dogs there snarl and bark at him, but the Helot lies still, philosophical as stone. According to Lykourgos, the example of the drunken Helot teaches temperance to Sparta’s young.” He laughed.

  “So with you, then. Yes. They take what you write to the eating halls, where they read it aloud to the boys and advisers, who laugh in outrage at your laborious intortions, and answer them in the laconic way Lykourgos has made popular: ‘Wisdom acts. Stupidity labors to explain itself.’ And thus they purge the State of sickly reasoning.

  “That’s it, no doubt. Yes. Praised be Apollo!”

  His expression became glum.

  “The trouble is, you can never know if you’re right or wrong, and until you do you must pull your nose and scratch your ear and ask the question some other way, in a predictably futile but inescapable search for certainty.”

  Agathon strongly disagreed. “False! Sir, what is certainty to me? I’m a Seer. Truths move through my mind like fish. I watch them, follow them into the gloom, turn indifferently to nearer fish, tapping my fingertips, marveling at the grace of their fins, and brooding, alarmed, on the emptiness of their eyes.”

  He considered this point and became conciliatory.

  “Perhaps they give you parchment, Agathon, in hopes that you’ll set down something they can condemn you for—some crime or indiscretion. They read, still as tigers in their dusky rooms, and watch through the dark, rustling ambiage, for some dire phrase to pounce on. A sudden summons then, a hasty trial…

  “No! Ridiculous! In Sparta, justice is for Spartans. Especially so in this age of universal war. They’ll waste no trial on me, much less on Peeker. Sooner or later, when he’s sick of making a fool of me, old man Lykourgos will nod his head and noble Agathon will hobble from his cell, joking and leering and impishly aiming the tip of his crutch at the nearest guard’s toes—or will be dragged from his cell, if we tell the truth, screaming and pleading, wringing his fingers, offering bribes, threats, promises, and that will be the end of poor old Agathon’s adventures and ideas.”

  I tried to break in, but the other Agathon was quicker.

  “Is it possible that they send what you write to Lykourgos?

  “What would he care?

  “And yet I wonder. He was interested once in all you said. He searched for years for the hiding place of your book.”

  He nodded thoughtfully.

  “An amusing theory. Old one-eyed Lykourgos sitting black-bearded and heavy as a sack of murdered men’s bones, shriveled small as a lizard’s corpse, waiting, waiting in the temple at Delphi for the god to make up his windy mind, waiting, passing his time with the writings of his half-cracked lifelong critic. Is it possible that even Lykourgos has moments of doubt, so that he can’t resist spying on the meditations of his enemies? Or is there even in him some flicker of the old Akhaian delight in ancient secrets, grand ideas?”

  As if only now aware of my presence, Agathon looked at me, lachrymose. “Peeker, my boy, I’ve wasted half the afternoon sitting here with my crutch across my knees and my chin on my fists, brooding for your sake on why they bring us this parchment and take it away as they do our chamber pot when we fill it.” His tone grew more poetic. “The sun is low. Only the icy crests of the bluffs to the east of the river still gleam with Helios’s fire, and in the darkened valley Helot workers are driving goats and cows up from the river through the snowflakes to their barns. I can reach no decision on the parchment business, but I think we can solve the probl
em. We’ll assume that all the answers are true—that our writings are for the eating halls, that what we write will either condemn us or save us in court, and that the letters all go to Lykourgos. I call this method Calculus.”

  I sighed, leaned on my hands.

  “A wise solution,” he said. “What matters in the world, my dear young friend, is not so much what is true as what is entertaining, at least so long as the truth itself is unknowable. So Homer understood. The question is, will it still entertain us tomorrow? Will we change our minds and hoard these writings in some secret place and offer the ephors only, say, obscene drawings of women?—Why not?”

  And so I gave up. It’s plain that my master has no respect for my opinions and no concern about my safety. The hell with him. I begin to suspect that a Seer is not someone who sees more clearly than other people, but merely a man who is forever looking in the wrong direction. I am going to figure out a plan of escape. If I think of one, see if I tell him!

  7 Agathon:

  Strange developments! “Magic is afoot in these woods,” in the words of Alkman. I must begin at the beginning.

  It was dusk. The first stars were beginning to appear above Mount Parnon and the wind was turning bitter cold when, pausing in the little song with which I was warming the cockles of my heart and entertaining my fellow prisoners for a mile or so on either side, I heard my jailer coming down the row of cells to the right of mine, feet crunching in the crusted snow, dragging a plank. He appeared at my door and glared at me, his bearded lips pursed to a kind of pout, steam blowing from his nostrils. I put aside my melody, rubbed my freezing hands together, and tried to look apologetic—for I do understand his problem. My very existence, for him, is criticism. My paunch condemns his asceticism; my timid, wholly irrelevant grins deny the iron- chained order of his soul. He went on glaring.

  “Dear jailer,” I cried, snatching at my crutch and rising from my table to welcome him. “Bless you! Always alert,” I cried, “like a rabbit!”

  His black eyes grew violent, and I corrected myself: “Like a bear.”

  I was too late. He spit, only vaguely in my direction, and set up the plank and turned away to get another. I spoke to him again when he returned with the second plank—“Any news of the wars?”—but he ignored me. When he came with the last plank he paused and looked at me a moment, not yet dropping it into place, and I believed he was struggling against a temptation to speak. For a man of stone, he was in agony—a brute straining toward thought I said nothing, of course. There are times when even humor is out of place. His mouth worked, his underjaw twitched, and for an instant I had hopes that his eyes would cross the way Peeker’s do when he’s intense—but he looked away, instead, and I was disappointed. What was it he wanted to say to me? Some word of animalistic rage? Some news of how horribly I’m to die? Strange to say, I think not. His iracund, muscle-bound face was like a child’s—it made me remember my own poor son Kleon, back in Athens. Without thinking, I stretched out my hand to him, and suddenly, with animal fury, he slammed the plank into position, shutting me in. He left then. I caught only a glimpse of his legs cutting the dusk like huge, slow stones, a statue walking.

  So much for the evening’s beginning. It was an omen, clear as an eagle carrying flowers above your left shoulder.

  Darkness settled. I fed my rats the portion of our supper Peeker and I had saved for them, and after that, feeling in no mood for art or talk with Peeker, I took my constitutional, walking around and around my table, deepening the trench my crutch end has cut in the hard-packed earth of my floor. Every few rounds I would pause at the cell door to look out, watching for revolutionists’ fires, listening for the outbreak of a riot or the noise of an execution. There was nothing. It did not calm me. Quiet nights are the worst. You keep waiting, wondering which direction the trouble is going to strike from. (I can seldom foresee any troubles that involve me directly. That’s how it always is, people say. Tieresias. Kassandra.)

  Somewhere near midnight as near as I can tell, I was startled by a hint of movement outside the bars but inside the lean-to of planks. I stopped, trembling like a leaf, clutching my heart (Even as a younger man, I was never up to this kind of thing.) Peeker’s eyes were open, bright as an owl’s. Nothing stirred. For a long time I waited, trying to see past the glow of the lamp on the table between me and the door. It was no illusion; that I knew. A wolf, some young Spartan here to murder me—I could not guess. Then there was another movement and something fluttered to the floor inside the bars. A minute later a dark, bony hand came through the bars and the index finger pointed at the scrap of thin parchment. Some trick by my jailer! I thought. Is it possible? Sucking my cheeks in, slow and wary, I moved closer to the scrap and, four feet from where it lay, I reached out with my crutch to drag it toward me. The rats in the corner watched, torn between snatching the note for dessert and keeping clear of the creature behind the bars. I stooped then, keeping my eyes on the dark doorway, picked up the parchment and glanced at it in haste. My glance caught and stuck. All the unreasonable pleasure in life I thought I had abandoned years ago churned up in my chest as if to drown me, and I reached out to steady myself on the table. The messenger behind the bars stirred, and I whispered, “Wait!” He stayed.

  The message was from a woman—a girl—what should I say of a sixty-year-old child? The note was from my beloved Iona. I was in no condition to read it just then, but I would know that furious, childish scrawl if I found it carved on the moon. I taught her how to write, I’m ashamed to admit. I am ordinarily an excellent teacher, and Iona was a brilliant student; but Iona learns what she chooses to learn, especially from me. I stared at the writing without reading it as I used to sometimes stare at her mouth, not listening to her words. It came to me then that the light from my lamp made the messenger vulnerable: the jailer, if he were to look from the side, would see the shape crouched under the planks and would sooner or later realize it was somewhat too large for a frog. I turned and blew out the lamp, then went to the door and peered out.

  “Hah,” I said, stroking my beard. It was a boy I had seen before—no more than nineteen, I would guess. It’s hard to tell a Helot’s age, especially of late. The war’s been hardest on the Helots. Malnutrition stunts them in their youth, labor and flight make them old before their time. He had slanted eyes, like Iona’s, and a face too much like a skull. His eyes flicked continually from side to side, the eyes of a boy who’s spent most of his life on dark unpeopled streets or sprinting up lightless alleys in the city of his enemies.

  “Iona’s all right, young fellow?” I asked.

  He nodded. It meant nothing. They always nod, eyes flickering away.

  “She’s not sick? She hasn’t got the piles? Her stools are normal?”

  “No, not sick.” I had to read his lips.

  “Not in prison, either?”

  “No.”

  “Good. I take it she’ll get out of Sparta, then, as I’ve always so wisely advised her?”

  “No.” This time he spoke aloud. I raised my hands to hush him.

  “Tell her she must,” I said. “Tell her if she doesn’t, the consequences will be dire.”

  He smiled and, seeing his smile, I knew him. Her grandson. So she’d brought him into it too. She was crazy.

  “Young man,” I said, “your grandmother is crazy.” I began pacing hastily back and forth in front of him. “We must try to help her, poor thing. I know how you must suffer, seeing her wander about like a lamb some horse has kicked, hearing her babble her curious language—but we must be patient and kindly and do what little we can to give her comfort. Could you tie her up in the cellar, perhaps wall her up someplace, with a hole to pass in food through?”

  He smiled again. “She learned it from you.”

  I straightened up, indignant. “Nonsense! All I offer is mild and harmless confusion.” Then: “You must force her to do as I say, get clear of Sparta.” I spoke earnestly now, on the chance that he was an innocent. “Do it for my sake.
”

  “No,” he said very simply, stubborn as a mule. “The revolution is on.”

  I sighed. “You’ve caught it, then—her craziness. Why couldn’t she have had mere measles, say, or the seaport plague?”

  He ignored me. (Everybody ignores me.) I’ll be back,” he said, “if I can.”

  I nodded. “No doubt. The cell next door is empty. They killed the fellow.”

  But he was gone. He went across the snow and into the trees without a sound.

  After his visit I couldn’t sleep, or anyway I thought I couldn’t, grieving for them—or for her, or for myself. But in the morning rats had nibbled my fingers as usual, so I’d slept after all. There’s a lesson in that. All human feeling is a slight exaggeration.

  8 Agathon:

  When he got up this morning, Peeker wouldn’t speak to me. He resents his lack of divine omniscience. A healthy condition in young people. He pointedly ignored Iona’s note, which I’d left on the table, and when the jailer came and I greeted him like an old friend, Peeker turned away and folded his arms and stared with intense unconcern at the back wall. I ate. He stubbornly eschewed the table. I understood his point of view, and in my youth I might have sympathized. But now that I am old and cachexic, I need my nourishment. When I’d finished my food I ate his. He remained intractable.

  Toward noon I said, “Peeker, it is my duty to tell you a story.”

  He laughed, full of violence and grief. That too was excellent, from my point of view. I am determined to make him a Seer.

  “Sit down,” I said kindly, persuasively.

  He sat. I dragged my chair from the table to the cell door, where I could sit with my back to the glare of the snow, and when I had made myself comfortable, I spoke to him as follows.