The Wreckage of Agathon

by John Gardner

  “Peeker, my boy, as you’ve observed yourself, I am much, much too old to be in love. It’s undignified. Also, it’s against my philosophy, I think. Nevertheless, you see before you a lover. Dignity and philosophy are for mountains.”

  Peeker laughed more violently than before. I waited for him to finish (gasping, clutching his head between his knees, and stomping up and down), then resumed.

  “I met her many years ago, when my wife was still here with me in Sparta and I was still on excellent terms with Lykourgos. He had less power in those days: I was satisfied with snarling obscenities at him, or laughing till I wept at his high-toned pronouncements.

  “I was, I must explain, an attractive and witty young man. This furfuraceous, fucoid mop that now shatters from my brow and spatters obscenely at the world from my chin was an august brown; my eye was aurora- borealic; my every speech was delicately perfumed. I had not yet succumbed to the fluxion of the world.”

  He was groaning, trying to crawl under the bed. I decided to alter my style.

  “What I meant to speak of, Peeker, was Iona—the lady who sent the epistle last night. I mean to lay bare my sufferings and sorrows.”

  His feet stopped struggling, and after a moment he backed out from under the bed. He studied me, to see if it was a trick, and then, with a hopeless sigh, sat down on the bedside as before.

  “Fat hell,” he said without spirit. Even his hair, hanging almost to his elbows, looked despondent. His eyes were two red holes.

  I nodded and told him the tale.

  She was a Helot—that is, a captive. Originally the word meant, I suspect, a captive from Helos. Such matters are always obscure in Sparta. Spartans are not, as they express it, hoarders of knowledge. In the beginning, people say, the Helots were slaves to particular masters; but Sparta’s communism did away with that. Now they are simply the property of Sparta, not exactly slaves but not Spartans either, more like the cows and goats they herd or the fields they till. They do all the work. (Spartans are warriors, Lykourgos says, not drones.) The Spartans have nothing to do with the Helots except, now and then, to hunt one down and cut him to pieces, or hang him for smiling at a Spartan girl, or put him on display and laugh at his dancing or the foolish way he talks.—They do, in fact, speak oddly: softly and slowly, with grammatical forms I believe to be older than those of the Spartan dialect. Once you have stupidly fallen in love with a Helot woman, their language becomes as beautiful as the music they play—not the clean harsh flutes of the Spartans (nor the rich, sophisticated music that comes from the Athenian harp) but gentle, Phrygian lyres that, crude as they are, move even a sensible man to tears. The Spartans scorn such music, of course. I may say in its defense that it conjures a world, an impossible world, admittedly—the innocence of Athenian childhood, the summer calm of a just state at peace. It’s healthy for a man to be reminded of such things, however they may mock him. (More healthy for a free man, of course, than for a Helot.) I stood with Lykourgos once at an execution in the square, and as I watched, full of rage at Lykourgos’s foul laws and howling in secret at the needless brutality of the legal murder, I heard, above the thwunk of the executioners’ bars, some Helot’s lyre behind me, far down the street. The sound was so distant I was only half sure it was not my imagination. In any case, I heard it, and suddenly all my anger gave way to grief and despair and searing love for some unreachable ideal. Tears filled my eyes and I nudged Lykourgos with my elbow. “Listen to the lyre, old horse,” I said. He watched the execution. “The music of weaklings,” he said.

  They never go near the Helot huts, except for more labor at harvesttime or else for theft or murder. (You seldom see it happen. You come upon a bright-red stain on a stone path, or an early-morning cluster of workers bending over something in a hayfield.) But my wife and I walked where we pleased in Sparta, and, because I was of use to him, or because he coveted my book, Lykourgos let it pass. We had far more in common with the Helots, we found, or anyway I did, than we had with our Spartan hosts. This was while I was still a guest, an “adviser,” honored though despised. We began to visit certain huts fairly often, usually for some festival—a funeral, a wedding, one of the innumerable game days or days of sacrifice Lakonia honors. The talk was a relief after all Lykourgos’s damned aphorisms. The Helots have no more education than the Spartans, but the Helots at least aren’t ignorant by choice. They have among them men who can recite nearly all of Homer, and not just for the supposed morality. They have excellent, uninhibited singers. They have women among them—Iona was one—who can cook as well as an Athenian. They have dancers and lyrists and, best of all (or so I thought as a callow youth), people more eager to play with ideas than to eat. Among these last, the best of the lot was Dorkis, Iona’s husband.

  We met him at his house. Iona had heard of our visits to some of her Helot friends—or so I imagine, knowing her—and, being a lady who would not be outdone, she sent a messenger to invite us to join her family and a few close friends for some pious festival—I’ve forgotten which. I was, at least from a Helot point of view, a person of importance: an Athenian, heir to the old Mykenaian and Ionian civilizations, no Spartan savage come down from the Dorian mountains. I was, moreover, the personal guest of Lykourgos, living in his palace, at times his unofficial diplomatic envoy to Thuria or Antheia, even Messene. What power she must have thought she had within her grasp! She had even then the fires of revolution in her, though she wasn’t yet aware of it. She would show me what culture the Helots maintained in semisecret, would ravish me with food and flowers and music and her clever husband’s talk. I would become her ally, her ornament, and she would become the greatest lady in the underground civilization of the Helots. How the Spartans would have laughed! Goats might sooner pretend to civilized manners! And I, too, laughed, to tell the truth. I was a cocky fool.

  We went. It was one of the better huts. One might in fact call it a fine house. It was large, anyway, by Helot standards, and newly limed, which made it a fair parody of Lykourgos’s place. We passed through the courtyard and stood in the doorway, my wife and I, looking in at the round room with its hearth in the center, and we were simultaneously dazzled and amused. There were huge wall paintings, all on arcane religious subjects and done in the most ungodly Oriental style. Bright drapes and beads hung everywhere, charging the room like a harvest of biffins and snow apples; the furniture—leviathan painted tables and carved chairs like behemoths at rest—burlesqued Athenian elegance; and wherever there was space there were fresh fruit and flower arrangements with figurines set in their leaves, and small clay lamps. The decorations, I learned later, were Iona’s work. She had a kind of genius along that line. It was all, that night, like some magical cave from the dream of a savage—light, shadow, color, incessant movement. But the crowning achievements were Dorkis and Iona herself. He was dressed like some apterous mythological bird, in azure and gold and burnished black and scarlet, with barbaric golden earrings like those of Sardis, and though it should all have been lewd, bumptious, he brought it off: his smile and eyes were brighter than his garb. He was no man of Helos, one knew at once by the slant of his eyes, but an Easterner. (He claimed mixed Ionian and Asian descent; his father had been an omen watcher on the island of Hydrea.) His wife, still axis of all that aureate churning and flash, wore a white chiton, unembroidered, pinned at the hip and shoulder by black two-headed serpents made of iron. Her breasts were like cream, like snow-capped mountains, as perfect as sacrificial doves, and exposed to the very halo of the nipple. No naked Spartan girl could have dreamed of competing. I gave her a hasty, embarrassed salutation—I was no voyeur, a dedicated amorist—and turned my attention to Dorkis. With a smile like sheet lightning, at once ironic and benevolent, she took my wife’s arm, and I watched them go, my wife (dressed in black) like Pallas Athena and Iona like—well, a bacchante who’d bear watching.

  “Ah, Agathon!” her husband said, and we embraced in the Helot style. (He was several drinks ahead of me—as were they all. But he w
ouldn’t hold his advantage long. He was used to Helot wine; I wasn’t.)

  “I’ve heard of you,” I said. “I’m glad we’ve finally met. You have a wonderful house.” I had, in fact, heard of him. Among the Helots he served as physician and sometime fortune-teller. Whether or not he told fortunes truly, he was not, from everything I’d heard, one of those crackpots who are forever pushing men back into the swamps—urging them to barbaric sacrifices in times of war, or stirring up the crowd to unusual cruelty, like that of the old days, in the whipping ceremony at the festival of Orthia. You have seen such men—wizards, witches, demagogues, not honest prophets: demon minds that feed on disaster. Dorkis was not one of those. To the Spartans, who knew nothing of his standing within his own culture, he was one of the most useful and responsible of servants (technically, he had been elevated to the hollow status of “New Citizen,” something between a horse and a Spartan Inferior); he was the man in charge of selecting and preparing the food for the communal eating halls. It was said that he’d been, before the redistribution, a personal servant to the palace. His power was enormous, at least in potential. He could have poisoned every man in the city, if he chose to—though one knew the instant one met his eyes that whatever the Spartans might do to the Helots, Dorkis would not turn poisoner. But he had other powers too, as history would show. He had the Spartans’ trust. They could hardly believe any evil of him, even after it was proved. This not only because he was obviously brave and noble (despite his curiously Oriental stance), but also because they gave him little advantages. Like masters everywhere, even Athens, they knew the art of corrupting the elite among the people they dominated, and letting the elite take care of the rest. They forgot two things, in his case: his odd religiosity, which made him in fact incorruptible, and his wife. Dorkis had one further hook into power. As master of the communal eating halls, he knew all the important Helots—vineyard keepers, olive growers, goatherds, potters, wagon masters, the lot. Most of them owed him favors.

  So, as I was saying, I’d heard of him—and had speculated about him. When I praised his house, sweeping my arms toward the painted walls, he laughed and shrugged, boyishly modest. He’d been an athlete once, a javelinist barred from the Olympics only by his station, and when he shrugged you saw that he still had the chest and shoulders for it. He said, “Oh, it’s nothing, nothing.” And then, quickly, extending a hand to one side and pivoting, he invited me to meet his guests.

  The house was crowded and noisy as the sea with party cachinnation, but I no longer remember clearly who was there. A man named Kebes, a vineyard keeper whom I’d met before, the largest young man I have ever seen, close to seven feet tall and still as stone; a woolly- bearded goatherd who’d done well enough that nowadays he seldom sniffed a goat but who somehow nevertheless maintained a perpetual dudgeon; a small, ironic, testy man whom I later met often but whose name I never learned (he had a son who was insane; he became a famous arsonist and roof crawler in the later days of the revolution); two or three Helot priests. There were always priests at Dorkis’s house. Religion, as I’ve said, was one of his fascinations. Sex and wine, sad proofs of life’s caducity, were the others. There were various other people there, well-off Helots and their wives, an Athenian ex-patriot or two, a pet liberal Spartan, all milling, lounging, battening each other on wine and fanny patting. I talked through nearly the whole evening with Dorkis. Tuka, my wife, talked with everyone, as usual. She was radiant, casually elegant as a mountain temple, so conscious of her easy superiority of taste and class that she could lay them aside like a shawl. “These Spartan markets!” she said, and staggered, face and body, as if she’d been hit on the side of the head by a timber. “You take an armload of iron”—she struggled with an invisible load—“and all it buys you is three eggs and a cauliflower. But OK, at least it’s better going into the market than trying to get out. On the way in you’ve got protection, but on the way out all these people have these armloads of iron they can’t see over, and every time you turn around you get zonked.” She reeled, carrying the invisible cauliflower and eggs, being zonked. “It’s so absurd, really. Why use money at all—as my husband tells Lykourgos.” (I never did.) “Why not let people just buy things with lies and promises? It would keep everybody on his toes.” Everyone laughed. Iona said scornfully, laughing with the rest, “Clearly unfair! Tuka would own the whole world in a week, and we’d all have to move to Africa.” They laughed again, and Tuka launched a story. I turned back to the men.

  Dorkis was pouring wine now, the thick, resonated honey distillation the Helots drink straight and the rest of the world mixes one-to-six with water. “To Lykourgos!” he said, and grinned. He liked me, it was manifest; and—who knows why?—I was delighted. I knew from the first that I was doomed to show off for Dorkis as I would for some girl.

  “To psychotic coherence!” I said. He and the priest beside him laughed. We drank. But Dorkis was thinking, impish. His eyes brightened and snapped into focus on distances, like an eagle’s.

  “That’s the trouble,” he said. “Coherence.”

  I smiled. He liked me. Ah!

  His eyes snapped over to me, then away again, and he tipped his head back, thinking out his phrases. It hit me that he too was showing off. I was honored. “There’s a sense in which everything has to balance,” he said. His right hand peeled away like a seagull, illustrating balance. “The world’s a great big clutter of truths, some of them conflicting but all of them true. Each truth is a kind of stern god. Turn your back on one—” His hands danced out, turned their backs.

  The priest beside him shook his head sadly, a little drunk. “We must not presume,” he said. He had a weak chin.

  Dorkis ignored him by nodding agreement, a favorite trick of his, I learned. He opened his arms with loving-kindness for the whole world. “Pursue one single truth, never glancing to left or right, and pow!” Light sparkled from his eyes with the word, the boxer’s pow of his fist. He was glorious, bright as a thousand garnets. He could have said “Circles are square” and I would have been hurled to the highest reaches of philosophy. I drank and filled my cup. “There’s a sense in which nothing is true,” he said. “Triangles, for instance. All the laws of geometry fail when you try to draw a triangle on a round pot. The sum of the angles changes, or else the lines aren’t straight.” He hunched his shoulders, more like a wrestler than like a potter, laughing with delight at the difficulty of life and pretending to struggle over lines on the side of his cup.

  “It’s simple,” I said. “You smash the pot and draw in the rubble.”

  He laughed. “To Lykourgos!” We drank.

  “That’s the way it is,” he said. “Life. Experience. It’s like something alive, forever changing its shape. There’s a sense in which as soon as you learn its laws it’s become something else. It wreaks havoc on ethical theories.”

  I laughed, merely from good humor. If I wanted to be hypercritical, I might have observed that Dorkis was inclined to be sententious.

  “Everything’s air,” he said. “The breath of God.” With this phrase he again opened his arms wide, like a man just home from the city calling his animals; and I laughed.

  The priest smiled and nodded to show he was awake. He looked puzzled, however.

  Dorkis said, “You have to ride it, like a bird.”

  “That’s so,” I said. I realized with pleasure that I was drunk on two cups, and the whole evening lay before me like a meadow. “Ethics,” I said, “is some theory a man imposes on the world. A man makes up a set of rules, or some fool priest makes up the rules—” I wagged my finger at the priest. “And you try to make the rules inside you fit what’s outside. If the world outside is nothing like what your rules say, or if it fits your rules on Tuesday but then on Wednesday it changes…” (This was not my usual view, but I was pleased by it, and I’ve held it ever since, for sentimental reasons.)

  The priest shook his head and waved his cup. “I’m sorry, but you’re both quite mistaken.”

/>   “Priests would be beggars if people weren’t always mistaken,” Dorkis said.

  The cheerful talk went on through dinner, some splendid thoroughly unspartan meal I no longer remember except in isolated images: my wife, Tuka, gleaming, talking with fine wicked wit about Korinth; some fat, dark lady who looked like a grackle bending her head to hear what the testy man said through the side of his mouth; Iona holding up a wide clay black-figured dish as if doing a dance with the cluster of shadows on the white stone wall behind her. Dorkis and I shouted, telling stories with obscure points. His teeth and slanted eyes glinted, the muscles of his cheeks bunched up like fists, his hands flew wildly, now like a boxer’s, now like some delicate artisan’s. The drunker he got, the keener his mind became, it seemed to me. I grew duller, but I made up for it in noise. At some point I slept.

  Later he sat on the soft couch with his arm around Tuka, his hand on her breast. She talked lightly, cleverly about silversmiths, and Dorkis laughed till tears came, ravished by her brilliance—the quick, dingy wit, the lightning-fast plasticity of face, the clowning body. He clung to her tightly, head against her shoulder. I was a little surprised by all this, but it seemed not unnatural. I went outside. The trees went round and round like big black chariots.

  I stood for some minutes sucking in the air, trying to get my mind clear, and then I walked out into the garden, momentarily convinced that I was interested in vegetables and flowers. I picked a leaf and held it up against the moon. Awe went through me like a pain, and then, for some reason, I lost interest. I urinated. When I returned to the back steps of the house Iona was leaning against a pillar as if with native and accidental grace.

  “You have lovely breasts,” I said. “I couldn’t help but notice.”

  She smiled. I was full of woe.