The Wreckage of Agathon

by John Gardner

  “Come roll with me in the garden,” I said. I put my hand on the pillar she leaned on, and she smiled again, studying my face.

  “If I followed my inclinations—” she said. She remembered the cup in her hand and took a sip.

  I put my hand on hers and she looked down. For an instant my mind cleared. She was confused, less certain of the game than I had imagined—or was she acting? She filled my mind with jungles. Birds and tigers. I was tempted to press her and perhaps I would have, but Tuka was standing in the low, square doorway, her skin white against the black of her hair and dress. She was smiling the slightly crooked smile she gets when she’s had too, much to drink, and she was looking at us up- from-under like a bull. It struck me with terrific force that Tuka looked like Lykourgos.

  “Let’s go home,” she said.

  We went.

  9 Peeker:

  Stories, stupidities—he never lets up! The ephors came this morning, three of them, to collect our writing. I gave them nothing, though I wanted to. The old man’s talk about why they collect the stuff got to me. Agathon gave them a big messy pile of things—stupid damn drawings of dogs.

  I was afraid when they came—all those guards and people with banners and all those swords—but when they’d stood there at the cell door a little while, talking with the jailer, asking whether we were eating and how we were sleeping nights, I began to feel less afraid. Agathon sat at the table serene as a mountain, smiling at them the way he’d have smiled at a delegation of children, and when they spoke to him he would answer as if they’d asked some other question, like a deaf man. Their spokesman—I didn’t hear any of their names—was a tall man with pale-blue eyes, young for a man with so much power. His legs were hairless, like a young boy’s, and pale from his spending all his time indoors. He stood with his head thrown forward a little, like an important man being taken on a tour of a city’s defenses. He had a sharp mind, you could see at a glance, but what he might be thinking was as obscure as old astrologers’ charts. He glanced through Agathon’s drawings and didn’t smile.

  When I saw they were about to turn away I said, “Sir!” The spokesman turned back with his eyebrow lifted, impersonal and polite. “Son?” he said. I was moved—all choked up—at his calling me son. A feeling went through me, like the shock from an eel, that I could trust him. Why would he be here visiting us if he didn’t care that we got justice? And the way he stood, perfectly erect, not slouching the way some tall men do, or erect except for the thoughtful and considerate bend of the head and shoulders, not a slouch but an invitation to us to think of him as a friend—it made me think of a ship’s captain or an iren guiding his troops. His mild eyes fixed me like pins.

  I said, “Sir, we’ve been falsely accused.” My eyes filled with tears. It was like a plea, but I wasn’t ashamed. He put me at ease.

  “Oh?” he said.

  He was waiting, and I said, “My master’s the loyalest man in all Sparta. He’s too proud to say so himself, sir, but it’s true. He’s a man of the deepest integrity, sir. That’s why people hate him. And he’s a good man, absolutely law-abiding, only there’s certain people that spread rumors about him—people I could name: old Bottje, for instance, the rich old goof that peddles horse manure in the vineyards. I mean, they resent the way he dresses and things. Also, he puts them to shame. It’s the truth. They’re mediocre, you know, and my master’s a genius. People can’t stand that—they say things in public and then there’s Agathon showing that all they say is wrong. That bothers people.”

  The ephor merely listened, far away as the mountains, the eagles that fly beyond the rims of the farthest mountains, but I could see he was taking it all in. He’d weigh it, maybe begin an investigation. I glanced over at Agathon. He was looking at me with quizzical interest, as if I was talking about somebody he didn’t know.

  The ephor was still waiting, looking me up and down with cool but not unfriendly detachment, the kind of thing you expect from a good administrator. The others stood a step behind him, one of them fat and kindly, soft-looking, rubbing his little hands together, eager to be my friend, the other ephor short and square, stony- faced, the kind that might be your friend and then again might not.

  “Lykourgos knows about him, sir,” I said. “Agathon worked for Lykourgos for a long time. He was one of his top advisers.”

  “But Lykourgos is at Delphi,” the ephor said. He was honestly concerned. He sucked in the corner of his lower up, thinking about how he could get through to Lykourgos.

  “Well,” I said, “the kings know about Agathon too.”

  His eyebrows lowered a little. He was still looking at me hard, judging me carefully. “Do you think they’d care?”

  He was right, I knew. What was justice to them? But I was excited. The ephor was a man who leveled with you. I’d been right to trust him. Now I wished the shit I’d written something to give them, some kind of point- by-point defense. That reminded me, and I said, “Sir, what’s the charge against us?”

  His eyes were still coming at me firm as nails and his look was still mild, but his mind was a thousand miles away, reconsidering our whole case. Then he looked past me, over my head, remembering something. He worked it out, made some decision, then turned to the jailer. “See that they get everything they need,” he said. Without another word, he left, striding across the sloping field with the other two ephors hurrying behind him and the soldiers and men with banners running to catch up.

  Agathon smiled. “You played it brilliantly,” he said.

  I could have hit him with a chair, but I kept my temper. We had hope now. “You’re crazy,” I said. “I mean literally.” And it came to me that it was true. He was a great Seer, yes, and he was a good old man, but he was out of his mind, insane. I’d been cowed by him before. I hadn’t realized that a genius can be as stupid as anybody else at one or two points; but I knew now. I wasn’t playing, I was pleading with that ephor with all my heart. And if Agathon couldn’t see that, it had to be because he’d spent so much time seeing through men’s lies he’d forgotten what plain truth sounded like. I glanced at him to see if my guess about him was true. He was still smiling, and he’d rolled the pupils of his eyes up out of sight. It scared me, that sudden realization of how crazy he really was. I was going to have to fight for us both—with no idea what it was I was fighting or who it was that was against us. There he sat, filthy and fat, lewd, with those horrible eye whites staring at me and cracks of dirt around his neck and sweat beads on his forehead and the tip of his nose. He was helpless, I could see it now, which meant not only that I had to do it all, I had to outmaneuver his craziness to do it I wanted to cry. But there was still that tall, cool ephor. There was hope.

  I decided to work the whole thing out in writing. That was what they’d given us the parchment for—I could see that now.

  What are the most likely charges against Agathon?

  1. Corrupting the youth, mainly because of his singing.

  2. Friendship with Helots; hence, possible complicity in the revolution. (Nonsense.)

  3. Talking too much about the kings, etc.

  4. Public nuisance (smelling of onions, breaking wind, etc.).

  5. Bad personal appearance.

  6. Molesting old women.

  I kept staring at the list. I couldn’t believe it. Surely there had to be more to it than that! Surely they could see that all these were mere foibles or jokes!

  When I glanced over at Agathon, he was looking at me as coolly, as rationally, as the ephor had, his interlaced fingers resting on his beard. The complete transformation unsettled me. He was solemner than a funeral pyre. He said, “I’ll tell you another thing about Lykourgos, my boy. He gets headaches.”

  I waited.

  “He’s had them all his life,” Agathon said. “He’s asked me about them once or twice, since I pretend to a smattering of medical knowledge. I suggested that he have himself poisoned: then all our headaches would end at once.” Agathon laughed wildly, then sob
ered. “He rarely smiles at my jokes. He merely stares at me, mournful, and sometimes shakes his head. I have a theory about his headaches, though. He gets them from clenching his teeth. I told him once: ‘Lykourgos, that which is unnatural, Nature destroys. You’re a doomed man.’ ‘All life is doomed, finally,’ he said.”

  You see what I have to contend with.

  10 Agathon:

  Peeker labors on. God bless him. As the soldiers labor on, dying for freedom (both sides) at Stanyclarus Plain and along the coast I can gather no news, either by normal or by extraordinary channels, on the plague.

  Last night, unluckily, my jailer did not put the planks up over my door, so that Iona’s boy couldn’t visit me, if he meant to, for lack of cover. I sat wrapped in blankets beside the door squinting out into the ghostly snowlight, hoping to catch some sign of life, some sign that he was at least there, waiting for his chance. The sticks on the hearth crackled pleasantly, but my mind was full of Iona, Tuka, my poor unlucky children, my childhood friend, poor Konon. I watched the stars, unnaturally bright and distinct, riddlesome, imperceptibly turning above me, counting my hours, and they mixed themselves up, somehow, with my thoughts of people. I scoff at astrologers and tease my jailer with the antics of those Great Pretenders, but I know I too am a kind of pretender in matters of Destiny. I clown, pretending to experience what in fact I do experience: I mime and burlesque my own nature in an abaxial attempt to get it clear; but I understand nothing, for all my fine reputation. I strut or rant or giggle or taunt reality with obscene little gestures, like some actor imploring tier on tier of silent observers to show some reaction—laugh, throw stones—but the stars remain aloof, expressionless, creating—perhaps even purposefully (as an audience voluntarily gives the actor time)—the span of my existence. At times, squinting up, furtive, humbly amenable, I am filled with a superstitious fear that they know the plot, and possibly control it. Or that, in any case, someone, Something, knows the plot How else can I explain these “impressions” that occasionally come to me—clear knowledge of distant things, things still in the future, almost always things of no interest to me whatever? No; precision: I have an unreasonable intuition of deadly inevitability, both in myself and in the world. The skull behind Zeus’s mask.

  I used to feel it at times with my son Kleon. I would observe him at play, transforming the pebbles on a path into houses, ingeniously constructing and peopling cities, or talking to imaginary friends under a roof of low-hanging branches behind the goat pen. In all he did there was a gentleness, an insistent faith in the goodness of things, that turned on harsh actuality, would make him, inescapably, what he would be. When he was overtired, as a small boy, and things went wrong for him—some game interrupted by a command to go to bed, or his will frustrated by the recalcitrance of matter (a stubborn pony, a pebble that obstinately refused to stay put on the wall he was building)—the gentleness would give way to an alarming rage, a childish yet terrible nihilism that filled me with fear. The change I would see in Kleon at such moments made his future seem to hang on blind chance: given the right set of accidents, he would grow up to be the best of men; given the wrong accidents, he might become the worst. I fully credited this doctrine, the fortuity of time, but for all the certainty of my intellect I would find myself struggling to penetrate his future; anticipate and control it. The point is, I caught glimpses which seemed to deny—no, overwhelm—my doctrine: I felt moments of emotional certainty, however illogical or nonsensical, that I was onto something, that I was suddenly face to face with some potential more real than all the others—moments of heightened awareness, as it seemed, that cried out with all the fixed authority of a parent or a king or an oracle—sudden and final as an earth-splitting, river-building stamp of star-rimmed Pegasos’ hoof: This is it.

  So, too, with Iona. Throughout my long affair with her, I again and again experienced periods in which it seemed that whatever strange hold she had on me had relaxed a little; I might eventually free myself of her cacodemonic influence. I would meet her with pleasure at some Helot party or walking on the street, the same pleasure I’d have felt on meeting Solon unexpectedly, or my father, or some fellow poet-sage. We’d talk casually, brightly, Iona and I, and I would think, At last we can be friends. And then one day, at the height of my confidence, I would turn and catch her out of the corner of my eye, and she would smile and I would know I was trapped forever. She was my Great Bitch, my ambsace, my doom. If she had said, before Lykourgos and all the ephors, “Kiss me, Agathon,” I would have done it. And it’s a matter of fact that whenever she sent me out into the hills for thorns and stones and wild flowers for some room decoration, I dropped all my labors, poor miserable wretch, and went (I’d sit baffled, marveling, as she wove bits and pieces of the world together into charming, riotous wholes of blooming confusion, substance triumphant. “Are you going to use that?” I would say as she toyed with some black, shriveled olive leaf. She took it as a challenge. She’d have used the Kolossos of Rhodes if I could have lugged it to her house.) It would all have been simple if Tuka hadn’t had equal, if not greater, power. Between them, I was as helpless as a ship in a hurricane. I was never short on will—I am capable even of violent opposition to what I disfavor. But there were forces, both inside me and outside, that turned my will to jelly. It was sexual partly, of course. If I feel the itch of it even now, a sensibly impotent old Seer, no wonder if in my middle thirties I walked crouched over or hopped on one foot. They were the two most beautiful women I’d ever encountered, and when I touched either one of them I was fiercely aroused, driven madder, in fact, than I’ve ever been since by Apollo. (An accident of time and situation, perhaps. Old, I look at ladies fifty years my junior and wonder that any man alive is moderately sane.) But it was more than that. They were, both of them, goddesses in the only sense of the word I understand. They were embodiments of heavenly ideals—conflicting ideals—that my soul could not shake free of. Tuka, even on those awful occasions when her mind came unhinged, had the precision of intellect, the awesome narrowness of purpose, of a mathematician or a general. She knew, beyond any shadow of a doubt, what she wanted from life and why she wanted it, and she would stalk her desire with the single- mindedness of a carpenter driving a nail. Iona wanted not some one thing but everything; she had a mind as wide, as devious and turbulent, as a poet’s, and she went for what she desired like a swarm of blind bees in a windstorm. I danced with Tuka once, at one of the Helot festivals, and when the dance shifted and I turned to Iona she whispered with a fixed smile and eyes like a Lystragonian’s, “Get out! Don’t speak to me! Get out!” She was enraged, jealous of my dancing with my own wife, and when I begged her to be reasonable she snatched her veil from the back of a chair and quit the place. Dorkis, though he grinned, looked baffled and meek. She had always been too much for him, though they both pretended it was merely his respect for her independence. (Perhaps it was. Perhaps I’m too hasty.) “You should go after her,” I told him. “It’s not safe, out on the streets at night. Suppose some young Spartan fools should come across her, out there alone.” He left at last, reluctantly, more afraid of perturbing Iona, I think—invading her privacy, he would have said—than of what any Spartan thug might do. I wanted to go after her myself. I couldn’t stand Iona’s rage, and she knew it. But Tuka’s eyes held me, nailed me where I was like bat’s wings on a barn door. I understood again, that instant, the two women’s power over me, and I wondered, riding the current of their bedazzling rage, what I was riding toward. I would not think about it. The future was blind chance, and I would wait it out. But whatever is deepest in a man told me I was lying. This was it. A glimpse of Destiny. I was sure of it. But this was what?

  Many years later, after Dorkis’s execution, her power over me changed its form, though not its intensity. She accepted, rightly, her blame for his death, and accepted something else more strange, her mysterious identity, through me, with Tuka—alter ego, mirror image, incubus. And so Iona committed a kind of suicide: curbed h
er will and physical desire with the same whimsical violence she’d once used to execute them. There was for her no question, now, of our being lovers—though now, curiously, since Tuka had gone home to Athens, there was nothing material to prevent it or nothing but the fact that Iona’s heart had turned to iron and stone and cleansing sulfur fire. Iona’s hairline had begun to recede, there were shiny wrinkles crossing her forehead and fanning out at the corners of her eyes, and her flesh was no longer as firm as it had once been. Nevertheless, even now when I met her it was like meeting a dryad in the woods. Her shape sealed off reality: beyond it nothing of the same intensity existed. She controlled me absolutely, and though I clowned, exaggerating the foolishness and invertebrate absurdity of my sad condition, neither of us misunderstood. I waited for her to assert her will, as I wait for the stars, and she did nothing. I learned the meaninglessness of space: the two women, one in Athens, one beside me, were equally remote. “Iona, my lovely Iona!” I said, and wrung my fingers in theatrical despair. She smiled, girlish, pretending to be flattered, but her eyes were as cold, as aleatory, as the Kyklops eye of Lykourgos.

  And so I believed, again—and thought I would go on believing—that everything was chance. But one day around twilight, when I was sitting on a hillside where horses grazed, the strange conviction came over me that there was no longer a city of Methone. I set out, that same night, walking. Three weeks later, when I arrived at Messene, I encountered the first of the refugees laboring—emaciated, half crazed, silent—toward the sandstone ridges of Stanyclarus. The war would come there too, I could have told them. The wheat-yellow plain would burn to white ash, the villages would belch up smoke. I went on to Methone. Snow was falling. There was no sign of the Spartiate army. No one had buried the city’s dead. This time there could be no mistake. I had foreseen it, I’d known. But I’d known what? The sea stretching out from Methone was lead gray, dark as spoiled wine, mute. There were no birds. I saw what I took to be a corpse huddled on the stone stoop of a doorway. The arm moved, like a black leaf stirred by wind. “Go away,” the old man whispered. “Plague!” I fled.