The Wreckage of Agathon

by John Gardner

  I was in bed for two months. Tuka came to see me and talked to me very soberly, softly, about how a girl shouldn’t let the boy she loved go to war without her blessing and promise. I wasn’t impressed, she was still old Philombrotos’s daughter. But the rustle of her skirt as she crossed the room, the small shy weight of her hand on my arm, frail as light, made me feel I was bleeding to death inside, hopeless, wicked, unpardonable. I was painfully, totally aware of her, as though her barely perceptible scent had replaced the air I breathed. I hated myself passionately, and, in my despair, blamed it all on her as I would on the gods if they were nearer. (I had lied to her about the broken leg—she thought I was a hero.) She said, looking away from my eyes and smiling, sly, that when I was well she had a gift for me. I got better at last, despite my wish, and agreed to meet her near a huge old olive tree behind the vineyard where we used to play, to collect the gift I bathed and dressed myself elegantly, swearing and growling at myself all the time (the mind is a tricky instrument), and, clenching my teeth and exaggerating my heroic limp, I went out to meet her by the tree. She was lying a pool of sunlight, naked as a goddess. Her slave sat at a distance, with her back turned. Sudden, searing shame overwhelmed me and, beating on the ground with my fists, I told her of my lie. I was unworthy. She calmed me, drew down my face to her breast I collected.

  12 Peeker:

  O gods, gods, gods! Was ever anything alive so cruelly mistreated? I’m being driven insane, and there’s no one I can turn to. I thought it was more damn flibbertigibbet when I read what he wrote, his plan for me. But he means it! He’s going to unhinge me!

  Yesterday we saw a murder, right before our very eyes—some fellow sneaking across the field, trying to stay out of sight in the tall grass, coming toward the prison—toward one of the cells farther down—and all at once there’s these two men on horseback galloping straight at the man out of nowhere, Spartan soldiers, and I heard the grass whizzing and the noise of the hoofs and I saw the man on the nearest horse twist—that’s all I saw—and when they’d gone by there was a javelin standing like a leaning signpost, and nothing, not even the javelin, was moving. It was as if I’d been staring at the thing for hours, but that was a trick my mind played, because the riders reined up and turned back and I watched them get down and lift up the body and sling it across one of the horses, and then they remounted and rode off.

  “Agathon!” I said. I sort of choked it out. But he was standing right behind me, he’d seen it all. It was as if he’d been expecting it.

  He shook his head and went back to the table. “It’s going to be a long, hard winter, Peeker.”

  I went ferocious for a minute. I sort of jumped at him and grabbed his crutch and I was going to club him with it. “Winter, winter, winter,” I screamed. “That’s all you can say. It’s crazy! Even if it’s a fucking metaphor it’s crazy.”

  He was waiting to be hit.

  I felt angrier than ever. The room went blood red. “People die right in front of your eyes and you just fart around, tell stupid shit-ass stories about girls and old dead politicians, and people are actually dying! There’s some things a human being doesn’t have to stand!”

  He rolled his eyes up at me. I had the crutch up to brain him. He said, “Nonsense.”

  I swung down. I don’t know what happened because I just flipped out zero, a tingle across my brain and then nothing, as if it was me that was hit—Apollo maybe. I don’t know. I never saw anything like it. When I came to he was sitting on the bed, holding my head in his lap and patting me as if his mind was a million miles away. I shook my head. It hurt like hell, but I couldn’t find a lump when I felt around for one. I remembered I was going to kill him and I felt awful. He was a good old man, though he stunk to heaven, especially up close. I started crying, and he started patting me again. I said, “Master, I’m going crazy.”

  “I know,” he said. His voice was thick, like a person’s at a funeral. The end of his beard touched my neck and tickled, and I thought how vicious it was that a person could be annoyed by a fucking tickle at a time like this. I cried harder.

  “I really am going crazy,” I said.

  “I know,” he said again. He could hardly bring it out, and I cried for him.

  After a long time he said, “Peeker, I’ll tell you something.” Suddenly, absurdly, his voice was cheerful. “Our jailer’s going to speak to me yet. I have no doubt of it. This noon when he brought us our plates of smashed worms—or whatever it is—he stood outside my cell door with his arms folded for half an hour, watching me eat. I ate, first my plate then yours, very slowly and delicately—partly because it’s the only way I can trick my stomach into willingness, partly to teach him fine manners by my example. When I finished I wiped my lips very nicely with the piece of my robe I reserve for the purpose, and I said to him, ‘Jailer, I’ll tell you an interesting fact. Everything we study, we modify by our study of it. Hence truth eternally eludes us.’

  “He did not look convinced, just held out his hand for the plates.

  “‘Take crabs, for example,’ I said. ‘We poke them with a stick to find out how they behave, and they behave as if poked by a stick.’

  “He folded his arms, the plates dangling from his fingertips.

  “‘This is of course a very simple example,’ I said. Take a subtler example, such as atoms of light. Light, as you know, is one of the four great elements—in common parlance, fire. We study it by bouncing it off polished stones, or bending it in water, or squeezing it through holes. And how does it behave? It behaves as if bounced or squeezed or bent. We learn nothing. We merely cause events.’ I bent closer to him, waving my finger to keep his attention. ‘Has it occurred to you that sundials do not measure time but create it?’ It had not, I saw. Time,’ I said, ‘is actually a thing, like porridge.’ I folded my arms and beamed at him, triumphant. The left side of his mouth twitched very slightly. He withdrew.”

  “Master, you’re insane,” I said.

  He smiled. “That’s more like it! Before you were saying you were. If there’s one thing I hate it’s youthful arrogance.” We laughed.

  When I woke up again it was dark. He was patting my head. When it came back to me I said, “Who was it, master?—the one they killed.”

  “Some Helot, I expect.”

  “Was it someone you knew?”

  He didn’t answer for so long I thought he’d forgotten the question, but then he said, “No doubt.”

  “And you didn’t think anything about it?” I realized I was lying with my head in his lap and I felt silly. He was saying:

  “Oh, a thought or two may have passed through my mind. I may have thought how brave and virtuous the man must have felt, sneaking across to the prison. And I may have thought how brave and virtuous the soldiers must have felt, nailing him down like a rabbit. I may have had a passing thought about rabbits, or field mice, or stones.”

  I sat up, pushed the hair out of my eyes. I was still seeing it—the horses, the javelin sticking up like a signpost. “You don’t believe in anything, do you?”

  “I believe in the gods,” he said.

  I said, “Hah!”

  “That too,” he said. “Magic is afoot when a doomed young man says ‘Hah!’”

  Doomed. I began to shake all over. He launched some idiotic story.

  13 Agathon:

  Lykourgos, in his time, was a great general, though one very different from Solon. He comes, after all, of Dorian stock, and he once wore all the dignity of a king. Philombrotos greatly admired him, during his stay in Athens, and he would have admired Lykourgos still more if he’d lived to see him lead his crack troops into battle. You would hardly find them in girls’ dresses, with coy smiles, and flowers in their hair. They train naked, hour on hour in the summer heat or the winter wind, until their hides are like leather and their muscles are like pliant wood. They learn to fight, as they learn to march, with precision, every movement clean as the closing of a trap. The iren gives his signal and they draw th
eir swords as if with one single muscle. He calls out again and they advance a step like the spikes, of a single harrow. I cannot tell whether to laugh or shake in terror. When a man moves his hand by an inch too much, the iren signals him out of formation and bites his thumb. The man does not scream. Not a muscle of his face stirs.

  When they fight they wear breastplates and groin- plates of metal, and feathers in their hair like the Philistines. (The Dorians were neighbors to the Philistines once, generations ago. The two people are very much alike, but the Philistines have had no Lykourgos.) As they march to the attack, the Spartans play their flutes, a piercing, deadly singsong thing in the Lydian mode, with no trace of joy, no faintest intimation of mercy. They destroy a city, kill everything alive in it down to the humblest dog, and send their ultimatum to the next. All this is Lykourgos’s work. Only a fool would deny that it’s effective.

  I had been working under Solon for six months—and had been married a year—when Lykourgos arrived in Athens. I was twenty. Solon had as yet no official position (it was that year that Philombrotos died and Solon replaced him as arkhon), but he was in fact already what Klinias had been called in jest, king of Athens. Philombrotos and his fellow arkhons, and even Pysistratos himself, did nothing without Solon’s consent, yet they hated all Solon stood for. Philombrotos knew, as everyone did, that when and if Lykourgos returned to Sparta it would be as Lawgiver, exactly the position Solon was worming, or rather pigging, his way into in Athens. When he found the two men in the same town, Philombrotos couldn’t help himself: he had to bring them together. He made Lykourgos a guest at his palace, assigning him three of his best slaves, and invited Solon to dinner. I too, along with Tuka (and many others), was invited. Though I lived in the house, I did not see Lykourgos until the night of the dinner. He kept to his room like a sick man or a misanthrope—both of which, I soon discovered, he was. Philombrotos went to visit him, and they would talk, with the slaves outside the door, for hours. I can imagine how it was. For old Philombrotos, the world was falling apart. A fat wine merchant was the city’s only hope, and if he saved the city it would be at the expense of what made the city fine. It would be like saving a beloved wife from enemy spears by whoring her. He was beginning already to talk in a politely disparaging way of Draco’s laws, “written in blood,” he said. He would giggle as he said it. You couldn’t be sure how to take him.

  So no doubt on those visits to Lykourgos’s room, Philombrotos sat in troubled silence, trembling faintly, as he always did the last few years, and Lykourgos delivered sentencia in his quiet, angry way, like talking stone. The old man couldn’t help but agree with all Lykourgos said, but he could see no way to get from where Athens was to Lykourgos’s iron vision. In his own house common blood had seized a place. Tuka, pregnant (or so we thought), had threatened suicide if she couldn’t marry me. She meant it, at least at the moment. Or if she didn’t, Philombrotos couldn’t be sure. There’d been a wave of suicides among the old families in recent months. (“Changing times,” Solon said mournfully, rolling his eyes up, looking pious.) Philombrotos wept. He was too weak from his civic troubles to fight. When we met in the halls, now, we bowed as we had in the old days, as if we were no more than fellow citizens. I forgave the old arkhon, and I did not mind my victory. I was Solon’s aide, and Solon was the future.

  But Solon was a better man than I. When he learned of the invitation he was distraught. It was dusk, and we were sitting in the room in his house where he did all his reading and writing. (He read as he ate, gluttonously, and he kept a book like Klinias’s, as if he fancied himself a sage.) The room, that evening, was full of shadows. He was always strangely reluctant to light his lamps before nightfall. I could never tell whether it was miserliness or one of his superstitions.) He said, “This is awful! Horrendous! It can’t be done!” He pulled at his cheeks with his fingertips and made nervous clicking noises.

  “Why not?” I said. I took great delight in undoing his grandiose posturing. That was, I think now, my chief use to Solon. In his old age he was a relatively dignified man, considering.

  “It’s unthinkable!” he said. He had a habit of filling the air with exclamations while his mind raced ahead, figuring. “It’s one thing to borrow a poor old man’s nuptial bed as if by drunken mistake. It’s another to make him bow and humbly abandon it to you.”

  I shook my head, smiling. A new kind of Midas. Everything he touched turned obscene.

  He fiddled with the stick on his desk that he kept for luck, still tsking and clicking like a carter. “You know what he’s after. He wants to set us side by side and see whose way is best. But he has no choice! Why can’t old men be reasonable?”

  “I imagine he knows he has no choice,” I said. I was thinking of myself and Tuka.

  “Then he’s one of those people”—he lowered his voice—“who make their slavegirls whip them.” He wrung his hands, then giggled.

  It came to me that he was chiefly embarrassed for himself, the figure he’d cut “You’ll come off all right” I said. “You’re an Athenian.”

  “No I won’t,” he said. He pouted. But he thought a moment and his face grew foxy. “Yes I will!” He sent me home.

  The night of the dinner, Solon was, to no one’s surprise, late. The wide room was filled with dignitaries. We were just beginning to eat without him when a slave announced his arrival. Philombrotos got up, with difficulty, and took a step or two toward the door. Solon came in, spread his legs apart and threw out his arms, exactly as he had the first time I’d seen him. “Gentlemen, God bless you!” he said. And then, to Philombrotos: “Forgive me. I’ve taken a liberty.” He waved at the door, where his house slave waited, and a moment later the old man—a Korinthian, I think—came in wheeling a cart of Spartan wine. Where Solon had gotten it God only knew. No Athenian would normally drink the stuff, though the Spartans vow by it Exiguous food and drink is their national emblem. Solon snatched up a bottle from the cart and held it aloft as if it were captured treasure. “To the grandeur of Sparta!” he said. For an instant everyone was stunned. Who’d ever heard of a thing so unpatriotic? And yet it wasn’t of course. His words pierced some ludicrous old error. Then, first one or two, then more, we all cheered and laughed and even clapped. Lykourgos’s features worked as if in agony. At last he too laughed, seizing his pleasure as if to strangle it “Bless my soul!” he said. It was like a voice from the heart of a cave. Solon sat down in his place of honor by Lykourgos and talked all that night about wines. He happened to have brought along a poem of his on the white wines of Sparta. Philombrotos watched him, baffled and weary, like a man brought against his will from beyond the grave.

  Two days later, at Solon’s house, Lykourgos said:

  “The trouble with a genius is that he dies. The state falls to ordinary men, and they destroy it.” They were talking of Solon’s wild improvising.

  Solon smiled. “I’d rather be destroyed by ordinary men than by System.”

  “In my system,” Lykourgos said, “there will be no ordinary men.”

  Solon thought about it and nodded. “True, perhaps,” he said. “And when you die, there will be no room for genius in all Lakonia except your grave.”

  That night, Solon gave me a sheaf of writings. “Read these,” he said. “Tell me what you think.”

  I glanced at them and knew whose they were by the handwriting, though it was one I’d never seen. It was as dark and spare and severe as Lykourgos himself, and even harder to decipher. I said, “Shall I take them with me?”

  He nodded, thinking about something else. “If you lose them, God help us both.”

  They were aphorisms, fragments, God knows what. I took them with me and, compulsive scrivener that I am, copied some of them down. I included them later in the book, when I got it from Klinias.

  Our vanity would like what we do best to pass for what is hardest for us. Slaves make a difficult virtue of acting like slaves.

  The will to overcome an emotion is only the will of a stronger
emotion. Opinion is desire.

  Strong character, virtue, means shutting the ear to even the best counterarguments.

  Madness in individuals is rare; in groups it is the rule. Good government is predictable, and irreversible, psychosis.

  That which each age considers evil is the atavism of an old ideal.

  Every system of morals is a sort of tyranny against Nature and Reason. That is, however, no objection, unless one should decree, by some system of morals, that tyranny and unreasonableness are bad.

  Religion, politics, and art all give us herding-animal morality (Thou shalt not shove). By what secret rules do the great priest, the great king, and the master artist live?

  The great State is the mechanical image of some great man. It has no faults he did not have, though it cannot have his virtues. Good. Private virtues make empty talk at parties.

  Imprisonment and execution are not great evils, merely mirrors, too clear for cowardly eyes, of reality as it is.

  Greatness is impossible without religion. A man must know himself God.