The Wreckage of Agathon

by John Gardner

  He was baffled when Solon repealed all Draco’s laws. We were alone in his chamber, except for the omnipresent Alkander—his servant, the boy who put his eye out. According to Solon, the laws were too severe, the punishments too great. Lykourgos quoted me Draco’s own comment on why nearly all crimes were punishable by death: “Even small crimes deserve death,” he said. “As for greater crimes, well, death is the worst I’ve got.” Lykourgos sat with his chin pulled in, gloomy and distant. His rabbinical nose commanded the room like a battlement against a night sky.

  “But why?” I said. It was in the days when I still tried to reason with him. “Why death for, say, loitering?”

  “It purifies the blood,” he said. “That’s the beginning and end of Law and Order.”

  “The blood.” I pretended to muse on it.

  “The blood of the State,” he said. His voice was flat as iron. “The criminal nature is a product of bad breeding. It must not survive to another generation.”

  “Of course!” I said. “You mean people like our friend here, Alkander.”

  Lykourgos winced. Just a flick of one eyelid. He loves his bodyguard, insofar as a man of ice-cold marble can love anything merely mortal. “You’re clever, Agathon. An incisive mind.” He always judged my sallies dispassionately, indifferently.

  I told him of Solon’s jurors. It was a plan he’d worked out before he became arkhon, and I knew the theory of it. I had it in my book. In a counterfeit bid for the support of the rich, Solon refused the poorest class in Athens—the Thetes or hill people—any place in the public assembly, but he let them be jurors. The Thetes were very cross at first, but in time they found out that they’d won a great advantage. Nearly every dispute that came up in Athens would sooner or later come to them. Even in cases he assigned to the arkhon, he allowed an appeal to the courts. Moreover, he was careful to word his laws in a way that was obscure and ambiguous, so that the power of his jurors would balance the power of the rest.

  Lykourgos scowled at me, thinking it over. “Where inequality exists, Justice is impossible.” He was crosser than usual. He had a headache.

  “True,” I said. “But when a rich man’s treated unjustly, he has his wine cellar to fall back on. A poor man has only his ass.”

  He closed his one eye and pressed his fingertips to it as if to console it. “Clever but not to the point,” he said.

  “This then,” I said. I leaned toward him—sitting opposite him, six feet away. Alkander watched me with his arms folded. “To get rid of inequality you have to change man’s nature—in fact, deny the structure of the universe. It can be done. You’re proving it. But some would say—not me, you understand; I take no position—some would say your option’s barbaric, even stupid. If laws are to deal with men as they are and reality as it is, they have to provide for unequal men in a world of flux. Say the State is, as the poets say, a ship. If you want to keep it exactly what it is, you have two choices. Either you patch it day by day, replace wornout boards, reweave old sails, repaint it with tar, or you haul it up onto some smooth stones and carefully protect it from all use, even the weather’s.”

  “Men as they are are not worth building a State for,” he said. “Common minds have believed too long that whatever is is necessary. The time has come for a higher belief.”

  “Bullshit!” I exploded. “What would you know about common minds, or any other kind of human mind, Lykourgos?”

  His head shot forward, hands braced on the chair arms. “I have known human feeling.”

  “Bullshit!”

  He was enraged, and it wasn’t abstract now. I had blundered onto his heart, and I had nicked it. His jaw worked and his voice had all hell in it. “Agathon,” he bellowed, “I have known the affections of a woman.”

  “Never,” I said. I snapped it like a whip. “She faked it!”

  He was out of his chair and coming at me, and then Alkander was on him, holding him, yelling at me over his shoulder, “Go! Get out of here! Maniac!”

  But I hung on one second longer. “Your brothers queen,” I said, and laughed. “How stupid of us all!”

  Alkander let him go, willing to see me dead for that. But Lykourgos sank to the floor, clenching his fists and moaning, helpless, on fire with self-hate and hatred for me. Alkander knelt by him, touching his back. I left. I heard him pacing, hours later. He paces rapidly, stiff- legged, his chin lifted, moving across the room and back, again and again, exactly like a tiger.

  It wouldn’t be easy for Lykourgos to forgive me for that discovery, I knew. But the next time I saw him he was calm, stern, and distant, as always. “Nothing in the world is knowable,” he said. “Knowledge is unflinching assertion.”

  “I assert, then, that a man still wants to know.” And then, recklessly, with a glance at Alkander: “Perhaps, in fact, she loved you.”

  “Perhaps the eagles love me, or the gods.”

  It’s a terrible thing to hear Lykourgos laugh.

  18 Peeker:

  We found one of our rats dead this morning. Some disease. Agathon turned it over and over, thinking, saying nothing. It makes me uneasy.

  19 Agathon:

  Dorkis and Iona were of course not the only people we ever saw in Sparta. We had various friends we partied with or went riding with or went with to things like the festivals of Orthia and Orestes or, when autumn came, the bullfights. One can hardly help having friends in a vast and sprawling city, even a reactionary city like this one. A hermetic soul may get by well enough in the mountains, with no one to talk to but his god; but here the sheer press of population is against it—and more: the nature of the population. At festival time, or during the games, mankind stands thick as a field of wheat, a mixed and mingled half-breed or many-breed humanity that by its diverse character threatens all that any one man may stand for. The Spartans, first. Naked as tombstones except for their crude iron neck rings and bracelets. Fierce, austere people who laugh at no joke more than six words long, who breed by contract and kill non-Spartans as casually as they’d kill a horse with spavins. Then there were Egyptians and Sardinians, immodestly dressed, by comparison, in toe-length robes and jewelry and spangles, who lay one another, male or female, as casually as Athenians drink wine. Then Greeks of the Perioikoi, born of every Hellenic city, some puritanical as Homer himself, some more licentious than Sardinians. Then Helots, the humble majority, weighed down like donkeys, some of them, and others—like Dorkis and Iona—gilded like Mesopotamian gods. What is a man to make of himself, or of his father’s codes, in such confusion? In Athens, the sexual code (for instance) was simple. A man should be faithful, and if he couldn’t—and many couldn’t—he should view his breach with reasonable shame. If he slept with a slavegirl, and everyone did, he should dislike himself for forcing upon her the shame of prostitution. (In Sparta, the rape of a Helot was called an act of patriotism. In Sardis it was called a snack.) Who could survive, in such a city, except by supporting what was best in himself—or whatever was worst, what cried out in anguish for nemesis—by the sleight-of-hand of friendship, the buttress of some similar nature, bad or good?

  Some of our friends—the friends of whom Tuka was usually fondest—were rich fellow expatriates from Athens. These, in general, didn’t get on very well with Dorkis and Iona, mainly because of Dorkis’s way of fondling women, I suspect. He petted them in public, but in the dark he was stubbornly loyal to his wife. The Athenians were, in public, more discreet.

  I was not, in general, fond of Athenians in Sparta. I can tolerate watching a bull murdered with one man as well as with the next. It’s better, I suppose, than the old Minoan cult in which the god-bull was always victorious, his victims mere children. And when festival drinking and dancing get thoroughly out of hand, I can sneak off with one man’s wife as well as with another’s. Nevertheless, there were few Athenians in Sparta who weren’t fat parasites, men whom the State’s isolationist laws hadn’t driven away but had turned to genteel outlaws—heavily moustached, scented, oil-bathed, weigh
ted with semiprecious stones. They were cultured, some of them even refined—when Tuka played her harp they knew what to praise—but I am not, myself, as amused as I might be by culture and refinement The crudest men I have ever known were gawky old Klinias, my beloved master, and Solon, my beloved employer, whom some poet once called “The Father of Athens and Mother of All the Hogs.”

  We lived what is known as a rich life, badly hung- over three mornings out of five, hiding our heads from the sunlight in rooms draped with purple cloth and thickly padded with Oriental rugs, so that no sandal’s click might cleave our skulls. We were sealed off from the ordinary work of the world, and virtually sealed off from our children too, except when we made a point of seeing them, Tuka instructing Diana on the harp, I struggling to make poor Kleon a horseman. I was impatient of the same gentleness and timidity I admired in him on all other occasions, and intolerant of his fear’s beclouding of his mind. I was, myself, a man absolutely without fear on a horse. Though I’m a gentle person, in most respects, I have ridden horses men swore were bewitched; bedeviled, mad creatures that I think would as soon have eaten me as borne me. A week after my brother’s funeral I rode the chicken- brained stallion that killed him. Later, on a winter rabbit hunt, I rode that same horse to his grave.—In any case, Kleon was afraid of the plodding brown mare I’d given him—a lovely horse dark as a roasted chestnut—and for reasons too shadowy for me to fathom, I was beside myself. I would shout at him, calling him stupid, brainless, and when Kleon wept, struggling to do what I demanded—think clearly—I would clench my teeth and swear. “I’m scared,” he would say. “Daddy, Daddy, I’m scared!”—crying, clinging to the horse’s neck. I would reason with him, tense with anger, explaining to him what fun he would have with the other boys if he learned to ride, explaining to him how ashamed he was (and it was true) when friends younger than himself—a boy named Markapor, for instance—went casually thundering off. “Please, please, please, Daddy. Please!” he would wail, and at last I would say, “Get off then, damn you, and walk,” and I would ride off. I would talk to him later, telling him that what I had done was inexcusable, even though his fear was, of course, annoying and frustrating. I had never treated anyone that way until now—and I did this kind of thing more than once, turning the whole force of my rage on a child. And yet I loved him more than I’d ever loved anyone else. Were Tuka’s rages at Kleon the same? Or Iona’s rages at her children? Tuka hit Kleon in the stomach once—he’d broken something that belonged to her, and destruction, the world’s mutability really, was intolerable to Tuka. She hit him—not a slap but an angry punch with her fist—and I jumped to her, caught her shoulder, and slapped her face so hard she went flying across the room. (I wasn’t angry then. I was collected but outraged. I slapped her as I would have spanked Kleon for throwing a stone at Diana.) “Don’t ever do that again,” I said. Righteous, true; righteous as a drunken god. But she never tried it again, at least in my presence. Tuka would reach the same frustration I reached with Kleon when she worked with Diana at the harp. Diana didn’t want to play the harp, she said. I insisted that she must. It’s hard, in the beginning, I told her; everything you try you fail at. But it gets easier later, and eventually it can be a pleasure. We knew that for a fact, Tuka and I, though Diana couldn’t, and so we asserted the natural right of superior knowledge and forced her. Diana wept, letting her hands fall away from the strings, and Tuka would shriek at her, and Diana would lift her hands and play again, weeping. Unlike Kleon—he may never learn to ride a horse, though he knows all the secrets of my grammata—Diana learned quickly, and soon she was playing with sheepish pride for friends.

  But except for the time we righteously set aside for their instruction, or for play with them—somewhat better times than the times of instruction, but also less frequent—we saw very little of our children. We had various circles: some friends we “sat up with,” as Tuka put it, meaning that I talked philosophy or politics with the husband while Tuka gossiped with the wife; other friends with whom, as she put it, we cavorted. With a curious, obscurely destinal regularity we got into difficulties with the latter. I must reluctantly set down some facts.

  First, though no one would believe it who has seen me ranting in the Spartan hills in my later years, winking and sneering and spelling dark spells, prophesying plagues and trepidations of the earth and stars, my hair flying wildly, my eyes like a frog’s, my arms stretched out as Lykourgos stretches his, forming with the fingers of each hand V’s for Victory, I was once a handsome and sweetly poetic young man. Weak-chinned, admittedly, and given to grand pontifications, but lovable, all in all. I was, moreover, an ambitious person, but ambitious in ways still uncertain, undirected. I’d taken a few students and was gaining a reputation of sorts; but my heart wasn’t in it I was employed off and on by Lykourgos and the ephors, sometimes as a sort of informal adviser, sometimes (by Lykourgos, not the ephors) as an envoy in delicate matters where messages transmitted or discussions held were not to be mistaken for official positions of Sparta. I was, in effect, a high- class odd-jobs man with a company horse; I was the voice of all things tentative or tendentious. “Do so-and- so,” I was instructed to say, “or, between you and me, Sparta will have—in my personal opinion—no possible course but war.” It was stupid work, though at times dead serious. Those I talked to—after the endless preliminaries (the boat ride, the tour, the entertainment by the poet-harper and his acrobats)—those I talked to understood as well as I did that we were playing a perhaps meaningless game: the ephors do all official diplomatic work for Sparta. Even the kings have no final say in foreign affairs, except as generals in war. Yet I’d been sent at state expense, with the seal of Lykourgos on my introduction, which meant that something might conceivably be possible, a meeting with the ephors in the future, perhaps, or some secret, gentleman’s agreement; and on my side I knew that, though they knew I meant nothing, they were talking with me, so the game we were playing might at any moment turn earnest. There was a further complication. At the heart of the game, we all knew, lay one question: would Sparta’s role in and around Lakonia be defensive or aggressive? The ephors favored aggression—extend the borders and establish a buffer of subject city-states. Lykourgos favored a defensive, isolationist posture. One meant immoral imperialism, an extension of suppression like that which had already deracinated all Helot pride; the other would produce a city of warriors, state- supported killers, spoiling like overtrained watchdogs for a fight. They would have no choice but to occupy their time as warriors do, fighting one another or murdering scapegoats, some passing Helot drudge. I’d have chosen neither, if that choice were possible; but Sparta has always been the plum, with her wheat and cattle and beautiful hills of olive trees and vineyards—a city the gods created to entertain them with endless invasions. So I favored Lykourgos’s view, the lesser evil. I was morally bound to it hand and foot, in fact, as Lykourgos understood. Why else would he send his most obstinate critic, “pet democrat,” as he used to say, on missions aimed at thwarting the will of the ephors and imposing his own despotic will? Not, of course, that I was ever out of sight of his secret police (but neither were the ephors), and not that, if I had made some mistake, he would have troubled to rescue me. Nevertheless, for almost four years the curious partnership of enemies worked. I was born, no doubt, to be caught, my whole life long, in double binds. But enough of all that. The game I played with those I met in the cities of the sons of Hellen was a tricky, devious free- for-all, in which Lykourgos, through unofficial agents like myself, worked every city against every other, and all of them against the ephors. Except for allies I could win in the playing, my only ally on earth was Lykourgos, whose values I detested and whose power gave me no sanction. There are doubtless envoys who would have scorned the canescent unrealities I manipulated like Sardinian pieces on a playing board, but I have always clowned and mocked, played games, in the hope of discovering the real. While we toyed with fictions, picking our way through the vague potentialities that
littered our path like shadowy rocks and moray eels, my hands and armpits ran with sweat, and my hind end went numb from sitting still to dramatize my indifference.

  When I returned from these missions, I would, after copying what I’d gotten for my book (this was before Klinias’s book arrived and I began adding to it), drink myself to stone for a week, then plunge with renewed vigor into the idiocy of parties, wild night rides through the countryside with friends, or, sometimes, pointless verbal duels with Lykourgos. Invariably, when we went to expatriate Athenian parties, I would deliberately, solemnly get drunk. Occasionally scenes ensued.

  One night, very drunk, Tuka and I stayed late at a party given by a young Athenian couple we’d been seeing off and on for a year or two. The man, Hamrah, a man of Egyptian stock and comically proud of his Athenian citizenship, was a black-market king who dealt in Asian ornaments and jewels, especially ivory figurines of gods and goddesses. He was a very tall, stern-minded man who had curiously direct and simple theories. All life, he said, was based on the principle of advertising pressure and response—a phrase he’d picked up from some Phoenikian peddler. That was the basis of his financial success, his perfect understanding of his wife, his success with young ladies of heretofore impeccable morals, and so forth. I rarely troubled to argue with him. He had a fine sense of humor, at least about everything except himself, and he was an excellent horseman. I couldn’t afford to be too fussy. There were few enough in Sparta who rode as I rode, hellbent, indifferent to arm or skull. Also, he seemed a good father—jovial and rowdy with his sons. His wife, unluckily, was a gentle, sensitive girl who could easily be raped (and eventually was) by music or poetry, who cared for moment-to-moment feeling, and whose friendships—with Tuka, for instance—were as close and oblivious to purpose as the friendship of the earth and sun.