by John Gardner
The following morning, Tuka and the children were gone.
I have lost track of time completely. It may have been yesterday that I last worked on this sordid tale. It may have been last week. In any case, I’m feeling splendid this afternoon, relatively speaking. My friendly jailer’s physician does not look optimistic, but a man knows how he feels. And God knows it must be physical. It can’t be what’s been happening.
Iona came. Her grandson had told her I was deathly sick and recalcitrant about accepting their version of liberty; and though she long ago gave up love of me for love of war, she had to come see for herself, try her arts of persuasion. She walked up to my cell door in broad daylight. She shouldn’t do that, for more reasons than one. War has made her ugly. The jailer must certainly have seen her, but no one was around to force him to the duty he has no respect for, and so he allowed the visit. Or else he’s dead.
No. It’s not true that war has made her ugly. It’s changed her, merely; moved her toward the universal wreckage. Her slanted eyes, once charming, seductive, have grown cunning, smoldering like lava pits. Her language, once stumbling, girlish, self-conscious, has become professional, incisive, the language of one who has grown accustomed to giving cruel orders. In her presence, I become poor old Kronos. I understand her, love her, pity her, and pretend not to notice that she looks on me as a kindly, once potent and beneficent old god, now half dead.
She talked with Peeker for a long time. Then with me. She said, “We’re getting you out of here tonight.”
“Iona, you look so lovely!” I wrung my hands.
“Lay off, Agathon. I haven’t much time.”
“I saw the glow of the fires. It was wonderful. Wonderful!”
“Agathon, stop it.”
“You see through me. That’s your way.” I shook with delight.
“For the love of God!” exclaimed Iona.
“Behind all those masks I’m serious, you know.”
She clenched her fists. “Stick your face up close to the bars and I’ll ruin you!”
“You would! You really would! That’s what I love about you!”
Iona looked at the bars. I could still beat her.
“Look,” she said. “You’re sick. You have to get out of here. So we’re freeing you, Agathon. Tonight.—No, don’t interrupt, don’t clown, just this once.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I wrung my hands.
She bit her lips and said nothing for a minute, and I knew why. She did love me, whatever that means, and she was waiting out her frustration.—No, that’s too simple. She remembered that she once had loved me, and that, however destructive it was, it was good. But it wasn’t, now, good; my degeneration disgusted her, and she was trying to think back to what I had been before. I had her, because I am simpler than she, even though I am, quote, a philosopher. I said, “Iona, you should have left I told you to run. Don’t you trust me?”
“I couldn’t,” she said.
“Because of Dorkis’s martyrdom,” I said. “Right. But he didn’t choose it, you know. It landed on him.”
“Agathon, stop it.”
“I know,” I said. “Nevertheless, even though it’s reasonable, it’s true.”
“Listen,” she said. (I tried to remember if I’d told her about Konon. Listen. Listen.) She said, “Let’s say I killed Dorkis.”
“Child, dreary child,” I said.
“No, I’m tougher than I used to be. Let’s say I did—and I don’t mean merely by the scroll. That part’s easy, you know—dying to protect someone you love. It went beyond that. He’d accepted the plan. He’d begun to act, and it was because of his actions that they believed he wrote the scroll. Each thing made them believe the other, the scroll and the actions. So if I was to blame for his dying, it was this way: I pushed him too fast, refused to allow him his own nature. He acted hastily, unlike himself, and because I pushed him into making mistakes I killed him.”
“Surely Dorkis deserves a little of the credit,” I said pleasantly.
“Nonsense,” she snapped. “I killed him. I loved him, of course. Irrelevant I accept what I did, because he accepted it. You saw him die. He was proud, Agathon. Even though he’d acted too quickly, clumsily, he was glad he’d acted. It was as if he’d finally discovered his depths. And so listen. I have to finish it for him. If I don’t, it’s meaningless. And so I will finish it. This time the plan’s better. It won’t fail.”
“Ah, optimism,” I said.
“No. Care.”
“Possibly.”
“It is.”
“Conceivably.” Then: “Take advice from a sly old Seer. You plan for the future, but what you don’t understand is, there is no future. Thaletes’s words, but the voice of the universe as well I have seen the future of the Helots, Iona. Doom. Fire and torture and decimation.”
“Agathon” she said. She tightened her fists on the bars. The knuckles went white.
“The world in its Itness,” I said merrily, interlacing my fingers, “is a bunch of gears. You move them by their own laws, not by the laws, much less the desires, inside you. To plan for the future you expect is, alas, to plan for a time that will never exist. Even if you mysteriously succeed, by the time you achieve your glorious plan, the world will have changed, and the plan will be irrelevant. You know what everything’s about?”
“Stop it, Agathon! Just for one second in your life, stop it and look at yourself. Those filthy clothes, that tangled hair, those wasted eyes, wasted gestures, wasted ideas! Be something!”
I did stop, because her commands even now had power over me. I studied her, eyes narrowed.
“We’re going to make you well; as soon as you’re well you’ll help us. We need your mind, your knowledge of them, your way of swaying people.” She paused, searching my face. “Will you come with us?”
I rubbed my mouth. Her neck was creased like an eroded hill and age had enlarged her knuckles. I thought her more beautiful than ever.
At last I said slowly, “‘Be something,’ you tell me.”
I would not have said, the first time it happened, that my spirit was seized by a god. I dislike the terminology, though I use it myself at times, for the sake of convenience or obfuscation. I was filled, merely, with an overwhelming sense of the boundless stupidity of things. Tuka had left me—I’d thrown her away as if her beauty, her goodness, her artistry—that above all—were nothing. Now when I heard some Helot lyre I was not softened by it but stirred to scorn by the crudeness of the instrument, the vulgarity of the technique, compared to Tuka’s on the harp. Because of some animal force in me, or animal rigidness of brain, I had let all that go. And for what? Dorkis was dead, Iona full of sulfurous smoke. And leaving the palace because the place was bitter to me now, I had lost even whatever chance I might have had to influence Lykour- gos. If I ever had it in the back of my mind that I’d come here to Sparta in search of some kind of Destiny, I could see now that I’d blasted it to atoms. In the months following Dorkis’s death, I’d let myself go to seed, had taken pride, in fact, in how quickly and thoroughly I went. When I stood on a hill in a good breeze my rags flew around me like blackbirds and my smell laid vineyards waste. Any man so bold as to speak to me got back such babble, such lunatic clowning, such mock weeping, such preening, such mock flattering, above all, mock philosophizing, that he left walking sideways, cautiously eyeing my crutch.
And then one day, in the main square of the city—it was the first of May—I watched the Spartans marching. It was the opening of Lykourgos’s ugly festival of Orthia, goddess of the hunt—the festival in which, nowadays, the maidens dance naked and sing scornful songs about those who have been cowards, and teasing songs to those who are bachelors, and hymns of praise to butchers. After that they go up to Orthia’s mountain temple, twelve miles north, for the barbaric ritual scourging of young men. Sometimes they kill one or two. The soldiers’ flutes went through me like heart pains, and their festival capes, the painted round shields, the raised swords of the se
cond rank, blinding in the sun, assaulted my eyes like glaring ice and snow. They came wave on wave, the hoplites in front, bearded, overgrown, deadly efficient from many wars, and after them the younger troops—the archers, the company of javelinists with their white capes, the clean-up troops, naked and terrible, their daggers stretched forward and upward, rigid, as if to scrape open the bellies of the high, still clouds. I thought all at once, watching the precision of their murderous march, of Tuka’s fingers moving precisely, at lightning speed, on the lyre; and I saw, in the same motion of mind, Iona’s fingers constructing one of her enormous decorations. As if in a daydream I saw an underground room full of corpses—a room much larger than the crypt where I used to keep my book: the vault of some mountain shrine. I saw, clear as day, Iona’s head on a pikestaff, and soldiers laughing. And as the phantom or impression passed over my eyes, I felt something new coming over me, a rage so black and indifferent to life that my natural cowardice left me. I could feel my eyes widening, bugging, and a tremble coming over my lips. Then suddenly, as if part of the dream, I found myself strutting majestically beside the troops, whistling with their flutes. No one laughed, of course. The irens glanced over from the fronts of their ranks, but they were baffled: there were no rules for how to deal with this. The spectators, too, were looking at me, some frowning, some glaring, bursting with indignation. I mocked their frowns, their glares. We came to a corner where a group of young Helots were sitting on the wide stone steps of an ephor’s majestic old house, and they pointed at me and laughed. I pointed and laughed back. Then, in front of the chief gate of the two kings’ palace, the procession stopped. The kings came down, Arkhelaus stern, effeminately pompous, as usual, Kharilaus vague, miserably wishing for a chair. I mimicked them too. Even kings were not above my law. Lykourgos stood to the left of them and slightly in front of them. I mocked the mighty Lawgiver.
“Who is that person?” Kharilaus said.
“A messenger and friend,” I said, and looked obsequious, panting in short breaths that went ssew, ssew.
“Who?” he said.
Arkhelaus raised his hand and said, “Be still, brother.”
I put my finger to my lips and winked.
Lykourgos glanced at the saner of the kings and got a nod. “Leave, Agathon,” he said.
“Ah, woe!” I said. Ssew, ssew. “Poor Agathon is no longer with us. His soul was snatched at the pinprick of midnight, and now, praise heaven, his leastmost fart is a wind from the great god Apollo.” I clutched my chest and panted harder. It burned my throat.
“Agathon,” Lykourgos said quietly, “leave us.”
“Apollo?” Kharilaus said.
“He’s mad, your majesty,” Lykourgos said.
But Kharilaus was uneasy. “Have him come nearer.”
I hurried close.
Kharilaus looked more uneasy yet. “He smells, this man.”
“Odors deceive us,” I said, and wagged my finger at him. “A thing which is unusual may seem at first unsavory, as, for example, a child’s first olive, or a lady’s bush, or idiocy in a monarch. But on closer inspection and greater familiarity, we learn that olives are fashionable food, however disgusting, and even one’s own blessed mother has a bush, and idiocy in a king gives the ship of state ballast.”
“Get him away,” Kharilaus said. “He stinks.”
Lykourgos’s jaw was working. “Go,” he said.
I stood before them, smiling, wringing my hands, puffing, looking pitiful.
“Arrest that man,” Arkhelaus said. But Kharilaus said, “Is it true that he’s a god?”
I bobbed my head. “Sure as day,” I said. “I’ll prove it. I’ll cause an earthquake.” I raised my arms.
“No, no, no!” Kharilaus cried. “No earthquake, please!” His tiny eyes widened to roughly the size of a pig’s.
I grinned. “I was just kidding.”
Two guards stood beside me, waiting to arrest me. They didn’t smell so heavenly themselves.
I said, “I don’t want to keep you from your naked girls or your whip, games, so I’ll give you my message at once, and then I’ll be gone.”
Arkhelaus waited and poor fool Kharilaus bit his soft lips.
“O Kings, O mighty Lawgiver, I stink to teach you the smell of your mortal flesh. I hobble on a crutch to teach you the awful arrogance of your soldiers’ strutting. I cower and tremble like a new-caught slave to teach you the emptiness of puissance and power. And now, worst of all, I shall reason with you, to teach you the perfect foolishness of reason.” I began to hobble back and forth in front of them, gesticulating, winking, twitching. “Why does a man become a lawgiver? For fear that, if somebody else does it, he may be given laws which run counter to his nature. And what is the nature of a man who becomes a lawgiver? It is the act of giving out laws. But ah! Here’s the hideous problem, then!” I stopped and cowered, as if pressed down by the weight of the towering sky. “What is the nature of the laws a lawgiver gives out?” I pretended to wrestle fiercely with the question, pointing my toes in, knee against knee, and counting off the difficulties on my fingers. “Are they the laws of somebody else’s nature? No! Otherwise somebody else could give them out. Are they the laws, then, of anybody else’s nature? No again, for if anybody else could give out the laws, we would have no discreet and official position called Lawgiver. But then we’re forced to a terrible dilemma! Either the laws which a lawgiver gives force all men to be lawgivers, which is ridiculous, or else the laws which a lawgiver gives are the expression of a nature foreign to all but the lawgiver himself, which is unthinkable. For if the latter were true, the lawgiver’s laws would force all men into the nature of the lawgiver, each man sadly abnegating his real nature, that being outlawed, and all men would be lawgivers, which situation we call by the name of anarchy. Terrible! Repulsive! How do we resolve this dreadful dilemma? Ah! I see light in your majesties’ eyes. You have solved it—and rightly, I may as well mention, for as a god, I know your thoughts! The strongest lawgiver in the country gives laws to the next strongest, yes! and he gives laws to the next, and so on, down to the least and feeblest of all men. Yes, yes!” I clapped my hands, delighted. “And who does the least and feeblest give laws to, since by law he must be a lawgiver? Of course! Obvious!” I leaped to Kharilaus as though he’d thought of it. “He reverses the chain and gives laws to the man just above him. Wonderful! Wonderful! And this reversal we call by the name of Revolution. I bid you adieu. Dance prettily! Whip stingingly. Tra la!”
I left them abruptly, moving as quickly as I could, listening in pounding terror for the footsteps of the guards behind me, but no one followed. When I glanced over my shoulder they were standing, undecided, watching my retreat, frowning like crocodiles. That night I lay in my hut sick with fear, sick to the point of vomiting, but no one came to get me. I thought myself a very lucky man and resolved to flee at once to the safety of Athens. Yet I didn’t leave. Within three weeks I was at it again, wheedling, grimacing, banging my crutch on the pavement. It was like some kind of addiction. I couldn’t help myself: I would see some new absurdity—now from the Spartans, now from the Helots—and an impression would come, and the clowning despair would rush over me, the total indifference to anything but the monstrous foolishness of human beings, and in a flash—or a giggle—I was at them. As my idiocy became familiar, it became safe. Children began to mock my eccentricities, or follow after me, mimicking my hobble. At last I had taught them something.
So it was that, for better or worse, I had found my Destiny. I picked at my clothes with my fingers, as if nervously, and winked at my beloved Iona. “‘Be something,’” I said. “Maddening as it is, love—to you and, ah! to me as well—I am Sparta’s Seer. I’ve called myself a silly fool, a coward, and I am. But I’m also something more, and conceivably better. I’m the absolute idea of No. No, I will not come and help you murder Spartans, and with me or without me you’ll fail, die in blood, as even the Spartans will eventually fail, and as we all will die, eventually, b
ecome dinner for worms. But I will die with a certain worthless dignity: I did not simplify.”
“Pompous, pompous, pompous!” she screeched. “You’d mock it in anyone else.”
“I am pompous. It’s true! O miserable, miserable beast! I hate myself!” I stamped my foot.
“In the name of the gods,” she hissed. She was clutching the bars as if to snatch the door off.
“But you see how it is,” I said, funereal. “I told you to run. It’s your only decent choice, but you refuse to run, because you’re dead set on killing—because of guilt about Dorkis, or hunger for revenge, or because you’re caught up in Thaletes’s ideas, or anyway your version of them. You think like a Spartan: it’s filthy, vulgar to submit. You must rule them, destroy them. I understand. I understand! Creative destruction is the first law of the universe. But I say No to the universe. ‘Fuck it!’ saith angry Agathon. I’ll have no truck with it. And so I refuse to be rescued from my cell.”
She shook her head, tight-lipped, and there were tears in her eyes. “You don’t know what you’re saying. Agathon, you’re dying.”
Peeker was watching me. Solemn, strangely good- looking, I thought, with those deep sad eyes of his.
“So kiss me good-bye, Iona,” I said. “Come, come!” I pushed my face into the bars and leered.
She shut her eyes tight, and I could see her thinking, hanging terribly suspended between the choices. Or maybe she was thinking of the smell. She kissed me. My heart filled with pain. “I love you, Agathon,” she said.
And so she left.
Night, but I must continue. Time almost out.
My jailer has dropped all feigned indifference. He told me the news himself. Lykourgos is dead.
It happened at Delphi. Suicide. He sacrificed to Apollo, and asked him whether the laws he had established were good, and sufficient for the people’s happiness and virtue. The oracle answered that the laws were excellent, and that the people, as long as they observed them, should live in the height of renown. A fake Rhetra, but never mind that. Lykourgos took down the oracle in writing and sent it by a messenger to Sparta. Then, having sacrificed a second time to Apollo, and having taken leave of his few friends, he made an end of his life by a total abstinence from food. He is said to have told his beloved Alkander that it seemed to him a statesman’s duty to make his very death, if possible, an act of service to the State. I’m not certain whether he meant by that, as I hope he did, that he was saving the State the cost of his food, or merely that by dying at Delphi, having forced the people to swear they’d abide by his laws till his return, he forced them now to perpetual obedience. No matter. As usual, no one in Sparta laughed. Even I forgot to laugh. Solon, I suppose, can now call him a happy man.
