Glory and the Lightning (50 page)

She broke into Dejanira’s sobbing and said, “I can hardly believe this of my son. I will go with you to his chambers, for your slave woman has announced that he will see you.” She glanced at Dejanira contemptuously and rose with difficulty and threw a white toga over her nightdress. Her heart was painfully thumping but her countenance was composed. “Come,” she said, and led the way from her chamber, and Dejanira followed her like a servant, moaning over and over. Agariste walked like a goddess, proudly suppressing her pain, and thinking, and Dejanira trailed after her like an obese shadow, sniffling.

Pericles was sitting in his library, but he was not reading. His face was closed and intent. He looked up at the two women and frowned, but he directed his attention at once on his mother. He saw her translucent pallor and requested her to seat herself, but he did not invite his wife to do likewise.

“I was informed that only Dejanira wished to see me,” he said, but his tone was gentle towards his mother. “You are ill; why have you risen to visit me this night?”

Agariste waved her hand in the direction of Dejanira but did not look at her. In a few concise words she repeated what Dejanira had told her, and the threats of Daedalus. She had an orderly mind and could speak shortly and clearly. As she did so she watched Pericles’ face. It had become impassive again, a marble mask which concealed his thoughts. When Agariste had stopped speaking he leaned back in his chair and was silent. His mother waited. Dejanira’s sobs and random exclamations filled the library. Her black hair was disheveled, for she had been running her fingers through it constantly in her distraught state. Her cheeks were blotched, her eyes and nose red. She mumbled over and over about bankruptcy, her father’s position as Archon, ruin, exile, confiscations of estates. But neither Pericles nor Agariste heeded her.

Then Pericles said to his mother, “It is all true, that I must defend Ichthus, for he is a simple, just and good man, and he speaks the truth. He also, unfortunately, writes it, and broadcasts it.”

“You understand the consequences if you fail, my son?”

“I have weighed them. I shall not fail. I must only induce Ichthus to recant and plead for mercy, for he values my opinion and guidance. He is a man of fervor, but tractable. I have been thinking of all this for hours, and I have come to the conclusion that a brief ostracism will be his only punishment.”

Pericles was not so confident as he appeared, but he wished to allay his mother’s fears and to soothe her.

Agariste sighed with relief. Her son was the most powerful man in Athens. She thought of Xanthippus, who would defend a man and his principles, however he deplored them. But Xanthippus had been heedless on many occasions, while Pericles was never heedless. Nevertheless, father and son were both exemplary in public virtue and never failed to do their duty. Agariste sighed again, sorrowfully.

Then Pericles turned to his wife for the first time and his face was even more impassive and hard. “I must inform you, Dejanira, that I am about to divorce you. You have made my house untenable and caused disorder and dissension in it. You must leave my house tomorrow and return to your father, taking your son, Callias, with you, but my own sons must remain.”

Dejanira’s lumbering thoughts were stirred into disjointed confusion. She was also filled with despair. She broke into loud and hysterical weeping. She attempted to go to her husband but Agariste restrained her. The mother said to her son in a dispassionate voice, “This is for the best. We have been an unhappy household since your marriage, Pericles. Unhappiness is not to be suffered if it can be removed.”

She stood up and took Dejanira firmly by the arm and forced the younger woman to look at her. “You will have observed that none of us is in danger, and it is all your father’s fevered imagination. Go to your quarters at once, there to prepare to leave this house in the morning.”

Dejanira straggled with her briefly, while Pericles watched, then subsided. She burst out into a storm of denunciations, complaints, pleas, importunities, incongruous arguments. Pericles closed his eyes wearily. Sweating, Dejanira exuded an offensive smell and the fastidious Pericles drew in his nostrils, as did his mother hers.

“Come,” said Agariste. But she pitied Dejanira who had been so brutally dismissed and rejected. “There is no use in crying this way. Tomorrow is time for reflection and decision.” Dejanira stared at her with bulging eyes, and licked away the moisture on her upper lip. She thought that Agariste was assuring her that she would not have to leave this house. Her breast heaved and she permitted Agariste to lead her away.

She said to the silent woman as they walked through the halls, “I love Pericles. He is my life, my love. On our wedding night he called me his sweetness. I have never forgot it. He embraced me not only with passion but with joy.”

Agariste raised her eyebrows, disbelieving. She was also surprised that Dejanira could love in this manner, and with such vehemence. Again, she pitied the younger woman and her touch on Dejanira’s arm was kind and comforting. Yet she knew that Pericles’ decisions were inexorable.

CHAPTER 11

Though Anaxagoras had told Pericles that a man who could not command his body and his emotions to his will was not a full man at all, Pericles found that he could not sleep that night. He had disciplined himself to make firm decisions and then act upon them with no regret and no wistful glances back over his shoulders. A strong decision, which later proved catastrophic, was far better than vacillation, which weakened a man. One was action, the other inaction; one was life, the other a dim death. Pericles had long before decided to divorce his wife. Still, he had not been insensible to her wild grief and protestations of love, and her lamentations. These had not shaken his decision; compassion was often cowardice, which one later regretted. Or, one became hostile and angered, knowing that he had succumbed to artful manipulation, and had been betrayed by maudlin deceit on the part of others.

To him, the situation of Ichthus was far more grave. Unable to sleep, unable to reach a decision—he was innately a prudent man for all his resolution and character—he rose long before dawn and sent a message to the barracks that he would be leaving immediately. A sleepy slave brought him a cool melon, a delicately broiled fish, light bread and wine for his breakfast. He ate, brooding, and tapped the table with his fingers. At moments he was furious with his endangered friend for his indiscretion; Ichthus had also placed his few friends in jeopardy, and his widowed mother and his relatives. But in the next moment Pericles would say to himself: He is a brave man, and courage is more to be desired than any other virtue. He did what he must. That is all a man can do.

Pericles stared at the smoking lamp on the table, which flickered in the darkness of the small dining hall, and he cursed the government of which he was a part for its oppressiveness. He cursed the Archons and the Assembly and the Ecclesia. Though Daedalus had accused him of pampering and wheedling the market rabble, no aristocrat in Athens despised that rabble more than Pericles, himself. He had not been reluctant to express his detestation, and he had admitted his fear of the rabble, which was incontinent, vociferous, irrationally passionate, stupid, the prey of sly demagogues, greedy, demanding, thinking with the area below the navel and never from the chin up. To Pericles, they were the peril of any nation, for they lacked heroism and patriotic fervor and the spirit of self-denial. The immediate was their only concern, and their base animal appetites. By the very weight of their overwhelming numbers they were dangerous to the State and to law and order. They invited chaos. The athlete or the Statesman they fawned on today they would render apart tomorrow and with the same lack of discrimination, and with the same absence of considered judgment. That which displeased other men but slightly, stirred anarchy among the rabble, and destruction, and the lust for murder. Yes, it was well to fear them.

The aristocrats, in the main, did not distinguish between the rabble and those whom Cyrus the Great had so extolled: The sturdy peasantry, the small merchants, the industrious manufacturers, the shopkeepers, the artisans, the builders and the conscientious workers, the scribes and the clerks, the officers of the army and the navies, the cooks, the innkeepers, the weavers and the blacksmiths, the prudent little investors, the winemakers, the shipbuilders and the mill owners, and many others on whom the very existence of a nation depended. But Pericles distinguished between them and the rabble. It was his hope that the rising middle class between the rabble and the aristocrats would grow in strength and influence, and so he cultivated it. To him they were the heart of a country and their judgments, though often simple and rarely complex, were usually sound and sensible. They also had a profound mistrust of government and their elected officials, which Pericles considered very perspicacious. Unlike the rabble, which adored power, the middle class suspected it. They paid their enforced taxes ruefully—the rabble usually paid no taxes—and grumbled loudly. They voted glumly but with care. The rabble voted for any pretty face or eloquent liar.

To his fellow aristocrats Pericles was ambiguous; some of them hinted he was a traitor to his ancestors. To the rabble he was accursed, an oppressor. But the middle class admired and revered him. They knew he was concerned with them and admired them in turn. He had been able to relieve them of many customs duties when they engaged in trade and imported or exported. It was no secret in Athens that he desired to make of his city a place of beauty and glory for the joy of the multitude and honor abroad. But his enemies—and they were a multitude in themselves—condemned him for removing the common treasury of Greece from the island of Delos into Athens, herself, where it could be available for the construction of temples and beautiful public buildings, and theatres and the extirpation of noisome alleys and houses and stinking old streets. He wished to encourage all the arts and all learning, and his rich enemies hated him for this, for was not their money more valuable than all the music and the paintings and the statues and the murals and the theatres in the world? The middle class rejoiced in his plans. The aristocrats and the powerful and miserly stirred up the rabble against him. He was taking bread from the mouths of the poor and driving them from their “modest” habitations. What were art and gracious buildings compared with the belly? The middle class, though not quite understanding the grandeur he proposed, had a vague vision of majesty and they were proud and they trusted him. In truth, he was the only man in government they did not fear and suspect.

It was this middle class whom Ichthus had caused to stir and to think and to ponder, to turn for long moments from their ceaseless and prideful industry, and to consider their government. He was a menace. Ichthus had declared that a nation became great only when it encouraged a variety of opinions and protected all religions and listened to judicious dissent. But a city cowed into conformity of thought, and which became only an assemblage of meek and timid sheep under the staff of government, was a dead city in which no ideal or splendor or nobility could flourish. It became the lair of wolves at the top and jackals at the bottom. For these sentiments Ichthus must die.

Pericles’ guard of six mounted soldiers, helmeted and armored in leather, arrived and he rose and went to join them. His chariot waited outside, with two fine white horses. He always drove it, himself. It was not the splendid car of the aristocrats, all gilt and enamel, but Pericles was no man for personal ostentation, for all he had one of the most lovely houses in Athens. He jumped into the chariot and took the reins from a slave, to whom he spoke kindly, thanking him. He was unaware that his mother had died peacefully in her bed in the night. Even the household did not know it as yet.

As the cavalcade swept down the hill, the soldiers carrying torches, Pericles glanced at Piraeus, the port of Athens. Some red torches still burned there, and there was some sluggish movement of lanterns. Athens still slept. However, as Pericles looked at the port and then beyond it, he saw a line of purple fire, flickering and brightening, at the horizon of the dark sea, which was formless and almost soundless. A round and tarnished moon sloped slowly to the west and the stars seemed to race in attendance. A cool and acrid breeze touched Pericles’ face, smelling of clean pepper and clean earth and water and freshening grass and flowering plants.

He wrapped his cloak more closely about him and his helmet was a dancing red moon, itself, in the flare of the streaming torches. The horses’ hoofs and the rattle of the chariot wheels on stone aroused echoes from the sleeping sides of houses and other buildings. The line of purple fire on the watery horizon spread rapidly towards the land, a brilliant carpet thrown down before the entrance of a king. Very soon Phoebus would drive his incandescent chariot into the sky and Athens would awaken. His gold and roseate shadow was already mounting against the somber sky and the opposite hills were suddenly outlined in quickening light. Now the breeze on Pericles’ face blew warmer moment by moment. No longer was Athens spectral, a pale and diffused blur. Her flat and crowded roofs began to shimmer with silver and rose as she lay among her heliotrope hills. The small white temples on the acropolis slowly sparkled, moved into vision one by one, shyly, as through mist. Birds swooped and fluttered over the cavalcade, which disturbed their nestlings, and they cried out shrilly. A shepherd with his crook and sheep caused the company to halt, and the guarding dogs barked at them.

The great white Agora was still below Pericles, its tiled roof beginning to redden in the rapidly growing dawn, its white walls and columns faintly gleaming. The upper tiers of the theatre emerged from shadows. All at once vehicles moved into view, rattling, wagons, cars, carts, and the sound of voices rose sharply in the freshness of the morning.

The chariot and horsemen reached the street of the Agora, the largest meeting place of Athens, which seethed from dawn to long after midnight. Here could be found the gymnasia, very popular with the effete who needed exercise, and especially the sedentary members of the government. Here also were many shops and offices, and the Odeon, the music hall where concerts were regularly held, and bazaars and small taverns where men gathered to dine at noon and drink wine and incessantly argue and play dice or backgammon or draughts and exchange gossip and rumor and scandal and news, and to tell the latest lewd jokes. Here were barber shops and textile shops and little jewelers and many others. Flower-stalls brightened the passageways and the streets about the Agora, and here could be found in profusion low actors, mountebanks and tumblers and jugglers, magicians, ragged dancers and astrologers, all shrilling for a chance drachma for which they would perform in the very midst of the crowds or on the steps of the colonnades, or on the surrounding streets. Workrooms of all sorts were jumbled together in the Agora, and throngs filled them, and the shops, whether or not they were customers, there to gather for long discussions with vehement gestures, or to inspect wares they had no intention of buying. At noon one had to scramble and use elbows and knees to find a seat in the taverns, which smelled of spilt wine and beer and whiskey and sweat and roasting meat and frying fish and baking bread. Waves of heat, at midday, almost visibly rose above the Agora, especially in the warm months.