The Ghosts of Athens (24 page)

But no – they had trouble in mind. They joined another group of monks in a different style of horrid clothing and started an argument. I didn’t bother straining to hear what they were shouting about, though it did have the rhythm and confidence of proper Greek. But one of them suddenly stepped forward and jostled another. In no time, they’d set about each other with sticks and leather satchels. I rubbed my eyes and looked up at the blue sky.

‘You’d never think it, dear boy, but there’s not a straight line in the whole building.’

Oh, no!
I thought. What was he doing up here? I stared to my right. Over by a wooden shrine of Saint Prolapsius the Unthinking, Priscus was reclining in a chair carried by four sweating slaves.

This was the first I’d seen of Priscus in full daylight since just west of Cyprus, and there was no doubt how he’d aged and shrunk within himself in so short a time. Balthazar was probably as wrong about him as he was about everything else. But he might have had a point. Priscus jabbed with his cane at the chief carrier’s head, and the chair came properly over. He smiled brightly and waved a satchel that was doubtless stuffed with drugs.

‘When I was last here,’ he cried in a voice as bright as his smile, ‘the bricked-up entrance still hadn’t been rendered, and it was all an untidier thing to behold. I’m glad it looks so much better now.’ He got up unsteadily and waited for Martin and Nicephorus to help him down from the chair.

Now he was showing himself in full view, the local trash had set up a low and sinister mutter. Before his arrival, they’d been edging closer and closer to where I sat; one of them had even reached out a short and rather dark arm to touch the damp robe in which I was trying to look grand. Now, they’d all withdrawn to stand a dozen feet away. I can’t say I’d been glad to see Priscus. But I wasn’t displeased by the effect he was having on the Athenians.

He tottered past me and sat down heavily on my left. He sat a while in silence, absorbed in the shouting, wheeling monks over by the temple. Then he stretched his legs with a groan that showed his real state of mind. But he gathered himself almost at once. ‘I guessed you’d be up here the moment the weather permitted,’ he said with a forced return of jollity.

He bent forward and looked past me to the right. ‘Ah, there you are, my fine young man,’ he said. ‘Come on, don’t be shy. If
I
haven’t bothered eating you, the Lord Senator Alaric will do you no harm.’ He laughed and waved at a darkish boy whose lack of size was only emphasised by the amount of clothing in which he’d been swathed. ‘Well, come on, Theodore,’ he urged, ‘the Lord Senator is waiting for enlightenment.’

The boy blushed and stood up straight. He gave a slight bow of greeting to Nicephorus, who stared back without movement or expression. ‘Every line is curved to give an impression of straightness,’ he said in the harsh but correct Greek of a Syrian. He pointed at the western portico and stammered slightly from shyness. ‘The centre point of the base here is two inches higher than the outer points. The centre point of the long base is four inches higher. On this, the columns incline inwards. If you extend the lines of the outermost columns, they would meet a mile and a fifth above the base. Because they incline in diminishing proportion to their distance from the edges of the base, any two pairs of the inner columns also form a triangle, though of progressively shorter base . . .’

An encouraging smile on my face, I let the boy go through his lesson. I paid no attention to Nicephorus, who’d finally shut up and was watching the fight with vague interest. There was nothing I didn’t know already – this much about Athens I’d read and reread – but he was a sight more accurate than his Uncle Nicephorus had been. I pretended not to notice the increasing volume of what was on its way to a small riot, and listened to the boy. I’d thought, when I saw him asleep, that he was only about six. But, if he was undersized, Theodore must have been ten, or even twelve. Whatever his age, he was a scholar of some precocity. It was plain he must have been the person who was reading Gregory of Nyassa in the library. Those cushions now made sense. So did the lamps that had been left burning. He must have read until his chest had given up on him, and then staggered off to be put to bed by Euphemia.

I thought of Euphemia. At some time since he’d gone off to compose my funeral eulogy, Priscus must have made or remade her acquaintance. I felt a stab of jealous anger. I’d find out sooner or later what could have got her to lend him Theodore’s services as a guide.

I turned my attention back to the building I was having described to me. The western pediment, I knew, had been sculpted by Phidias himself, and showed the contest between Athena and Poseidon for guardianship of the city. The long sides carried an immense and glorious relief of a Panathenaiac Festival. Even in old times, I’d have been too far away to see much of this. As it was, the sculptures had been cleaned of their paint and gilding and then covered over with a uniformity of what may have been plaster, but that I hoped was only white paint. In the next few days, I’d give orders for a wheeled viewing platform to be built. This would let me see everything properly. If it was plaster, I’d see if I could get it taken off. Because he was subject to the Pope, I’d make this approach to the Bishop of Athens through the Dispensator. If that didn’t work, I’d offer him my tongue of Saint George. That would surely be enough to set the workmen in motion.

A loud and final scream from one of the monks drew me down to the riot under the portico. Things had now turned openly bloody. One of the monks was on his back, and a couple of his rivals were jumping up and down on his chest. I could have taken this as an excuse to get up and intervene. It would have saved me from the trouble of being pleasant to His Magnificence the Commander of the East. But, since Nicephorus himself was taking no active interest, I failed to see any reasonable excuse for noticing the fight.

I glanced a little to the right. A boy had climbed on to one of the statues and was rocking backwards and forwards on it. Now I was getting used to the local dialect, I could hear his repeated shout that he was taller than all the Prophets. Someone in the shabby crowd called back what might have been an obscenity. The boy rocked hard and shouted something that was too fast to catch. If he didn’t get down soon, he’d have the head off the statue. Again, Nicephorus said nothing.

I got up and walked towards the nearest edge of the Acropolis. I could hear everyone else follow me over. I looked down to what had been the Temple of Hephaestus, though it was now a shell with a church built within it. I knew that this had once been close by the centre of Athens. Now, there was a huddle of silk weaving factories for about a hundred yards between it and the modern wall. I scanned the rest of the old centre. It made as little sense from above as it had from the ground. Perhaps if I spent a while in the residency library, looking at that mural, I might get some idea of what was down there . . .

‘You are welcome to disagree, dear boy – your taste in art is perverse enough, I’m sure,’ Priscus broke in behind me. I only noticed that Theodore had continued his explanations as he halted for another stammer. ‘But I can’t say any of this compares with even the Church of the Apostles back home. Would you like to comment, by the way, on its conversion to a church?’ He turned and pointed back at the astonishing little Temple of Athena.

I might have taken this as an excuse to leave the edge of the Acropolis and walk right over to the temple. But the scuffle of the monks had passed through riot into a small pitched battle. Instead, I focused on the pediment. ‘I imagine it was damaged at some time in the past – perhaps in the barbarian attack of three hundred years ago?’

Priscus nodded.

‘That may be why the original roof is gone. The new roof is based on the inner wall, into which I can see windows have been cut for the church. That leaves the outer colonnade redundant. But I’m glad the architects had the good taste to leave it in place.’

‘You’re a clever boy – I’ll give you that!’ came the reply. ‘But let Uncle Priscus assure you the barbarians never got up here. There’s too little damage to indicate that. I’d blame fire or some other accident of time for the loss of the ancient roof.’ He turned and raised both arms at a couple of boys who’d crept up behind us.

One of them screamed softly and made a complex sign with his hands. A warning voice from within the crowd called them away.

Priscus watched complacently as everyone shuffled back another few feet. ‘I still don’t think much of these old buildings,’ he said. ‘Certainly, this one pales to nothing beside the Great Church in Constantinople. Even so, I’ll grant it all has a certain elegance for those who like that sort of thing. Didn’t some Roman general think so in ancient times?’

‘You are surely thinking of Sulla,’ I replied with a sly smile. I leaned against the warm stones of the boundary wall and looked at the Temple of Athena. If I ignored the dark figures still darting about under the portico, it had a nobility about its shape that no scowling mosaics of Christ could take away. ‘I’m surprised you could forget the man who set the precedent for every later reign of terror. Those who don’t compare your late father-in-law to Caligula often compare you to Sulla.’

Cheering by the moment, I smiled into the sneering face. ‘Yes,’ I went on, ‘it was Sulla. The Athenians had, with a regrettable want of common sense, backed Marius in the first of the civil wars that ended the Republic. So before he could get home for his big killing spree in Rome, Sulla rolled up here at the head of an army. Just before the city fell, the whole city assembly went out to beg for mercy. They wasted every trick of Greek eloquence on the old beast. Finally, they fell silent and pointed up here. Sulla followed their pointed fingers and stood silent for what everyone thought an age. Then he turned and, without looking at the scared assemblymen, walked off to his tent. “I spare the living for the sake of the dead,” was all he said before going in.’

‘Well said! Well said, my dear young fellow,’ Priscus jeered at me. ‘You’ve a talent for dramatic narration – such a pity you weren’t sent off to Hippopolis. But you have left something out. The real drama in the account is that Sulla’s engineers had already got part of the wall down, and the first wave of soldiers were through the breach and getting stuck into the customary massacre. It was a devil’s job to call them off. No one but Sulla could have done that.’ He stopped and flashed a nasty look at Martin. ‘Do you suppose the barbarians will show such taste and restraint when they push down the heaps of rubble that pass nowadays for the walls of Athens?’

I saw Martin jerk slightly as if he’d been prodded from behind. Nicephorus unfixed his gaze from the monks, who might now have succeeded in kicking someone to death.

Priscus leaned closer to me. ‘Shall we go somewhere a little more private?’ he whispered. ‘Even in Latin, what I have to say is not really for an audience.’

There was a time when you could stand anywhere on the high end of the Acropolis and look down to Piraeus and the sea. Then the whole plateau was levelled to make a regular platform for the temples, and was surrounded by walls. After that, you had to go back into the Propylaea and through a side door to climb on to the roof of what had been the Temple of Victory for the sea to be visible. This was where, so legend said, King Aegeus had stood and waited for the return of his son Theseus from Crete; and from where, when Theseus had forgotten to show he’d not been eaten by the Minotaur by replacing black sails with white, the old man had jumped down and killed himself. That may have been two thousand years earlier. Now, I stood in much the same spot, with the nearest equivalent I’d yet seen to a man-devouring monster a few paces to my right. Groaning from a very gentle climb, Priscus had clutched hold of a sturdy but dead bush that had poked through the roof, and was trying his best not to look worn out.

‘I didn’t suppose tourism would be your motive for coming up here after me,’ I said.

Four miles away, the sea was a sparkling, blue carpet, broken here and there by dark islands. Just below me on the left was the theatre built by Herodes Atticus – a most generous benefactor, second only to Hadrian himself. If I looked right, there was the head and upper torso of yet another statue of Hadrian. This time, he was patting the head of his boy Antinous. An ancient city is a place of many layers. There’s a continuity of building from earliest times into the fairly recent past, and it takes much forgetting and a lot of squinting to see things as they must have appeared at any specific time in the past. Up here, though, I could almost think myself into better times, when Athens still mattered as other than a defensive point in a game that spanned the known world. Certainly, the shining sea, far off, and the deep blue of the sky were as they’d always been in Athens, and always would be.

I pulled myself back into the present and stared at the Governor’s letter that Priscus held in his free hand. ‘I’ll admit I came out before I’d bothered opening it,’ I said. ‘I don’t suppose it’s a cheerful read.’

‘Cheerful, dear boy, would be an unfair description,’ came the reply. Priscus tightened his grip on the bush and reached inside his robe for a lead flask. Holding the letter under his arm, he pulled out the flask and handed it to me.