The Praise Singer (16 page)

“No,” I said. “Never a word.”

“Well, well. I am glad I met with you. To think of that; never a word. He thought his uprightness not worth boasting of, because it was his habit.”

I went on my way. I remembered the sheep-sickness; I had been still a shepherd. When the first few died, he had beaten me for letting them eat black hellebore. Later, when he knew the truth, he said, “Well, Sim, it seems you were not to blame.” I was angry that he said it so unwillingly, never counting the cost to his pride in saying it at all. This man had done him more justice. I had often been ashamed that he was known for a hard man; that he had never been known for a crooked one, I had not considered; just taken it for granted, as he had brought me up to do. All in all, I thought, I had best stop pitying myself over the choral prize. The judges had thought me the best, and I should be content to know it.

So I went to my mattress on the ship, with some bread and cheese bought on the way, and bedded down for the night. Some sailors were working late, shouting and hammering, so I lay awake. About midnight, I heard singing, coming along the waterside, and threw my blanket round me and went up on deck to look.

It was a komos of revelers, waving torches, and singing a skolion to which they dance-stepped along. They were not far away, and I could see Hipparchos leading them. He had one arm over the shoulders of the youth to whom he had given the painted wine-cup. They made a handsome group, like Dionysos with a young sa?tyr.

The sound faded away; the sailors had turned in, and so did I. It had been a long day. As men count great events, nothing much had happened. The Delia had been celebrated; an old man had died in the way of nature, and his sons had put him on the pyre. Yet it had been a full day for me.

It is a strange thing to recall; but as I fell asleep, I was wondering how it might feel to be courted for one’s beauty. I expect Pythagoras would have told me that in some past life, as youth or woman, I had been cruel to my lovers, and had chosen to make amends. In my time I have talked with many philosophers, who have expounded to me the ways of the gods with men. Out of them all, Pythagoras’ belief seems to me the most just, supposing it is true. But then, if it is, and all these things befall us, unless we have the Sight we shall never know.

WE GAVE OUR FATHER the very best funeral the laws of Keos allow. No wailing, even by wife or daughter; one lamb and one goat to offer at the tomb; no incense. They measure even the libations of wine and oil. Had we had his body, his grave-clothes must have been as simple as in life, and his grave-wreath only of origan. We draped his urn with fillets of fine wool, and tied our hair into his mourning-wreath. (But for Midylos, Theas and I would have left our shearings forgotten on Rhenaia.) We put the urn on a bier hung with a linen cloth; and Theas and I carried it to the tomb in the silence the laws prescribe.

Later, to the scandal of half Iulis, we had a small carving done on his grave-stele, in the Athenian style, by an artist from that city. Of course he had never seen our father; but that is usual. He just asked his age and how he wore his hair and beard. He was done leaning on a staff, with Theas bidding him farewell. He, at least, was there to be copied.

To the very end of the rites, Theas was just what he had always been, the eldest son of Leoprepes. It was as though our father was still watching, as Homer tells it, on the hither shore of Styx, awaiting his rite of passage. After the offerings at the tomb came the funeral feast, given in the Kean style he would have approved. After that, if Patroklos’ ghost spoke truly to Achilles, Leoprepes son of Theasides, of Iulis, had made the crossing.

We went home, and slept; next morning the sun was shining, and the birds sang their spring songs. Our mother went briskly about the house, with well-water and hyssop. Theas rode into town, saying he had business there; and came back clean-shaved.

“I’d have as soon kept it up after that time in Samos,” he said quite coolly, “but the father would never have stood it. Athenian dandies-you know what he used to say.”

So that was how the sculptor did him on the grave-stele, standing with our father. He forgot to mention it, and once the outline was chiseled, it was too late to change. I kept quiet about it, and so did he.

Looking back, I can’t think why I was so surprised at the change in Theas. If I had been less taken up with myself, I could have expected it. I, the unwanted one, had long since had my freedom. Theas, the beloved, respected, cherished, had never been free at all. Now he was like a vine that bursts with green shoots in a single day of sun.

Not that he plunged into riot and revelry, like some heirs of strict fathers. That was never his style. But when next Laertes put to sea, with a cargo for Sidon and Naukratis, Theas was with him. He wanted to learn the trade of shipmaster; then he would hire a good pilot, and buy a ship.

Nowadays, men of good birth seem to think sea-trading beneath them. It was different when I was young. Laertes had inherited a big estate, grew his own grapes for wine and raisins, pressed his own olive oil, and pastured the flocks whose wool he sold. But he never gave up the sea till he was past sixty and his joints got stiff, though by then he was one of the chief men of Iulis. When Theas joined him, he was in his prime: had traded as far north as the Euxine, for furs and corn and Hyperborean amber; south down to Naukra?tis for faience and alabaster jars and ivory and incense; and bought purple in Tyre to sell in Athens. The Ionian ports were open to trade again under their Persian satraps; once more in Miletos you could get lapis and embroideries from Sardis. Laertes had started out, like many another landowner’s son, just selling his father’s spare produce; now he was richer from trade than land. For years, as I might have guessed, Theas had been dying with envy. It had never soured their friendship; Theas had been born without sourness in him; but I remembered, now, how he’d told me in my boyhood Laertes’ sailor tales, dwelling on the fights with pirates.

He finished all this business before he said a word; when he came back from Koressia harbor, he was like a boy again. Our mother was much dismayed; she had never thought, she cried, that he would be a wanderer. He replied that she had plenty of kin in Iulis, and Midylos close at hand. He was kind, but firm as rock.

When we were alone, I said to him, “Theas, what would you have done if Father had lived to fourscore?”

He looked a little surprised, either at my asking, or not having asked before. “I’m thirty-three. I was giving it two more years. Half a man’s life, and the best half, I reckon is all one owes.”

“That’s fair,” I said. “But I prophesy the best is still to come.” I was right in that. But I thought, too, that it would have destroyed our father; and that after all he had had a lucky death.

Remembering the knife Theas gave me when I left home, went to Khalkis, whose swordsmiths were famous then as now, and bought him the best short sword that I could find. He was delighted with it; in after years he told me it served him well, though before they got to close quarters he had done pretty well with javelins. I expect that in all those years when he had exercised with them at home, he had dreamed of using them in battle. At any rate, before he was thirty-five-the age when he’d planned to claim his freedom-he had picked off the captain of a Cretan pirate, and sailed on to Naukratis with the captured ship, and his own cargo of Corinthian helmets for the Greek soldiers in Pharaoh’s pay.

As for me, I went back to my land in Euboia, now truly mine. No one could say my father had been a harsh landlord. He did not like my absences, but kept to his word and never told me so. If he grumbled at my accounts, it was not from avarice-he might do it in a good year-but because I had altered something on the farm. It was true that since old Phileas knew the work so well, I had begun to give him his head. His changes were for the better; the farm ran smoothly; he did not take free men in thrall for debt, or ill-treat the slaves; so, my mind at rest, I was free to walk out in the woods and hills and by the shore, following the rise and fall of words as one might chase a bright bird that teases one by flying out of view or perching in hidden branches, then of a sudden comes swooping in perfect plunge, its colors flashing, the whole curve of its path clear to enraptured eyes.

I trusted Phileas, and he did not betray me. If he kept a few pickings for himself, which would have been only human, he never exceeded. I think he feared Dorothea more than me. She was a personage in the village now, and took a pride in it; even if my ship came early into port, I always found things just so.

All in all I had been living very well; it had been foolish to let my accounting to my father hang over me for a month beforehand. He had a way of fidgeting while I spoke, so that I felt something was coming without knowing what. I had sometimes lied to him, but only about small things for the sake of peace; and to his profit, not his loss. Yet these trifles had oppressed me, almost as if I were a boy who could still be beaten, even when I had just come from Athens with gold in my belt and praise in my ears. I went home after the funeral feeling as if a heavy mortgage had been paid off.

But now in Athens a long day was ending, which had dawned in storm and fitful sun and returning gales?, then passed into a fine untroubled afternoon and a mild evening. Now twilight was here and it would soon be dusk.

Not, like my father, with a single stroke, but little by little every day, the strong old master was failing. Often in those days he sent for me, or Hipparchos sent me to him, saying my songs refreshed him when he was tired. He was getting to be like ancient Nestor, who used to dwell on the days before Agamemnon was born, let alone Achilles. I would sing to him from the Sons of Homer, or sometimes make a song for him myself, about his early deeds in the Salaminian War. There, when he had thanked me with his regal courtesy, he would often set me right; he was not silly, just clearest in his memory about the past, as I am getting to be. About the present, he was apt to be forgetful. Sometimes when a man had been acquitted in his own court, he would order his arrest, not from injustice, but because the judgment had slipped his mind. No harm was done; Hippias would always oversee his orders and put things right. He did not even need to conceal it; Pisistratos, when reminded of the mistake, would thank him kindly, and praise the gods for giving him a good son to prop his age.

One night he had a few friends to supper, old men like himself who had been in his party since early days. He asked me too, because he had meant that I should sing. I was well prepared for his forgetting all about it, as in fact he did. It was a kind of compliment, that I should seem to him like any one of his guests. I enjoyed the good food and wine, and did not put myself forward; but I could feel, as the meal went on, that the company had disappointed him. His mind was sharp still, if not his memory; most of the others were maundering on about old men’s trivial concerns, or deploring the manners of the youth-which, I think, had never been so good as they were then, and certainly have not since. He tried to lead the talk, but it would fall away in trifles. He did not, as Polykrates would have done, get up and go to bed; but, when the eldest made his excuses, graciously included all the rest. I, of course, went up last. He made a gesture for me to stay.

When all had been ushered out, he turned to me smiling. “My dear boy, all we old fellows have been rambling on till past our bedtimes. It is their loss, that they have not heard you sing; but I hope it need not be mine. Will it be playing tyrant, if I keep you for a while, to please an audience of one?”

I said what was natural, adding that it would be something to remember; which, indeed, I found was true.

He motioned me to the supper-couch next his own, and beckoned the slave to bring me a clean wine-table. Seeing him pause above his cup to smell the bouquet, I ventured to praise the vintage. He looked up, like a man recalled from his thoughts. “The best year in ten. I am glad it pleases you. It was Solon who taught me to know wine. Will you sing me something of his?”

I was startled speechless. Solon’s fame, as I knew it, was firstly for his laws; then for refusing a tyranny, and choosing exile instead; then, on returning to find Pisistratos in power, for urging the Athenians to resist him. When they would not, Solon left his old panoply outside his door in the street, and gave out that he had retired. I had only snatches of his songs; they were all political, and I pleaded my shortcomings with relief.

“Did you never hear this?” He put out his hand for my lyre-at these small parties I did not use the kithara-and tried the strings; then in his old cracked voice gave the first line of a charming love song. He stopped too soon; just as if he had been some poet met at a festival, I said, “Sir, will you teach it me?”

What is more, he did, and I have it to this day. It is not very long; it likens itself to a flower which will not die while the beloved wears it. When I had sung it back to him, he said smiling, “Yes, it deserves to be worn longer, and you are young. I bequeath it you.”

Even in his age, you could trace the bones of old beauty. He had all his tee?th, and his mouth was still finely carved. Faint gold shone in his hair. When he was not looking, I half shut my eyes, and could trace the brave keen face, a sculptor’s delight had the art of those days been good enough; listening to his lover, learning the thoughts of manhood. What other would Solon choose?

He had our cups refilled with the cold pale wine. We drank; I waited. “He loved me to the end. And I him. I loved him when he warned the city of me, and begged them to throw me off before it was too late. He would not have been Solon, if he had not done it. He was the best man of our age. When he did it he loved me still. It was partly for my sake too, for fear of power corrupting me . . . Do you know, people went to him, after that speech of his (part was in verse; I will teach it you one day when it is not so late); they went to him, and urged him to fly before I killed him. Dear man, he laughed. He said his old age would protect him-he was ten years younger than I am now. Again and again, after all that, I went to him for advice, never in vain. He was like a fine olive tree, which when its roots are checked one way will put them out another. Summer or winter, storm or calm, his soul sought justice and the end of wrong. He worked as he could, with what he had; first with the people, then with me … Kleon, fill up.”

The slaves had gone, the butler was there alone. He shook his head like an old nurse, then lovingly filled the cups.

“There was no one like him. Everyone knew it; or why did they go to him when the state was like a knot of vipers? They begged him to give them laws, because he was in no blood-feud, and was the only man fit to do it. The lords, the knights, the merchants, the commons, all swore before the gods to keep whatever laws he made for them. And so they do. They keep them to this day … I see to that.”

I gazed with fascination at that grim smile. Now I could picture him in his prime, while I was an urchin tending my first sheep, weeping from loneliness on the mountain; and he was lord of Brauron in the north, teaching his hill-men to fight.

“He had promised them justice, and that he gave. He took from every man the right to wrong another. He freed the debt-thralls. He canceled the mortgages, and had the debt-stones broken in the fields. I was with him often, when he was at work on it. I was young then. I saw he had removed oppression, but had not gratified envy or revenge. He seemed to me like a god. I said, ‘If there is any justice in men, they will set you up a hero shrine.’ He brushed that aside; but I think it was what he hoped for. From public office he never made one drachma, though ever since his fool of a father went broke, he’d had to shift for himself with trade. He was a fine soldier; but at home he would never grasp at power, he wanted nothing not given him by free consent. But what man does not covet honor?”

“What man,” I said, “or what god, for that matter? But he has it, surely? The Athenians call him Solon the Wise.”

“Now they do. I hope, where he is, it reaches him. They have lived with his laws and liked them, now that they have me, who could have given them laws they would have liked much less, but for my oath and honor, as well they know. Oh yes, they thank him now. Did they thank him then? Not they, not when it could have warmed his living heart.”