The Praise Singer (17 page)

His fingers tightened round the wine-cup’s stem. I think he might have broken it, if it had not been made of gold. I asked, “How was it then, sir?”

“Then?” He looked at me, saw me young, and suddenly looked old again. “Then he gave out his laws, and had them carved on the wooden tablets you can see today, set up in the King Archon’s colonnade. All sorts of men- lords, knights, merchants, commons-praised him for his laws and found them admirable. Except, each of them found, for just one thing. He had satisfied none of them. That shows you how just he was. So, therefore, each of them wanted a thumb upon the scales, just a tilt their way. Then they would truly honor him . . . Kleon, fill up.”

Th?e butler came softly with the jug. He had put in more water, when his master was not looking.

“He was a man of honor, and believed the same of his friends. Well, perhaps he was right; let us say they were not all men of discretion. Somehow, before his laws were proclaimed, one or two men learned that he meant to cancel mortgages. So they bought land on mortgages, for which they could not have paid. And mean-minded men, whose greed he had not satisfied, put it about that he had advised it.”

He set down his cup. He had truly returned there. I saw that his hand was shaking.

“In my youth, I was not without some beauty. It was all I had to offer him in his trouble. Every day they bickered and complained; and always what they wanted had to be taken unjustly from some other man. He had a steady soul -that was why they’d gone to him in the first place-but he began to lose his sleep. Still, he had true friends who had never tried to use him. They told him his laws were just, and should be enforced. They urged him to accept a tyranny; they said he would be backed by all moderate men. They offered him gold of their own, to hire Thracian soldiers-excellent advice, as I have found. I was a boy still; I begged him to consent, as though he would do for my young face what was not in him to do at all. He was kind to me. Solon was always kind. Tyranny, my dear, is like one of those mountain climbs which take one up, but not down. One can only fall. They have sworn their oaths to me; if they fear the gods, they will have to keep them. And they cannot harry me to change my laws, if I am not there.’ He was gone ten years, trading his way, seeing the world. I stayed, and became a man . . . He’d known I was old enough to think; he thought that because I loved him I would think like him. Indeed I loved him. Indeed he was my teacher. But what he taught me was not what he supposed.”

I murmured some assent. I did not want to remind him of who I was, in case he had forgotten. I felt like Orpheus, visiting the shades.

“Few men are wise enough to know themselves, as Pythian Apollo commands us. He was. He had done what he could, and knew what he could not do … When he sailed, he gave me his dog, a young harrier, liver and white, that he’d been rearing. One can’t do with a dog on shipboard, he could not keep him, so he gave him me. I reared and trained him; he was the best dog I’ve had. His name was Bia: Strength. I was young, but I knew it was an omen.”

The old butler, who’d looked as if he wanted to get him off to bed, had stopped fidgeting and drawn near to listen.

“He grew old here without bitterness. It was as if he drained all of it in one draught and threw the cup away. When he came back to find they’d made me First Archon, he sang the Athenians one of his poems, telling them not to blame the gods if they thought better of it later. Someday I will teach it to you; but I expect you know those lines. Everyone does.”

He was right, of course. He saw it with a smile.

“He retired from all public life, just as he’d said. But he knew how to live without being busy. He had traveled the world, meeting the sages and the kings; he knew the gods’ names among foreign peoples, and their rites of worship. At Sais, the temple priests had told him Egypt’s history back for six thousand years, and how the anger of Poseidon destroyed Atlantis. He had known and seen more than Odysseus . . .”

I wondered if, like old Argos, the dog Bia had known his master on his return. But then, Argos had been left masterless.

“He had known pleasure too, choosing the best like wine. All in all, he had enough stored up in himself to last him another lifetime. He lived between his town house and his farm, enjoying the seasons and his friends. People thought I made much of him for the sake of policy. It was no matter what they thought. We understood each other.”

He picked up his mint-scented napkin, wiped his mouth and set aside his wine-cup. The butler prepared to show me out, I prepared my thanks. Then he said, “A good man will gather? good men round him, and know too little of evil. A bad one will gather his like, and do nothing good. Ruling men, it seems, must be like this wine we have drunk tonight: strong enough, sweet enough, but with a fleck of mold upon the grape, which comes once in a way and makes it what it is. And never drunk neat … Ah well, it grows late. Thank you, my dear boy, for the pleasure of your conversation, and for your charming songs. We were all delighted. A very good night to you.”

Eight or ten days later, he invited me again to sing; but while I was dressing, a messenger brought me his regrets. He was indisposed that evening, but hoped for the pleasure shortly. So I did not ride back to Euboia; at first, because I waited to hear from him; then, because I waited as all the city was waiting.

First, he had caught a cold; then, it had gone to his chest, with fever; then, his mind was wandering, and with his sons by his bed he had asked to see his children; then, he was sinking fast. As news came in, there began to be a hush all over Athens; at any sound in the street, everyone would pause to listen. The Acropolis, when I went up, was full of silent people, watching the house. When sunset came, the guards did not close the gates, and anyone stayed who wished. As the dark deepened, some went off to bed. I waited. It was a calm, warm night; and I knew the hour at which Hermes the Guide comes oftenest for his travelers. A little before the dawn, a woman cried; then we heard the household lamenting.

Around me, in the dark, women began to wail. In those days they went about more freely than in Athens now, and not a few had kept the death-watch. For some time they keened, their mantles flung over their heads; men stood still, talking in low voices, as people do when there is nothing left to stay for, yet they cannot make up their minds to go. As dawn was breaking, we saw the tall jar of purification set by the door, for those leaving the house to asperse themselves clean of death. In little knots the crowd drifted away.

I walked in half-awakened streets in the faint light. Doors opened, people looked out to ask for news. When they heard it, they seemed not so much grieved as dazed. For days it had been expected everywhere; yet now they could not quite believe it, nor see beyond. He had been there so long. He had put his style on everything, like Exekias who both shaped his vases and painted them. Like Exekias he kept up the old grand manner. He had been tyrant, but never upstart; he was the Old Archon now, head of the family. It was as if they had waked that morning, and found the Acropolis gone.

Next day he was laid out in state, and anyone he had ever received as guest came to do him honor. He lay in the hallway with its honeycomb marble floor, his bier draped with an old embroidered pall, maybe an heirloom from King Nestor’s day. They had clothed him in pure white wool, and spread fine linen over him, and laid fringed fillets across him. He was crowned with a wreath of gold, twined with parsley and origan. His three lawful sons stood gravely by to greet us; his daughters and daughters-in-law and granddaughters keened for him, but decently, as Solon’s laws required, without loud outcries or rending their hair and clothes. Nothing was in excess, nothing hubristic; but he looked in death what he had long been in all but name -last of the Athenian kings.

Before dawn next morning they took him to his grave in the Kerameikos, his menfolk walking before, the women behind wailing softly to the sound of a single flute. They needed no slaves to carry him; at every rest-halt there was a little crowd of Athenians waiting, in silence, to take the bier. Silently they did their stint, and silently stood back after, asking no recompense for the pollution; men came forward, even, to lower him into the grave. They laid on the coffin his old panoply, the two-winged helmet, the javelins and the spear, the gold-hilted sword, the shield with its serpent blazon. A wavering torchlight shone down into the vault; the shadows of the ?helmet-crests flickered like black bats. The kindred came forward with their gifts, pots of spices and scented oil, vases from Egypt, grave-flasks painted by masters of the art. Then the masons closed the slab, and so they left him, till the sculptors set up his stele. The mourners went home to take off their ashen clothes, comb their shorn hair, bathe and break their fast.

He did not stay long alone. Quietly, when the great had gone, the people came with their offerings. They brought what they could, what they might have brought for their own fathers: a basket of figs, a copper cloak-brooch, an ancient vase long in the household, painted with checkers and rings; a fillet stitched in the night; a little warrior pinched out of clay with the colors fading; a dish of honey-cakes. They laid them down, and went away with their cloaks pulled over their faces.

Solon, I thought, now are you reconciled?

I turned towards my lodging to sleep. The streets were waking, the stalls set up in the Agora; men met and greeted, and everywhere one heard, “What now?”

On my way, I fell in with a man I knew, a certain Proxenos, one of the first men of the Gephyriot clan. He was as handsome as I am ugly, and pleased with it too; no popinjay, however, but a noted horseman who had raced his own chariot at the Isthmia. We walked on together; he too had watched on the Acropolis. “And I would have brought my son, if he were a few years older, so that he would have had it to remember. Such things should be handed on.”

At his door, he asked me in to breakfast. Over the wheat bread and warmed wine, I asked him what he foresaw for the city now.

“Who knows?” He looked up frowning. “My father supported Solon, because the times were bad and the man was honest. Everyone gave up something; my father said the eupatrids gave up too much. To my mind he was right. But we gave it for law, not tyranny.”

It was the first time I’d heard that word used in Athens, except about other states. His family was a very old one. “I’m a Kean, so it’s not for me to say. But it seems to me there is law here, and justice too.”

“Truly. While the Tyrant consents. He is still a man with a spear while we have none. Pisistratos seldom lifted it, and I give him credit for that. But we are still disarmed; the spear is there; and as for the man who holds it now, I doubt he is better than any one of us whose forefathers played their part in affairs in former days . . . Forgive me; you are a guest-friend of the family. I have said too much.”

I said smiling, “You would have done in Samos. But here in Athens, we are just two men talking of public business, and your only fear is lest you have offended me. That is something, we can both agree.”

“You are right, although . . . No, you are right. We have seen the fate of other cities in stasis; we should know when we are well off. Hippias will be made First Archon without dissent. He has been his father’s pupil; for that matter, he must have been governing, in all but name, for some time already. He is steady and past his youth. No doubt we could do worse.”

“And Hipparchos,” I said, thinking it my due to a generous patron, “he has done a good deal to adorn the city.”

“Oh, yes. That is his part; I expect he’ll keep to it and be content. A pleasant lightweight, who will be neither here nor there.”

Just then his young son, of whom he’d spoken, came running into the room, having escaped somehow from the women. He must have been two or three years old. Proxenos picked him up, and pretended to scold him; but I could see, and he too no doubt, that his father was delighted to show him off. No wonder; he was as lovely as infant Apollo in my Delian ode. He clung about Proxenos’ neck, telling of some nursery exploit. It was a pretty sight; I offered the hoped-for tribute, that the family looks had been passed on.

“That’s to be seen,” said Proxenos, proudly rumpling his golden hair. “Handsome is as handsome does-eh, young Harmodios?”

PISISTRATOS on his deathbed had desired that the power should b?e shared between his two eldest sons, with precedence for the first. Law-abiding in death as in later life, he had willed it should be voted on by the Areopagos, that venerable tribunal. Each member was a former archon. But the old man had been First Archon a long time; of the ex-archons who could still get their old bones up the sacred hill, almost all in their time had been Pisistratos’ men. As for the Alkmaionids, they were still in exile. Hippias became First Archon without a vote against it, with Hipparchos next in rank. As Proxenos had foretold, it all went smoothly.

For some time the Old Archon had been, to most Athenians, part man part legend. Nothing now changed in the life around them. It must have seemed the old order would last forever.

For my part, I would get no work during the time of mourning. It was neither an Olympic nor a Pythian year, so I took myself home to Euboia. Summer was ending in a sweet ripe smell of good harvests. I had friendly neighbors, thanks to my steward’s good sense. When the crops came in, we all took turns to help each other, gathering the vintage, or lending slaves, or sharing an olive-press.

Country festivals delight me, with their ancient work songs as the grapes are trodden, the oxen led round the threshing-floor or the millstone. They are simple, these songs, like the beat of the heart or the breath of life; and their sound mates with their meaning as simply as the beasts mate in spring. They were sung before there were bards or poets, and of them we were all begotten. They are still our kindred, if we know our craft. Pulse and breath set us our bounds, within which is found all mastery. Without pulse and breath the body dies; without their measures the poet. But within their limits are the startled or the tranquil or the eager heart; the breath of ecstasy, or calm, or tears, or terror. What a possession is ours! Eighty years I have wandered through it, and have never reached its furthest frontier yet.

I did not lack company, having many friends in Eretria; I had my songs to make, and Dorothea to warm the house and exchange her gossip for mine.

“That Hipparchos, by your account of him, he’ll be kicking up his heels, now his old father’s hand is off the bridle.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But his father trained him, and I think he knows where to stop.” He and Pisistratos had always used their famous tact on one another. Hipparchos never used to present to his father anyone, however amusing, that he might not care to acknowledge in public; he, in return, never upbraided his son for his loose acquaintance, unless he picked up someone politically dangerous.

“That’s often the way,” she said over her shoulder, as she stirred the pot with our supper. There was a hare in it, and some cunning spices. “But it’s wonderful the changes you see when the strong hand’s gone. Look at your own brother. Not that he’s changed for the worse, but he’s changed, that’s sure. Would you ever have looked for that?”

“No, but I should have done.” He had visited here both before and after our father’s death; each time treating her with as much respect as if she had been my wife. But the first time, in his plain clothes with his simple barbering he had looked every inch a Kean. Last time, he’d looked every inch a gentleman-adventurer, as we knew them then. To save trouble at sea he had grown his beard again, but now it had a rakish point to it; he had cut off his long plaits, and wore his hair short to the nape. He had a gold earring, and sandals with silver studs. In his fighting panoply, which he put on to show us, he looked good enough for a vase-painter; his helmet’s tall crest was inlaid with blue enamel, and his leather corselet embossed with stampwork.

“This is heavy,” I said. “What if you have to swim for it?”

“No laces, all clasps. I can be out of this before a ship can settle, even if she’s rammed. As for falling overboard, we make the other fellows do that.” Theas, it seemed, was enjoying every day of his youth; all the more, no doubt, because he’d had to wait for ?it till he had turned thirty.

“Yes,” I said to Dorothea, “he’s changed, but all he is now was there already. It’s truer to say that he’s become himself.”

She took the spoon from the simmering pot, blew on it, licked it, nodded. “It’ll be the same with Hipparchos, I daresay.”

Of course she had never set eyes on him, or even heard of him from anyone but me. If her voice had an edge, I well knew why. Some women can read things in their men, like a diviner in a goat’s liver. She knew what I was waiting for. She knew why I kept quiet about it: not from deceit, but from fear that counting on it would bring bad luck. That did not make her like him any better.

I expected nothing yet. When a Pisistratos dies, his sons don’t start to make merry after the bare month of mourning; especially when the heir is a man like Hippias. I was content to wait.

Meantime, I crossed to Keos, mostly to see Philomache. The year before, she had borne a healthy boy; Midylos, and his father the ancient athlete, had been near dancing with delight. But it was a hot dry summer; many babies died of the flux, and she lost him at two months old. When I saw her soon after, she looked to have aged ten years. Now she had been brought to bed again; I found her blooming, and doting on the new one, for all that it was a girl. Midylos was one of those men who like a daughter, and was only sorry for old Bacchylides, grumbling that he would die before he saw a grandson. “Though,” said Midylos to me, “he’s not much past sixty, and as tough as an old vinestock. If he’d give over watching the pot, it might boil sooner. But he craves an Olympic victor. I sorely disappointed him. Even here on Keos, Theas always beat me in the games.” He laughed. He was a well-liked man with a good farm, and well content.

As for Theas, no doubt his wife did not see enough of him; but the house was prosperous, and his two young sons adored him. “When Daddy’s ship comes” was their day of festival; their dream of manhood was to sail with him. Sometimes I felt regret that I had no children, to whom I could be the father I wished I’d had. But I would never be such a father, the head of a house, the stay of a home. One can bargain with one’s concubine, one cannot with one’s child. With Dorothea at least I had dealt as fairly as I knew how; and now came the time when I was glad of it.

I had not been a month back in Euboia, when I had a visitor from Athens: Onomakritos of the oracles, no less. He announced himself by a groom riding ahead. Even for a man so pompous, it looked rather like an embassy.

With equal ceremony, I set food and wine before him, and made solemn small-talk till the last replenishment had been declined. Having meantime satisfied his courteous interest in my health, my land, my harvest and my relatives, I was free to ask how things were going in Athens.

The aspect of the planets, he said, was most benign, and Athene’s sacred olive had borne abundantly, sure omen of prosperous times; it was plain the gods remained well disposed to the city. There was much more like this, letting me know that all went splendidly in Athens, without slight to the illustrious dead.

Just as I was thinking he meant to leave his business till next day, he came to it. He had been sent by both the Archons (there were still nine, but we let that pass as usual) to tell me that the sculptor had almost finished Pisistratos’ grave-stele; they awaited only the epitaph to carve on it, and a threnody to sing at its dedication. The Archons were sure it would have been their father’s wish, as it was their own, that I should make them. After that, they hoped I would stay on as their guest in Athens, and make the city my home; a source of pride to the Athenians, and of delight to them.

Nothing could have been more graceful. I perceived the mark of Hipparchos’ hand. It was of a piece with his usual tact, getting me invited by Hippias’ cherished diviner, to prove that he too would welcome me. I accepted gratefully, adding that I was honored in the messenger.

He bowed, l?ike a man with more to say, and got down from his supper-couch to open his traveling bundle. I’d wondered why he’d not let the slave take it upstairs. He dug about in it, but spilled out the wrong bag, sending a handful of divining-pebbles rolling about the floor. The boy serving the wine-a well-mannered young Karian, whom Theas had bought for me in Halikarnassos-put down his jug and went to pick them up; but Onomakritos checked him with a solemn hand, and stood over them brooding. After considering each, he gathered them himself. “Sir,” said the boy in his halting Greek, “is two there by door.” The sage bustled over, gazed at them deeply, and said, “So far!”

He had dropped his pomp as a man does a fine cloak when he has work to do. For the first time, he did not look like a charlatan. When he had pouched the pebbles, I asked if it was for me he had read the signs.

“Certainly it was. How not, when it was on your account I came to spill them? An unsought omen is never to be neglected.”

“You said, ‘So far!’ Am I to travel, then?”

“Yes, on the earth, and further than you have yet. And through the years of mankind, also. And the furthest of both will meet.”

I thanked him for his divination. Poor man, I am persuaded he had the Sight, but not often enough to sustain his pride. If he had kept from hubris and its follies, he would not have ended as he did, in exile, the lying sycophant of a barbarian king.

His pebble-bag stowed away, he now got out what he had first been looking for. The Archons knew well, he said, that to give them the pleasure of my company this time of year would certainly cause me loss. They were happy to send me something in recompense, and to promise that I would not lose by coming to Athens, now or in time to come.

The bag that came out this time was big as the first and looked as heavy. But this one chinked when he put it on the table. Half of it was full of good white silver drachmas, stamped with the Attic owl. The rest of the weight was gold.