The Walled Orchard (28 page)

And so on, day after day, wherever two Athenians met together. For we Athenians love to have something to look forward to, and something to discuss; and since everyone enjoyed talking about Sicily so much, they fell in love with the project itself. I have said that we had all been working hard since the end of the war to get our fields and vineyards productive again; well, that was part of it too. Athenians love working hard in short bursts, but the prospect of working hard at the same thing for the rest of their lives fills them with gloom and misery, and they start to consider themselves little better than the slaves of their own land. On the other hand, they had done most of what they could usefully do already — the vines and olives and figs were planted, and it would be years before they could enjoy the fruits of that work. What they wanted now was some new project, preferably with unlimited scope; something which they could hand on, unfinished, to their grandchildren.

Above all, I believe, it was the complete safety of the enterprise that thrilled them so much. For even if we lost the war, what harm could possibly come of it? After all, the Syracusans were hardly likely to leap aboard their ships and come after us; and even if they did, we always had the City walls to keep us safe. There was no power on earth capable of storming the City, and so long as we had the fleet, no siege could starve us out. As to the cost of the war, hadn’t we been assured that Egesta and Catana and all those other fat, wealthy Sicilian allies would pay for the whole thing? Hadn’t our men been to those cities and been entertained in private houses there, and seen that every vessel, from the mixing-bowl to the chamber pot, was made of solid silver? Hadn’t they been shown the floors of the temple treasuries, knee-deep in four-drachma pieces?

Now the trouble with being a Comic poet is that you see everything in terms of individual people; if you don’t like an idea, you look for some person, some notable public face, to attack. And then you don’t attack his policies or his public work — that would make terribly dreary poetry. No, you go for him personally, and in particular his sex life, for it seems to be a generally held belief that what a man does in bed is a perfect paradigm of all his other activities. Now it so happened that the man behind the Sicilian project did all sorts of funny things in bed with all sorts of peculiar people, and so I started to feel instinctively suspicious.

The whole thing, you see, had been Alcibiades’ idea. The best Alcibiades story I know, as it happens, has nothing to do with his sexual activities; if I find time, I shall tell you some Stories about those later. No, this story originated as a Pericles joke, and I got it from Cratinus, so you may feel quite free to laugh if you so wish.

When Alcibiades was about twelve or thirteen, his lover was no less a man than Pericles himself; and it was about the time of the Euboean crisis. Now Pericles, as you know, was faced with the problem of presenting his annual accounts, as General, to Assembly; there was a truly staggering sum for which Pericles could find no explanation which he could give to the Athenians without ending up on the wrong side of half a pint of the best hemlock. At the time, then, he was terribly worried about this, and even talked about it in his sleep.

Now Alcibiades has always liked to get his full six hours, or even more if possible, and he found this extremely upsetting. So one night, as Pericles was lying there muttering, ‘I must find some way of giving my accounts, I must find some way of giving my accounts,’ Alcibiades shook him by the shoulder and woke him up.

‘You’re looking at this from the wrong angle,’ he said. ‘What you’ve got to find is some way of
not
giving your accounts.’

Pericles said something memorable, like ‘Shut up and go to sleep,’ but when he woke up he had the most marvellous idea. He simply put the whole sum down under ‘necessary expenditure’, and provoked a major international crisis to divert attention. In that way, Pericles escaped not only with his life but unimpeached, and was able to lead us through the first part of the war.

That story is typical of Alcibiades; first, that he should see that the way to deal with an insoluble problem is not to try and smash it open but to walk round it and leave it alone; second, that he should exercise his brilliance not for the good of the City but so that he could get his full quota of sleep; third, that he should be in bed with the leading man of the day. I confess that I have never liked Alcibiades, and the reason I dislike him is the reason everyone else adores him; because he’s the best-looking man in Athens. I tend to resent good-looking people. The Athenians, as I have said before, believe that the beautiful are good and that only the good are beautiful.

Alcibiades must have thanked the Gods that the only person prepared to make a real stand against him was Nicias son of Niceratus, because even his best friend (if he had one) could not pretend that Nicias was a thing of beauty, particularly when his kidneys were giving him trouble. I think Nicias started off as much in favour of the idea as everyone else; but then he saw a few inconsistencies in the project as outlined, and felt it his duty to point these out. Now everyone listened when Nicias spoke, even though it was generally agreed that he was the most boring and depressing speaker in Athens; I think they listened because they reckoned that something that tasted so horrible must be doing them good, like medicine. Whatever the reason, Nicias spoke and they listened, and Alcibiades started to worry. You know how the Athenians are, being a democracy; the more they love a man, the more they want to see him destroyed. Alcibiades had no wish to meet with the same treatment that they had handed out to Themistocles, Pericles and Cleon. He also knew about Nicias’ obsession with duty. If Nicias was somehow bounced into joining him as co-leader of the Sicilian project, with some nonentity as third partner so that Nicias would always be outvoted, that would put an end to all opposition; with Nicias on the team — thorough, meticulous, conscientious, screamingly dull old Nicias — even the most timid and cautious people could not help feeling absolutely safe.

So Nicias was appointed a second General; and he panicked. The only way he could think of to discourage the Athenians was to rely on his reputation and give them a grossly inflated estimate of the resources that the project would need if it were to be absolutely safe, in the hope of scaring the people off. So he prepared an enormous schedule, and read it out. The project would need scores of ships, he said, virtually every ship we had, and most of the male population of Athens would be needed, either as soldiers or sailors. And you couldn’t expect these heroes to go forth and conquer for the usual rates of pay; you’d have to give them a whole drachma a day, at least until the Sicilians started paying their share. Then there would be supplies and materiel; so many hundred thousand arrows and throwing-spears and sling-bolts, so many pairs of sandals and cloaks (thick, military) and cloaks (lightweight, military) and helmet-plumes and spear-covers and rowlock-pads and coils of rope and jars of sardines (fresh) and jars of sardines (dried); all of them at market price or above, because of the urgency, so there would have to be property taxes to raise the money. In short, he said, Athens would need to prepare the greatest army and navy ever assembled outside Persia; she would have to put forth almost her entire strength.

He finished his speech, in the confident expectation of silence broken only by discontented grumbling. What he got was a roar of approval and an almost unanimous vote in favour. I remember the expression on his face as if it were yesterday, like a man struck by lightning in the evening of a cool summer day. What he hadn’t reckoned with was the almost unnatural gregariousness of us Athenians; when something nice is happening, we don’t want to be left out, and for weeks people had been tortured by fears that they would be left behind. Now Nicias had said that there would be room for everybody. Everybody was going to go to Sicily!

Except me. I found out later that the person drawing up the enlistment roll was an unimportant little man who I had made some passing remark about in a Comedy. This had so enraged him — he wasn’t used to it, I suppose —that he decided out of spite to leave me off the roll.

I remember how furious I was when the roll was read out, and how I stumped back home, kicking a stone in front of me all the way. I was nasty to Phaedra, refused to eat any food, and went to bed while it was still light.

I lay in bed for hours, unable to get to sleep, and mused on the unfairness of life. About the only person I knew who wasn’t going was Aristophanes son of Philip, and the only reason he wasn’t going was because he was a coward and had bribed someone at the draft board. And now, I supposed, people would think that I had done the same. Only a few days before, I had been to see little Zeus, and he had been anxiously going over his property to see if he could manage to squeeze another cupful or so of produce out of it to bring him up to Heavy Infantry status, so that he could go to Sicily too — for if he went to Sicily, he said, he could probably make enough in pay and plunder to pay me back what he owed me. Knowing him, he had probably managed it, so he would be there. So would everybody in the world, except me and Aristophanes.

But Callicrates wasn’t going, said my soul. He was slightly too old for military service, and had refused to lie about his age, saying that a man who strove too hard to get mixed up in a war probably had something wrong with his brain. The more I thought about it, the more I was comforted, in a way, for most of the people I valued most were too old to fight. This set me worrying in a different direction (why did I only make friends with old people, and what would become of me when they died?), and between the two conflicting streams of anxiety I fell asleep.

I was woken up by the most appalling noise. Phaedra woke up too, and threw her arms around me out of pure terror, and as soon as I realised it was her and not the heavily armed Syracusan cavalryman I had been having a nightmare about, I felt rather brave and told her not to worry, I would protect her.

‘Marvellous,’ she said. ‘What from?’

‘Whatever made the noise,’ I said.

‘Idiot,’ she said, unwinding herself from me, ‘go back to sleep.’

There was another terrible crash, right outside our front door, and a lot of confused shouting. My first instinct was to hide under the bed, but that would have been the sort of behaviour one would expect from a man who
wasn’t
going to Sicily. Besides, I didn’t want to appear a coward in front of Phaedra, or life would be intolerable for the next week or two. So I pulled on a cloak, found my sword, and poked my head out of the front door.

The first thing I saw was my little statue of Hermes, with its head and phallus smashed off, lying on its side. I am not a brave man, but I had paid good money for that statue after its predecessor was wrecked, and I wanted a word with the person responsible. I looked up and down the street, but there was no one in sight; just moonlight, a few stray dogs and a little pool of fresh vomit. Just like any other night in the violet-crowned City of the Muses.

A sensible man would have cursed freely and gone back to bed. Instead, I looped my cloak round my arm, gripped my sword firmly, and set off in pursuit. For I could hear smashing-noises just round the corner; the assassin had not got far. Walking quietly, on the sides of my feet, I crept round and saw a gang of very drunk-looking young men dismembering the statue outside the house of one Philopsephus, a grain merchant.

There were rather a lot of them, and some of them were quite big, and drunks can be terribly violent. I decided that Callicrates was right; only a fool would strive too hard to get mixed up in a battle. I started to retire, but unfortunately I had left it rather late for that. One of the jolly stone-masons had seen me, and was yelling to his friends.

How do drunk people manage to run so fast, I wonder? Before I could cover the few yards to my door they were on to me, and I brandished my sword at them as if I were Achilles himself. One of them made a rude noise and took it away from me, and another one grabbed my arms from behind.

‘I said no witnesses,’ said a voice behind me, slurring its words somewhat. ‘We’ll have to cut his throat, whoever he is.’

‘Good idea,’ said the man who had taken my sword. He was a tall man with a bald head, and I recognised his voice.

‘That would be typical, Aristophanes son of Philip,’ I said, ‘using a drunken brawl as an excuse to murder your chief rival.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ said Aristophanes, ‘it’s not you again, is it?’ He peered at me and made a sort of whining noise, like a dog after a titbit. ‘Gentlemen,’ he protested to his friends, ‘this is too much. Every time I have a little bit of fun in this city, this little creep pops up and gets under my feet. It’s getting beyond a joke, it really is. Please take him away and cut his head off.’

‘Who is he, then?’ asked the man behind me.

‘My name is Eupolis,’ I said, ‘and as a poet I am under the direct protection of the God Dionysus. Anyone who so much as nicks my skin will be condemned to drink nothing but water for the rest of his life.’

Someone giggled, and soon they were all roaring with laughter, the way drunks do — all except Aristophanes, who was begging them to kill me. It would be such fun, he pleaded; they could cut off my head and put it in a bag, and use it for turning people into stone.

‘And now,’ I said confidently, ‘if I may have my sword back, I will leave you to your work, which I can see is of considerable public importance.’

‘That’s right,’ someone said. ‘Got to stop the fleet sailing. Can’t have Alcithingides prancing round Sicily nibbling all the cheese off the cities. Going to burn the fleet soon as we’ve finished here.’

‘What a splendid idea,’ I said. ‘Then no one can go.’

I prised my sword out of the hand of the man holding it (I recognised him too; in fact I knew most of them now I could see them clearly — all people who weren’t going to Sicily, which probably explained why they had been having a party) and walked quickly away without looking round. The sound of breaking marble indicated that they had resumed their work. I shut the front door behind me, and put up the bar.