The Walled Orchard (51 page)

‘Clever,’ I said. ‘Socratic, almost. But that doesn’t explain away the other time I saw Him; in the Theatre, after my play flopped. I wasn’t in any danger then.’

‘Oh, you just imagined it that time,’ said Phaedra. ‘Over-excitement, hot sun, not much sleep the night before.’

‘All right then,’ I said. ‘How come the God was able to predict his own reappearances? How come my soul when I was a boy was able to see that one day I’d have a play flop and end up in a walled orchard?’

Phaedra shrugged. ‘Simple,’ she said. ‘Mental revision. You’ve rewritten your own memory. You’ve scraped off what was there before and put in something else, like the officials do when they’re cheating the naval accounts.’

‘You won’t starve,’ I said. ‘You can be the first woman philosopher.’

‘I thought you’d be too stupid to understand,’ she said. ‘Never mind, it can’t be helped.’

She put her hands on my shoulders and kissed me. ‘So what do you think we ought to do?’ I asked. She considered this for a moment.

‘I think we should go to bed,’ she said. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m dead to the world. Sorry, that was tactless of me. Very tired, I should have said.’

‘I meant, what should we do about this Demeas business?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘if I were you, I’d write the funniest speech you’ve ever written in your life and use it as your defence at the trial. It’s the only hope you’ve got.’ Suddenly she threw her arms around me, nearly crushing my windpipe (for she was a strong woman, though you wouldn’t know it to look at her). ‘Eupolis, you idiot,’ she said, ‘I don’t want you to be killed.’ Then she started to cry. That nearly broke my heart, and I tried to comfort her.

‘Phaedra,’ I said, ‘don’t worry, everything will be all right. Your father will look after you and the boy, I know he will. He hasn’t got a male heir, so Eutychides will be provided for. And there’s plenty of time to get some of the money out; you know how long trials are taking…’

‘Oh, you’re horrible,’ she sobbed. ‘You’re going to die, and all you think about is money. That’s absolutely typical. You just don’t think, do you?’

She wrenched herself out of my arms, fled into the inner room, and bolted the door again.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

T
he nice thing about being under sentence of death is that you stop worrying about the trivial things in life; and if, like me, you’re prone to worrying, this is a great advantage.

It’s all right, you haven’t dropped a scroll out of the book; we haven’t got to the trial yet. I was speaking figuratively. I only felt as if I was under sentence of death. Now you will say I’m exaggerating, trying to make my story more dramatic. Well, perhaps you’re right. We shall see.

I went round to Aristophanes’ house the next morning. I don’t know what I expected to achieve, but it would have been worth trying if I had managed to see him. But the slave who answered the door said he was out of the City on business and would not be expected back for a week at the earliest. Now at first I wondered if the son of Philip had panicked and fled; this would solve everybody’s problems, and I began to feel cautiously optimistic. But, to make sure, I set my slave Thrax to watch Aristophanes’ house, and sure enough he reported back not long after to say that he had seen Aristophanes go out and come back half an hour later with two partridges, a sea bass and a Copaic eel. Evidently the prospect of informing on the man who had saved his life was not having a harmful effect on his appetite.

So off I went again; and again the slave told me that Aristophanes was out. He can’t have remembered me from my earlier visit, since this time he told me that his master had gone off to Eleusis for a fortnight to attend the Mysteries. I asked him whether he was sure, and he said, yes, why shouldn’t he be; and then I asked him if he liked sea bass. He said no. Then I gave it up as a bad job and came home.

Phaedra said I should go and see Demeas. She reckoned that I could double-cross him, by promising to give evidence on his behalf; and then, when he called me at the trial, I could swear blind that Aristophanes was as innocent as the day was long, and that Demeas had offered me money to give false evidence against him. The Athenian public love treachery but hate traitors, as the saying goes, and they might just have swallowed that and killed Demeas instead; but obviously it was too late to do that, now that Aristophanes had so clearly done a deal with Demeas, and all I could say to Phaedra was that it was a great pity she hadn’t thought of that last night, when it might have done some good. Not that it would have, of course; Demeas was far too experienced at that sort of thing to be caught out so easily, and it would probably have brought about the death of both Aristophanes and me.

In spite of Phaedra’s protests, I set about getting some of my money out of Athens. There were two problems. One was how to realise my assets; the other was where to send them once they were realised. There was no earthly point in sending money to any part of the Athenian Empire, since it could be recovered from there with no trouble at all by the Public Confiscator. But there was similarly no point at all in sending it into some enemy country, since then Phaedra wouldn’t be able to get it back and the Spartans would probably get it and fritter it away on warships or some such nonsense. Then, when we were going through Phaedra’s jewellery, we came across the pendant (gaudy but not cheap) which the Thessalian princes had given me when I went on my embassy there. We looked at each other and said, ‘Well …’ but neither of us could think of a better idea; so I sent out Thrax again to ask an acquaintance of mine who was a Councillor if Alexander and Jason were still alive and in power. The answer came back that Alexander had murdered Jason and was ruling on his own. So I sat down and wrote Alexander a letter. I reminded him of our visit and thanked him once again for the performance of my
General,
crammed in as much theatrical gossip as I could remember or invent, and added my love and best wishes. Then, as a sort of postscript, I said that I was sending with the letter a small sum of money; if he would look after it for me until either my wife or her agent came and collected it, I would be ever so obliged to him and terribly, terribly grateful. Then, in a moment of inspiration, I said that as a tiny mark of my esteem I was sending him the original manuscript of two of my plays and a copy of the collected works of Aeschylus —luckily I had one by me, quite legibly copied and sturdily boxed up. I think it must have been those two manuscripts of mine, or maybe the Aeschylus, that did the trick, because when the time came, Alexander paid up virtually in full, and added a pair of gold earrings and an iron brooch in the form of a dung-beetle, as a present.

There was still the problem of a trustworthy messenger; but Phaedra suggested my steward from Pallene. You may remember that I had used his name for the hero of my
Maricas.
He was devoted to me, I knew, but getting on in years and not up to a long and dangerous journey. But he had a son, Philochorus (named in my honour), who was young and strong and had been on trading expeditions, so I sent for him.

Now it sounds easy enough to talk of realising assets, but of course it wasn’t as simple as that, not by a long way. I had sixty-eight acres of land, almost as much as Alcibiades himself, although mine was of course more widely spread, and a fair amount of it was bare rock. Still, it was a huge estate, and there was no point even trying to sell it, as a whole or in parts. Things are very different now, of course, but in my day people simply didn’t sell land, unless they were destitute or didn’t have enough to live on and wanted to buy a ship or something. The best I could do was mortgage it or grant long leases, and I only managed to dispose of about eight acres that way. I could only get a fraction of its value, too; not only did the people I was trying to do business with have a fairly shrewd idea of what I was about, but the market was by now well and truly flooded, what with the confiscations and so many estates being masterless after the Sicilian campaign. I was due for my fair share of that, by the way; two cousins of mine, who I had never met, were killed in the War, and I was their nearest male relative. It seemed ironic at the time; there I was about to add nearly eighteen acres to my already quite considerable fortune, and I wouldn’t live to fight the lawsuit. I assigned it in writing to my son, but without any prospect of his ever coming to contest the case.

What I could dispose of was my various other interests. I had never really appreciated how valuable they were — things like shares in ships and mines and factories aren’t like land; you don’t cherish every little bit of them, and show them off to your son, you just leave them to the people who know about such things and go over the receipts once a year to make sure you aren’t being cheated. But when it comes to raising money in a hurry, there’s nothing to compare with such things. What with the War and the disturbed state of everything, of course, nobody was wildly enthusiastic to buy, but I was able to get rid of some of them by lowering my price sufficiently. Finally, of course, there was my actual reserve of coined silver; that wasn’t to be sneezed at, when all was said and done. My uncle Philodemus had brought me up to keep at least a talent in ready money at all times, and I have always done this, if possible. Not for the first time, I was grateful to him. In addition to this, Callicrates’ widow sent me a loan of half a talent, from the reserve Callicrates had also maintained. I really didn’t want to accept it, but she insisted; it was what he would have done, she said, if he had been alive, and to please me she accepted a mortgage on some of my land in Pallene as security.

So that was that; and when Philochorus set sail from Piraeus to Thessaly he took with him a considerable sum of money; enough to make sure Phaedra would be provided for, and to enable her to bring my son up properly.

‘Knowing your luck,’ said Phaedra, as we saw the ship sailing away, ‘he’ll get robbed by pirates.’

‘Or bandits,’ I said. ‘Thessaly is alive with bandits.’

‘Not to mention your friend Alexander,’ Phaedra added. ‘We must be mad, entrusting that lot to a man who’s not even really Greek.’

‘It won’t come to that,’ I said. ‘Bet you Philochorus will jump ship at the first stop with the whole lot.’

‘I doubt it,’ she replied. ‘He looked stupid enough to be honest. But that won’t stop the sailors murdering him and throwing his body over the side.’

We walked home together through the City, and for some reason we were both feeling remarkably cheerful. It wasn’t just because we had managed to get the money out; the whole business had been rather depressing, and we were both just glad it was over. No, I really can’t say what had got into us both, but soon we were laughing and pointing funny things out to each other and making silly jokes, and people stopped and stared at us as we passed them; for in those days it was rare to see a man and a woman, especially a wife and her husband, laughing together in the street. Now, of course, things are very different, and nobody laughs at you or makes faces behind your back if you happen to mention that you are quite fond of your wife. Personally, I blame the modern craze for philosophy and this so-called New Comedy we hear so much about.

But when we reached our house, there was Demeas and a small gaggle of his faithful process-servers, gathered to bear witness that I had received the summons. He went through the legal rigmarole with the sort of polished ease that makes you realise that you are in the presence of a true craftsman, looked over the outside of the house to make sure there were no obvious structural faults that would reduce its value, and waddled away.

It was a most impressive charge. Demeas was prosecuting me for blasphemy, treason, conspiracy, damage to public and private property, communicating secrets to the enemy, assault with intent to degrade, gross bribery of officials, conspiring with persons unknown to pervert the course of justice (I liked that), disorderly and offensive conduct, and attempted murder. I had no idea what the last one was for; I could only imagine that it came free with the rest of the deal, like the extra handful you get from the olive-merchants, for luck. I later found out that he always put that in, so that if the trial looked like going against him, he would fall back on the attempted murder charge, claiming that the defendant had attacked him by night in the street in an attempt to silence him; and he took a small, elderly relative about with him wherever he went to be his witness.

I heard in due course that no date had yet been fixed for a trial. I think this was an open invitation to me to run. News of my frantic efforts to get money out of Attica most certainly reached Demeas, because he put in an offer, through agents, for a share in a ship I was selling; so he must have guessed that I was getting ready to leave. This would of course be in his interests. After all, he hadn’t had to name his witnesses yet, so he wasn’t committed to an account of that night’s events in which Aristophanes was merely an innocent witness. If I ran, he could prosecute Aristophanes too. Aristophanes would then run, and he could move on to the next candidate; in fact, I could see nothing to stop him until he was the only man left in the whole of Attica. I’m sorry if I seem slightly obsessive about this Demeas; but it’s an extraordinary thing to have someone trying to kill you for the sake of your money, especially if he isn’t even a relative. I suppose that’s how deer and hares feel, when we kill them not out of any personal enmity or fear but for the sake of their flesh and their skins.

Enough about him for the moment. Phaedra seemed to be taking it all very badly. If she had stormed at me for being a stubborn and irrational fool, and the sole cause of my own misfortunes, which is what I had expected from her, I could have taken that in my stride. But she did nothing of the sort. She tried to be cheerful, and she made a thoroughly bad job of it. Now, I was in a very strange mood for most of the time; one moment I was full of almost childish good spirits, making funny remarks and playing practical jokes (which is a crime against good taste of which I am not usually guilty), and the next moment I would be as miserable as a failed harvest. It didn’t help to have Phaedra dragging round after me like a beggar’s dog, quite obviously on the point of tears and trying her very best to cheer me up. To make matters worse, we no longer even wanted to quarrel or bicker with each other. I suppose it was a bit like the Athenians and the Spartans (explain yourself, Eupolis; whatever will you come out with next?), in that we stopped hammering away at each other and turned our combined malice on the world in general and Demeas in particular, just as the Athenians and the Spartans once stopped fighting each other to resist the Persian invaders. The parallel is not intended to be exact, since the Greek alliance drove the Persians into the sea, whereas all our jokes at his expense didn’t whiten a single hair on our victim’s head. But the fact remained that we were growing depressingly close to each other, and I don’t think anything has ever been worse timed, not even the Athenian invasion of Egypt under the celebrated Cimon. Irony again, you see; the moment our marriage was on notice to be dissolved, courtesy of my friend Demeas, we suddenly found out that we could live together after all. Together, we could put up such a barrage of comedy that our jokes blotted out the sun, as the King’s arrows did at Thermopylae; and that was with both of us only giving half our minds to the job, what with Phaedra being so depressed and me so perplexed.