The Walled Orchard (56 page)

‘So when one of us separates himself from the whole, not only does that person damage himself irreparably, but he offends against us and so deserves the most severe punishment. He has offended against our unity; he has, so to speak, removed a stone from the walls of Athens, and the removal of one stone can cause the collapse of the whole wall. When a man ceases to be in all respects an Athenian, he cannot be permitted to live in Athens, or indeed to live at all. If a man starts to grow in the wrong direction, he must be pruned off before he starts to warp and misdirect those around him. This is because in a democracy there must be consensus.

‘Now in the case of this despicable man, who has done his best to bring about the maximum possible harm to his city, it is an easy matter to see where the best interests of the City lie. But that is not the point I am addressing myself to. I am concerned that, because this man is a Comic poet — and a good one, let me add — and has given many of you much pleasure with his witty words and spectacular Choruses, some of you may say to yourselves, “Eupolis has done wrong, and will be punished; my fellow jurors will see to that. But after all, this is a secret ballot; nobody will ever know which urn I myself put my pebble into. I think I’ll vote for his acquittal; after all, he did write
Maricas.”
Now that seems like an innocent whimsy, and no doubt a few of you were considering doing just that. Think again. In a democracy, not only those who do wrong and those who conspire with them or aid and comfort them are guilty and must be punished; but also those who spare them for private or individual reasons. Because this is a democracy, built on consensus and fortified with unity, we cannot allow ourselves the luxury of personal motives. If I was on your jury and my own father was in the dock and was guilty of a crime against Athens, I would have to vote against him, though all the Furies in Hell haunted me for the rest of my life. That is the great burden of living in a democracy; we must all fit the mould, or be cast aside as useless and dangerous. I say again: anyone who votes for acquittal will be as guilty as if he had done the crime himself. So vote, as I know you will, for conviction and death; only by doing so can we, as a city, lift from our shoulders the miasma of this man’s blasphemy.’

As soon as he stopped speaking, the water-clock gurgled for the last time, and the Court was absolutely silent. I wish I could capture for you the look of pleasure on the faces of those jurors. This was good, old-fashioned stuff, but spiced with those little touches of novelty that excite the palate. Each man turned to his neighbour and nodded, and I almost expected them to stand up as a Chorus and start singing the anapaests. But if I had prayed to Zeus and Dionysus and Pan, god of shepherds and confusion, and my prayers had been answered, I could not have asked for a more helpful speech. It fitted exactly what I had prepared, and only a few minor adjustments would be necessary to the speech I was carrying, like an eight-months-pregnant woman, in my mind. As the herald called out my name and told me to state my case, I felt the weight of fear slipping off my shoulders, as if I was a man who couldn’t afford a mule laying down a heavy basket of olives I had carried into town from the country. I stood up, waited for the clock to be refilled, and started to speak.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

‘I
n all my years of attending debates,’ I said, ‘I don’t know when I’ve enjoyed a speech more than the one Demeas has just made. It had the lot, didn’t it? It had structure, pace, style and diversity; the only trick he missed was having a couple of slaves walking up and down handing out free hazelnuts. As soon as he had exhausted one theme, he switched straight to the next; but you didn’t notice that he’d changed tack, so skilfully did he make the transition. It just seemed to flow, like the streams in the mountains when the ice melts in spring. In fact, I admire his speech so much that I can’t bring myself to answer it; that would be a worse desecration of the beautiful and holy than the one I stand accused of. So I won’t even try. Not a word about Demeas’ speech.

‘But I don’t want to cheat you of your entertainment. Three obols isn’t much for sitting on those cold, hard benches all day, especially for you older men, and you have a right to be diverted by some fancy speaking. So I’ll make my defence quickly, and then fill up the rest of my time with some jokes or a song or something.

‘Now we’re all grown men here, and we know the score. I’m not talking to a party of colonials just off a wheat-ship, who think the Propylaea is a ship, or the Council Chamber is a wine shop. You know and I know that Demeas is prosecuting me because he needs the money, and Aristophanes has given evidence against me partly because he’s an ungrateful arsehole and partly because he’s scared shitless of Demeas, and all the other witnesses are hired by the day for a drachma down and two bushels of figs later. We also know that you’re going to convict me because you want blood after Sicily, and because Demosthenes and Nicias got themselves killed before you could impeach them. Everyone here today, with the possible exception of the red-haired man in the second row from the back who hasn’t got the common decency to stop eating while I’m talking for my life, also knows that my only hope of getting out of this in one piece is to give you one hell of a good speech, so that you’ll let me go to show everyone how cultured and intelligent you are. And then you’ll pick on some other poor sod who can’t make jokes or think up fancy phrases, and glut your blood-lust on him. That’s what we call a democracy, men of Athens.

‘A democracy is a pack of wolves without a permanent leader. When there are plenty of sheep about, everything’s well, and they congratulate themselves on how beautifully the wolf-democracy works, and maybe vote themselves all an extra hour’s sleep at the new moon. But when they’ve eaten all the sheep, and the shepherds have banded together to hunt them out of their nests with dogs and nets, they start turning on each other and eating the fattest and the weakest. Then they find out that the wolf-democracy isn’t quite what they thought it was; there’s still this mystical Whole that Demeas has told us about, but the Whole consists of those wolves who haven’t yet had their number called. The hunger continues, of course, and so does the democratic process. You can have a democratic process right up to the point when there are only three wolves left, and two of them can outvote the third and eat him. Then you only have two, and that’s an oligarchy.

‘Now this would all be perfectly laudable, if only you got something out of the democratic process, beyond satisfying your perverted craving for human blood. But you see, where the wolf image breaks down is that you don’t actually get to eat your victims; you don’t derive any benefit from killing them. The only people who gain are men like Demeas here, who get the informer’s share of the proceeds of sale. Now you will say to me, “Eupolis, you’re wrong, as usual. All your considerable wealth will be confiscated and the proceeds will go to the public purse. We’ve fattened you up, and now we’re going to kill you.” Mathematically speaking, yes, you’re right. The cost of this trial is — let me see now, five hundred and one jurors at three obols a day comes to a touch under two hundred and fifty-one drachmas. The public purse will get far more out of my carcase than that, even when Demeas has had his share. As a method of raising revenue for the public purse, judicial murder beats harbour dues into a three-legged stool.

‘But what makes you think that any of that money will be used to benefit you? If my wealth were divided up, so many drachmas a man, that would, I concede, be fair and equitable. But it won’t be; it’ll all be frittered away on the War, or public buildings, or ambassadors’ wages, or hiring mercenaries, or any one of the hundreds of ways in which a community of people such as yourselves can dissipate money which they no longer regard as their own. And what benefit will you derive from that, may I ask? Don’t bother thinking, I’ll tell you. None. You won’t get it, Athens will get it. And what’s this thing we call Athens? I’ll tell you. It’s an enormous misunderstanding, self-perpetuating and carried on with in the hope that one day it’ll sort itself out.

‘It started like this. Once upon a time, long, long ago, when the world was young and people had to earn an honest living, before the Law Courts were invented, three shepherds met together in what is now the Market Square. There was a fig tree growing there, and they sheltered under its branches from the sun. But one day the fig tree died, and so the shepherds, who had grown used to meeting in that place, piled up a few rocks and bits of wood to create an artificial shade for themselves and their flocks.

‘After a while, other shepherds in the area started dropping by to take shelter under this pile of rocks, and soon there was no room for all of them. So the pile was made bigger; and the bigger it got, the more people came to take advantage of it. The pile of rocks became a recognised place to meet people, trade, and discuss the season’s prospects. The next thing that happened was that the pile of rocks had become a market, and a man (I can’t remember his name offhand; you’d better ask Herodotus) built a house there so that he could be near the market when it opened in the morning. The next thing anybody knew, there was a little village, and the village became a town, and the town became a city. The trouble was that so many people lived in the area that there was no longer any grass for their sheep to eat, and soon all the people were looking as thin as Peison the painter. So they stopped herding sheep and started growing barley. But you can’t grow barley unless you know which bit of land is yours and which bit belongs to someone else, so they had to invent property; and once you’ve got property you have to have laws, so laws came next. Of course, this brought them into conflict with all the people who didn’t live in the City, whose land they started taking in (because there wasn’t enough to go round) and therefore it became necessary to invent war.

‘And so, one by one, all these things like war and law and property started appearing out of nowhere, like long-lost relatives when a will is being challenged; and soon there were dockyards and archons and taxes and prosecutions for illegal legislation and informers and politicians and street-fights and ostracism and philosophers and plague and mortgages on redemption and oratory and boundary-stones and policemen and hectemorage and hemlock and dried fish and Solon and the oligarchic tendency and the empire and silver money and figures of speech and civil war and jury-pay and the market commissioners and the Theatre and ambassadors and red ropes for Assembly and all those wonderful ingredients which go to make the boiled stew we call the Athenian democracy. And nobody could remember where they had all come from or what in hell they were there for, and nobody wanted them or knew how to cope with them; and so a commission of wise men was set up, under the chairmanship of the King Archon, to decide what to do next.

‘Well, they sat and talked and argued and took votes and prosecuted one another, but in the end they had to admit to each other that they were no nearer the truth of it all than they had been when they started. The more they thought about it, the more difficult the problem became, and soon there was talk of packing the whole thing in and emigrating
en bloc
to Sardinia.

‘But, just as the Commission was on the point of coming to blows yet again, someone came up with a wonderful idea. Again, I can’t remember his name, but I’m sure you know who I mean. Anyway, this gifted individual realised that all the Commission had to do to avoid being impeached and condemned to death for failing to execute its task was to claim that there was a huge conspiracy going on, prosecute a few unpopular people, and simultaneously declare war on Sparta.

‘Of course it worked like a charm, and we’ve been following the same recipe, with subtle variations, ever since. This conspiracy about the statues, men of Athens, is nothing new; it’s the same conspiracy they were wetting themselves about when my grandfather’s grandfather was herding goats on Parnes. The conspirators change, sure, but the conspiracy goes on. It’s aimed at the overthrow of true democracy in Attica and it’s such a huge conspiracy that every single one of you is involved in it. It’s a conspiracy by the people to enslave the people, and we call it Athens.

‘Please don’t think I’m advocating any other system of government. It’s inhuman to expect a man to obey the orders of another man, be that man a king or a dictator or an oligarch or an aristocrat or a rich man or a soldier. Just imagine what it would be like if Athens was ruled by a dictator, as it was in Pisistratus’ time, when they built the Nine Fountains and opened the silver mines and planted out the waste land with olives. There would be taxes, and restrictions on freedom of speech, and endless wars, and trumped-up political prosecutions, and all that sort of thing. Admittedly, we have all those already under our democratic system, but at least we know that they’re democratically instituted. Like the Theban soldiers that time, when they were fighting a night-battle, and one lot of Thebans started shooting arrows at random and hitting their own men. And the men on the receiving end of the arrows were greatly distressed and didn’t know what to do, until one perceptive man pulled the arrow out of his friend’s belly and looked at the feathers in the flight and smiled with relief and said, “Don’t worry, mate, it’s one of ours.”

‘There is, after all, a sort of horrible Socratic logic about what you — I mean we — are doing to each other, or do I mean ourselves? The facts: the Athenians have got themselves into a terrible mess. The necessary course of action: someone must be punished. Therefore Athenians must be punished. Therefore we must punish some Athenians. I can do that sort of thing for ever. You know what I mean: if you have not lost something, you must still have it. You have not lost horns. Therefore you still have horns. There is a horse: you do not own it. There is a horse you do not own. Therefore you do not own a horse. If a man is in Megara he is not in Athens. There is a man in Megara. Therefore there is not a man in Athens.

Somebody must be punished. Eupolis is somebody. Therefore Eupolis must be punished. Water will travel uphill, if you put it in a jar and carry it.

‘Stick to the point, son of Euchorus, and don’t try to be clever with us. But men of Athens, what do you want from me? Why have you put me here, who never did anything but write you plays, bite your enemies and fight the Sicilians for you? Don’t be a fool, Eupolis, you know what we want from you. We want blood and Comedy, and not necessarily in that order.

‘So how would it be if I told you what a democracy is, and then you tell me whether a man who seeks to overthrow it, as Demeas says I do, deserves to die or to be honoured with a statue, like we honour Harmodius and Aristogeiton, who killed the Dictator? Is that a suitable way to pass the time until that contraption over there finally runs dry and it’s pebbles-down-the-slot time? Well, I think it is and I’m the one on trial, so if you don’t like it you know what you can do.

‘Democracy is a system whereby you cut off the feet of tall men so that they’re the same height as everyone else, and then say that everyone is equal. Democracy is a way of saying things so that people believe what you deny and don’t believe what you assert. It’s a state of mind in which you’ll credit any slander about a man, however incredible, but you won’t believe anything good about him, even if you see him doing it with your own eyes. A democracy is a place where the reward for doing good is death by hemlock, and the punishment for doing wrong is a pension and a statue in the square. Democracy is a system of counting where the highest common denominator is also the lowest common factor, and where two and two always make five — four, plus one extra to bribe the relevant official. A democracy is a city where the only qualification for holding power is wanting it, and the only people prepared to hold power are those who should at all costs be prevented from doing so. Democracy is where everyone can read but no one can understand; where nobody is guaranteed a square meal when he’s hungry, but he can rely on a public funeral if he’s killed in battle. Democracy is where everybody contributes, but nobody gets anything back. It’s where a clever word at the right time can do more harm than King Xerxes’ army, but where a good idea is the shortest way to prison. A democracy is a city where a Monday can be made into a Thursday by a majority vote of the citizens, and where black is white if enough people want it to be. A democracy is a way of ordering your life whereby you can’t say where your next meal is coming from, but you can have the Generals executed if you’re starving. Democracy is a cannibals’ harvest festival, where everyone does their best to feed the hand that bites them. A democracy is a theory of logic by which everything clever is true, everything that tastes nice is good for you, everything that’s somebody else’s is yours, everything that’s yours is liable to be confiscated. In a democracy, the impotent old men have a right to sleep with the pretty girls before the handsome young men do, and everyone has a right to pay taxes. In a democracy —only in a democracy — a man can be had up on a capital charge of which he’s entirely innocent, but can, if he’s really clever, get off by yelling abuse at the jury.