The Walled Orchard (59 page)

It was about this time, too, that the revolt in Chios began to be taken seriously, and a large force was sent to deal with it. Now I can’t remember how long all this took; and in my desire to get to the end of this story, perhaps I’m rushing forward by months or even years. To tell you the truth, I have only the vaguest recollection of the sequence of events after my trial, since I was out of them, more or less, and took little notice of what people told me. But I do remember that the institution of the Ten and the rebellion in Chios — or was it the other one, in Samos? — had a lot to do with the rise of that extraordinary fellow Pisander. I always get Pisander muddled up with Phrynichus (not Phrynichus the Comic poet, Phrynichus the General), but to be honest with you, the main characters don’t matter all that much. What mattered was the change in the way people thought, and that was quite startling.

For years there had been rumours of an oligarchical tendency in Athens; young, rich men with lots of time on their hands who wanted to overthrow the democracy and seize power. This had started as a conspiracy rumour, and nobody took any notice of it unless they needed it for an impeachment or a Comic play. Now I don’t know which came first, the rumour or the actual tendency, but by this time the dream was starting to take shape, and a very unpleasant shape it was, too. Up till now, oligarchs had been like giants or centaurs — you believed in them up to a point, and you knew someone whose uncle had seen one, but you never expected to meet one yourself. But now, you began to suspect that the peculiar people whose names you heard so much about, if you were the sort of person who listened to that sort of talk, might indeed be oligarchs, and you began to worry about the greatest single issue of the day, the return of the lost leader, Alcibiades.

I have deliberately not said much about Alcibiades; partly because I didn’t know him well enough to talk about him, and partly because I think his importance has been vastly exaggerated. To hear some people talk, you would think the fellow was a one-man city, with fleets and armies and money of his own. Not a bit of it; he was a rather glamorous individual who spent his exile from Athens amusing himself with peripheral intrigues at the courts of Sparta and the Persian governor Tissaphernes. He may have made a great many suggestions to influential men among our enemies; but I doubt whether he put a single new idea into their heads. We Athenians, believing with absolute sincerity that only Athenians can achieve things in this world, need an Athenian to be the cause of what happened next; and since Alcibiades was in the area at the time, we naturally assume that the Spartan—Persian pact, which finally did for us in the War, was something to do with some grand design or policy of the celebrated Alcibiades.

But if Alcibiades himself was of little importance, his name was another thing altogether. Wherever two or three Athenians met together to talk, his name would inevitably be mentioned; and out of that three, one would be pro-Alcibiades. Probably just to be perverse; now that it was permissible to think and talk about such things, those Athenians who loved to debate and argue (which means all Athenians) were starting to talk about and debate a change of constitution. Would an oligarchy actually be a good idea, they asked themselves? What could be said in favour of it, and what against? Now once Athenians start to talk about something, you can be sure that sooner or later they’ll try doing it, particularly if it’s something that hasn’t been done before. In fact the greatest thing in favour of the idea of oligarchy was its novelty, coupled with a certain air of secrecy, wickedness and danger. Add to this the continued feeling of doom and despair because of Sicily, and a degree of revulsion from the excesses of the first reaction to the disaster, and you have a fine hot stew on which to feed and make yourself thoroughly ill.

Of course my name was linked with the nebulous conspiracy right from the start, because of what I had said at the trial, and as a result of this I was probably right to keep as much out of sight as I did (although, as I have explained, this was hardly policy on my part). But I’m sure the Tendency looked upon me as One of Us, and the democrats whispered about me as being One of Them. Everything in Athens is either One of Us or One of Them, and the only things that change are the definitions of Us and Them. These change regularly and out of all recognition, but nobody ever seems to notice this. Sometimes I wonder what it would have been like to have lived out my life in some more normal city, like one of those orderly little places you hear about in Crete or Euboea, where things never change and nobody takes any interest in what their city is doing because their city never does anything beyond a little unobtrusive road-mending. In a way, it would be heavenly, but I expect I should have gone mad within ten years, unless I had been born there and known no other way of life.

As it was, even in my self-imposed retirement in Pallene, I started to feel that tingling sensation that an Athenian gets when something is about to happen in politics. In my case, this sensation manifests itself most strongly in those parts of the body and the soul concerned with the composition of anapaests. Now I’ve never wanted to change the way people think; but I do like writing anapaests. It makes you feel involved. And you will remember that just before my trial I had thought up that marvellous idea for a play, with all the various Demes of Attica coming on as a Chorus, and all the great Leaders of the past coming back from the Other World to give advice. I think what sparked it off was that scene Aristophanes and I put together in the smithy in Syracuse, where we brought Aeschylus back to life to debate poetry with Euripides. In any case, I started thinking more and more about it when my mind was empty, and the thing seemed to gather a momentum of its own. I had made a deliberate decision
not
to write anything more for a long time, but the play was taking shape in my mind, like an unmarried girl’s pregnancy, and there was nothing I could do about it. If Athens was in a crisis, I would have to write something, and that something would have to be relevant.

It was Phaedra who made me break my vow. One evening we were sitting together in my house in Pallene. She was sewing away at something, and I was staring at the hearth with my mouth open, an occupation which was rapidly becoming my profession and career. It certainly irritated my wife who tried not to look at me when I was doing it. On this particular evening, however, she seemed to lose patience with me altogether.

‘What’s got into you?’ she said. ‘If you don’t close your mouth soon, a spider will come and weave a web over it.’

‘Stop moaning,’ I replied. ‘There’s nothing needs doing, is there?’

Phaedra looked at me for a moment. ‘There’s something the matter with you,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what it is, but the sooner you get rid of it the better. You’re beginning to make me feel uncomfortable.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said, and I put my feet up on the couch and pretended to go to sleep.

‘I know what you remind me of,’ she said after a while. ‘Do you remember that man who used to live near the fountain, the one who had the two white dogs?’

‘Vaguely,’ I said. ‘Was his name Euthycritus?’

‘I couldn’t say,’ Phaedra replied, ‘and anyway, that’s beside the point. You remember that he had a stroke?’

‘That’s right,’ I said, ‘so he did.’

‘And you remember,’ Phaedra went on, ‘how he couldn’t move or talk, but his eyes were just the same as they had been. And his wife used to get the slaves to carry him in his chair to the front door and park him there so that he could watch the people going up and down.’

‘And everyone used to look the other way,’ I said, ‘because they couldn’t look him in the eyes without cringing. I remember. Wasn’t he once an athlete or something like that?’

‘Possibly,’ Phaedra said, biting through her cotton and putting her work down. ‘Anyway, that’s who you’ve been reminding me of these last few weeks.’

I didn’t think that was funny at all. ‘You do say the most ill-omened things,’ I said to her. ‘Fancy comparing me to a cripple.’

‘Well, it’s true,’ she said. ‘I think you’d be perfectly happy sitting in a doorway watching the shoppers.’

This startled me, because it was quite probably true.

‘Have I been as bad as that?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ replied my wife, ‘or worse. You’d sit there even if there weren’t any shoppers. What do you think about, for God’s sake? Are you working out geometrical theories or just counting birds?’

‘I’m not thinking about anything,’ I said, ‘except occasionally how glad I am to be alive.’

‘That’s odd,’ she said. ‘You’re behaving just like a corpse. And a docile corpse, at that.’

‘Aren’t wives supposed to pray for inactive husbands?’ I said. ‘You never used to like it when I was always dashing about doing things.’

‘And all that nonsense you’ve been talking lately,’ she went on, ‘about our relationship and so on. What sort of talk is that for a husband and his wife? You sound like a philosopher talking to his boyfriend.’

I frowned. ‘I just wanted to get things straight,’ I said.

‘Things are naturally straight,’ she said, ‘unless you fiddle with them. You should just get on with life instead of thinking about it.

‘That’s a very solemn remark,’ I said, smiling mockingly at her. She frowned disapprovingly.

‘You know what I mean,’ she said. ‘Don’t start being all Chorus-like and commenting on everything I do as if I were Clytemnestra or somebody. You do a lot of that, I’ve noticed.’

‘A lot of what?’

‘Observing,’ she said. ‘You look at people, and listen to them, as if you were a judge at a fair. Nobody wants your assessment, thank you very much.’

‘I know,’ I said, ‘but I can’t help it, I do it naturally.’

‘What you need to do,’ Phaedra said, standing up and collecting her sewing things, ‘is to find something to do. Otherwise you’ll turn into a god or a lump of rock or something.’

‘Explain,’ I said.

‘Well,’ she said, sitting down again, ‘you’re just like that sometimes; a god on a mountain, or a boulder, or a tree. You just stand or sit there and watch, as if the world was a play put on for your benefit. Now when you used to write plays, this was more or less justifiable, because you made some sort of use of it all. You needed to catch how people speak and act, and make some sort of judgement for your anapaests. But now you just seem to do it for your own entertainment, and it’s not natural. Either snap out of it or start writing again.’

‘You’re odd, too,’ I said. ‘I never really know whether you approve of me writing or not. You never seem to take any interest while I’m composing something. You always give the impression of being a patient wife allowing her husband to pursue his childish hobby, as if I collected seashells or carved miniature ships on scraps of ivory.’

Phaedra shrugged. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I don’t think you’re particularly clever, if that’s what you mean, just because you can compose lines that scan. And I’m not a Comedy enthusiast, like some people are; I prefer Tragedy, personally, and I’m not a very literary person when you come right down to it. Most women aren’t, actually. But I suppose you do it as well as anybody,’ she said fairly, ‘and probably better than most. And you’ve got to do something, so you might as well do this.’

I sat up and put my hands round my knees. ‘So you think I ought to write a play, do you?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘For my sake if not for yours. Then people won’t point to me in the street and say, “There goes that woman who’s married to a corpse.” I really can’t stand much more of this godlike stuff, you know. It was different after you got back from the War, when the trial was on; you had a purpose in life then all right, and I rather liked you. But now…’

‘All right,’ I said, ‘I get the message. You can’t stand the sight of me just sitting here peacefully. You want me to be busy.’

‘Only because it’s your nature to be busy,’ she replied.

‘At the moment you don’t really seem to exist, and that’s unnerving for a girl. I-never know when you’re going to start walking through walls or slowly disappearing, like a dream in a poem.’

So the next day, I took the plough out over the fallow, and instead of getting to the end of the furrow and then stopping, as I had done the last time I tried it, I went straight on and did a day’s work, without knowing it. When I got home, I had an opening speech fully fledged in my mind, and it was the best I had ever composed. Now one thing that always worries me is whether what I’m doing now is as good as what I’ve done before. This is quite an obsession with me, and I end up hating things I’ve written because I can’t seem to do as well any more. This time, though, I knew it was good. The lines seemed to have a crispness and a crackle about them, and instead of ending a line off with a conventional jingle, I had tried my best to find something new and startling, the way you do when you’re just starting out in the Theatre and every word is important to you.

Shall I tell you all about the play? I’ve been very good so far, and not bored you with little synopses of my various brilliant dramas, so I think I’ll allow myself the indulgence, just this once. The story was as follows. The Athenian State is in a crisis, because it hasn’t been able to think of anything new to do since it sent a fleet to conquer the moon. So worrying is this mental sterility that our hero takes it upon himself to go down to the underworld, like Odysseus, to ask the opinions of the glorious dead.

Once he has made the journey, the first person he meets is the celebrated Myronides, the general who led Athens to victory at Tanagra, the battle I told you about which ended the previous war with Sparta in my grandfather’s time. I picked on him because he seems to represent, to my generation at least, the last honest citizen and competent general of the old school. In fact he was just as much of a rogue as all those who came before and after him, but I was not concerned with absolute historical truth. No Athenian is, or we wouldn’t celebrate Marathon as a victory. Anyway, Myronides acts as our hero’s guide and takes him to see all the great statesmen of our history, from the immortal Solon to Pericles, and each of these gives his considered opinion about what should be done. To put each of these towering figures in his place, I made my Chorus up of the demes of Attica, with Pallene as Chorus-leader; because, when all is said and done, it is the demes and not the city which make up Athens.