The Walled Orchard (60 page)

I had set out to write a play, and as good a play as I possibly could; but the more I wrote, the more serious this Comedy of mine became. As you can see from what I’ve told you, it was a very political play; and I don’t suppose I would ever have written such a work at any other time. I had set out with no clear message in my mind; but as the play progressed and I tried to think what advice Solon might actually give us in our present situation, I found a strong theme emerging and did my best to do it justice. It wasn’t at all what I thought myself; but that’s not really a poet’s job. Aristophanes, for example, has consistently attacked the War and demanded an end to it from the moment he started to write; but he has nothing personal against the War, and at least until he went to Sicily thought very little about it. But his characters are mainly heavy-infantry farmers, and such people naturally disapprove of the War; so in order to write what he wants to write and make the sort of jokes he likes, Aristophanes must present himself as a peace-lover and a countryman, which could hardly be further from the truth. Similarly, in my case, having appointed myself the spokesman of our great political leaders, I was virtually forced to make an impassioned plea on behalf of the democracy. But, to be fair to myself, I argued for the good parts of our constitution, the parts that Solon envisaged and Themistocles and Pericles didn’t manage to spoil between them. I argued that what Athens needed now was the sort of democracy where everyone was entitled to be heard so long as he spoke sense; where the majority should not oppress the minority in the way that the Few had oppressed the Many in Solon’s time. Obviously (I said) you can’t create that sort of system by legislation or the creation of new institutions. A democracy is the most vulnerable system of all. Furthermore, a democracy more than any other form of government tends naturally to incline towards repression, intolerance and violence, because it is the form that imposes the least restraint upon human nature. But a democracy where men restrain themselves, thereby doing to themselves what nobody else either can or should do to them, is potentially the best of all forms of government, so long as it is based on mutual tolerance and consideration and a general intention to do what is best for all, and above everything, what is possible in the circumstances.

Well, that’s what I said in the play. As you know, I don’t believe a word of it. I don’t believe that any state the size of Athens can govern itself, whatever form of government it chooses, without causing immeasurable damage to the people who live in it. But I honestly believe that in my play I gave the City the best advice that I could, and I am proud of what I wrote then. It came out of my own experience in the way that no Comedy has ever come out of experience before, because instead of attacking and making fun of what was being done, it suggested what should be done; and instead of being hurtful to a few for the sake of pleasing many, it was designed to say what the author thought — or at least what the composite creature representing the author would have thought had such a person ever existed. And in one respect it did reflect my own personal opinion; that the demes, the villages and regions of Attica are what matter, and that the great men and their political factions and movements are the servants of the demes and should never forget it.

‘There now,’ you are saying, ‘that was very clever of you, Eupolis, but what happened next?’ Well, I wrote the play, completing it fairly quickly by my standards, and sent it to be copied. It had occupied my attention fully all the time I had been composing it, and apart from political gossip I had taken no notice of anything else. But, as any playwright will tell you, writing the thing is the easy, relaxing part. The hard work would be getting it accepted and produced.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

O
bviously, the first thing I had to do was go and see  Philonides. Now he hadn’t had anything to do with the Theatre or the training of Choruses since the Sicilian disaster —I don’t know if there was any deep meaning behind that, or whether it was just coincidence — and when I told him that I had a new play which I wanted to put on at the Festivals he didn’t seem to want to know. He argued that he was getting old (which was true enough) and that he wasn’t interested in that sort of thing any more; but I bullied him and wheedled away at him, and finally, more to get rid of me than for any other reason, he agreed to hear the play and look at a copy of the written version.

I was so confident about the play that I never had any doubts that once he saw it he would be won over completely, and as it happens I was right. As soon as he heard the entry of the Chorus, he was hooked; for unlike so many of the people who have tried to emulate him, he knew that he was first and foremost what his title said he was, a trainer of Choruses. To him, as to me, the Chorus was the heart of a play, and its costumes, movements, singing, verse-speaking and general effect were his primary concern and greatest love. He excelled at marshalling and controlling men en bloc and in Sparta they would have made him a general. It was because he was so good with Choruses that he was able to control and manipulate individual actors; as he himself used to say, if you can reduce a whole Chorus to tears with a single tirade, you should never have any problem imposing your will on just one man. Now Philonides could see that my Chorus of demes, if properly handled and appropriately costumed, could be the most spectacular and effective Chorus he had ever seen led out, and the temptation was too strong for him. He put up a good fight, right up to the last minute, but in the end he gave way and agreed to train this as his last and best Chorus.

The next thing was to go and see the Archon to apply for a Chorus for the Dionysia, and I must confess that I was not at all sure that I would be able to get past this obstacle. I’m convinced that I wouldn’t have succeeded without Philonides’ backing; as it was, I had a terrible time before I finally won through.

To start with, there was the problem of the play having been written by me. As I said just now, I was pretty thoroughly identified in the public mind with the oligarchs, because of my defence speech, and so it was natural enough for the Archon to feel that choosing a play by Eupolis was tantamount to declaring himself an oligarchic sympathiser. On the other hand, the play itself was patently for the democracy, and it was a brave man in that climate who identified himself in any way with such an outspoken statement in support of either side. There was a general feeling in the City that the mysterious leaders of the planned oligarchic coup —nobody knew who they were supposed to be, but everyone was convinced that they existed — were going around and preparing lists of diehard democrats who would have to be liquidated come the Glorious Day, and nobody wanted to be on those lists, for understandable reasons. So it was asking a lot of the Archon to demand that he choose a play that denounced oligarchy. I can only suppose that he came to the conclusion that my supposed oligarchic sympathies and my outspoken democratic views in the play cancelled each other out, and that by endorsing the play he was hedging his bets.

But those two factors weren’t the only things against me. For one thing, it was a while since I had asked for a Chorus, and unless he submits work very regularly, like Aristophanes always has, it doesn’t take very long for a poet, however strong his reputation has been in the past, to be forgotten about or supplanted by some up-and-coming young pretender. Just then, there were several men who were being talked about as the New Generation of Comic poets, and there had been many applications for Choruses. Suffice to say that I was forced, for the first time, to submit to the indignity of a series of postponed decisions, and to be chosen last out of the three competitors. In fact it was a very close thing at the end, since the Archon very nearly gave the Chorus to a young man who has never been heard of since, who had put together an entirely innocuous, if not particularly good, piece of nonsense about Hercules and a cauldron of lentil soup.

But in the end I got the Chorus, and the next difficulty was putting together a cast. Now since I had been given my Chorus last, and only after a long delay, all the good actors had been snapped up by the other poets and I was left with the no-hopers and the young apprentices, who had to be trained virtually from scratch. To make matters worse, Philonides, who was getting more and more enthusiastic about the project every day, had thought up some of the most fiendishly intricate and difficult dance routines and bits of business ever seen on the Attic stage, and with not enough time to rehearse and an inexperienced and generally feckless cast, I was all for watering these masterpieces down to make sure we had at least something to show the audience come the day. But Philonides would have none of it; instead, he set out to train every actor and Chorus-member as if he had never been anywhere near the Theatre in his life. This used up huge quantities of time, money and patience, all three of which were soon in short supply, and Philonides took to venting his fury and frustration on me, which I found rather unfair. But in the end he won through, as I knew he would. There is nothing Philonides can’t make a Chorus or a cast of actors do, if he’s determined that they’ll do it. I believe that if the Council had given Philonides a Chorus and told him to use it to sack Sparta, he’d have pulled it off, and ahead of schedule.

As I said just now, money was a considerable problem. It was just my luck to have appointed as my producer a certain Promachus, notoriously the meanest and most humourless man in Athens. For a start, he hated the very idea of being made to finance a Comic play, since he disapproved of Comedy on principle and my play in particular. It would have been difficult enough if it had been an ordinary sort of play; but with Philonides calling for the best of everything for his Chorus, and new and expensive machinery for special effects, Promachus soon declared that he was going to deposit twelve hundred drachmas with me, and that was all that could be expected from him. So in the end I found myself paying for most of the expensive things, and I didn’t enjoy that particular experience at all. Of course, when the time came, Promachus took all the credit, as a producer would be entitled to do under normal circumstances, and set up a magnificent votive statue recording how much had been spent on the production (two thousand drachmas). He didn’t say how much of that money had been provided by me, of course; in fact, I don’t think he mentioned my name at all.

What with him, and Philonides’ regular outbursts, I didn’t have much time to worry about anything else, such as whether the play was really as good as I believed it was. Still, I managed to spare a few hours’ anxiety for the activities of my old comrade-in-arms the son of Philip. I hadn’t actually set eyes on him since the trial, but as soon as I emerged from my slumbers and started work again, I started to hear rumours that he was furiously angry with me for having been acquitted after he had given evidence against me, with all the damage to his reputation that inevitably ensued, and that he had sworn to have his revenge on me, come what may. I heard from a fairly reliable source that he had done his best to persuade the Archon to reject the play, and also that he had tried to dissuade Philonides from taking it on. I confess that I found this behaviour rather excessive, coming from a man whom I had no great cause to respect, but I didn’t dare try any form of retaliation in case it made things worse. I know a man is supposed to help his friends and harm his enemies, but I couldn’t be bothered just then.

I also heard that Aristophanes had got mixed up very deeply with the oligarchs, and although you could find some such rumour about anyone you cared to name at that time, I was inclined to believe it in this instance. The gist of the rumour was that he was terribly friendly with the celebrated Phrynichus, the General, and this is actually borne out by various things he says in some of his plays, for what that’s worth. He was also supposed to be doing his best to ingratiate himself with Pisander, the other main ringleader; but apparently Pisander couldn’t take him at any price and refused to have anything to do with him. That I can well believe, for whatever his faults Pisander wasn’t without a measure of common sense, and the son of Philip would be a definite hindrance to any cause to which he attached himself. But it seems, if the rumour had anything to it, that Aristophanes was quite serious about the oligarchic cause, and wasn’t just in it for the fun and the mischief. He saw himself as part of the ruling faction, up there with the best of them, and presumably once there in a position to settle some old scores, such as me. Now I can honestly say that that particular prospect didn’t lose me any sleep; but I was rather concerned in case he should try anything nasty against my play. Good-natured sabotage, as I’m sure you remember, is all part of the fun of being a poet, but the whole climate in Athens at the time was such as to make you wonder what a vindictive person might not try and do. Everything seemed just that tiny bit more dangerous than ever before; it was as if the Athenian Game had got rather out of hand, and people were taking things a touch further than they would have before. This was true in everything, not just the Theatre; I don’t really know how to describe it to you. You know how a game of catch can sometimes turn nasty, with the players deliberately throwing the ball at each other when they lost their tempers; well, I suppose it was like that, in a way.

Of course, violence and other forms of extreme behaviour were nothing new; but all the light heartedness seemed to have gone out of politics and the other forms of public life in Athens, and I think this was because, as a City, we had rather lost our nerve after Sicily. Before, we were all that bit more prepared to take risks, and accept the consequences if we failed — I suppose because we were certain in our hearts that we couldn’t fail, and so there would be no consequences to take. But now, Athens seemed to have become old and sour instead of young and exciting, and the endless search for novelty wasn’t so much a quest for new sensations and fresh objectives as a sort of desperation, because nothing seemed to be going right any more. All the old energy was still there of course, but it was the furious energy of someone who knows he’s losing, rather than the vigour of ambition. For example: we built a new fleet in next to no time, and won a few quick victories with it, which made us all feel elated and safe for a while. But we could do nothing about the revolts in our subject cities, and still less about the Spartan fortress at Deceleia on our borders, which was very slowly grinding us down. The fortress made me think back to the old days my grandfather used to talk about, before the Persians came, when the Athenians could not rest easy at nights for the thought of Aegina being still unconquered, and Themistocles urging them every day to wipe out the ‘eyesore of the Piraeus’. The thought of a Spartan fortress on Attic soil would have been intolerable to the Athenians of his time, but we seemed to be able to put it to the back of our minds and get on with something else. In the meantime, to divert our attention, we thought more and more about domestic matters, including the constitution; and this sort of brooding was definitely bad for us. Hence this sourness that I’ve been describing. All  the old, typically Athenian characteristics were still there, of course: the energy, the love of words and novelty, the random cruelty. But they were like those warships of ours which had been captured by the Syracusans; they were ours, but they were being used against us, to do us harm.

I guess it wasn’t the best time to be putting on such a very political play; but I had written the thing, and it was topical, and I wanted to see it staged. But there was more to it than that; I suppose because, since my speech in my defence, I too had been thinking rather more than usual about that sort of thing. Now do you see what I mean? At the time when this story starts, your average Athenian would no more have been rethinking the democracy than he would have been rethinking the sky; the democracy was just there, and it was impossible for it to change. I may not have liked the democracy very much, ever since I was old enough to consider these things, but it simply wasn’t one of the things that a man could expect to do anything about; just as, if he doesn’t get on well with his family, he can’t expect to be able to resign from it and join another. You can’t deliberately divorce yourself from your City; your City can banish you, but even that is a most extreme measure, in many ways as drastic or more so than putting you to death. No, if something big was happening to the political system of Athens, even I couldn’t stop myself from having my say.

Rehearsals became more and more frantic as Festival time drew closer, what with Philonides shouting and the actors not yet knowing their words and the fullers accidentally dyeing a whole batch of costumes purple instead of red; and the fury in the Theatre seemed to be matched by the frenzied activity outside it so that, after so many years, I can no longer separate them in my mind. I say ‘activity’ deliberately; nothing substantial appeared to be happening, but a great amount of energy was being expended by a great many people; and when so much heat is produced in such a small space, something, sooner or later, is likely to be broken or at least melted down. The situation in the War was no less exciting, but that seemed like a peripheral issue to us in the City, and we regarded it as little more than a source of new and rich debating-points — how would the oligarchs react to such and such, or what would the Old Guard make of the developments in Persia? This was very short-sighted of us, because we were in grave danger of losing control of our most productive subject-states. The Spartans were starting to think like sensible, rational human beings at last, instead of Homeric heroes, and they were getting ever closer to making a treaty against us with the greatest of all enemies, the King of Persia. If I hadn’t been so wrapped up in the preparations for the play, I’m sure I could record a great many matters of interest to generations yet unborn about those truly fascinating few months before the Dionysia in March; as it was, I had only a vague idea of what was going on outside the City and in the War, and if I were to give you a detailed account it would be mostly hearsay, and Athenian hearsay at that. But I can tell you a little about that year’s Dionysia, if that will do instead.