The Walled Orchard (8 page)

Now, about Aristophanes. He’s seven or eight years older than me, and he started young. His first play,
The Banqueters,
was put on years before he was legally old enough to be given a Chorus, and so he had to go through the charade of pretending that his uncle had written it; although as soon as the Chorus had been allotted he wasted no time in setting the record straight. But by then it was too late to stop him having his Chorus, since the Committee on Plays and Warships had already appointed him a producer, and in those days nobody would even have considered trying to back out of their duty to finance a Chorus. It was a splendid system, all told; the Committee assessed the means of all the citizens and drew up a list of those wealthy enough to equip a trireme warship for the fleet and to pay the production expenses of a play. Rich men were actually proud to be appointed (it was a sure way of letting the whole world know how rich they were) and by and large the system worked. It was a good way of doing these things, and considerably better than the way we do it now.

I suppose that if I had met Aristophanes in the Market Square or at some literary gathering I might conceivably have got on well with him, and the whole course of my life would have been different. But I first set eyes on him among the goats above Pallene, although then, of course, I hadn’t the faintest idea who he was. I was eight at the time, so he must have been about fifteen or sixteen, and probably writing his first play. His father had a strip of maybe two and a half acres in our part of Pallene; most of their land was over in the south-east of Attica, and they had various properties on Aegina. Anyway, Aristophanes occasionally had to tear himself away from the City to do a little half-hearted agriculture, and to relieve the tedium of this he would play tricks on his neighbours.

One day, then, I was on Hymettus with my goats, sheltering from the sun under a stunted little fig tree, which was all that was left of some desperate individual’s attempt to farm in that miserable region. In fact, there’s a story attached to that attempt, and since it’s a Pisistratus story I think I’m justified in putting it in here under the general heading of Athenian history. Pisistratus, as you know, was the dictator of Athens well over a hundred years ago; he was the first man to coin silver money, and he used State revenues to set up many poor landless people in small farms. In his day, every cultivable acre was pioneered and reclaimed, and he carried on his programme of subsidy long after there was nothing left but bare rock. He has a bad reputation these days because he ruled without the People and imposed taxes on citizens; but I have taken the trouble to find out about him over the years and my belief is that without him Athens would now be a little village surrounded by a wooden fence.

Be that entirely as it may, one day Pisistratus came up to this steading on Hymettus, and saw the crazy fool who was trying to turn it into a farm. He was ploughing, but all he succeeded in doing was turning over a few of the smaller boulders. Pisistratus was impressed, for this was a man after his own heart, and so he strolled over and started talking with the man.

‘That looks like hard work,’ said the dictator, amiably.

‘Yes,’ said the man, ‘it is.’

‘So you’re taking advantage of this new scheme, are you?’ said Pisistratus encouragingly. ‘What sort of thing do you grow up here?’

‘Blisters, mostly,’ said the man, ‘together with a little pain and suffering, of which that bastard Pisistratus takes five per cent. Well, all I can say is that he’s welcome to it.’

As soon as he got back to Athens, Pisistratus abated the tax on the pioneers, and that was the beginning of his downfall. In order to cover the shortfall, he increased the tax on everyone else to ten per cent, and everyone who mattered was so livid with him that he met with nothing but obstruction and bad feeling until the day he died.

It was on this historic spot, then, that I met Aristophanes the son of Philip for the first time. I was lying on my back with my eyes closed, thinking how nice it would be if only I didn’t have to herd goats, when I was woken by a sharp kick on my collar-bone. I woke up and reached for my staff, and there was this tall man standing over me.

‘Right then,’ he said, ‘on your feet.’ He had a City voice, high-pitched and sharp, and I took against him at once. ‘Who’s your father and what’s his deme?’

‘Euchorus,’ I replied, rubbing my collar-bone, ‘of Pallene. Who wants to know?’

‘Shut up,’ replied the stranger. ‘I’m charging Euchorus of Pallene with goat-rustling.’

Now I started to feel suspicious of the stranger, since I knew my father would never do a thing like that. He knew every animal he owned by sight and had names for them all, and even when someone else’s stray got into his flock he would go out of his way to try and find out who it belonged to, and if he couldn’t he would sacrifice it to the Gods and hold a party for the neighbours.

‘Are you sure about that?’ I said. ‘Name your witnesses.’

This shook him, I think, since he hadn’t expected a child to be so well up on criminal procedure. Not that I was, of course; it just so happened that the words were a catch-phrase in our family, and I think they must have slipped out without my thinking. Anyway, the stranger looked around, as if seeking inspiration, and he happened to catch sight of the old white billy-goat, who was destined one day to be my chairman of judges.

‘For a start,’ he said, ‘I hereby cite as chief witness for the prosecution Goat son of Goat, of the steading of Pisistratus. That goat there, which belongs to me.’

‘No, you’re wrong,’ I said. ‘It belongs to my father.’

‘Be quiet, you little heathen,’ said the stranger, ‘or I’ll have you for receiving.’ Then he seemed to be torn by some inner conflict, which made him want to relent. ‘Tell you what I’ll do,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to go to all the trouble of a lawsuit; they can drag on for days and they cause bad feeling between neighbours. I’ll just take back what’s mine and you can tell your father what a narrow escape he’s had. How does that sound?’

‘I think that’s really nice and Athenian of you,’ I said humbly. ‘And since he’s your goat you’ll know all about his habits.’

‘Habits?’ said the stranger. ‘Yes, of course I do. I reared this goat from a kid, and I’ve rescued it from wolves more than once with my own hands.’

So he advanced on that old white goat, shooing it with his hands and the hem of his cloak. Now I knew he would do that, just as surely as I knew that that was one thing our old white billy couldn’t abide; after all, it was a Goat King and had rights. It lowered its head, made a noise like a disappointed audience, and charged straight at the stranger, butting him in the pit of his stomach and knocking him over. He fell awkwardly, bumped his head on a stone, and swore. The goat gave him a look of pure contempt, nodded his beard like a councillor, and trotted off to join his flock.

‘To the charge of goat-rustling,’ said the stranger, dabbing the blood elegantly from the side of his head with the hem of his cloak, ‘I shall add a charge of witchcraft tending to cause a breach of the peace. Your father, who has evidently been to Persia and is almost certainly a collaborator, has cast a Babylonian spell on my poor goat and turned him into a savage, man-slaying monster. It is my sacred duty as a Greek to kill that goat and appease the anger of the Gods.’ He rose painfully to his feet, wrapped his cloak around his left arm and drew his sword with his right. As he did so I saw that he was wearing a little Hecate charm round his neck to ward off evil spirits, and that told me that he was superstitious. That was all I needed to know.

‘You’re clever as well as brave, stranger,’ I said. ‘Not many people would have noticed that. What gave it away? Was it the split hoof on the offside front leg?’

The stranger paused for a moment, and his hand may instinctively have moved towards that charm I was telling you about just now.

‘Split hoof,’ he repeated.

‘It’s not a Median spell, though,’ I continued brightly. ‘I think it’s Thessalian, or something like that. It’s been really dreadful, ever since Father came back from Thessaly. None of the neighbours will talk to us any more, and I think they’ve put a dead cat down our well.’

‘Your father’s been to Thessaly, has he?’ said the stranger.

‘Oh yes,’ I said, trying to sound miserable. ‘That’s where he brought that
thing
back from. It’s really horrible, making those awful noises all night. And we haven’t had a fresh drop of milk in the house since it came.’

‘What thing?’ said the stranger.

‘That goat over there,’ I said, pointing to a big black goat with a twisted horn, which had raised its head and was staring at the stranger, the way goats do sometimes.

‘Eurymenes in our village says it’s a witch and they tried to burn it the other day, but it wouldn’t burn, even when they poured pitch all over it. Then it went trotting through their houses setting all the hangings alight. They were going to take Father to Court but they were too frightened.’ I stopped and gazed at the stranger as if he were a Hero come to deliver us. ‘Will you really prosecute my father for witchcraft?’ I said. ‘We’d be ever so grateful.’

‘Of course,’ said the stranger, backing away, with his eyes fixed on the black goat. ‘In fact, I’ll go straight to the Archon this very day.’

Then he turned round and walked away terribly quickly. I managed to keep myself from laughing until he was out of sight, and told my father the whole story as soon as I got home. Of course he thought I was making the whole thing up and made me learn fifty lines of Hesiod as a punishment.

Well, that was the first time I met Aristophanes. The second time was over seven years later; but I recognised him at once and he recognised me.

My cousin Callicrates and I were returning from a quiet dinner party with some boring friends of his, where we had drunk very abstemiously and discussed the nature of Justice. It was as dark as a bag in the streets, and Callicrates and I had our hands on our sword-hilts all the way. We were nearly home and safe when we rounded a corner and saw the one sight that the traveller by night fears above all others: a Serenade.

Perhaps you have never been to Athens, and the young men in your city are rather better behaved; so I will tell you what a Serenade involves. A group of young men, probably Cavalry class, meet at a party which they find uninspiring. So they appropriate what’s left of the wine and the better-looking of the flute-girls, light torches and set off to find a better party. In their search for the Perfect Party they spare no pains and leave no flat stone unturned; they surge out into the Market Square and run in and out of the Painted Cloister, then they throw up outside the Cloister of the Herms, cross the Square, and work their devastating way uphill from house to house like a Spartan army, to the sound of flutes and singing. There are, of course, the inevitable casualties by the way; some of them fall over and go to sleep, and others who find themselves passing under their girlfriends’ windows stop to sing a Locked-Out song until they get the slops in their faces. Generally, however, they stick closely together, like heavy infantry in enemy territory, for while the Serenade itself is vaguely sacred to Aphrodite and Dionysus, any straggler can be picked up by the Constables or charged with assault by a citizen. The general objective of most Serenades is to capture the Acropolis and overthrow the Democracy; but since in the history of the City no Serenade has ever managed to stay together long enough to get much further than the Mint, little substantial political change has ever come out of one of these affairs.

This particular Serenade was a truly terrifying spectacle. There were at least forty young men, armed with swords and torches, wreathed in myrtle and singing the Harmodius. The ten or so girls with them looked scared out of their wits, and I noticed that one of them was a free-born girl, whom they had presumably confiscated from one of the houses they had visited.

It was round her neck that Aristophanes was hanging, and he was clearly one of the leaders of this Serenade. He was yelling at the top of his voice — I think he was shouting orders, like a taxiarch — and his companions replied by cheering loudly and occasionally being sick. Callicrates and I stood very still and pretended to be doorposts, but they noticed us and stopped in their tracks.

‘Line halt!’ called out Aristophanes. ‘Spartans to your left front. No prisoners.’

Callicrates, who had been on Serenades himself when he was younger, knew better than to run, for they would have been sure to chase after us and beat us up or kill us if they caught us. Instead he stood his ground and said nothing, in the hope that they would go away. This usually works, but not always; and this was one such occasion.

‘Look, gentlemen,’ said Aristophanes, ‘there’s a Spartan over there who isn’t afraid of us. What’ll we do to him?’

His co-Serenaders made several excellent suggestions, and I could tell that Callicrates was beginning to get worried. Now I am not a brave man, as you will discover in due course, but I was too young to understand the real danger I was in, and besides, fear brings out the cleverness in me like nothing else. Also, some malicious God was urging me to rescue the poor free-born girl that Aristophanes was holding, since if he got her to himself for any length of time later on, her chances of a good or even reasonable marriage would be gone for good. Remember, I was then at an age where girls have that sort of effect, although now I regard them as an intolerable nuisance.

Anyway, I filled my lungs with air and called out, ‘Are you so drunk that you don’t recognise the Goatherd of Hymettus, from the Steading of Pisistratus?’

Then I raised the torch I was carrying so that he could see my face. Of course, there was no guarantee that he would recognise me after so many years, not to mention the effects of the plague; on the other hand, I was so ugly, particularly by torchlight, that recollection on his part might not be necessary to achieve the desired effect. But he recognised me all right, and nearly dropped his torch.

‘Have you still got that little Hecate?’ I asked. ‘Because if you have, you’ll need it. Remember the Thessalian spell, and the goat who broke your head, and my father who learned magic?’