John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

He smiled again. “She learned it from you.”

I straightened up, indignant. “Nonsense! All I offer is mild and harmless confusion.” Then: “You must force her to do as I say, get clear of Sparta.” I spoke earnestly now, on the chance that he was an innocent. “Do it for my sake.”

“No,” he said very simply, stubborn as a mule. “The revolution is on.”

I sighed. “You’ve caught it, then — her craziness. Why couldn’t she have had mere measles, say, or the seaport plague?”

He ignored me. (Everybody ignores me.) I’ll be back,” he said, “if I can.”

I nodded. “No doubt. The cell next door is empty. They killed the fellow.”

But he was gone. He went across the snow and into the trees without a sound.

After his visit I couldn’t sleep, or anyway I thought I couldn’t, grieving for them — or for her, or for myself. But in the morning rats had nibbled my fingers as usual, so I’d slept after all. There’s a lesson in that. All human feeling is a slight exaggeration.

When he got up this morning, Peeker wouldn’t speak to me. He resents his lack of divine omniscience. A healthy condition in young people. He pointedly ignored Iona’s note, which I’d left on the table, and when the jailer came and I greeted him like an old friend, Peeker turned away and folded his arms and stared with intense unconcern at the back wall. I ate. He stubbornly eschewed the table. I understood his point of view, and in my youth I might have sympathized. But now that I am old and cachexic, I need my nourishment. When I’d finished my food I ate his. He remained intractable.

Toward noon I said, “Peeker, it is my duty to tell you a story.”

He laughed, full of violence and grief. That too was excellent, from my point of view. I am determined to make him a Seer.

“Sit down,” I said kindly, persuasively.

He sat. I dragged my chair from the table to the cell door, where I could sit with my back to the glare of the snow, and when I had made myself comfortable, I spoke to him as follows.

“Peeker, my boy, as you’ve observed yourself, I am much, much too old to be in love. It’s undignified. Also, it’s against my philosophy, I think. Nevertheless, you see before you a lover. Dignity and philosophy are for mountains.”

Peeker laughed more violently than before. I waited for him to finish (gasping, clutching his head between his knees, and stomping up and down), then resumed.

“I met her many years ago, when my wife was still here with me in Sparta and I was still on excellent terms with Lykourgos. He had less power in those days: I was satisfied with snarling obscenities at him, or laughing till I wept at his high-toned pronouncements.

“I was, I must explain, an attractive and witty young man. This furfuraceous, fucoid mop that now shatters from my brow and spatters obscenely at the world from my chin was an august brown; my eye was aurora- borealic; my every speech was delicately perfumed. I had not yet succumbed to the fluxion of the world.”

He was groaning, trying to crawl under the bed. I decided to alter my style.

“What I meant to speak of, Peeker, was Iona — the lady who sent the epistle last night. I mean to lay bare my sufferings and sorrows.”

His feet stopped struggling, and after a moment he backed out from under the bed. He studied me, to see if it was a trick, and then, with a hopeless sigh, sat down on the bedside as before.

“Fat hell,” he said without spirit. Even his hair, hanging almost to his elbows, looked despondent. His eyes were two red holes.

I nodded and told him the tale.

She was a Helot — that is, a captive. Originally the word meant, I suspect, a captive from Helos. Such matters are always obscure in Sparta. Spartans are not, as they express it, hoarders of knowledge. In the beginning, people say, the Helots were slaves to particular masters; but Sparta’s communism did away with that. Now they are simply the property of Sparta, not exactly slaves but not Spartans either, more like the cows and goats they herd or the fields they till. They do all the work. (Spartans are warriors, Lykourgos says, not drones.) The Spartans have nothing to do with the Helots except, now and then, to hunt one down and cut him to pieces, or hang him for smiling at a Spartan girl, or put him on display and laugh at his dancing or the foolish way he talks. — They do, in fact, speak oddly: softly and slowly, with grammatical forms I believe to be older than those of the Spartan dialect. Once you have stupidly fallen in love with a Helot woman, their language becomes as beautiful as the music they play — not the clean harsh flutes of the Spartans (nor the rich, sophisticated music that comes from the Athenian harp) but gentle, Phrygian lyres that, crude as they are, move even a sensible man to tears. The Spartans scorn such music, of course. I may say in its defense that it conjures a world, an impossible world, admittedly — the innocence of Athenian childhood, the summer calm of a just state at peace. It’s healthy for a man to be reminded of such things, however they may mock him. (More healthy for a free man, of course, than for a Helot.) I stood with Lykourgos once at an execution in the square, and as I watched, full of rage at Lykourgos’s foul laws and howling in secret at the needless brutality of the legal murder, I heard, above the thwunk of the executioners’ bars, some Helot’s lyre behind me, far down the street. The sound was so distant I was only half sure it was not my imagination. In any case, I heard it, and suddenly all my anger gave way to grief and despair and searing love for some unreachable ideal. Tears filled my eyes and I nudged Lykourgos with my elbow. “Listen to the lyre, old horse,” I said. He watched the execution. “The music of weaklings,” he said.

They never go near the Helot huts, except for more labor at harvesttime or else for theft or murder. (You seldom see it happen. You come upon a bright-red stain on a stone path, or an early-morning cluster of workers bending over something in a hayfield.) But my wife and I walked where we pleased in Sparta, and, because I was of use to him, or because he coveted my book, Lykourgos let it pass. We had far more in common with the Helots, we found, or anyway I did, than we had with our Spartan hosts. This was while I was still a guest, an “adviser,” honored though despised. We began to visit certain huts fairly often, usually for some festival — a funeral, a wedding, one of the innumerable game days or days of sacrifice Lakonia honors. The talk was a relief after all Lykourgos’s damned aphorisms. The Helots have no more education than the Spartans, but the Helots at least aren’t ignorant by choice. They have among them men who can recite nearly all of Homer, and not just for the supposed morality. They have excellent, uninhibited singers. They have women among them — Iona was one — who can cook as well as an Athenian. They have dancers and lyrists and, best of all (or so I thought as a callow youth), people more eager to play with ideas than to eat. Among these last, the best of the lot was Dorkis, Iona’s husband.

We met him at his house. Iona had heard of our visits to some of her Helot friends — or so I imagine, knowing her — and, being a lady who would not be outdone, she sent a messenger to invite us to join her family and a few close friends for some pious festival — I’ve forgotten which. I was, at least from a Helot point of view, a person of importance: an Athenian, heir to the old Mykenaian and Ionian civilizations, no Spartan savage come down from the Dorian mountains. I was, moreover, the personal guest of Lykourgos, living in his palace, at times his unofficial diplomatic envoy to Thuria or Antheia, even Messene. What power she must have thought she had within her grasp! She had even then the fires of revolution in her, though she wasn’t yet aware of it. She would show me what culture the Helots maintained in semisecret, would ravish me with food and flowers and music and her clever husband’s talk. I would become her ally, her ornament, and she would become the greatest lady in the underground civilization of the Helots. How the Spartans would have laughed! Goats might sooner pretend to civilized manners! And I, too, laughed, to tell the truth. I was a cocky fool.