John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

We went. It was one of the better huts. One might in fact call it a fine house. It was large, anyway, by Helot standards, and newly limed, which made it a fair parody of Lykourgos’s place. We passed through the courtyard and stood in the doorway, my wife and I, looking in at the round room with its hearth in the center, and we were simultaneously dazzled and amused. There were huge wall paintings, all on arcane religious subjects and done in the most ungodly Oriental style. Bright drapes and beads hung everywhere, charging the room like a harvest of biffins and snow apples; the furniture — leviathan painted tables and carved chairs like behemoths at rest — burlesqued Athenian elegance; and wherever there was space there were fresh fruit and flower arrangements with figurines set in their leaves, and small clay lamps. The decorations, I learned later, were Iona’s work. She had a kind of genius along that line. It was all, that night, like some magical cave from the dream of a savage — light, shadow, color, incessant movement. But the crowning achievements were Dorkis and Iona herself. He was dressed like some apterous mythological bird, in azure and gold and burnished black and scarlet, with barbaric golden earrings like those of Sardis, and though it should all have been lewd, bumptious, he brought it off: his smile and eyes were brighter than his garb. He was no man of Helos, one knew at once by the slant of his eyes, but an Easterner. (He claimed mixed Ionian and Asian descent; his father had been an omen watcher on the island of Hydrea.) His wife, still axis of all that aureate churning and flash, wore a white chiton, unembroidered, pinned at the hip and shoulder by black two-headed serpents made of iron. Her breasts were like cream, like snow-capped mountains, as perfect as sacrificial doves, and exposed to the very halo of the nipple. No naked Spartan girl could have dreamed of competing. I gave her a hasty, embarrassed salutation — I was no voyeur, a dedicated amorist — and turned my attention to Dorkis. With a smile like sheet lightning, at once ironic and benevolent, she took my wife’s arm, and I watched them go, my wife (dressed in black) like Pallas Athena and Iona like — well, a bacchante who’d bear watching.

“Ah, Agathon!” her husband said, and we embraced in the Helot style. (He was several drinks ahead of me — as were they all. But he wouldn’t hold his advantage long. He was used to Helot wine; I wasn’t.)

“I’ve heard of you,” I said. “I’m glad we’ve finally met. You have a wonderful house.” I had, in fact, heard of him. Among the Helots he served as physician and sometime fortune-teller. Whether or not he told fortunes truly, he was not, from everything I’d heard, one of those crackpots who are forever pushing men back into the swamps — urging them to barbaric sacrifices in times of war, or stirring up the crowd to unusual cruelty, like that of the old days, in the whipping ceremony at the festival of Orthia. You have seen such men — wizards, witches, demagogues, not honest prophets: demon minds that feed on disaster. Dorkis was not one of those. To the Spartans, who knew nothing of his standing within his own culture, he was one of the most useful and responsible of servants (technically, he had been elevated to the hollow status of “New Citizen,” something between a horse and a Spartan Inferior); he was the man in charge of selecting and preparing the food for the communal eating halls. It was said that he’d been, before the redistribution, a personal servant to the palace. His power was enormous, at least in potential. He could have poisoned every man in the city, if he chose to — though one knew the instant one met his eyes that whatever the Spartans might do to the Helots, Dorkis would not turn poisoner. But he had other powers too, as history would show. He had the Spartans’ trust. They could hardly believe any evil of him, even after it was proved. This not only because he was obviously brave and noble (despite his curiously Oriental stance), but also because they gave him little advantages. Like masters everywhere, even Athens, they knew the art of corrupting the elite among the people they dominated, and letting the elite take care of the rest. They forgot two things, in his case: his odd religiosity, which made him in fact incorruptible, and his wife. Dorkis had one further hook into power. As master of the communal eating halls, he knew all the important Helots — vineyard keepers, olive growers, goatherds, potters, wagon masters, the lot. Most of them owed him favors.

So, as I was saying, I’d heard of him — and had speculated about him. When I praised his house, sweeping my arms toward the painted walls, he laughed and shrugged, boyishly modest. He’d been an athlete once, a javelinist barred from the Olympics only by his station, and when he shrugged you saw that he still had the chest and shoulders for it. He said, “Oh, it’s nothing, nothing.” And then, quickly, extending a hand to one side and pivoting, he invited me to meet his guests.

The house was crowded and noisy as the sea with party cachinnation, but I no longer remember clearly who was there. A man named Kebes, a vineyard keeper whom I’d met before, the largest young man I have ever seen, close to seven feet tall and still as stone; a woolly- bearded goatherd who’d done well enough that nowadays he seldom sniffed a goat but who somehow nevertheless maintained a perpetual dudgeon; a small, ironic, testy man whom I later met often but whose name I never learned (he had a son who was insane; he became a famous arsonist and roof crawler in the later days of the revolution); two or three Helot priests. There were always priests at Dorkis’s house. Religion, as I’ve said, was one of his fascinations. Sex and wine, sad proofs of life’s caducity, were the others. There were various other people there, well-off Helots and their wives, an Athenian ex-patriot or two, a pet liberal Spartan, all milling, lounging, battening each other on wine and fanny patting. I talked through nearly the whole evening with Dorkis. Tuka, my wife, talked with everyone, as usual. She was radiant, casually elegant as a mountain temple, so conscious of her easy superiority of taste and class that she could lay them aside like a shawl. “These Spartan markets!” she said, and staggered, face and body, as if she’d been hit on the side of the head by a timber. “You take an armload of iron”—she struggled with an invisible load—“and all it buys you is three eggs and a cauliflower. But OK, at least it’s better going into the market than trying to get out. On the way in you’ve got protection, but on the way out all these people have these armloads of iron they can’t see over, and every time you turn around you get zonked.” She reeled, carrying the invisible cauliflower and eggs, being zonked. “It’s so absurd, really. Why use money at all — as my husband tells Lykourgos.” (I never did.) “Why not let people just buy things with lies and promises? It would keep everybody on his toes.” Everyone laughed. Iona said scornfully, laughing with the rest, “Clearly unfair! Tuka would own the whole world in a week, and we’d all have to move to Africa.” They laughed again, and Tuka launched a story. I turned back to the men.

Dorkis was pouring wine now, the thick, resonated honey distillation the Helots drink straight and the rest of the world mixes one-to-six with water. “To Lykourgos!” he said, and grinned. He liked me, it was manifest; and — who knows why? — I was delighted. I knew from the first that I was doomed to show off for Dorkis as I would for some girl.

“To psychotic coherence!” I said. He and the priest beside him laughed. We drank. But Dorkis was thinking, impish. His eyes brightened and snapped into focus on distances, like an eagle’s.