John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

It was a heady summer day, late afternoon: light splashed through the room like something alive, making every painted and polished surface gleam as if newly oiled. All the city leaders were gathered, including the older Pysistratos, all sitting in their usual genteel poses, Philombrotos at his glinting marble table, Konon and I at our wooden desks, the slaves unobtrusively waiting in their places like furniture; but the meeting didn’t begin. I looked out at the hills and wished I was there. Then at last a slave came to announce a guest. Philombrotos stood up and bowed. Except for Pysistratos, who merely looked frosty, as usual, the others stood up too, as if the guest were someone like the King of Sardis. The slave reappeared, drew back the drape, and in walked the fattest, silliest-looking man I have ever met. (Only Kroesos himself is said to have been fatter, who weighed seven hundred pounds.) Solon was in his middle thirties, but nearly bald already. His nose was pink. No one needed to be told he was a wine merchant, without a drop of noble blood in his lineage — despite what people say now. His flesh jiggled like a mile-wide field of flowers in a breeze. He spread his legs and stretched his milk-white arms like a man meeting his concubines after long separation, and said, “Gentlemen, God bless you one and all!”

Klinias winced and focused his pink eyes harder on his toes. The slave closed the big door, bolted it, and stood waiting, holding the door hook. Pysistratos looked dour.

Philombrotos said, “My friends, meet Citizen Solon.”

They approached him gravely and tentatively and, one by one, shook his hand. “I’m honored!” Solon said. “Deeply flattered!”

Philombrotos said, “Not only is Solon one of our city’s most brilliant merchants and a widely admired philosopher, he is, they tell me, one of the favorite poets of our commoners.”

“A terrible condemnation,” Solon said. “Such taste!” He kissed his fingers in despair.

Philombrotos himself led Solon to his seat. They made a ludicrous couple — Philombrotos tall and lean and frail, keen-eyed, masculine, sensitive to the point of palsy, Solon fat as a monstrous baby, with a face as impish and androgynous (he had pretty lips) as Pan’s. Solon eased himself down, though the seat was marble, saying, “Thank you, God bless you!” his flesh all aquiver, and he let out his breath in puffs.

Philombrotos talked of Solon’s virtues. His father had been a wealthy man named Euphorion, a commoner who’d proved that arithmetic could be worth as much as vast holdings, but who, in middle age, had decided to give away all he had to the poor. They’d erected a statue in his honor. He’d died when Solon was under twenty, and Solon, having what he called a modest taste for luxury, had in four years (with a bare minimum of double-dealing, he often said) made a fortune as large as his father’s. He had sympathies — and some influence — with both the rich and the poor, and he was famous with both for his extraordinary good sense. In these times of political chaos, no man was better qualified to bring the two parties together.

The city leaders knew all this already, as Solon was no doubt aware, but he accepted the flattery of the recitation, even relished it, tapping his fingertips and beaming like a child. They came at last to the point. The war with the Megarians had come to a kind of stalemate, not so much because of the difficulties of war as because the commoners believed they were being taken advantage of, which they were. It was always the commoners and slaves who were killed, the aristocrats — a handful of powerful families — who collected the spoils; and whenever troubles came up at home, the war was blamed for their having to go unsolved. The problem was simple: how to trick the commoners back into battle and beat the Megarians once and for all so that problems at home could, where necessary, be dealt with.

Solon was radiant, gorging himself on the power the leaders were lending him, but though he could not hide his happiness, he pretended the thing was difficult. “Awesome!” he said, and rolled his head from side to side obscenely. He giggled, a laugh like a girl’s. “Simply awesome! Gentlemen, we stand at the rim of a new and startling age — a whole new spectrum of human emotions! It’s a thrilling and terrifying moment! History will remember us either as monsters or as midwives to gods! Let us struggle to prove ourselves midwives, the Mothers of Humanism!”

“Humanism?” Pysistratos said, looking skeptical.

“It’s a new word I’ve made up,” Solon said. “You don’t like it?”

They were offended, repelled by everything about him, not just his word — though no one in the room had any inkling yet that this pig would steal their power. But no one, on the other hand, could miss his confidence, and it was catching. You’d have sworn by his manner that he had in mind some hero, completely unknown to them, who could stand with the heroes of the First Age, like Theseus, or at least the Second, like Akhilles. Though Solon was grotesque, a sort of hog in the bath, he could solve their problems, they all knew, with a snap of his dough-white fingers.

“Let me think on it,” he said. He sat forward and rubbed his knees. “Let me pray on it — for a week.”

“In a week’s time—” one of the leaders began.

“Come come!” Solon said. He threw up his hands in alarm. “Against the vast span of futurity—”

They gave him a week.

Solon had, as he said himself, a great advantage over them: he had no dignity.

Within two days we heard the report that Solon had gone mad. He played the lyre half the night (he had no ear, could hardly tell note from note), he danced stark nude, he approached wealthy ladies with obscene propositions. His family confined him to his house and went about in mourning. His physician let it out that he was “possessed.” On the fourth day he escaped and ran straight to the center of the city, with a tin cup and some leaves on his head and, pushing aside the more familiar nuts, prophets, soapbox orators, he climbed up onto the herald’s stand. When people gathered around him, some in amusement, some in dismay, he began singing, thwanging out horrible noises on his lyre and rolling his eyes:

“I come as a messenger from Salamis the fair!

The news he sends this town my verses shall declare!”

And then, in mad, mock-elegant dactyls, he called the commoners to one last valiant attempt against the Megarians, an attempt all their own, to be led by himself, indefatigable, mad Solon. The victory, he hinted, would bring on a whole new age for common men. He swore solemn oaths that Apollo was inside him. It was a long poem, and brilliant in its way — the best entertainment seen in Athens for years. If it was full of joking, it was earnest too. For all his reading, for all his self- mockery, he had a childlike, merchant-class patriotism that couldn’t be scoffed away. When he talked of “a man’s debt to his country” it didn’t sound hackneyed: it made you think, coming from Solon, of merchants’ iron cash boxes and the famous scrupulous honesty of the old-guard Athenian tradesman. It was a brand-new metaphor, in Solon’s mouth: more telling, at least for that audience, than all the silvery Homeric talk of Philombrotos. Some agreed to join him on the joyous impulse of holiday spirit, others because they believed the god — or anyway truth — was in him. (That might seem strange to some people, but in Athens we were not of the opinion that gods are necessarily morose. Whatever strikes true, strikes deep and honest, whatever fills the furthest mountains with beauty and hope, we attribute to the gods.) He got a fair party of men behind him, and Pysistratos, along with other civic leaders, got him more by sober reasoning and bribery.