John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

“I know,” he said. His voice was thick, like a person’s at a funeral. The end of his beard touched my neck and tickled, and I thought how vicious it was that a person could be annoyed by a fucking tickle at a time like this. I cried harder.

“I really am going crazy,” I said.

“I know,” he said again. He could hardly bring it out, and I cried for him.

After a long time he said, “Peeker, I’ll tell you something.” Suddenly, absurdly, his voice was cheerful. “Our jailer’s going to speak to me yet. I have no doubt of it. This noon when he brought us our plates of smashed worms — or whatever it is — he stood outside my cell door with his arms folded for half an hour, watching me eat. I ate, first my plate then yours, very slowly and delicately — partly because it’s the only way I can trick my stomach into willingness, partly to teach him fine manners by my example. When I finished I wiped my lips very nicely with the piece of my robe I reserve for the purpose, and I said to him, ‘Jailer, I’ll tell you an interesting fact. Everything we study, we modify by our study of it. Hence truth eternally eludes us.’

“He did not look convinced, just held out his hand for the plates.

“‘Take crabs, for example,’ I said. ‘We poke them with a stick to find out how they behave, and they behave as if poked by a stick.’

“He folded his arms, the plates dangling from his fingertips.

“‘This is of course a very simple example,’ I said. Take a subtler example, such as atoms of light. Light, as you know, is one of the four great elements — in common parlance, fire. We study it by bouncing it off polished stones, or bending it in water, or squeezing it through holes. And how does it behave? It behaves as if bounced or squeezed or bent. We learn nothing. We merely cause events.’ I bent closer to him, waving my finger to keep his attention. ‘Has it occurred to you that sundials do not measure time but create it?’ It had not, I saw. Time,’ I said, ‘is actually a thing, like porridge.’ I folded my arms and beamed at him, triumphant. The left side of his mouth twitched very slightly. He withdrew.”

“Master, you’re insane,” I said.

He smiled. “That’s more like it! Before you were saying you were. If there’s one thing I hate it’s youthful arrogance.” We laughed.

When I woke up again it was dark. He was patting my head. When it came back to me I said, “Who was it, master? — the one they killed.”

“Some Helot, I expect.”

“Was it someone you knew?”

He didn’t answer for so long I thought he’d forgotten the question, but then he said, “No doubt.”

“And you didn’t think anything about it?” I realized I was lying with my head in his lap and I felt silly. He was saying:

“Oh, a thought or two may have passed through my mind. I may have thought how brave and virtuous the man must have felt, sneaking across to the prison. And I may have thought how brave and virtuous the soldiers must have felt, nailing him down like a rabbit. I may have had a passing thought about rabbits, or field mice, or stones.”

I sat up, pushed the hair out of my eyes. I was still seeing it — the horses, the javelin sticking up like a signpost. “You don’t believe in anything, do you?”

“I believe in the gods,” he said.

I said, “Hah!”

“That too,” he said. “Magic is afoot when a doomed young man says ‘Hah!’”

Doomed. I began to shake all over. He launched some idiotic story.

Lykourgos, in his time, was a great general, though one very different from Solon. He comes, after all, of Dorian stock, and he once wore all the dignity of a king. Philombrotos greatly admired him, during his stay in Athens, and he would have admired Lykourgos still more if he’d lived to see him lead his crack troops into battle. You would hardly find them in girls’ dresses, with coy smiles, and flowers in their hair. They train naked, hour on hour in the summer heat or the winter wind, until their hides are like leather and their muscles are like pliant wood. They learn to fight, as they learn to march, with precision, every movement clean as the closing of a trap. The iren gives his signal and they draw their swords as if with one single muscle. He calls out again and they advance a step like the spikes, of a single harrow. I cannot tell whether to laugh or shake in terror. When a man moves his hand by an inch too much, the iren signals him out of formation and bites his thumb. The man does not scream. Not a muscle of his face stirs.

When they fight they wear breastplates and groin- plates of metal, and feathers in their hair like the Philistines. (The Dorians were neighbors to the Philistines once, generations ago. The two people are very much alike, but the Philistines have had no Lykourgos.) As they march to the attack, the Spartans play their flutes, a piercing, deadly singsong thing in the Lydian mode, with no trace of joy, no faintest intimation of mercy. They destroy a city, kill everything alive in it down to the humblest dog, and send their ultimatum to the next. All this is Lykourgos’s work. Only a fool would deny that it’s effective.

I had been working under Solon for six months — and had been married a year — when Lykourgos arrived in Athens. I was twenty. Solon had as yet no official position (it was that year that Philombrotos died and Solon replaced him as arkhon), but he was in fact already what Klinias had been called in jest, king of Athens. Philombrotos and his fellow arkhons, and even Pysistratos himself, did nothing without Solon’s consent, yet they hated all Solon stood for. Philombrotos knew, as everyone did, that when and if Lykourgos returned to Sparta it would be as Lawgiver, exactly the position Solon was worming, or rather pigging, his way into in Athens. When he found the two men in the same town, Philombrotos couldn’t help himself: he had to bring them together. He made Lykourgos a guest at his palace, assigning him three of his best slaves, and invited Solon to dinner. I too, along with Tuka (and many others), was invited. Though I lived in the house, I did not see Lykourgos until the night of the dinner. He kept to his room like a sick man or a misanthrope — both of which, I soon discovered, he was. Philombrotos went to visit him, and they would talk, with the slaves outside the door, for hours. I can imagine how it was. For old Philombrotos, the world was falling apart. A fat wine merchant was the city’s only hope, and if he saved the city it would be at the expense of what made the city fine. It would be like saving a beloved wife from enemy spears by whoring her. He was beginning already to talk in a politely disparaging way of Draco’s laws, “written in blood,” he said. He would giggle as he said it. You couldn’t be sure how to take him.

So no doubt on those visits to Lykourgos’s room, Philombrotos sat in troubled silence, trembling faintly, as he always did the last few years, and Lykourgos delivered sentencia in his quiet, angry way, like talking stone. The old man couldn’t help but agree with all Lykourgos said, but he could see no way to get from where Athens was to Lykourgos’s iron vision. In his own house common blood had seized a place. Tuka, pregnant (or so we thought), had threatened suicide if she couldn’t marry me. She meant it, at least at the moment. Or if she didn’t, Philombrotos couldn’t be sure. There’d been a wave of suicides among the old families in recent months. (“Changing times,” Solon said mournfully, rolling his eyes up, looking pious.) Philombrotos wept. He was too weak from his civic troubles to fight. When we met in the halls, now, we bowed as we had in the old days, as if we were no more than fellow citizens. I forgave the old arkhon, and I did not mind my victory. I was Solon’s aide, and Solon was the future.