John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

But Solon was a better man than I. When he learned of the invitation he was distraught. It was dusk, and we were sitting in the room in his house where he did all his reading and writing. (He read as he ate, gluttonously, and he kept a book like Klinias’s, as if he fancied himself a sage.) The room, that evening, was full of shadows. He was always strangely reluctant to light his lamps before nightfall. I could never tell whether it was miserliness or one of his superstitions.) He said, “This is awful! Horrendous! It can’t be done!” He pulled at his cheeks with his fingertips and made nervous clicking noises.

“Why not?” I said. I took great delight in undoing his grandiose posturing. That was, I think now, my chief use to Solon. In his old age he was a relatively dignified man, considering.

“It’s unthinkable!” he said. He had a habit of filling the air with exclamations while his mind raced ahead, figuring. “It’s one thing to borrow a poor old man’s nuptial bed as if by drunken mistake. It’s another to make him bow and humbly abandon it to you.”

I shook my head, smiling. A new kind of Midas. Everything he touched turned obscene.

He fiddled with the stick on his desk that he kept for luck, still tsking and clicking like a carter. “You know what he’s after. He wants to set us side by side and see whose way is best. But he has no choice! Why can’t old men be reasonable?”

“I imagine he knows he has no choice,” I said. I was thinking of myself and Tuka.

“Then he’s one of those people”—he lowered his voice—“who make their slavegirls whip them.” He wrung his hands, then giggled.

It came to me that he was chiefly embarrassed for himself, the figure he’d cut “You’ll come off all right” I said. “You’re an Athenian.”

“No I won’t,” he said. He pouted. But he thought a moment and his face grew foxy. “Yes I will!” He sent me home.

The night of the dinner, Solon was, to no one’s surprise, late. The wide room was filled with dignitaries. We were just beginning to eat without him when a slave announced his arrival. Philombrotos got up, with difficulty, and took a step or two toward the door. Solon came in, spread his legs apart and threw out his arms, exactly as he had the first time I’d seen him. “Gentlemen, God bless you!” he said. And then, to Philombrotos: “Forgive me. I’ve taken a liberty.” He waved at the door, where his house slave waited, and a moment later the old man — a Korinthian, I think — came in wheeling a cart of Spartan wine. Where Solon had gotten it God only knew. No Athenian would normally drink the stuff, though the Spartans vow by it Exiguous food and drink is their national emblem. Solon snatched up a bottle from the cart and held it aloft as if it were captured treasure. “To the grandeur of Sparta!” he said. For an instant everyone was stunned. Who’d ever heard of a thing so unpatriotic? And yet it wasn’t of course. His words pierced some ludicrous old error. Then, first one or two, then more, we all cheered and laughed and even clapped. Lykourgos’s features worked as if in agony. At last he too laughed, seizing his pleasure as if to strangle it “Bless my soul!” he said. It was like a voice from the heart of a cave. Solon sat down in his place of honor by Lykourgos and talked all that night about wines. He happened to have brought along a poem of his on the white wines of Sparta. Philombrotos watched him, baffled and weary, like a man brought against his will from beyond the grave.

Two days later, at Solon’s house, Lykourgos said:

“The trouble with a genius is that he dies. The state falls to ordinary men, and they destroy it.” They were talking of Solon’s wild improvising.

Solon smiled. “I’d rather be destroyed by ordinary men than by System.”

“In my system,” Lykourgos said, “there will be no ordinary men.”

Solon thought about it and nodded. “True, perhaps,” he said. “And when you die, there will be no room for genius in all Lakonia except your grave.”

That night, Solon gave me a sheaf of writings. “Read these,” he said. “Tell me what you think.”

I glanced at them and knew whose they were by the handwriting, though it was one I’d never seen. It was as dark and spare and severe as Lykourgos himself, and even harder to decipher. I said, “Shall I take them with me?”

He nodded, thinking about something else. “If you lose them, God help us both.”

They were aphorisms, fragments, God knows what. I took them with me and, compulsive scrivener that I am, copied some of them down. I included them later in the book, when I got it from Klinias.

Our vanity would like what we do best to pass for what is hardest for us. Slaves make a difficult virtue of acting like slaves.

The will to overcome an emotion is only the will of a stronger emotion. Opinion is desire.

Strong character, virtue, means shutting the ear to even the best counterarguments.

Madness in individuals is rare; in groups it is the rule. Good government is predictable, and irreversible, psychosis.

That which each age considers evil is the atavism of an old ideal.

Every system of morals is a sort of tyranny against Nature and Reason. That is, however, no objection, unless one should decree, by some system of morals, that tyranny and unreasonableness are bad.

Religion, politics, and art all give us herding-animal morality (Thou shalt not shove). By what secret rules do the great priest, the great king, and the master artist live?

The great State is the mechanical image of some great man. It has no faults he did not have, though it cannot have his virtues. Good. Private virtues make empty talk at parties.

Imprisonment and execution are not great evils, merely mirrors, too clear for cowardly eyes, of reality as it is.

Greatness is impossible without religion. A man must know himself God.

I returned the parchments to Solon. He said, “Well?”

“Stark raving mad,” I said.

“Terrible, but not insane.” He tapped the desktop with his stick. “I admire his courage. It’s going to be a great experiment — a great adventure. I wish I could see it.” He giggled.

I shrugged. “So when he gets it going, go see it.”

His eyebrows went up in alarm. “Good heavens no! I’ll send some friend.” He smiled.

“Don’t look at me,” I said.

“Don’t worry.” He laughed. “When the time comes, you’ll beg me to let you go. You see, you’re a tyrant. His mirror image.”

“That’s not true,” I said. He really seemed to mean it. “What makes you say that?”

“Sheer whimsy, my love.” He laughed again, glancing over at his slave. Solon’s mind, I could see, was far away.

I told Tuka later what he’d said. She said, more soft, more sweet than morning bells, “It’s really true, you know. You’re a tyrant.” She had a marvelous capacity for defending the wrong if it seemed to give her power over me. This time, for some reason, I was persistent. It was this, partly: she had an irritating way of forever comparing me with her father. Either her father was good at something, like taking care of the tedious details of daily life, busy as he was, and for me it was simply impossible, or else her father was bad at something, like listening to things his family said, and I was exactly like him. It was her father she wanted to be married to, not me.

“Tell me one single thing that I ever did that was tyrannical,” I said.

She sighed as if there were thousands and took my hand. “Agathon, look at your fingernails. That’s disgusting!”

But Solon’s prediction was right, in a sense. It was at my request that, two years later, after travels for Solon had inclined my spirit to wandering, I went with Tuka to Sparta. Lykourgos had just pulled his money trick. In Athens it would have meant civil war. (Solon was skirting war hour by hour, straddling the chasm between the commoners and Pysistratos.) Lykourgos’s nightmarish vision of men was becoming actuality. I had to see it. It may be I thought I could stop it.