John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

Kroesos was furious. “Look here,” he said, “do you figure we’re not among the happy men at all?”

Solon, unwilling to exasperate him more, replied with great and gentle formality: “The gods, O king, have given the Greeks all other gifts in moderate degree; and so our wisdom, too, is cheerful and homely, not kingly wisdom. Our humble understanding, observing the numerous misfortunes that attend upon all conditions, forbids us to grow overconfident of our present enjoyments, or to admire any man’s happiness that may yet, in the course of time, suffer alteration. To salute as happy a man who is still in the midst of life’s hazard we think as unwise as crowning a wrestler still honking and blowing in the ring.”

After this, he was dismissed, having given Kroesos some pain but not much instruction, as it seemed to Kroesos.

Aesop, the man who writes the fables, was in Sardis at the time on Kroesos’s invitation — an old friend of Solon’s — and he was troubled that Solon was so ill received as a result of his own mulishness. “Solon,” said he, “when a man gives advice to kings he should make it pert and seasonable.”

Solon nodded as if abashed and said softly, feebly, for he was well up in years: “Or short and reasonable. Or curt and treasonable. Or tart and please-him-able.”

Aesop sighed. Though a person of the greatest sobriety, he was always unmanned by a jest.

Why I made the story up I’m not exactly sure, except that it has of course things to do with my demon Lykourgos. Has to do with Time and Scorn. Solon — realist, pragmatist, democrat — scorns in moderation. Lykourgos’s scorn is absolute, like a god’s. (“Moderation in all things including moderation,” Dorkis used to say.) Solon babbles, filling the air and suffocating his enemies with “humble wisdom” or else comforting noise; Lykourgos hardly speaks and, when he does, speaks in aphorisms or rebukes as quick and short as Spartan daggers or, say, thunderbolts. Solon, in his prime, would fall in love with ten women and five or six boys a years; Lykourgos turns women into men. His marriage laws, for instance. He’s set it up so that the husband carries his bride off by a sort of force. The woman who supervises the wedding clips the bride’s hair off close around her head and dresses her up in man’s clothes and leaves her on a mattress in the dark. The bridegroom comes in in his everyday clothes, unties her virgin zone, and takes her. When he’s finished he returns to his own dormitory, to sleep as usual with the other young men. So it continues night after night, year after year, so that sometimes a man may have several children before he has ever seen his wife’s face by daylight. If a man falls in love with another man’s wife — which happens fairly often where women walk naked — the law allows him to ask the husband for her company; and it forbids the husband to refuse him except if the lover or the wife is sickly or a weakling. Lykourgos goes further. He orders that children not be begotten by the first comer but by the best man that can be found. I suggested to him once that the law was perhaps a little inhuman. “The reverse,” he said. “Is it human to breed better horses and cows than men?” When a child is born, they carry it to the judges, and if the child looks sickly, they kill it, throw it from a cliff as they would a runt pig.

He was baffled when Solon repealed all Draco’s laws. We were alone in his chamber, except for the omnipresent Alkander — his servant, the boy who put his eye out. According to Solon, the laws were too severe, the punishments too great. Lykourgos quoted me Draco’s own comment on why nearly all crimes were punishable by death: “Even small crimes deserve death,” he said. “As for greater crimes, well, death is the worst I’ve got.” Lykourgos sat with his chin pulled in, gloomy and distant. His rabbinical nose commanded the room like a battlement against a night sky.

“But why?” I said. It was in the days when I still tried to reason with him. “Why death for, say, loitering?”

“It purifies the blood,” he said. “That’s the beginning and end of Law and Order.”

“The blood.” I pretended to muse on it.

“The blood of the State,” he said. His voice was flat as iron. “The criminal nature is a product of bad breeding. It must not survive to another generation.”

“Of course!” I said. “You mean people like our friend here, Alkander.”

Lykourgos winced. Just a flick of one eyelid. He loves his bodyguard, insofar as a man of ice-cold marble can love anything merely mortal. “You’re clever, Agathon. An incisive mind.” He always judged my sallies dispassionately, indifferently.

I told him of Solon’s jurors. It was a plan he’d worked out before he became arkhon, and I knew the theory of it. I had it in my book. In a counterfeit bid for the support of the rich, Solon refused the poorest class in Athens — the Thetes or hill people — any place in the public assembly, but he let them be jurors. The Thetes were very cross at first, but in time they found out that they’d won a great advantage. Nearly every dispute that came up in Athens would sooner or later come to them. Even in cases he assigned to the arkhon, he allowed an appeal to the courts. Moreover, he was careful to word his laws in a way that was obscure and ambiguous, so that the power of his jurors would balance the power of the rest.

Lykourgos scowled at me, thinking it over. “Where inequality exists, Justice is impossible.” He was crosser than usual. He had a headache.

“True,” I said. “But when a rich man’s treated unjustly, he has his wine cellar to fall back on. A poor man has only his ass.”

He closed his one eye and pressed his fingertips to it as if to console it. “Clever but not to the point,” he said.

“This then,” I said. I leaned toward him — sitting opposite him, six feet away. Alkander watched me with his arms folded. “To get rid of inequality you have to change man’s nature — in fact, deny the structure of the universe. It can be done. You’re proving it. But some would say — not me, you understand; I take no position — some would say your option’s barbaric, even stupid. If laws are to deal with men as they are and reality as it is, they have to provide for unequal men in a world of flux. Say the State is, as the poets say, a ship. If you want to keep it exactly what it is, you have two choices. Either you patch it day by day, replace wornout boards, reweave old sails, repaint it with tar, or you haul it up onto some smooth stones and carefully protect it from all use, even the weather’s.”

“Men as they are are not worth building a State for,” he said. “Common minds have believed too long that whatever is is necessary. The time has come for a higher belief.”

“Bullshit!” I exploded. “What would you know about common minds, or any other kind of human mind, Lykourgos?”

His head shot forward, hands braced on the chair arms. “I have known human feeling.”

“Bullshit!”

He was enraged, and it wasn’t abstract now. I had blundered onto his heart, and I had nicked it. His jaw worked and his voice had all hell in it. “Agathon,” he bellowed, “I have known the affections of a woman.”

“Never,” I said. I snapped it like a whip. “She faked it!”

He was out of his chair and coming at me, and then Alkander was on him, holding him, yelling at me over his shoulder, “Go! Get out of here! Maniac!”

But I hung on one second longer. “Your brothers queen,” I said, and laughed. “How stupid of us all!”

Alkander let him go, willing to see me dead for that. But Lykourgos sank to the floor, clenching his fists and moaning, helpless, on fire with self-hate and hatred for me. Alkander knelt by him, touching his back. I left. I heard him pacing, hours later. He paces rapidly, stiff- legged, his chin lifted, moving across the room and back, again and again, exactly like a tiger.