John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

It wouldn’t be easy for Lykourgos to forgive me for that discovery, I knew. But the next time I saw him he was calm, stern, and distant, as always. “Nothing in the world is knowable,” he said. “Knowledge is unflinching assertion.”

“I assert, then, that a man still wants to know.” And then, recklessly, with a glance at Alkander: “Perhaps, in fact, she loved you.”

“Perhaps the eagles love me, or the gods.”

It’s a terrible thing to hear Lykourgos laugh.

We found one of our rats dead this morning. Some disease. Agathon turned it over and over, thinking, saying nothing. It makes me uneasy.

Dorkis and Iona were of course not the only people we ever saw in Sparta. We had various friends we partied with or went riding with or went with to things like the festivals of Orthia and Orestes or, when autumn came, the bullfights. One can hardly help having friends in a vast and sprawling city, even a reactionary city like this one. A hermetic soul may get by well enough in the mountains, with no one to talk to but his god; but here the sheer press of population is against it — and more: the nature of the population. At festival time, or during the games, mankind stands thick as a field of wheat, a mixed and mingled half-breed or many-breed humanity that by its diverse character threatens all that any one man may stand for. The Spartans, first. Naked as tombstones except for their crude iron neck rings and bracelets. Fierce, austere people who laugh at no joke more than six words long, who breed by contract and kill non-Spartans as casually as they’d kill a horse with spavins. Then there were Egyptians and Sardinians, immodestly dressed, by comparison, in toe-length robes and jewelry and spangles, who lay one another, male or female, as casually as Athenians drink wine. Then Greeks of the Perioikoi, born of every Hellenic city, some puritanical as Homer himself, some more licentious than Sardinians. Then Helots, the humble majority, weighed down like donkeys, some of them, and others — like Dorkis and Iona — gilded like Mesopotamian gods. What is a man to make of himself, or of his father’s codes, in such confusion? In Athens, the sexual code (for instance) was simple. A man should be faithful, and if he couldn’t — and many couldn’t — he should view his breach with reasonable shame. If he slept with a slavegirl, and everyone did, he should dislike himself for forcing upon her the shame of prostitution. (In Sparta, the rape of a Helot was called an act of patriotism. In Sardis it was called a snack.) Who could survive, in such a city, except by supporting what was best in himself — or whatever was worst, what cried out in anguish for nemesis — by the sleight-of-hand of friendship, the buttress of some similar nature, bad or good?

Some of our friends — the friends of whom Tuka was usually fondest — were rich fellow expatriates from Athens. These, in general, didn’t get on very well with Dorkis and Iona, mainly because of Dorkis’s way of fondling women, I suspect. He petted them in public, but in the dark he was stubbornly loyal to his wife. The Athenians were, in public, more discreet.

I was not, in general, fond of Athenians in Sparta. I can tolerate watching a bull murdered with one man as well as with the next. It’s better, I suppose, than the old Minoan cult in which the god-bull was always victorious, his victims mere children. And when festival drinking and dancing get thoroughly out of hand, I can sneak off with one man’s wife as well as with another’s. Nevertheless, there were few Athenians in Sparta who weren’t fat parasites, men whom the State’s isolationist laws hadn’t driven away but had turned to genteel outlaws — heavily moustached, scented, oil-bathed, weighted with semiprecious stones. They were cultured, some of them even refined — when Tuka played her harp they knew what to praise — but I am not, myself, as amused as I might be by culture and refinement The crudest men I have ever known were gawky old Klinias, my beloved master, and Solon, my beloved employer, whom some poet once called “The Father of Athens and Mother of All the Hogs.”

We lived what is known as a rich life, badly hung- over three mornings out of five, hiding our heads from the sunlight in rooms draped with purple cloth and thickly padded with Oriental rugs, so that no sandal’s click might cleave our skulls. We were sealed off from the ordinary work of the world, and virtually sealed off from our children too, except when we made a point of seeing them, Tuka instructing Diana on the harp, I struggling to make poor Kleon a horseman. I was impatient of the same gentleness and timidity I admired in him on all other occasions, and intolerant of his fear’s beclouding of his mind. I was, myself, a man absolutely without fear on a horse. Though I’m a gentle person, in most respects, I have ridden horses men swore were bewitched; bedeviled, mad creatures that I think would as soon have eaten me as borne me. A week after my brother’s funeral I rode the chicken- brained stallion that killed him. Later, on a winter rabbit hunt, I rode that same horse to his grave. — In any case, Kleon was afraid of the plodding brown mare I’d given him — a lovely horse dark as a roasted chestnut — and for reasons too shadowy for me to fathom, I was beside myself. I would shout at him, calling him stupid, brainless, and when Kleon wept, struggling to do what I demanded — think clearly — I would clench my teeth and swear. “I’m scared,” he would say. “Daddy, Daddy, I’m scared!”—crying, clinging to the horse’s neck. I would reason with him, tense with anger, explaining to him what fun he would have with the other boys if he learned to ride, explaining to him how ashamed he was (and it was true) when friends younger than himself — a boy named Markapor, for instance — went casually thundering off. “Please, please, please, Daddy. Please!” he would wail, and at last I would say, “Get off then, damn you, and walk,” and I would ride off. I would talk to him later, telling him that what I had done was inexcusable, even though his fear was, of course, annoying and frustrating. I had never treated anyone that way until now — and I did this kind of thing more than once, turning the whole force of my rage on a child. And yet I loved him more than I’d ever loved anyone else. Were Tuka’s rages at Kleon the same? Or Iona’s rages at her children? Tuka hit Kleon in the stomach once — he’d broken something that belonged to her, and destruction, the world’s mutability really, was intolerable to Tuka. She hit him — not a slap but an angry punch with her fist — and I jumped to her, caught her shoulder, and slapped her face so hard she went flying across the room. (I wasn’t angry then. I was collected but outraged. I slapped her as I would have spanked Kleon for throwing a stone at Diana.) “Don’t ever do that again,” I said. Righteous, true; righteous as a drunken god. But she never tried it again, at least in my presence. Tuka would reach the same frustration I reached with Kleon when she worked with Diana at the harp. Diana didn’t want to play the harp, she said. I insisted that she must. It’s hard, in the beginning, I told her; everything you try you fail at. But it gets easier later, and eventually it can be a pleasure. We knew that for a fact, Tuka and I, though Diana couldn’t, and so we asserted the natural right of superior knowledge and forced her. Diana wept, letting her hands fall away from the strings, and Tuka would shriek at her, and Diana would lift her hands and play again, weeping. Unlike Kleon — he may never learn to ride a horse, though he knows all the secrets of my grammata — Diana learned quickly, and soon she was playing with sheepish pride for friends.