John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

The old bastard’s crazy as a loon. He’s trying to drive me crazy too, for company. An hour before dawn I hear this terrible crash and I think the room is tumbling down but it’s Agathon falling out of bed. “Ye gods!” he yells, “I’ve been remiss! Remiss!” I’m thinking he means the gods made him fall as a punishment, which I happen to believe, but then I see it isn’t that. He comes crawling over on all fours to shake me — it’s too dark for him to see that I’m awake — and as soon as his breath comes over me like a dead rhinoceros I shrink back against the wall. “Ah ha!” he yells, “so you’re awake! Good boy! It’s time for your education.”

“Fat hell!” I say. “It’s the middle of the night.”

“Count it as yesterday,” he says. “We let yesterday slip by us.” He grabs ahold of my hair and I’ve got no choice. “Now,” he says, “I am going to teach you history.”

“History is irrelevant!” I yell. “Education is meaningless. You can’t piss in the same mud puddle twice!” Sometimes you can beat him by an appeal to principle.

But his mind was made up. “Be still, Peeker. History’s useful, even when it’s false. It strengthens a young man’s character, leads him upward to the knowledge of Joy and Death. Besides, this is a personal history. To reject it would be inhumane. I’m a feeling creature, Peeker — whatever you may think.”

There was a catch in his voice, and, dark as it was, I was aware that he was clutching his heart. Though I know his tricks, I decided to be cautious. “Personal,” I echoed, noncommittal.

“Exactly!” he said. “It’s the story of my loves and hates, and how they made me a Seer.”

He was sounding downright fraught now, and I knew there had to be a catch. At last I saw it. “Loves!” I said. “You mean women, master?” It cracked me up.

“I mean women,” he said, and his tone was so lugubrious I stopped laughing. I thought of the women. They’d all be dead now, suffocated by his breath. I could see that in a way it was sort of sad.

“OK,” I said, though I knew better.

“We’ll begin with Lykourgos. A grisly tale of hate.”

“OK.”

He let go of my hair.

For a long time, once I’d given in, he sat on my bedside not saying a word, just patting my head and thinking, full of woe. The donkeys and chickens started up. It would be morning soon. At last Agathon left my bedside and crawled over to his own bed to find his crutch, then climbed up it and jerked his way over to the cell door to stand looking out, lecturing mostly with his back to me. He pulled thoughtfully at his beard as he talked, except when he paused to scratch himself, and sometimes he’d turn to glance at me, crafty, and would laugh as if in rage.

“Peeker, my boy—”

Zeus only knows why he does these things. Here we are in prison, and the whole world’s reeling as if the gods have gone mad — wars on every side — the Spartans moving one by one through the cities of the Perioikoi: Methone has fallen and all its citizens are dead; Pylos, ancient home of Nestor, has been turned to a charred desert; Algonia, Gerenia, Leuktra, and Thalemae are burning. The suicidal Helots are rising in rebellion, terrorizing the outer suburbs; and while the Spartan army pushes out through valleys and plains like a tidal wave, Kyros the Persian stares across at Lakonia from the ashes of Sardis. Agathon knows all this better than I do. The finest Seer in Greece. But he twiddles his fingers, tells frivolous tales of kings nobody remembers. What am I to do?

“Peeker, my boy, they tell a story of Lykourgos’s great-grandfather Soös. In the dead heat of summer he attacked the king of the Klitorians in a dry and stony place, and neither army had water. Near the end of the day the Klitorians asked for a truce and offered a deal: King Soös would give up all he had taken in land and spoils if the two armies, to save themselves, might drink in peace at the nearest spring. After the usual oaths and ratifications, the armies moved to a spring three miles away, and the Klitorians drank while Soös and his Dorian army stood with folded arms and waited. When the Klitorians had drunk their fill, King Soös himself came up to the spring and sprinkled his face without swallowing a drop, then turned on his heel and marched his army off through the dust in scorn of his enemies, relinquishing nothing, since neither he nor his men had drunk their water.

“No legend, this little Spartan tale! I give you my word as Apollo’s Aid, I see its truth in our jailer’s murderous eyes.” He leered and winked (it was daylight now).

He tells about their hero of heroes, Lykourgos.

“Lykourgos, when he was a young man, was king of Sparta for eight months. While he was king it came to light that his sister-in-law, the former queen, who’d been barren heretofore (known to be an insatiable slut, and feebleminded), was pregnant. With characteristic self-righteousness, Lykourgos immediately declared that the kingdom belonged to her issue, provided it were male, and that he himself had regal jurisdiction only as the child’s guardian. Soon after, an overture was made to him by the queen, that she would herself in some way destroy the child, on condition that Lykourgos would marry her. Lykourgos brooded — grinding his teeth together, if I know him — outraged to blisters and boils by the woman’s wickedness.

“I give you the heart of the matter in a vision, Peeker:

Lykourgos stomps in his fourth-floor chamber, black, oh, black

Of beard and heart, pacing; and though he’s a dwarf, a crack

Flies through the marble tiles at every step. He turns,

He kicks the wall. He stomps to the other end and turns

And kicks again. Dark cracks go up and down the halls

Like trees, like lightning upside down. The palace falls,

Lies still in billowing dust! Then, lo! from the towering dump,

Lykourgos rises, scowling, scattering boulders off his hump!

O Lord, let us be fierce and bold

Like him, before we grow too old!

Oh, let us seize our Destinies

As wrestlers seize each other’s knees

And throw ourselves, head over heels,

To where life shocks like mating eels!”

I groaned and hid. He could at least have a little respect for visions. And for dactyls! He was once the most famous poet — or at least second most famous — in Athens. Is nothing sacred to him?

“But that’s something else,” Agathon said. He cleared his throat and drew himself up, struggling to be more formal.

“Lykourgos played the fox. He pretended to accept the woman’s proposal, sending a messenger with thanks and expressions of joy — hah! — but he urged her not to force a miscarriage for fear of impairing her health or endangering her life. He himself, he said, would see to it that when the child was born it should be gotten out of the way. And so the woman came to the time of delivery. As soon as he heard she was in labor, Lykourgos sent people to be on hand and observe all that happened, with orders that if the child was a girl they should give it to the woman, to eat or dandle, whichever she pleased—” He cackled, transported by his imagery, then caught himself and looked angry. “—But if it was a boy, this child of the queen’s, they should bring it to Lykourgos, wherever he was and whatever he might be doing. It came about that when Lykourgos was at supper with the principal magistrates of the city, the queen was delivered of a boy, who was soon after that presented to Lykourgos at his table. Lykourgos took the child in his arms and said to those around him, ‘Men of Sparta, here is a king born unto us!’ So saying, he placed the child in the king’s seat and named him Kharilaus, or ‘Joy of the People.’ All this without a trace of humor or embarrassment, and without a flicker of doubt as to why he behaved as he did or why the queen behaved in the strange way she did. Needless to say (though the story does not report this part), nobody laughed. They were Spartans.”