John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

He told me a story once. I didn’t believe it at the time — I thought he made it up to convince me that he really used to have the famous book — but I’m not sure now. It could be true.

There was an empty crypt in the graveyard next to the shrine of Poseidon — a very old crypt that he learned about from a man in Korinth. The bodies had been removed a long time ago, maybe a hundred years or more, and the door had been sealed. But the crypt had a secret entrance, the man in Korinth told him, a large movable stone half buried in vines, and when Agathon went to look where the man said the entrance was, he found it. The crypt was the perfect place to hide the book. So night after night Agathon would sneak out to the graveyard, taking a few scrolls at a time and ducking from tombstone to tombstone and tree to tree till he reached the crypt, and at last, after weeks of this, his treasure was hidden. He could go there when he pleased and close the secret door behind him, and he could read with no crack of light showing until the air became too thin to breathe; then he’d blow out the lamps and open the secret door until morning and then close it and steal away home to bed before anyone was up. Not a soul in all Sparta knew about the place, not even his wife.

Then came the revolution. He had friends that were up to their ears in it, especially the woman he keeps prattling about, Iona. (I saw her twice: small, shrunken, rolling-eyed as a wolf. The grass wherever she touches it turns to dust. It may be true that she was beautiful once. You might even say that she’s beautiful now, if you like your beauties old as Time, and violent, and crazy.) One night she and her husband and their people burned up the hall of ephors. By morning it was nothing but stone walls and window holes. (They’ve rebuilt it since, though not the way it was before. It used to be carved columns, beautiful hangings, statues, the works. The inner supports are now planed timbers, and the only decoration, if you can call it that, is Poseidon’s iron trident. Statues encourage hero cults, Lykourgos says.)

Anyway, someone saw them and recognized one or two Helot faces. So the Civic Guard was after them, and Iona, or else Dorkis, one of them, went to Agathon. She knew he had some secret hiding place for his book. He’d bragged about having one, no doubt. They put on pressure. (Iona, it must have been. Both of them must have known that sooner or later, even when the book was involved, he’d succumb to her.) And at last poor miserable Agathon showed them the secret entrance and the revolutionists — all but the leaders: Dorkis, Iona, and one or two others — went in. They bored air holes and closed the entrance behind them. No one knows for sure what happened then. Some Spartan saw them going in, or some informer revealed their hiding place. Within hours the Civic Guard had cracked open the front door and thrown in oil and lit it. Those who tried to escape by the secret entrance or the open front door were struck down like pigs at a slaughterhouse; those who didn’t flee died in the fire. The Guard waited until it was certain that no one had survived, then left. Until then, the Helot crowd watching could do nothing. But as soon as the Guard left, the crowd rushed to the smoldering crypt to see the horror and reclaim their dead.

Agathon was one of the first. No one noticed, in the beginning, what he was doing. While the others were dragging out bodies, hunting in the maniacal way people will at such times for some sign of life, and grieving when they found none — old men tearing their clothes and hair, women beating the ground, screaming — Agathon was rescuing the charred remains of his scrolls of dead knowledge, hurriedly stepping over bodies, as indifferently as he’d have stepped over stones, snatching up the parchment husks and running with them, weeping and moaning, to the torchlight where the others were examining their dead. Cruelly, like a sow driving through children to her litter, he pushed past mourners, trampled dead men’s outstretched hands, till he came to the center of the torch’s influence and threw himself on the ground to peel blackened page from blackened page, searching for some remaining scribble. He would howl, finding nothing, and would tear out locks of his hair and beard; then, with a wild look, remembering the crypt, he would charge back through the mourning crowd, indifferent to their lives and sorrows as a battering ram, and would search the blackened room again. Long after he knew there was nothing there he kept returning to the place, searching and whimpering like a bitch who’s lost her pups.

They saw it, at last: separated their grief from his and reacted like a single heart to the outrage. It was the women first. Some woman, pushed over as Agathon ran past, looked up from the corpse she futilely soothed, and saw, and understood, and screamed. They seized him by the hair and clothes, pulled him to the ground, began beating him and scratching at his face. Then the men and children understood and started kicking him and throwing sticks and stones. They would have killed him except for Dorkis, his friend.

He appeared out of nowhere, as if shot down by lightning, shielding Agathon’s body with his own and howling, “Wait!” In the dim light no one recognized him. He caught stones as they came and hurled them back, snatching up stones from the ground with his free hand. “Wait!” he kept yelling, hurling stones with the aim of an infantryman. Whether his barrage checked them, or whether they finally recognized him, Agathon couldn’t say, telling me the story. They paused, anyway, and Dorkis rose to a crouch. “What’s the matter with you people?” he yelled. The women told him, sobbing, all of them speaking at once. (Agathon got this all at second hand. He was out cold. They’d fractured his skull.) Who knows whether Dorkis understood their jumbled noise or simply knew, knowing his friend? “Go away!” he said. “You have no idea how this man loved his book. You’re fools! Idiots! Go away! Mourn your corpses!”

They were swayed, or shamed. Who knows? They backed away, and then Iona was there, and the other leaders, and they began the process of carrying away the dead. Dorkis threw Agathon over his shoulders and carried him the mile and a half to Dorkis’s and Iona’s house. Dorkis worked on him all that night and all the following day — Agathon remained unconscious — joining broken bones, forcing in the mysterious Asiatic medicines he’d learned in his father’s house in Hydrea. For six days Agathon remained a breathing corpse. When he awakened Dorkis was sitting above him, upright, unsupported by his chair but fast asleep. Agathon asked for water, and Dorkis was awake in an instant.

It was months later — a week before Dorkis was executed — that Dorkis said to him, almost pityingly, as Agathon tells it, “You care more for knowledge than for people.”

“No,” Agathon said.

Dorkis smiled. It was a terrible smile, as Agathon reports it Dorkis was blind, at this time, and he’d been beaten till he was a mass of raw meat. “Don’t fret” be said. “I haven’t said I don’t love you for it.”

— Something has dawned on me. Agathon’s friend Dorkis was the man the revolutionists called Snake — the man I saw die. The mutilation, the blindness. Yes. He died like a god. Inexpressible. When the Spartans killed him, they killed him at the first blow — an extraordinary mark of respect.

Everything I think is confusion! Crazy old Agathon’s best friend in Sparta was Snake! They called him “The Mind of the Revolution.” Famous for his wisdom, his gentleness in private life, his deadly efficiency — until the time of his great mistake, the night he showed up with the sympathizers at the crypt. They had evidence before that. Documents. But no one believed, no one could connect him with the revolution. Then why? Why throw away his safety for Agathon? If he was wise, as everyone says he was, he must have known Agathon’s thing for his wife. And he must have known that Agathon would never do the same for him.