John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

He said, “You seem unhappy, Father.”

“Ah, well.” I shrugged. “Not as happy, perhaps, as Tellos, or those fortunate, fortunate brothers Kleobis and Biton.”

“Who?” he said.

“Some idle tale.” (Poor Akhilles, I thought. Dead these six hundred years.)

I did not see Solon while I was in Athens, though he asked after me. I saw Tuka twice, dressed in black, as stern and grieved as Lykourgos and more beautiful than ever. I said, “You look like a shipwreck, Tuka.” She smiled. “Thank you.”

I sat with my daughter Diana on the steps. She said, “You really are wonderfully funny. It must be they keep you as a court clown.”

“Do my kind of humor in Sparta and they bite your thumb,” I said.

She laughed. I wondered if it really was funny or if it was only that she loved me, whatever that meant.

Kleon said soberly, “Stay, Father. For Mother’s sake.”

I shook my head. “It’s not possible.”

“Because of—” He worked at it awhile, looking at his hands.

“No, not because of Iona. I rarely see her, though we’re friends.”

“Why then?”

“You wouldn’t understand.” An evasion. He knew I knew it. “Destiny,” I mumbled.

“What?”

He leaned forward, and this time I shouted it. “Destiny!”

Iona’s boy (grandson), crouched outside the bars, whispered at me, “Don’t shout! If the jailer hears—”

“Destiny,” I said more softly. I knew where I was and yet didn’t know. Time had collapsed on me. Destiny. Destiny. I tried to make out what it meant. Terror came over me, deeper than anything physical, it seemed, and I tried to face it, embrace it, but it wouldn’t come clear. An image of people dying: a faint sound of screams. They were all around me. I see an army moving down from the north. Great God Apollo save…I got up, shaky, and, leaning heavily on my crutch, went over to the cell door to be closer to the night. The image was gone.

The jailer was standing behind the boy. The boy’s eyes moved, following mine — Peeker saw him the same instant — and when the boy saw the jailer he cringed against the bars.

But the jailer didn’t stir. He merely looked at us, and after a while he said hoarsely, “Go away.” The boy inched around him, backed away, then turned with a jerk and ran. When I touched the place on the bars where the jailer had laid his fingers, I received an impression. “You are going to be murdered,” I said. He looked at me. “Don’t doubt me,” I said. “You are going to be murdered.”

When I woke up briefly, sometime an hour or so before dawn, the sky to the north was red orange. The grain storages were burning.

I had chicken for breakfast. It was four hours late. I was too sick to eat it, but I ate it anyway, because I knew it was not my food, it was my jailer’s. He stood stiffly erect, watching me eat, and when I thanked him he did not speak.

“I do you good, jailer,” I said. I made my face unhappy. “But alas, like the world, I’m perishing.”

Agathon is perishing,

But hear my second verse:

If Agathon is perishing,

He still could be worse!

I could be much worse, if I tell the truth. My stomach is in knots, my bowels run pebbled black water, I have a high fever, intermittently, but my mind is sometimes clear. I worked most of the morning on a piece of writing not related to this series of notes, or lamentations, or whatever — a kind of disquisition on jugs, the relationship between jugs and plants and lower animals and men. I filled several parchments, but I seem to have mislaid them. It seemed to me as I wrote that my brain had never been more alert, for all the Civil war of my system. It was perhaps the effect of the powder my physician gave me, a thing that lowers fever and makes the fingertips and toes go quite numb and at times produces a kind of ringing in the ears, not wholly unpleasant. It makes my mind seem detached from my body and nonpartisan, almost spiritual. But whatever the chemistry of the thing, I praise Apollo that my mind is clear again, if only for the moment I wrote, and read part of what I’d written to Peeker and my jailer, and they listened, though each perhaps with only part of his mind. They showed neither approval nor disapproval of my theories. A group of strangers were behind the jailer, peering in.

I said to my jailer at one point, breaking off in the middle of a sentence, “What makes a man like you a Spartan jailer?”

He shook his head, as if that were the least of his questions. “I’m past the age of fighting for my country,” he said.

No doubt he knew I could make that very risible but had decided to bring it out anyway, and so I said nothing. He looked off to the north, where the storage bins still filled the sky with smoke. He shouldn’t be standing here, he knows. The prison is desperately shorthanded. — Iona’s work, unless I miss my guess. But he’s indifferent. He’s given up, like me. Perhaps he has accepted the fact I warned him of, his death. Poor soul, he loves this hellhole of a country. So do I. I will finally admit it. For all its sicknesses it has stumbled to certain virtues. It does not have, like Athens, the cancer of slavery. Even a Helot has more humanity than a slave, as I used to try to tell my wife. She couldn’t see it; arkhon’s daughter, fat-souled with wealth. But then, even Solon couldn’t see it. And so I understood my jailer, I think. I have sometimes stood on a hill in summertime, looking over the miles and miles of blowing wheat and barley this fertile land produces, the deep green pastures — specked with goats and cows and sheep, studded here and there with elm and maple trees — the land parted, as if gently, by wandering streams, and split down the middle by the wide, smooth-as-a- mirror Eurotas with its fishing boats and pleasure boats and its children swimming, splashing each other and laughing. I have gazed at the peaceful old temple to Orthia rising out of the marshy borderland, its white reflection motionless in the water (they have no scourgings there, only prayer and calm; the darker temple of Orthia is hidden in the mountains). And sometimes at night, on a fast horse, I have ridden that countryside alone, my head down close to the horse’s neck, my nostrils flaring to suck in his smell. The still night air would go rushing past my ears and the stars hung motionless, poised to strike, as if not a mile above me. I’d gallop down lanes where the smell of grapes rose from either side like fine perfume, down wide dirt roads that by day would be filled with Helot wagons piled high with cabbages or bundles of cloth, and I’d ride through villages where even the poorest were richer than most of the world. No such abundance leaps out of the earth around Athens. You fight the stony ground with broken knives and get scraggly grain in return, or thistles thick as fenceposts at the base. No wonder horde on horde of invaders has seized this Spartan ground with spears and shovels and temples to propitiate the knocked-down gods. Slaves are slaves, in Athens: the rich stand on the broken heads of the poor, and Solon’s laws are not the laws of nature but a feeble redress. In Sparta they have no need of slaves, they can get along on the semicaptive civilization of the Helots. In times of peace the Helots are even granted their own society, up to a point. What they need in Sparta — Lykourgos is right — is men who can hold off next year’s crop of invaders.

My jailer, whom I have scorned as a fool, is the helpless victim of a dream, an idea. Sparta at peace, wealthy, aloof, invulnerable.

Did he mean this too, looking off to where the storage bins still smolder: the dream is, like any dream, a victim of its history? They came down hungrily out of their mountains and seized the place and made their captives slaves, because slavery was their way, the way of all our cultures for centuries, though in fact they had no need of slaves in Sparta. That changed. The situation evolved. But the anger of the Helots did not die, nor the guilty arrogance of the conquerors. It might have been a magnificent State: a group of workers, a group of defenders, and at the head of it all two kings, not one — just rule tempered by another just ruler. But hate was in Sparta’s history, irrevocable: the diarchy too had its history: two kings, not one, because of the jealousy of ancient houses whose names we no longer remember except in dim, contradictory legends. And so Lykourgos wrested from Apollo the theory of the ephors, the board of wisemen-priests who ruled both kings and commoners. But every man on the board had his history.