John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

Alkander hung back, glanced at the crowd. They looked like they’d just remembered they’d missed their lunch.

Lykourgos said again, “Come with me.”

The boy obeyed, looking at the ground, and Lykourgos led him to his house. He made Alkander his personal servant and bodyguard, and in a few weeks Alkander worshiped Lykourgos as he would a god.

Nobody laughed.

I pause for questions and comments. Peeker is asleep.

Ah well, ah well. It’s for my sake I lecture him, not his. When he sits asleep, skinny legs aspraddle, feet sticking out under the far side of the table, beneath where his hands hang (his head is balanced on his square chin like a dancer on the wedge of four square toes), my mind, left to its own devices, falls back, like a boulder returning to earth, to thoughts of my beautiful Tuka, my beautiful Iona. I am a man in the clutch of goddesses. You too would wink and leer, break wind, speak poetry. I have been blinded, deafened by holiness; they have severed the frenum of my tongue as boys slit a crow’s.

But I hardly show it. No trifling comfort. I showed it less in the insouciant days of my onion patch, my peeking through windows, my jug. Yet even now I manufacture distractions: my wonderful weather, my pedagogy, my fond recollections of lunatic converse with kings.

I must wake up Peeker and explain to him that THE WORLD IS A SHRIVELED PUMPKIN.

I’ll tell him tomorrow. Let him rest.

By daylight I have a splendid view. It has, like all views, its drawbacks — chiefly the fact that I view it through a squat Kretan door which, most of the time, is wide open to the elements, or open except for nineteen crude iron bars on an iron frame, so that the north wind strikes me not as Zeus sent it, but sliced. Snow drifts to the legs of my table, then melts, turning my floor to mud. It’s a cell that hasn’t been used in years — hence the absence of the outer door — but the prison’s bursting its seams just now, thanks to the revolutionists’ plots, the Messenian saboteurs, the sickness in the seaports, the general worldwide climate of rapine and destruction. No doubt they thought I’d be indifferent to cold, being a philosopher and a messenger from Apollo. I endure, however. I can sleep, wrapped in my horrible blankets, curled up to the right of the door, my feet near the hearth, where the wind gets me on the rebound, reduced to an irritable turbulence full of dampness and unwholesome smells — my own. Sometimes, though not always, they cover the door for me at night, thanks not so much to their kindness as to my craft. When I came here, two weeks and three days ago, I used to sit by the door every night making marks on the dirt floor or in the drifted snow with my crutch, pretending to plot the positions of the stars. When my jailer glared at me, as if to ask what the devil I was up to, I would merely roll my eyes up, open my hands in wise-old-Athenian despair, and murmur, “It’s going to be soon, my good man, very soon! Look! Ares in the ascendant!” But I wouldn’t tell him what it was that was coming soon, would merely cackle as if with no hope for Sparta. It made him nervous. They don’t believe in knowledge, and their councilors scorn the opinion of the Helots (which I used to promote when I was loose — partly from meanness, partly from conviction) that earthquakes will soon destroy this wicked land. But it made him nervous just the same. Whenever he’s sure no inspectors will come, he puts wide planks in front of my door to block my spying on the stars. I accept it philosophically. I say, “Jailer, dear friend, a man of my years has no time left for grudges. Apollo bless you! I’m his Seer, you know. He does what I tell him. I snap my fingers and he jumps.”

But despite drawbacks, my view is impressive. I look down from my low hill to the beautiful Eurotas River, gray blue and glassy, virtually abandoned at this time of year (a few young idiots swim there at times, proving themselves, as usual, or possibly washing). The snow-covered summits of Mount Taygetos rise to the west of the river, a few Helot huts against their base, sending up threads of smoke to the home of the eagles. On the east side of the valley there are the glittering bluffs where the shrine of Menelaos is, and beyond the bluffs the pale-blue ridges of Mount Parnon. Only a Spartan would leave such a view to mere prisoners and plant his best houses where a civilized man would dig sewage ditches. It’s not, I suspect, that Spartans have no eye for scenery, and not that they’re so stupid as not to know that a fine landscape can pick up a doomed man’s spirits. It’s their stony superiority: they disdain their own inclination toward beauty (“even pigs make aesthetic choices,” Lykourgos claims), and they disdain such paltry sadism as giving a prisoner nothing of interest to look at. As usual, I can think of no revenge. “Such splendor!” I say, wringing my hands and clutching my chest with my inner arms like a man about to faint. I faint. He leans on the bars and frowns (I watch through one eye), then goes away.

I begin to think he is, all things considered, a harmless dog, no more to be feared than, say, Peeker. He’s fierce, dangerous, not to be toyed with, he lets me know by the twist of his eyebrows and mouth; but he’s one of the older ones. Though his face looks only middle-aged, his hair is the color of milkweed pod. I would not play games with Lykourgos’s new generation.

Or would I? I would. I’ve done it a hundred times with my antics as wobbly old arrow of the far-shooter Apollo. Clearly, the urge toward self-destruction in a civilized man is irrepressible. I’ve played my games with Lykourgos himself — never doubting the outcome, which now is upon me. — Or us. I must not forget my faithful Peeker, my footnote, my apistill. Civilization, mother of the arts, implies a failure of healthy imagination. So Lykourgos. Hence his insistence that girls go bare, and that burials, not to mention tortures and executions, take place in the heart of the city, for all to see. Babies look over their mothers’ breasts to watch small boys beat a smaller, weaker companion with iron bars — the coins of the Spartans. Gangs of young thugs, in their war games, knife Helots in the streets, and passersby, wrinkling their noses against the Helot smell, give thoughtful criticism.

My jailer, I suspect, would find knifing me distasteful, though he would do it. Though he never talks to me, naturally, I believe he occasionally listens to me when I teach him things of interest. I never teach him anything true. What little I know of reality I’m saving, in hopes of bribing him with it, when my case gets even more desperate. I told him this morning that in the old days (the days of Theseus and the rest) goats were male, sheep female. This is seditious, actually. It cuts to the heart of Lykourgos’s theory about women, namely, that women are merely a variant sort of men. “In the process of time,” I said, leaning heavily on my crutch and looking skyward thoughtfully, but smiling and smiling to keep his attention, “sheep and goats became separate species.” (Peeker hid his head.) “No one fully understands it, but the evidence is irrefragable. It has to do with our erroneous notions of time and space. We define objects in terms of the shape of space they displace, and we forget that old men are what they are because they’re old. You follow me?” He looked at me, very cross, and I had an inkling that he did not fully understand. “Time is a thing,” I said, and, leaning closer to him: “It bites.”

We still don’t know what the charge is, and the old man’s still done nothing about defending himself. It’s all insane. What’s the matter with him? The ephors aren’t fools. They know his value to the state. Why don’t they talk to us then, come hear our side? Lykourgos is a just man — even righteous, in fact; Agathon says so himself. I keep asking myself, What’s happening? What’s happening? and I kick the walls and pound on my head with my fists, but I know the answer: Nothing’s happening. There’s an execution almost every night, but Agathon just babbles on. The crazy old bastard will let us both be executed and he won’t even lift a damn finger! Who can I get to come listen, give us justice? We’re needed, now more than ever — the endless wars in the north and west, the rumble of revolution all around us.…