John Gardner - The Wreckage of Agathon

I don’t know why it is — the muggy heat after yesterday’s rain, or the queasy feeling I always get when I eat too much cabbage, or the way my poor master’s flibbertigibbeting mashes my brains — but I feel more confused, more unreal, more hopeless every day. Again and again it strikes me: This is serious! They’re going to kill us! It’s as clear as a vision, clear as a white duck in a dark-green pool. I turn to Agathon, scared shitless, and he does something crazy — some moron joke, or a bump and a grind — and I’m disoriented, like a man cast out of Time. Have we all been fooled? I wonder. Is he merely insane? He teases the guard unmercifully, like some impudent, fat nine-year-old, and he teases me, teases himself. My mother would be laying plans. Is he doing that, behind a facade of clowning? When someone is driving a cart for my mother, she does everything the driver does, a little ahead of him. Her shoulders go “whoa,” though her hands are folded in her lap; she pulls the team to the left or right with reins invisibly rising from between her locked thumbs. “Zeus helps those that helps theirselves,” my mother says. Who helps those that help Zeus?

Nothing I do can make him admit the seriousness of things. I was sitting at the table, trying to write — Agathon writing across from me — and I said, “Master, what is Lykourgos planning?”

He said, “My boy, let me ask a more significant question. Why are we sitting here writing when we could be gathering beautiful icicles to save up for summer?”

“In Apollo’s name—”

“No no, my boy, I’m in deadly earnest. Why are we writing?”

“Because they give us parchment,” I said.

“And why do they give us parchment? The stuff’s expensive.”

“God only knows.”

The old man deliberated, then shook his head. “No, we must think this out more soberly. Do they read what we write?” I had no answer, so he answered himself. “It seems unlikely, yet every three or four days they come and take what we’ve written. — But do they read it?” he asked himself again, and answered, “Probably not.” The dialogue amused him and he began to throw himself into it, turning his head one way for one voice, the other way for the other, like a rhapsode.

“They will preserve it, for the record?

“Doubtful. Their poetry is oral. They have lost the art of writing music down. Their communism dispenses with the need for public records, so they say. They do not even write down their laws, on Lykourgos’s theory that when laws are written, men abandon the sense for the letter.

“Then why do they give you parchment?

“God only knows. Because I used to be a scribe?”

“You must do better than that.”

“Master,” I said. But he was engaged. He began wagging his finger at himself, lecturing himself pedantically.

“Perhaps they do it for their scornful amusement, using you as they occasionally use the Helots. They seize some Helot in the marketplace and take him to a house and give him wine, and they force him to drink it, like it or not, until he can barely stand. Then they lead him lurching and staggering to the eating hall where all the young Spartans and their older advisers are seated at their tables, brotherhood by brotherhood, and they make the drunken Helot dance and sing and struggle to play the flute. He kicks up his heels and clumsily lifts his filth-smudged, wine-bespattered skirt, showing his crooked, hairy legs, and he blunders into tables where the young men throw pieces of food at him or cover his head with a messy iron pot or reach out to trip him or slyly, as if lovingly, seize hold of his private particulars. They applaud his antics and give him more wine until he vomits and passes out, and then, roaring with scornful laughter like a wolf pack’s growl, they strip him of his clothes and hurl him like a grain sack through the window into the street. The dogs there snarl and bark at him, but the Helot lies still, philosophical as stone. According to Lykourgos, the example of the drunken Helot teaches temperance to Sparta’s young.” He laughed.

“So with you, then. Yes. They take what you write to the eating halls, where they read it aloud to the boys and advisers, who laugh in outrage at your laborious intortions, and answer them in the laconic way Lykourgos has made popular: ‘Wisdom acts. Stupidity labors to explain itself.’ And thus they purge the State of sickly reasoning.

“That’s it, no doubt. Yes. Praised be Apollo!”

His expression became glum.

“The trouble is, you can never know if you’re right or wrong, and until you do you must pull your nose and scratch your ear and ask the question some other way, in a predictably futile but inescapable search for certainty.”

Agathon strongly disagreed. “False! Sir, what is certainty to me? I’m a Seer. Truths move through my mind like fish. I watch them, follow them into the gloom, turn indifferently to nearer fish, tapping my fingertips, marveling at the grace of their fins, and brooding, alarmed, on the emptiness of their eyes.”

He considered this point and became conciliatory.

“Perhaps they give you parchment, Agathon, in hopes that you’ll set down something they can condemn you for — some crime or indiscretion. They read, still as tigers in their dusky rooms, and watch through the dark, rustling ambiage, for some dire phrase to pounce on. A sudden summons then, a hasty trial…

“No! Ridiculous! In Sparta, justice is for Spartans. Especially so in this age of universal war. They’ll waste no trial on me, much less on Peeker. Sooner or later, when he’s sick of making a fool of me, old man Lykourgos will nod his head and noble Agathon will hobble from his cell, joking and leering and impishly aiming the tip of his crutch at the nearest guard’s toes — or will be dragged from his cell, if we tell the truth, screaming and pleading, wringing his fingers, offering bribes, threats, promises, and that will be the end of poor old Agathon’s adventures and ideas.”

I tried to break in, but the other Agathon was quicker.

“Is it possible that they send what you write to Lykourgos?

“What would he care?

“And yet I wonder. He was interested once in all you said. He searched for years for the hiding place of your book.”

He nodded thoughtfully.

“An amusing theory. Old one-eyed Lykourgos sitting black-bearded and heavy as a sack of murdered men’s bones, shriveled small as a lizard’s corpse, waiting, waiting in the temple at Delphi for the god to make up his windy mind, waiting, passing his time with the writings of his half-cracked lifelong critic. Is it possible that even Lykourgos has moments of doubt, so that he can’t resist spying on the meditations of his enemies? Or is there even in him some flicker of the old Akhaian delight in ancient secrets, grand ideas?”

As if only now aware of my presence, Agathon looked at me, lachrymose. “Peeker, my boy, I’ve wasted half the afternoon sitting here with my crutch across my knees and my chin on my fists, brooding for your sake on why they bring us this parchment and take it away as they do our chamber pot when we fill it.” His tone grew more poetic. “The sun is low. Only the icy crests of the bluffs to the east of the river still gleam with Helios’s fire, and in the darkened valley Helot workers are driving goats and cows up from the river through the snowflakes to their barns. I can reach no decision on the parchment business, but I think we can solve the problem. We’ll assume that all the answers are true — that our writings are for the eating halls, that what we write will either condemn us or save us in court, and that the letters all go to Lykourgos. I call this method Calculus.”

I sighed, leaned on my hands.