Antigone's Wake Page 10

“Yes! Aren’t they fascinating? We were very fortunate to engage his services — almost as fortunate as we were in getting you!”

  Sophocles couldn’t hide his discomfort. He began to speak, stopped, started again.

  “The trouble is — I don’t think they’re doing any good. They won’t knock down the walls, and the way they are being used is — provocative. All they can do is make the Samians more defiant.”

  “So what you are telling me,” Pericles said, “is that you think the engines are being used incorrectly. Is that true?”

  Dexion had heard him use this tactic in the Assembly — confronting dissenters by first repeating their words back to them. At best his opponent’s argument would seem more ridiculous on repetition; at worst it bought Pericles time to compose one of his elegant replies.

  “Not incorrectly. I just don’t see the point of using them when we might pursue other options.”

  “Other options?”

  Pericles sat down on his couch, his smile steady on his face.

  “We might try something … more direct.”

  “Dexion, we have been friends for quite a few years. Regardless of what you may have heard about me, I am always happy to learn better ways of doing things. So when you say, ‘try something different,’ I’m intrigued.”

  “Wouldn’t it be better — ” Sophocles began.

  “What I won’t do, though,” the other interrupted, “is take needless risks. What we all need to accept is that this is not the kind of war our fathers would have approved. We are not two armies here for an afternoon, in search of a piece of level ground to settle our differences. The Ionians have repudiated the honorable course by hiding behind their walls. I tell you, in fact, that they are dogs, every last one. Ask the Milesians who washed up naked on the beach at Lade after the Samians betrayed them! Ask the Great King, who feared the same at Mycale! Collectively, they are not worth the life of a single Athenian shieldman.”

  “If this Artemon is as clever as you say, maybe he can devise some advantage for us. I have heard of turtled battering rams, for instance.”

  Pericles’ smile faded as he spoke; talk of “turtled battering rams” seemed to strike him as not only naive, but tasteless.

  “Such devices might help break a weaker city. But Polycrates built better than that,” he replied. His tone was still genial, but with a didactic edge. “If you have any other suggestions that will put us inside the city without resulting in many dead Athenians, I would be glad to hear of it.”

  As an artist in words, Dexion had few peers in his city. But as a debater he was no better than average for an Athenian — still less so when it came to military matters, in which he had little confidence.

  “No, far be it for me to suggest that.”

  Pericles rose, put an arm around the poet. “If I had to predict, I would say all of us will feel as you do sometime in this campaign. You only feel it first because you are the best of us. That you have been put in this position, dear friend, I am deeply sorry. I think you must know that by now — ”

  Sophocles felt a disgusted languor come over him. Was Pericles admitting he connived in the poet’s dalliance with Aspasia?

  “ — but I insist that you may best serve Athens by finishing your play. Don’t let yourself be distracted by matters that are beneath you. And if we are all fortunate, you will present Antigone and Polyneices for us at the Dionysia next year!”

  The poet left knowing that he had been out-argued before he had even opened his mouth. The thought cast a cloud over him; had he been a fool, pretending to be a general while all the real decisions were out of his hands? Nais had said it — if he wanted to follow Aeschylus’ military success he should have picked up a shield and served in the line. Perhaps Sophocles, best acquainted of all of the tragic consequences of hubris, was guilty of pride after all.

  And yet … who were his colleagues in the generalship, that they deserved the honor better than him? What great battles had Lampides, Callisthenes or Xenophon won? Who were Cleitophon and Glaucon but well-connected nobodies, having accomplished not a fraction of what Dexion had for Athens? Why should the likes of them reap the honors, while poets like himself wring their hands and wonder if they were worthy?

  On his way back to his tent he passed the remains of a Samian village. Like all the settlements in the vicinity of the walls, it had been abandoned and burned before the Athenians arrived. But there was suddenly new life between the charred debris: having cobbled together useable plows out of sabotaged equipment, the Athenians were tilling the fields for sowing. To reap any crops they planted there would take months; Pericles, it appeared, was preparing for a very long wait.

  Dexion made one detour on the way back, to the makeshift armory east of his camp. The line-weapons of the hoplites in his squadron were kept there: eighty dogwood spears, propped against a rude wooden stand with butt-spikes planted in the ground. The two guards on duty roused from their bored stupor, startled by the arrival of their general. But this was no surprise inspection. Instead, Dexion strode to the nearest spear and, with grave deliberateness, grasped the iron tip with his right hand.

  It was the closest piece of metal he could find. Pericles had probably been sincere in flattering the poet and his worth to the city, but no prudent man would risk taking such an outburst of praise without taking precautions.

  *

  When he missed his wife, the feeling was as precious to him as artistic inspiration. Nais hadn’t made such sentiments easy in recent years. Often she seemed actively to discourage it, telling him not to write her any “lover’s twaddle” when he went on trips, or making little answer to the short testaments of matrimonial passion he did indulge. She professed to have no need for the physical act anymore. Yet there it was, as reliable as the apple blossoms in spring, whenever he crossed the borders of Attica — the aching absence of her, like the turning of a note in a song he recalled once broke his heart, but could no longer hear in his head.

  He met her long after he had achieved fame for his dancing and his harp-playing, and his stylus was just beginning to outshine Aeschylus’. He wasn’t “Dexion” yet, but he was the toast of both sexes. Servants of famous courtesans would approach him after performances, offering locks of hair clipped from undisclosed places, while five-hundred-bushel men came with propositions, dangling pretty slaves as bait. Elite athletes came offering commissions for odes celebrating exploits they hadn’t yet achieved.

  What, then, was a young man of sizeable appetites to do, with a city full of temptations and nothing more than a blank tablet waiting by his bedside? He took the best offers. He drank his share of the wine. Then he went home, feeling vaguely let down, and faced down his blank tablet anyway.

  On the fateful day he was going to the market along one of the back lanes of Colonus. He’d used these alleys since his boyhood to deliver messages to his father’s clients. In recent times their narrow confines and darkness, with the pavement invisible from the overhanging balconies above, helped him avoid the curious eyes of his public. He knew them better than any other place in the city. Yet as he approached one of the less appealing houses on the already unsavory street, he collided with a door that was suddenly thrust into the thoroughfare.

  “Don’t you knock first?” he complained, rubbing his nose. He saw no offender standing there, but felt something pass between his legs: the door had been pushed aside by a small, speckled sow. Looking after her, the poet saw her kinked tail waggle as she passed in headlong flight.

  “Don’t just stand there!” a deep-pitched female voice said from within. “Catch him!”

  “Madam, if you think this is somehow my fault — ” he began, but was brought up short as a singular vision stepped into the light.

  Her voice notwithstanding, this was no ‘madam’ but a young woman: a thin figure with gangling extremities and shocks of midnight straying from the linen wrap that covered her head. In one of her oversized hands she held a butcher’s cleaver; the blood from pr
evious efforts soaked both arms up to the creases of her elbows. Other colors — a bilious black, intestinal green — daubed the pillow of material around her waist where she had gathered up her tunic for work. This, in turn, exposed knees that were positively boyish in their chapped, scrapped, and soiled perfection.

  The girl was not beautiful in any way that could be fixed on the marriage or sex markets. Her blood-spattered vitality lent her an allure as elemental as Kore’s, while the intelligence that flashed in her eyes gave her all the mannish intensity of the young Athena. When she opened her mouth, her voice was like a blacksmith’s after a workday of breathing smoke.

  Within a moment of glimpsing her, he knew he must have her.

  “Young woman,” he said after gathering himself to orchestra height, “do you know to whom you are speaking?”

  “I am speaking to the man who is letting my father’s dinner get away,” she replied.

  Though it pricked his pride, he was glad of her ignorance of him. Few Athenian bachelors, even those who staged plays, respected women who frequented the theatre. His pride smarted worse when she leaned toward him with a flirty gleam in her eye, grasped the handle, and closed the door in his face.

  A few minutes later he knocked again. She opened up quickly, as if she had been waiting for him. Mirth brushed the edges of her lips as she looked down at the sow in his arms; frightened by its capture, the porker let loose a stream of loose stool against Sophocles’ bare leg.

  “Your father may have his dinner back,” said the poet, “if he agrees to speak with me about his daughter.”

  One thick eyebrow shot up. “Then you might as well know my name is Nais. His other daughter is married.”

  He started to follow her inside, until she turned again.

  “What are you doing?”

  Sophocles glanced at his soiled leg. “Yes, I suppose I should come back when I’m more presentable.”

  “Not too bright are you?” she smiled. “I mean get rid of that pig — you caught the wrong one.”

  Chapter V

  THE SANCTUARY

  “Now he is true no more to the promptings of his inbred nature, but dwells with alien thoughts.”

  — Chorus, Ajax, 1. 614

  *

  ANTIGONE: So you come to me again, dear maker, when your comrades are either asleep, or stand the watch before the walls of your enemies. It must be a powerful disquiet that drives you from your tent of honor, here to this beach, to speak with a mere girl.

  DEXION: A mere girl you may be, but it is manly freight that you bear.

  ANTIGONE: See me lying here, O adept of the Muses, and tell me that I weigh more upon the earth than I should. Is my waist not slim? Do my eyes not shine with youth’s steady fire? Are my loins clad for motherhood, or are they as unswelled as they appear, wetted by the goddess of sea-foam? Mount me, and will I not transport you?

  DEXION: It is well for you to toy with words as you toy with me.

  ANTIGONE: Subtle is the curse of the goddess Envy, that she may convince the most fortunate that they are miserable! For when have you known a day of trouble in your life, Dexion? You are the most esteemed of poets in your city. You are heaped with honors, and great men tell their wives to give their backs to you. And yet here you are, sickly with womanish doubt! How else must Athens show her esteem for you?

  DEXION: Too true — I made a mistake coming here. For when have I come to women for consolation, and received anything but scorn?

  ANTIGONE: A field sown with nothing yields nothing.

  DEXION: So you are girlish after all, because you speak nonsense.

  ANTIGONE: Is it nonsense, O master, to recite the indisciminate roll of the whores you have slept with, instead of making more sons for Athens? Phyrne of Piraeus, Nysa the Ethiopian, Arete the One-Eye, Aspasia of Miletus, the cooze with the tattoeed eyelids behind the grave of Sikelos, that Thracian you did on a bet, Tlepolemus the actor —

  DEXION: What of it? Who pines for his wife after twenty years of marriage? Indict me for whoring, and you indict half the men of Athens!

  ANTIGONE: Not half the men of Athens — only the men of Athens who mope about, pining for their women to console them.

  DEXION: I pray the gods you will soon be made silent.

  ANTIGONE: So much the worse for you, to whom I speak the truth!

  *

  As Pericles predicted, reinforcements arrived the next morning. Thirty more triremes were beached, and ten transports laden with heavy troops and supplies. This swelled the besieging contingent on the island beyond fifteen thousand — more than any army fielded by Athens in some time, the newcomers were dispersed among the units of the eight generals surrounding the city. If the gods looked down on the scene, they would have been hard pressed to say which was more menacing — Polycrates’ wall, solid and frowning, or Pericles’ siege line, encircling the city like a coiled dragon, bristling and restless as it spewed forth its haze of campfires.

  Not all the Samians were inside the city. As Athenian scouts explored the island, they found scores of small farms and villages functioning as if the war was happening across the sea. Fishing boats departed the north coast villages every morning, their masters perched high on their raked gunnels. Overnight huts, built of thatch and protected by the paint-daubed skulls of wild animals, were found in the forest. In the high pastures, tiny figures were glimpsed tending their flocks; when the wind was right, Dexion could lie in his tent and listen to the tinkling of goat bells. Pericles saw these common folk as allies of the Athenians, naturally opposed to the rich oligarchs of the city, and so ordered his troops to leave them alone. There would be time enough after the victory to bring their patriarchs down to take their places in the new democracy.

  It would take more than a war to force the natives to abandon the great Temple of Hera. The sanctuary lay four miles from the town, at the end of a straight causeway of beaten earth. It was sacred because the wife of Zeus was born there, and in the dry months, with the air sweetened by flowering willows and blossoms growing on the banks of the Imbrasos, it seemed a fitting place to consecrate to the goddess. For most of the year, though, the sanctuary was a stinking, bug-infested swamp, requiring constant upkeep to prevent the buildings and votives from sinking away into the morass. Indeed, the custodians of the Temple were the first of the Samians to approach Pericles, demanding that the Athenians take up the maintenance disrupted by the invasion. This he declined, blaming the Samian oligarchs for any neglect. He did, however, forbid the Athenians to interfere in any way with the business of the sanctuary.

  Sophocles visited the temple one day when the temperature soared and he could no longer bear to stare at the city’s blank walls. High summer had arrived, with breezeless days that made the world seem to flutter with the heat rising from the pebbly ground. As he approached the sanctuary, he saw what he took to be the mirage of a giant towering over the Sacred Way. Coming closer, he saw that the apparition was real — a massive, archaic figure of a boy in cream-colored marble, his arms locked at his sides, left leg set slightly forward, lips cocked in a mirthless smile. He was five times higher than a man. Beyond him was another fellow of similar proportions, and the image of a woman in a skin-clinging chiton, locks of chiseled hair spread over her shoulders, topped by a bluntly columnar headdress. As he approached the gate to the sanctuary, the votives became so thick on the ground they could not escape their neighbors’ shadows. At no other holy place he had visited — the Acropolis mount, Eleusis, the seat of Loxias at Delphi — had he seen so many bombastic, oversized offerings.

  The spectacle culminated in the sanctuary. The Temple, on which the Samians had been working for a hundred years, reared like a red-tiled mountain. The degree of its completion depended on the angle from which it was seen: from the open-air altar directly in front, a marble forest of columns loomed, their shafts dressed and gilded with azure and vermilion; from the side, half a dozen columns had yet to be erected, and a section of the roof gaped, half-ribbed. Ar
ound the temple stood more expensive dedications: treasuries donated by the rich families of Samos, statues of bronze, a whole samaena hauled from the water and mounted, toy-like, in a great marble cradle.

  Between them traipsed the birds from India sacred to Hera. These dragged their tapered tails around until, for whatever reasons moved them, they unfurled them like great, particolored sails, studded with hundreds of feathery eyes. The air of purposeful exoticism was completed by a strange fragrance that filled the place — an overflow of sickly sweetness, as if from geraniums the size of palm trees. The effect overall was of conspicuous excess, with everything designed to be the richest, the shiniest, and above all, the biggest.

  The Sacred Way was empty of city pilgrims, but the country folk continued to come in from every direction. They bore those modest offerings for the goddess simple people could afford: wives brought rude cakes of nuts and honey; husbands, sheep and fowl; brides, the dolls and baubles of their girlhood. Sophocles sat on a rock near the great altar and watched a peasant try to lead a young bull through the gate. Spooked, the bull dug in its forelegs, jerking its head back as his master whipped its nose.

  The poet was engrossed in the struggle until a voice startled him.

  “Is this the famous Dexion, here to honor the goddess?”

  He turned. A gray-haired man stood there. The mass of his well-fed belly swelled his black chiton; his fingers were dripping with jewels, and his skin shone pale in the sunlight, as if he had spent most of his life indoors, at some counting desk.

  “You know who I am?”

  “Of course! There are Samians who travel to the Dionysia every year. I myself have gone on two occasions.”

  Sophocles was facing one of the magistrates of the sanctuary. Such men were usually scions of the leading aristocratic families — just the sort who would have the time and money to journey to Athens for the festival. He was the first live Ionian Dexion had conversed with since his arrival.