Antigone's Wake Page 15

  When at last he understood what he was hearing, he shot to his feet and went straight to Pericles.

  This happened to be in the middle of the night. Pericles didn’t summon him inside but came out to meet him. With his white bedclothes wrapped around his lank form, and the reflection of the full moon gleaming from his shiny head, the Olympian resembled nothing other than an enormous wax candle.

  “What is it, Dexion?” he asked, making obvious the liberality of his patience.

  “I can hear the sound of the city suffering,” Sophocles said.

  “What?”

  “The Samians have no water.”

  Pericles gave him a long look as if to ferret out the joke. But when Dexion stared back without a hint of humor, he reached out to squeeze the poet’s arm.

  “That can’t be. The water’s been shut off only a few days, and I’m certain they stockpiled food when they heard we were coming. Would that you were right, my friend!”

  But Sophocles was right. Cities were like people — they could try to put a brave face on adversity, striking a resolute silence, but sooner or later their desperation showed in other ways. A starving man might be defiant, but he couldn’t stop the involuntary murmuring of his stomach. In a city under siege, when the mass of young or sick or weak of mind swelled beyond a certain number, the expression of their despair could no longer be hidden. It must burst forth at last, rising and merging and spilling over the walls.

  “I know you have no reason to trust my judgment in these things,” he told Pericles. “But mark my words on this. This war doesn’t have much farther to go.”

  *

  “Do they mean to insult us?” Pericles asked after Sophocles reported Callinus’ peace offer. “Or more to the point, do we mean to insult our honored dead by accepting such a proposal?”

  The assembled generals looked around, measuring the depth of zeal they were prepared to display.

  “Never!” cried Menippus.

  Said Creon of Scambonidas, “They spit in our faces.”

  “Of course, no,” Glaucon agreed.

  “When I took up my father’s shield,” said Callisthenes, “I swore I would die before bringing disrepute on those arms.”

  Glauketes was contented simply to declare, “I trust Pericles.”

  “They have transgressed the gods and we are the instrument of their punishment,” said Androcides.

  “The arms of Athens humble the proud,” Lampides agreed.

  “Unacceptable,” pronounced Xenophon.

  “It would be a terrible precedent,” Cleitophon observed, “for the Athenians to cut and run now.”

  “We fight on,” said Anagyprasian Socrates.

  Dexion meant to cast his vote earlier, but was beaten to it by all the others. Now everyone was looking to him.

  “The messenger should not be obliged to judge the message. But if you press me, I would say the issue is moot. The Ionians have no water.”

  “I will not judge Dexion’s ear for such things,” said Pericles. “It is for greater powers than us to dispense such mercies. In any case, the council has made its decision.”

  Pericles punctuated the council’s “no” with another round of nocturnal bombardment from the shieldbreakers. In truth, no one could have expected anything but a refusal — this Callinus was a stiff-necked fellow, provocative even when he meant to raise a hand. Yet Sophocles found himself negotiating with the gods as the machines rattled into the night, offering to dedicate any masterworks to come to Apollo, Artemis, father Zeus. He entreated Helios to burn up the Samians’ water faster. He begged Hermes to put one of Artemon’s bolts through the chest of Callinus. What a simple antidote that would be to their collective curse!

  The Ionians made their response the next morning. Just after the sun broke over Mount Mycale, a party of ten Samian shieldmen appeared on the walls opposite Pericles’ tent. They brought with them half a dozen Athenian prisoners, naked and bound, and a smoking brazier. The handles of metal tools hung over the side of the brazier, their business ends roasting over the coals. Curious, some of Pericles’ men came closer to see. This time, no archers rose to drive them back; Callinus wanted his enemy to have a good view of what happened next.

  A Samian picked up one of metal implements. From a distance all could see the end of the tool glowed hot — it appeared to be some kind of cattle-brand. As the first Athenian prisoner was forced to his knees, the Samian approached him with the iron. The prisoner struggled as his captors held him down. The brand was centered against his forehead, and the man screamed as the metal sank into his skin. His tormentor held it there a good long time, driving it deep as if he meant to disfigure him down to the very bone. Those who witnessed the sickening act remembered seeing the little puff of gray smoke, accompanied by the wet hiss of molten iron quenched by the prisoner’s flesh. The display was repeated five more times that morning.

  When they were finished, the Samians pushed the prisoners back out of sight and tossed the iron from the wall. Pericles had it retrieved. The design of the brand was a wide-eyed, recumbent owl, patterned after the emblem on the Athenian tetradrachm. Dexion wondered whether it was just dumb spite, to torment Athenians with the symbol of their own city. Or did the Ionians have in mind a more trenchant comment on Athenian avarice — rendering them, in effect, into versions of their own currency?

  The distinction scarcely mattered as the Athenian camp ignited. Soldiers with swords went around looking for Samian prisoners to torture, but there were none. Instead, a mob gathered in front of Pericles’ tent, demanding the outrage be avenged by taking the city immediately. The Olympian, knowing full well that he must seem attentive to the people, came out and attended to what they had to say. And he stood for hours more, facing every speaker, keeping his mouth shut as the crowd’s rage was spent on everything that had frustrated them since they’d arrived: Samian arrogance, slow food shipments, frigid nights, trench duty, gnats, generals who expect too much, generals who expect nothing, holes in tents, bad wine, blockade duty, ungracious villagers, infrequent mail, no decent market, no blankets, no hunting, no women, no end in sight.

  “Pericles, you know there’s nothing we won’t do for you!” cried one fellow who seemed to have experience speaking in the Pnyx. “Give the order, and we will tear down their walls stone by stone! Say anything, but don’t let this farce go on another day! Have mercy on us — let us kill and die like men, not waiting here like dogs!”

  The great man nodded as if he had taken all of this to heart. Then he replied, “Make no mistake. I hear you, dear citizens. And believe me, if there was any other way, I would oblige! But even if you could convince me to sacrifice your lives, you could never make a hundred dead enemies worth a single one of you. Nor would I make another generation of needless widows. That is something no command can change!

  “But there is one thing you can tell me,” he said, his eyes half-lidded now, his tone shifting from the declamatory to the seductive. “I may be wrong, but are there not a few prisoners from the enemy ships being kept on Tragia? I wonder what they’re doing right now. Lounging on the beach, perhaps? I wonder what they’d say if they were brought here, to bear witness to the savagery of their countrymen! Wouldn’t that be something to see?”

  He didn’t have to repeat the suggestion. A ship was sent to fetch the Ionian sailors that very day. Meanwhile, Athenian ingenuity was set to the task of fashioning some suitably humiliating cattle brand for them. Dexion saw the candidates in a pile before Pericles’ tent — among them, a sigma for Samos, an alpha for Athens, a cartoon of a vagina that could have been the evil eye turned sideways. The consensus went at last for a shape that was much like a pig’s snout seen in profile, meant to suggest the distinctive rams of the Ionian samaenas. In this way many of the craftsmen who had worked on Pericles’ splendid monuments occupied their time, devising better ways to degrade the enemy.

  Dexion and Poristes didn’t watch the show put on by the Athenians that night. Instead, they
sat on the hill overlooking the strait, sharing a wineskin. Alas, the screams of the victims — all thirty of them — were impossible to miss as they rose over the camp.

  The captain opened a fold in his cloak and spat in it. “What have the Athenians become, that they do such things?” he asked. “Are we Persians?”

  “I think the Great King would have had that wall down already, if it cost him ten thousand lives.”

  Poristes raised his right arm. “Then hail all-powerful Artaxerxes in his crooked hat! His father may have failed to enslave the Greeks, but Greek freedom will finish the job in the time of the son.”

  Laughing, Dexion asked “Fool, do you know what you’re saying?”

  “Too well at this time of night. Now pass the skin! And there’d better be more in there than lees and spit!”

  *

  The spectacle of Greeks disfiguring each other should have disgusted Dexion. Under normal circumstances, he would have resisted it any way he could — if not by arguments in council, then with verses scratched in secret. To be sure, he was saddened, and disappointed that the brotherhood of Athenians and Ionians had fallen to such squalor. He was worried that the ill-feeling between them would never be overcome. But he was not disgusted.

  In place of Poristes’ moralism, or Pericles’ resolve, he was instead strangely exhilarated. Now that is was clear he had little influence on events, he surrendered to the feeling that had lurked beneath the surface of his fear. The war was, in fact, such a unique eruption of awfulness into Greek affairs that it seemed as if he was watching a tragedy, just when he had convinced himself that men could not be more stupid, History — the governing technician — proved otherwise. In the face of deliberate starvation, mutilation, and shieldbreakers, what license could he deny himself in art? He felt a whole world of improbability was fair game now. The prospect made him tremble; in the face of what he might accomplish, he felt awe.

  Polyneices and Antigone almost began to write itself. Innovations, such as a split chorus and exchanges of masks between characters, seemed possible, even inevitable. He contemplated putting things before the audience — such as a kiss, or a violent death — that had never been staged before. As he took dictation, Bulos’ face showed the disapproval he thought befitted such vanities; instead of thrashing him, Dexion inwardly took satisfaction in knowing that his vindication was certain. Yes, some of his countrymen would resist change as they always had. But after hearing what happened at Samos, what Athenian could deny that a new day had dawned in the life of his city? What was impossible now?

  This perverse thrill was marred by only one thing. Since the first two letters had arrived from Photia and Nais, he had heard nothing more from home. When he needed time to order his hurtling thoughts, or when Bulos’ arm needed a rest from composing, Sophocles would go down to the beach to meet the supply ships.

  These were round-bottomed merchantmen too heavy to be run onto the sand. Instead, they anchored some distance offshore and unloaded their cargo onto barges. Standing there in his general’s cloak, he would be among the first to help the shieldmen haul these boats from the surf. Delighted by the sight of a general getting his hands dirty, the Athenians would demand the mail pouch right away, searching for Dexion’s letters even before their own. When there were none, the whole crew was disappointed.

  It was on one of these trips that he caught sight of the Antigone. She parked well up the strand with her hull canted for scraping. In this way she looked at him somewhat cock-eyed, as if tilting her head in mid-question. When she spoke this time, it was in Aspasia’s voice:

  ANTIGONE: And so you are here again, to look on your handiwork! On what occasion do you risk exposure, Sophocles?

  DEXION: My handiwork? Aside from an imprudent creation of a certain character, for what do you blame me now?

  ANTIGONE: Why, everything! Look at how these men respect you, a mere poet. You have succeeded in your ambition, for not even Aeschylus was so loved by his shieldmates. Yet what a price you have paid! How profligate you’ve been with the blood of fellow Greeks!

  DEXION: I indulge in nothing but foolishness, in listening to you.

  ANTIGONE: Hypocrite! You wrote my story — you know what it is to stand up to power. Are you so enamored of glory that you’ll see the Athenians disgraced? Why do you remain silent when Pericles tempts disaster?

  DEXION: I don’t know what you are talking about.

  ANTIGONE: You deceive yourself, while a higher law is transgressed. The warnings were plain — didn’t you see the eclipse? While the Athenians congratulate their ingenuity, and strike vain poses, the goddess grows angry. Not even the king of Olympus would willingly invite the wrath of Hera! What will save the Athenians when she strikes? Yet there you stand, knowing full well the disaster you must meet, thinking only of your own affairs. Self-deceiver! For what has all your art been, if not to raise your voice now? Or was it all for another purpose — to serve your vanity?

  Dexion rolled over in his cot. The moonlight shining through the tent fabric rendered the wall as luminous as a pan of milk. The camp seemed quiet around him, but the silence was strained, like a bowstring about to snap. Under the murmur of the evening breeze, there was a clicking sound as a shieldbreaker crew wound the firing mechanism.

  DEXION: There was a time, tormentor, that your words carried weight with me. You’ve caused me much pain, cost me many nights’ rest. But you should know now that your time is past — that your arguments make no more impression than raindrops on Polycrates’ walls.

  ANTIGONE: You are Aeschylus’ superior in this at least: the way you mix flattery and untruth gives your deceit a pleasant odor.

  DEXION: Go again to Pericles with my objections, you say. But why? If we offend, isn’t this the cost of power? Remember the play, when the Chorus sang, “And through the future, near and far, as through the past, shall this law hold good: nothing that is vast enters into the life of mortals without a curse.” Athens is great at last, and befitting her will be her glory and her punishment. It is not for a mere poet to foil her proper fate.

  ANTIGONE: Take care, O Sophocles, that you take to heart your own words!

  DEXION: I do nothing else. It is not for us to apply our timid judgment in such cases. Great in their time were the sons of Zeus and Peleus, yet Heracles put on his poisoned cloak in the end, and Achilles meet his arrow. Today no single mortal can match their glory, but cities of men can. Athens has been chosen for eternal fame — as long as men exist, they will remember her like an old man cherishes the memory of his youth. Yet for that honor her men are doomed to die, her walls cast down, her power humbled. It is a fate I can see now as clearly as the end of this war.

  ANTIGONE: I see you have changed, poet, for you espouse the foolishness of Creon. But be warned: ruined walls and dead men are not the only curses reserved for you. For this arrogance, this presumption to see clearly what is not for mortals to see, you will suffer special torment.

  DEXION: Still trying to turn my head, are you? Be gone now, witch! You have no more power over me. And if you speak to me in the future, I’ll give your words no more thought than I give the wind.

  With that, the Aspasian Antigone fell silent. The canted ship was, once again, just a ship, and Dexion never heard the doomed princess speak to him again.

  5.

  The soldiers on the hillsides were spread in every position idleness could devise. Some, off-watch, slept in midday, hunkering in the shelter of hills and shepherds’ walls to escape the autumn winds. Lying there, they looked like casualties of some rout, deposited where their pursuers had caught them, until they twitched, reaching into the recesses of their tunics to scratch the welts made by the bugs that infected every crotch in the camp. Some literally buried themselves in dirt to escape this torture: they had their line-mates pile on their bodies the rich Samian loam, which had the added advantage of being as soft and warm as woolen blankets. After this treatment only the heads of the buried sleepers stuck out, with round river-cobb
les for pillows.

  Other men sat hunched beneath their overcloaks, sets of knucklebones or clay dice between them, or making wagers on the first ant to escape a circle they had drawn in the dirt. The long, cold, dull days inspired much experimentation with the cook-fires. An increasing variety of birds, rodents and lizards were prepared and sampled, often with novel dressings (roast agama with wild mustard, acorn, and evaporated sea-salt, anyone?) These men would look up as Dexion approached, their boredom relieved by momentary curiosity as he asked, “Has anyone seen Iophon of Colonus?”

  None had. Diversion over, the men’s eyes would vanish behind clouds as the poet general passed them by. Did any army on the cusp of victory ever seem so dispirited?

  After the first try he saw it was useless to send his servant to find his son. Bulos was loathe to ask around, afraid that the soldiers would take their boredom out on dainty slaves. As unreasoning fears went, this one had some justification: with women in such short supply, abuse of slaves was rampant in the camp. Not even the property of aristocrats was safe. Slaves now went in groups to the stream for water, and nobody sent them out at night for anything less than dire reasons.

  Sophocles scoured every corner of the camp for the full distance all around the city walls. He stuck his head into tents hosting day-long drinking parties; he asked around the spear-sharpening circles held by those who imagined they were hardcore killers; he went out to the latrine ditches where, amid a stench so powerful it made him faint, the thetes toasted each other with vinegar. Iophon had always been elusive, but Dexion imagined that, with persistence, he would find him in the end. But the boy was nowhere to be found.

  Now he was becoming angry. Avoiding one’s parents was nothing unusual for youths his age, but all the fruitless inquiries were beginning to make Sophocles look foolish. As the errand dragged on, he had imaginary arguments with the boy. I’m glad my father didn’t live to see what an irresponsible wretch I’ve raised! he raged. I would have given yon important news of your mother! Have you no respect for her? To this, he imagined Iophon would give a theatrical roll of his eyes, put down some foolish ram’s head drinking horn he had bought in a junk shop, and ask the matter with Nais. I don’t think you deserve to know! Sophocles would retort, then turn on his heel and abandon him the way he never could in reality.