Antigone's Wake Page 16

  Then he saw wide-bottomed Menippus strutting up the crown of a hill with his entourage. It occurred to Dexion to ask where Iophon was; he had, after all, accepted responsibility for the boy. When Dexion hailed him, Menippus paused, turned, and seemed to recognize Sophocles. He waved. Dexion waved back — then watched the man retreat beyond the high ground. “Menippus, wait!” he cried out, driving himself up the hill. But when he got to the top, he was confronted with twenty ranks of identical tents and no clue where Menippus had gone.

  The man had clearly run away at the very sight of him. Furious, Dexion addressed a shieldman who happened to be passing by.

  “You there! Did you see where Menippus went?”

  “You just asked me where Iophon is,” replied the hoplite, his eyes laughing at him.

  Sophocles withdrew, wrapping the ends of his cloak around his shoulders. His dignity would allow him to search no further. In a way he didn’t yet understand, Iophon had to be responsible for this humiliation. The boy would pay the price soon enough.

  *

  He was back in his tent, indulging in a sulk worthy of mighty Achilles, when he heard them calling his name.

  “Master, someone to see you,” announced Bulos from behind the flap.

  “If it’s that ungrateful brat, tell him I have nothing to say.”

  “It’s not Iophon.”

  Dexion came out just in time to see four shieldmen from the beach arrive with triumphant grins on their faces. He stood hand on hip, at a loss to understand the occasion until the leader reached into a fold in his cloak and brought out a sealed scroll.

  “This was at the bottom of the pouch,” the man said. “You missed it.”

  Sophocles took the scroll. “So I see,” he said, inspecting the seal. The wax was impressed with a falcon — the glyph for Horus, which was also the name of the scribe/paperseller who had drafted Photia’s first letter.

  He turned to take it inside, but was brought up short by the expectant expressions on the faces of the shieldmen. “By Hermes blessed,” the poet saluted, not knowing what else they needed to hear. But that simple formula was enough. A soft light of satisfaction broke over them, as if a tiny sun had manifested.

  What was he supposed to do with this kind of honor? The admiration of comrades under arms was different stuff than the repute of writing fine plays. The latter was at the end of a long, intensely exhausting process that, frankly, he thought deserved prizes. And his audiences obliged with cash, livestock, and gratitude. When the festival season was over, he was recognized in the streets, but this was always as a prodigy, not a hero. Poets could win renown, but never glory — unless they picked up a spear like any other citizen.

  A military reputation was earned in just a few heated moments, and felt nothing like civic gratitude. It was, rather, a brotherhood of shared experience. Athenians throughout the camp believed they had a secret in common with Dexion. Yet this kind of fame already seemed more durable than any other. He could already imagine meeting the same shieldmen decades thence, their figures shrunk by age, squinting at the bulletins posted at the altar of the Eponymous Heroes, and finding the same conspiratorial grins on their faces as they shambled up on blasted knees to recall old times.

  He unrolled the letter, which read:

  22nd Pyanepsion

  Dear Father,

  We hope this letter finds you in good health. The most wonderful news has reached the city in the last few days, of the heroism you showed in a battle at sea! You should know that the whole city is very proud of you, no matter what certain people say in the streets. I hear them out the window sometimes, and on my way to the market, and would tell them how petty they were, if I had the gift of your golden tongue. As it is they shut up when they see the daughter of Sophocles in the streets, carrying her basket in a way that speaks as well as words.

  Dexion smiled — how good the Greeks were at being jealous! And yes, he imagined there must be a way to bear a basket that expressed contempt for all that. He must remember to ask how she did it, so he could use it on stage.

  You should know I’ve gone down to the water every morning to see if the Oropus has come back with your answer to my letter. It has not, but I found another ship to send this message: we went back to Clitus, and for the price of just a sack of last year’s olives, he gave Mother a philtre he uses on sick mares. It worked. She is eating now, and sits up in her bed. Yesterday the midwife came and felt how the baby lies and said it seems healthy, though I have my doubts because mother’s appetite is not what it should be. She is recovered, but I feel she could be sick again in a moment. I know it is terribly selfish to wish you were here to give your strength to this house, when you are accomplishing great things for the city. Is this permitted for a daughter?

  So that is my news. I hope your answer to my last is only delayed because with you and Iophon away and mother so delicate I feel alone. I will now go down to the ships to send this letter and check for your reply.

  — Your daughter, Photia

  Bulos came in with flint and a sack of coals. As he began the process of lighting the brazier, it occurred to Dexion that the smell of roasting meat could be a potent weapon if allowed to waft over the starving city.

  “Leave that alone,” he said as he rolled up the letter. “I say let’s cook dinner outside this evening.”

  Bulos’ head shot up as if he’d come under arrow attack. No member of a household, after all, was more adverse to a change in routine than the slave. He opened his mouth as if to object, but the look on Sophocles’ face dissuaded him. “Yes, general,” he replied.

  *

  The poet woke the next morning to the sound of jeering. Sitting up, it seemed to him as if the entire camp was collected in front of his tent, whistling in that way audiences did when they wanted a play cut off before the end. It was a sound he had dreaded all his life, but had never expected to hear now, in this place. He threw off the blankets and pulled a cloak over his naked body. On his way out, he had a vision of the whole Athenian contingent gathered around the flap, armed with pits and rotten fruit, ready to pelt the scribbler who dared presume he could lead men in circumstances that mattered.

  But the shieldmen were facing the other direction. When they felt Dexion approaching from behind them, they stopped whistling, stepping silently aside without turning to meet his eyes. In this way — like some honored ghost — he passed through a crowd of thousands, joining Pericles and Menippus at the head of the assembly.

  The Olympian was portrait-perfect, magnificent in crested helmet and armor. He alone looked at Sophocles; in his eyes Dexion could see something like compassionate pity. Menippus, for his part, was as absent in spirit as he was physically from the hill where the poet had chased him a day earlier.

  “Is there something wrong, then?” he asked. Pericles made an odd, open-armed gesture in reply — and that was when Sophocles saw a paper in his hand.

  “We have another message from Callinus.”

  The rest of the Greeks were looking toward the wall. A small group of Samians were gathered up there, this time around a single figure who was seated with his arms behind his back. From that distance Sophocles couldn’t see who the prisoner was, but he could feel it plainly.

  “I don’t understand,” the poet said. “Is this show intended for me?”

  Pericles opened the message:

  The Athenians have three days to accept the settlement, or the life of Dexion’s son is forfeit.

  Then Pericles lifted up something that had been rolled in the paper: a lock of shining black hair that, at first glance, he thought must be from the scalp of Nais. But that was, of course, impossible — she was far away, and her head had not looked that way in years. The hair must be Iophon’s.

  This thought came with no particular emotion. Instead, he was thinking with absolute clarity, as when he picked up the spear during the Ionian sally, or when he attacked the Ionian ships off Tragia. He turned to the other generals and there, on their faces,
saw all the emotion he would have expected in himself. Glauketes’ eyes shone from incipient tears. Xenophon had managed to contort his face into something resembling the Creon mask he had commissioned for his play. Only Menippus, it seemed, stared back with something like equanimity.

  “I don’t understand why my son is a hostage,” Dexion said, “when I left him in the care of Menippus.”

  To which the other replied, “If it helps our colleague, I will accept the blame. But it would be no more true to say that Sophocles handed him over himself.”

  This, at last, cracked Dexion’s calm. “Is that what you feared to say, Menippus, when you ran away from me yesterday?” he cried. “Is this how you accept responsibility?”

  “The boy went too close to the enemy during the battle,” retorted Menippus, more to the other generals than to Dexion. “Was I expected to control the son, when the father could not?”

  The poet had his hands around Menippus’ throat before anyone could stop him. As Sophocles’ thumbs collapsed the man’s windpipe, he pushed Menippus to the ground, using his knees to punish the man’s stomach and groin. He held on with such ferocity that tips of his knuckles were slashed by the edges of Menippus’ helmet. The blood, the smell of fresh olives on the man’s breath, and the look of terror in his eyes, all worked to aggravate Dexion’s rage. When half a dozen pairs of arms managed to pull him off, it was Pericles’ face that pressed against his cheek, speaking to him from a place so close his voice might have come from inside Dexion’s skull.

  “Leave him — he’s a fool. A fool. Leave him now.”

  Whether it took a minute or an hour for Sophocles to regain his composure, he couldn’t tell. They’d brought out a couch from one of the tents for him to sit on, and hustled the bruised and heaving Menippus out of his sight, when it occurred to him to read the message with his own eyes. Pericles handed it over without hesitation.

  The letters formed up on the page in block-like style, like a shopping list. The lock of hair the Ionians enclosed had a dry substance adhering at one end; examining it, he saw the substance was blood. The Athenians have three days to accept the settlement, or the life of Dexion’s son is forfeit. A sliver of pain pierced his heart — what had they done to the boy already?

  Dexion looked up at the barbaric tableau on the wall. None of the figures had moved since his altercation with Menippus. Having had a good look at Callinus during their short interview, he could see that the Samian general was not among them. Then two thoughts occurred to him. First, that in Nais’ weakened condition, any bad news about Iophon was likely to kill her. And second, that he had faced Callinus in the tunnel after Iophon had been captured, and so while they were speaking, the dog had already known how deeply he was prepared to hurt Sophocles. He had known it, and probably already formed the plan in his mind. What a precious example of Ionian treachery! What galling mendacity! In his rage, he imagined using his bare fists to reduce Callinus to a smudge on Eupalinus’ chiseled floor.

  Pericles watched the poet’s face warily, not speaking until Sophocles’ eyes meet his.

  “I don’t have to tell you, no settlement is possible. You know that.”

  Again, that sense of falling into disaster, into am, filled him. And for that moment, even more than when he faced rejection in the theater, he felt a sense of openness, of vulnerability, that swept away all the petty cares that afflicted his mind. He was Creon at last, about to lose his family; he was Philoctetes, and Ajax, and Antigone. He was charging one of the seven gates of Thebes, knowing the fate that must befall him. He was holding the red hot iron in his hand, ready to plunge it into his eye sockets. He was alive.

  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.

  Pericles, the mourner-in-chief, put a warm hand on his shoulder. For an instant, he seemed about to say something, but remained silent.

  “So you see, for once there’s nothing you can tell me,” the poet told him, smiling. “Nothing.”

  Chapter VIII

  THE BACK HAND OF FORTUNE

  “Ships are only hulls, high walls are nothing, when no life moves in the empty passageways.”

  — Priest, Oedipus Tyrannus, 1. 56

  *

  Lucky Polycrates at last met his end at the hands of a treacherous Persian. How the tyrant of Samos, who was by then the most powerful of all the Greeks, was bested by a low-grade schemer named Oroetes is an oft-told tale in Ionia.

  One day Oroetes, satrap of Lydia, happened to be pursuing his usual vices in the company of his friend Mitrobates. Now Oroetes and Mitrobates had competed against each other in all things since they were children. When Oroetes mastered the bow, learning to hit a target at three hundred yards, Mitrobates did the same with the sling, becoming the best with that weapon among all the King’s young nobles. When Oroetes wed a Median princess, Mitrobates attached himself to one of the leading families in Babylon. And when King Cyrus had made Oroetes satrap in Sardis, Mitrobates worked every lever of influence to achieve the same, getting himself appointed governor of Dascyleium.

  After this, Mitrobates got the better of his friend. On the ascension day of King Cambyses, Mitrobates made the young king a gift of several islands in the Sea of Marmara. This earned him precious recognition at court. Oroetes, for his part, looked abroad for easy conquests of his own, but there were none, for all the mainland of Anatolia was already in his hands, and Samos, lying just offshore, was too powerful to challenge at sea. It was on this point, which he knew full well galled his rival, that Mitrobates chose to needle Oroetes.

  “Of course, all of us respect you as a man,” he said as he lounged on the goldspun cushions of Croesus’ palace in Sardis, “though I’ve heard it said that you are not the true master of the west, as long as that Greek usurper thumbs his nose at the Great King.”

  Oroetes held his temper, calling instead for more aromatic firewood to perfume his loggia.

  “It is a curious story,” Mitrobates went on, “how Polycrates took control of the place with, what, just a handful of troops? How difficult could it be to take it again, with no more men than you have in your personal guard?”

  Again, Oroetes did not rise to the bait, but chose to show off the opulence of his table by cutting open the roast pig. A roast lamb reposed within, and inside that, a duck, which in turn sheltered a pigeon, sauced and raisined.

  Mitrobates continued, “But you are right not to consider it. The Greekling has become too powerful for the likes of us. You have enough to occupy you here, I say.”

  Oroetes said nothing. But in his heart the satrap conceived a deep hatred not of Mitrobates, but of Polycrates, whom he now imagined existed only to humiliate him. And so as Polycrates went about his charmed life, building and hunting and feasting as he always had, his neighbor to the east was hard at work conceiving plans for his downfall.

  His trap was sprung when he sent a letter to Polycrates. “It has reached our attention,” Oroetes wrote, “that the tyrant of Samos wishes to become the master of the Aegean. This is surely a worthy goal, but one that cannot be achieved without ships, which cost large sums of money. Know that we are prepared to assist you in your purpose, if you agree to aid mine. I have learned that the Great King in Susa means to dispose of me and my family. If you agree to take my household into exile, I will make you a gift of the King’s treasury in Sardis. This will give you enough wealth to rule not only the Aegean but all of Greece. As proof of my sincerity, I invite you to send your most trustworthy man to inspect the treasure with his own eyes.”

  To Polycrates, this offer was only right and proper, given the good fortune he had always enjoyed. He therefore sent his envoy, a man named Maeandrius, to Sardis. The treasuries there were always impressive by the standards of the Greeks. Not wishing to risk a refusal, Oroetes made them still more splendid by filling eight trunks with stones, and topping them up with a few inches of gold. Maeandrius, who was h
onest but also a fool, was so dazzled by what he saw on the surface that he didn’t think to look deeper into the chests. He then returned with the good news to his master.

  Not all the Samians were so easily deceived. When Polycrates began his preparations to go to Magnesia to meet Oroetes, his daughter Chryse came to him with frightful portents. In her dreams, she said, she had seen her father suspended in the air, his dead body being washed by the king of the gods. Polycrates laughed, and thinking that the gift of some precious bauble would improve her sleep, gave her a pair of ruby earrings. But Chryse came back the next day with an equally dire vision — this time of her father’s body hung by the feet, scourged and dripping a liquid the color of rubies.

  Chryse’s doomsaying incited fear among the courtiers in the palace. The tyrant, who was thinking only of getting his hands on the gold Maeandrius had described, therefore became angry with his daughter. “Be careful of spreading such nonsense in my court!” Polycrates warned her. “For if you are wrong, and I return unharmed, I will punish you with loneliness for the rest of your life.”

  “Let it be done, then,” replied the girl. “For I’d rather spend my days unmarried and childless than see my father suffer.”

  Triply-blessed Polycrates sailed away to Magnesia anyway. No sooner had he arrived than his escort was disarmed, and he was seized by the guards of Oroetes.

  “Villain, know that you have lived your last day in defiance of the Great King!” declared the Persian.