Antigone's Wake Page 2

  The troupe began the first song with voices so subdued that they were imperceptible beyond the first few rows of spectators. The people shushed each other, their hisses rising and falling away like one of the rare oceanic waves that broke on Sounion when the great Earth-husband, enthroned in the deep, tossed his weed-shrouded shoulders. When they settled at last, and the chorus rose, the audience heard them sing:

  He set out against our land because of the strife-filled claims of Polyneices,

  and like a screaming eagle he flew over into our land, covered by his snow-white wing,

  with a mass of weapons and crested helmets.

  He paused above our dwellings; he gaped around our sevenfold portals with spears thirsting for blood;

  but he left before his Jaws were ever glutted with our gore, or before the lure-god’s pine-fed flame had seized our crown of towers.

  So fierce was the crash of battle swelling about his back, a match too hard to win for the rival of the dragon.

  For Zeus detests above all the boasts of a proud tongue —

  They elegized like this for some time as the audience stood rapt, watching if they could, just listening if the columns blocked their view, with snacks unchewed in their mouths and their faces suffused with pleasure. For an ode of Dexion was nothing if not pleasant — neither too austere, like the poets of the generation that had served at Marathon, nor too precious, like the mellifluous droolings of the young. Better than anyone, he respected the people’s preference for dances over songs, and songs over dialog, even as he produced expositional verse as clever as the city literati could ever wish.

  Yet if there was one criticism — and among the Athenians there was always at least one — it was that Dexion was perhaps too smooth, too easy to take. Some still compared him unfavorably to Aeschylus, whose verses serried and bristled like phalanxes, and whose productions were like forced marches through bramble-fields. While Sophocles was something of a trimmer, all too aware of striking a fair balance, the old master was never anyone but himself. In his severity, Aeschylus seemed primitive, yet also much closer to the source of what once made the tragedies consecrated acts, not excuses for someone to exhibit his cleverness.

  But these were the carpings of scolds. When the song was over the people applauded freely. When the poet stepped forward, a fetching sheen of humility on his face, to announce the subjects of his plays, an immodest woman cried out that she would love Sophocles anywhere. Her ejaculation was followed by wolf-whistles from all over the Odeon, from men and women.

  “The people will be dignified,” announced Timocles, who waited for order, then turned to Sophocles. “Continue.”

  “The theme of the program,” said the poet, “is the wages the gods mete to the unjust. The first play has seven odes and seven episodes, and is called the Agamemnon. The second has ten odes and nine episodes, and is called the Danaids, and the third, with eight odes and eight episodes, is the Antigone. There will also be a satyr play, the Hamsters, with six odes and six episodes. The producer will be the metic, Chaerephilus of Chalcedon, and the protagonist for all the plays, Tlepolemus.”

  It came as a surprise to no one that the competition ended with Dexion’s victory. The last entrant of the day was a newcomer, a youth named Thespis, who produced the kind of metrical fireworks that impressed the sophisticates, but fell flat with the people. The archons gathered, and after a brief conference produced their verdict: Aristarchus would present first, then Thespis, and then, in the plum spot, Dexion. The people registered their approval by pelting the stage with blossoms if they had them, cheeses and uncracked nuts if they didn’t, followed by garbage, like fruit rinds and baked long bones with the tasty marrow sucked out, until the proceedings devolved into the usual riot. The archons loosed the Scythian flatfoots on the crowd, who cleared the Odeon by bludgeoning anyone in reach. When it was over, Sophocles was left on the stage with Timocles, looking down on the wooden floor smeared with urine, rose petals, discarded shells, and broken teeth.

  “Smooth event this year,” appraised the archon as he swung his cloak over his shoulders. “Good luck, Dexion.”

  *

  Sophocles made a practice of visiting the Theatre in the early morning before his work was presented. This entailed getting up shortly after midnight and coming into town when it was still dark, before the caretakers arrived to make final preparations for the day’s productions. He was, in fact, rising with the farmers in the valley around the city, who would likewise roll off their pallets in the deep gloom to turn out the family cow, or milk their goats, or tweeze the pests from the corrugations of their olive trees. In those days, with the nightly breeze blowing steady across the thyme-scented slopes of Hymmetus, it was still possible to hear activity on the farms outside the city. All the animal cluckings and brayings and clanking of iron tools against the stony soil reminded him of a life he had given up long before, when he left his father’s armory shop as a young man. Truth be told, it was a life to which he, like most lettered craftsmen, would be loathe to return. Yet it always gave him a pinch of sentimental pleasure to know it was still there.

  With spring not far advanced, his trek was through cold, deserted streets. It was the one moment of the day when Athens could be mistaken for a clean city. There would be no smoke in the air yet, and the hardpan of the streets was trackless and freshly wetted. The gutters would be clean for the moment, for the chamberpots of the citizens were yet undumped out the windows. Between the shutters, matronly shadows could be glimpsed collecting wood for breakfast fires. If he saw anyone on the street at that hour, it would be some hard-working storekeep shipping fish or winejars to his stall, or else — like some frail bird rarely seen — a freeborn girl with a wine jug, only permitted out on the streets when they were deserted of men.

  The theatre was a wooden, semi-circular grandstand, nestled under the open sky in the southeast shoulder of the Acropolis. Above it, flying from temporary masts, snapped the banners of the ten tribes into which Attica was divided. Higher still flitted the swallows that made their homes in the cracks and ledges of the sacred rock. For two generations nothing was above the birds but the rampart started by Cimon out of the fire-stained blocks of the old sanctuary of Athena. Now, just peeking over the bastion, still controversial in its smug, self-celebratory bigness, stretched the roofline of the yet-unfinished Parthenon.

  Inside the theatre, the painted stage scenery was already attached to the pavilion façade behind the orchestra: in this case, it was meant to evoke the Royal Palace of the Thebans. Dexion would look at it from various positions around the stage — front and center, from the stone seats reserved for the city magistrates; from the most distant upper tier, on the wooden benches where the women sat and, more often than not, chatted through the performance; from down on the orchestra, beside the altar of Dionysus, where he would play his harp for the choruses and fret over everything else in the production that failed to comport with his hopes.

  No play was ever mounted twice for the Great Dionysia, but the festival itself never changed. Dionysus Eleuthereus, son of Zeus, also known as Bacchos the Twice-born, drinking buddy of Silenus, patron of theater and madness, inspirer of sweet indolence and frenzied violence, had always called forth the most committed of Athenian carousers. The celebrants began to drink during the procession on the festival’s first day. After the seals on last autumn’s wine jars were cracked, the city watched through blurry eyes as the god, plaster face painted and uncut phallus festooned with ribbons, was borne aloft through the streets. He hit the road in his divine barge, but for good measure, as if ready to preclude any delay, he also had wings and a riding crop. The procession ended at the theatre, where the god was delivered to his altar in the center of the orchestra, and whence, on the first full day of festival performances, he would enjoy an unrivaled view of the year’s dithyrambs.

  Ten fifty-man choruses — one for each tribe — would compete to mount the best songs and dances in honor of the god. Dexion had part
icipated in his share of dithyrambs as a young man. Ungirdled, with skin oiled and goatskin around his shoulders, he danced in his first prize-winning chorus twenty-five years earlier, during the archonship of Phaidon. It was his first crack at performing as the troupe-leader, charged with introducing all the familiar stories about Dionysus — his rescue as a babe, plucked from his mother’s burnt corpse after she dared cast her gaze on the Thunderer; his emergence from his long childhood at Mount Nysa; his triumphant procession through India and Persia in an ivy-clad car pulled by panthers, spreading the blessings of the grape along the way. In every sense, Dexion’s career began with the god, for tragedy itself was said to have sprung from the dithyrambs, with the troupe-leaders having long ago evolved into protagonists, and the choral subjects straying farther and farther from the strict worship of Dionysus. As recently as Aeschylus’ time one could still hear old men complaining that the new plays had nothing to do with the god. But Dionysus himself, ever amused, ever erect and ready to fly, seemed content to take the best seat in the house.

  The second day was devoted to the year’s comedies, with the honored poets staging one play each. The crowd would file into the theatre as the sun rose, bearing blankets for their shoulders and pillows for the rumps that would remain planted on those wooden benches, with only brief pee breaks, for the eight hours necessary to see all five plays. For this entertainment, respectable citizens were expected to pay two obols each for a seat — less than half a day’s wages. Yet Dionysus would be displeased to see half the city barred from his levee. The city Treasury therefore paid the admission fees of hundreds of the city’s worst reprobates, scoundrels, and layabouts. These tended to cluster in the theater’s upper reaches, where they honored the god of inebriation out of small wineskins and earthenware cups. When bored, they pounded the benches with their heels; when amused, they guffawed the loudest, while at all times they shouted down impromptu reviews of the rich and the powerful in the seats below.

  The atmosphere at the end of the second day was more raucous than ever, with everyone giddy and exhausted after hearing sixty-five hundred lines of verse and sixty or seventy choruses, and the comic poets competing to influence the judges by stirring up the crowd, and the low-class spectators more than ready to oblige by flinging those earthenware cups, until the Scythians were inevitably called in to secure the formalities of the prize-vote. If the judges’ decision was unpopular, an undeserving winner would be lucky to escape Dionysus’s sanctuary with his ivy crown unmussed and his prize purse unpicked.

  And so the people trudged to the festival’s third day — the opening day of the tragedies — at daybreak, with most of them not having slept for forty-eight hours. The poet saddled with presenting his trilogy first (this year, the hapless Aristarchus) would have only half an audience for the initial four or five odes of his first play. All the officials were obliged to be there, but it was a rare judge who cast his first-place vote for a program few citizens had seen in full.

  By the start of the fourth day, consigned this year to Thespis’ tongue-tanglers, the earnest playgoers would have arrived in force, with the less-earnest either nodded off in their seats or slunk off to bed. The sobering influence of the tragedies themselves had its effect on the proceedings, which became ever more serious as the day wore on. In Dexion’s experience, the optimal moment came with the premiere of the opening play on festival day five. It was at this juncture, when the prospect of competition between the poets was felt most keenly, and the people came to the theater fresh after a good night’s rest, and his chorus and players were in their best voice, and the dust of the city had not yet risen to obscure the magnificence of the setting, that he had reserved to present his Antigone.

  The poet slumped on his bench as his heart sank. The sun would rise soon, casting its light indifferently on triumph or disaster. The quiet before a festival performance always depressed him, for the actors had learned their lines, the choruses had been drilled, the costumes had been stitched, and there was nothing more he could do. Anyone spying on Sophocles on the morning before a performance would have seen him sitting there with his lips silently moving, but not to his own iambs. The lines, instead, would be the ancient prayers of his fathers, and his audience Dionysus, Aesclepius, or any other god who might take pity on him.

  *

  Pericles never lingered at parties for the start of the drinking. Lysicles son of Neanthes therefore gave his review of the year’s tragedies while the food was still on the table.

  “Truly magnificent … a pity it had to end … “ he remarked, waving a peacock egg for emphasis. “No one can remember an occasion when the giving of the prize was so foregone.”

  “And what do you know about drama, Lysicles?” said Menippus son of Myronides, Pericles’ advisor in things military. “You are a dealer in sheep.”

  “Even for a tragedy, Antigone is such a tedious story,” said Aspasia, who had come to the hall in a chiton so delicately woven, and so expensive, that she dared not eat in it. Imported from the finest clothier in Miletus, the gown shone from certain angles like spun silver, while from others it was semi-transparent. On her head she wore an olive wreath circlet made of beaten gold, and around her right arm a golden serpent with ruby eyes and a carnelian tongue. By the twinkle in the eyes of her male guests she could see the impression this ensemble made. Pericles, who had withdrawn to the farthest corner of his couch, seemed irked by the show of her wealth — if not of her roseate, yet-unsuckled teats.

  “You insist on embarrassing yourself with this vulgarity,” the great man would tell her later, though the puckering of his high-domed brow proved it was the he who was embarrassed. “How will I defend myself from the demagogues, when you go around like a tramp?”

  “But I am your tramp, great Pericles!” she replied without shame. “And how else shall I present myself in this uncivilized place? Here, even the wives of the thetes pretend they have money, yet I am expected to dress like a pigseller’s daughter?” And noble Pericles, son of Xanthippus, blood descendant of Cleisthenes the Lawgiver, first citizen of Athens and architect of an empire that spanned the Aegean, would make no response except to cover his face. This was partly because he was not the sort to debase himself with petty arguments, but also because he had already learned not to match wits with Aspasia, who had a lively tongue and little dignity to lose.

  “In Sophocles’ hands the story was not dreary, but the finest sort of agony,” continued Lysicles. “For it may have been called Antigone, but it really had two heroes — the princess Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, and Oedipus’ successor as King of Thebes, Creon. Both were given their due. Everyone was so moved by the plight of each that the audience fell into a dispute with itself after the last chorus, arguing over which character was more admirable. The archons had to delay the next play.”

  Menippus spat in a fold of his tunic. “Yes, I can attest to that: the whole day was set back. The satyr play didn’t end until after sundown. I was numb by the end — you could have stuck a cavalry lance in my ass and I wouldn’t have felt it.”

  “How can the play have two heroes?” interjected ten year-old Alcibiades, his tender young mouth stuffed with roast dormouse. “That is not the correct form for tragedy.”

  Aspasia reached out to straighten the boy’s unruly bangs. Pericles’ ward was really coming into fine form — she would soon have to appoint a slave to instruct him in what a handsome young man should know about women. “Don’t talk with your mouth full, dear,” she said. “And finish your wine.”

  “I don’t like wine.”

  “Silly child, don’t the pine nuts make you thirsty?”

  “I prefer water.”

  She sighed. “Are we doomed to raise a boy with unbalanced humors? Pericles, tell him.”

  “The poet opens the story right after the war between the spawn of Oedipus,” Lysicles went on. “Polyneices, the younger son, has come to Thebes to wrest the throne from his brother, Eteocles. Both were cursed by Oedipus for
their disrespect after his secret was revealed; both therefore fall in the siege. Creon, the new king, chooses to honor the eldest with a state funeral, but decrees that the corpse of Polyneices must rot in the dust. Antigone, Oedipus’ daughter, will have nothing of that — she tells her sister Ismene so right from the start … “

  “It was interesting to watch the people argue over that fable … “ mused Pericles, positioned some distance away. Though his body dented the cushions like that of any other mortal, there was a precision about his repose that made everyone else look as if they were slouching. It was a grace Alcibiades was determined to imitate exactly, as was Menippus, though the latter was so naturally twitchy he could manage it only when he was a little drunk.

  “You’d expect the monied ones, the knights and the five-hundred-bushel men, to sympathize with Creon — the power of the state — but they seemed divided amongst themselves, with some for the king, others for Antigone — as were the thetes — “

  “Try some of this,” Aspasia told Alcibiades, holding a fingertip dipped in wine to the boy’s lips. “It’s the sweet vintage you like — “

  “No!”

  “So the first chance she gets she’s out on the battlefield, giving the body a ritual dusting. When Creon hears of it of course he’s beside himself. They can barely dissuade him from killing the messenger, who’s a splendid portrait by the way, an exact reflection of your typical Athenian bureaucrat, caring only that he doesn’t get prosecuted! Creon orders him back out to the battlefield, to find out who defied his orders — or else!”

  “Did you happen to attend the comedies this year, my dear?” Aspasia asked Pericles with a mischievous lilt in her voice. The great man ignored her, but Menippus whooped at the question, spilling the barley stuffing from the sow’s womb that was on its way to his mouth.