Antigone's Wake Read online

  He asked, “Is she gone?”

  She looked down to peer into the baby’s eyes, awake and alert in those first minutes of life, then at Dexion, who only wished he could close his for good. Then she smiled.

  “Iophon is here,” she said.

  *

  To the luster of Dexion’s war-heroism, the gods thus added the pathos of the widower.

  The following days passed with the unreality of an interrupted sleep. Taking to his bed for the first time since his return from Samos, he entered a state that was neither conscious nor restful. His body seemed to sway as if the bedframe was the hull of the Antigone. He saw corpses, from Callinus’s determined repose to shriveled Iophon to Nais, stilled in mid-utterance. He glimpsed the living, too: the midwife coming out of the birthing room, her arms drenched to her elbows in blood, her mouth forming the words, “The Hydra — she still lives.” He saw Photia and her steadfast, incomprehensible love, and the face of his infant son rising to the daylight, breaking the surface of a lake of venous, sickly purple.

  On the third day he climbed to his feet. Staggering on stiff legs to the front of the house, he expected to see Nais at any moment. He thought to see her at the hearth, boiling water to soften the barley, or in her spinning chair, or folding laundered tunics into an olive-wood box. Then he saw her corpse on the front table, lying with flowers around her head and with her feet pointing at the door — and he remembered.

  Meticulous cleansing gave the place the atmosphere of a tomb. A death in the house had polluted the dirt on the floor, and the grease stains by the cauldron, and the fingerprints on the doorjamb. All that life was gone now — swept away and replaced by monkshood in proper little bundles, and the acrid stench of some medicinal incense he could not name. A pan of those flavorless ritual cakes was cooling by the hearth. Nais’s funeral was no more than a few hours away.

  Continuing through the door, he came out into the garden on what turned out to be a cool and pleasant summer day. The blossoms nodded and the doves rustled just where they always had, their eyes wide at the world. The vegetable beds, he saw, had been cleared of weeds, and his composing bench shone with its coat of fresh paint. Testing the surface with a finger, he found it was dry. Depositing his bones upon it, he was suddenly, surprisingly old, yet also at peace with his exhaustion, knowing well how the hates had tested him.

  The poet was hardly alone in his loss. Had he inquired, he would have learned that three other women died in childbirth that day in Athens, and forty more that month. He might have inquired, but never would. What else could he learn but what he already knew? As long as souls were encased in bodies, it was their lot to suffer. The world was not made for the success or happiness of mortals. Indeed, to presume otherwise was to invite the kind of punishment that was meted out for untoward expectations.

  He had lost Iophon and Nais, but he was not abandoned. He had a new son. His name shone undiminished in the city. For all he was forced to endure, his eyes were still open. He was no Polycrates, striding oblivious toward his demise, passing from success to utter disaster in an instant. He would mourn Iophon and Nais, of course — that ordeal had hardly begun. But he knew there was still some distance for him to look down on the victims of true tragedy.

  The gate slammed shut, and he looked up to see Photia coming up the path. Her face covered with a white mourning veil, she had the infant bundled in her arms. Bulos, looking much set upon, trailed behind with her marketing bag and a rope strung with one small water flask for each of the nine springs around the city. These were for the final lustrations of Nais’ body.

  Photia hesitated when she saw her father lying there. Rising, he scratched and gave her a bored look — the only expression that would convey some reassurance, without being as ill-suited to the moment as a smile. Taking the message, she brought the baby to him. He was then confronted with the child’s squashed, sleepy face, which seemed to glow faintly from the play of sunlight on his downy head. For the first time, he had a good look at his features: they were his mother’s, with a hint of the elder Iophon’s crease between the eyes.

  “He grows stronger every day,” she said, her veil clinging to her lips as they moved.

  Sophocles didn’t answer.

  “I know it was wrong to give him that name, without your word,” she went on, her voice unsteady. “It was just the whim of a stupid girl — call him what you wish — you don’t need me to tell you that … ”

  He had never liked her vacillating chatter. What she needed was obvious, and he gave it: he took the babe from her and held him long enough to betoken recognition. In her happiness, Photia fairly leapt from her skin; the child, uncomfortable in the poet’s awkward grasp, wet his swaddling.

  “I thought Iophon was a good name before,” he declared. “I see no reason to change my mind now.”

  She seemed to restrain herself from speaking further as she took Iophon back and pressed him against her breasts. The child rooted against the fabric.

  “Have you found a wet nurse?”

  “A woman down the street had a daughter on the same day,” she replied. “We owe her for three days.”

  “I’ll send Bulos over with the money,” he said as he fell back onto his bench. It occurred to him that the most exhausting thing a man could do was not to work or fight, but to spend excessive time in his bed. He continued, “And I think it is time to remedy an oversight in your education. You must learn to read.”

  Photia stared at him open-mouthed. As if wafting over on a perfumed cloud, she brought her elated self toward him, and planted a kiss on his cheek.

  “To read! That would be a debt I could never repay. Thank you, Father.”

  “Don’t be so sure it’s a blessing,” he said.

  Photia turned to him again on her way into the house. “Oh, and they’ve been asking about you in the market. That little lizard Evangelus, and that person I’m not supposed to mention but whose name starts with mu. They want to know if you’ll be at the city memorial.”

  *

  Sophocles saw little point in staying away when the event arrived. He was grieving, to be sure, and tired beyond accounting, with the beginnings of a pounding in his skull that promised to dog him for days. Yet there were hundreds of families all over the city who had also suffered losses, and who would come to the memorial anyway. For a public figure like him not to show up would play to the public as arrogance, not discretion.

  To a calendar already loaded with festivals, the city added public funerals as needed. Though they were supposed to be solemn, they were popular events. The poorer families of the war dead liked them because their sons got a lavish send-off at public expense, and the masses liked them because they were good for a morning off from field and factory. The city paid for the grandstands and the bunting. Patriotic streamers of the tribes and the city hung from every cornice and draped around all the stone phalluses at the roadsides. Rich men such as Cimon and Nicias advertised their good citizenship by donating herds of cattle for the sacrifices. As the meat roasted and the people listened to the featured speakers, smaller entrepreneurs supplied the wine and the hand-food. If all went as planned, the Athenians went back to their daily routines with bellies full, heads buzzing, and hearts fortified with fresh testimony to their own greatness.

  The people gathered in the graveyard just outside the Double Gate. There, the sumptuous graves of previous arrivals, with their marble spires and urns freshly scrubbed for the occasion, and the precious carved vignettes of departing soldiers and ladies dressing for the underworld, provided a fitting (and free) backdrop for the proceedings. The gods, in a compliant mood, lent them a cloudless morning and a sun that cast shadows of knife-edge purity, flattering the reliefs and rendering the chiselled apex of every gravestone into a sundial.

  The organizers had set up the dais to face the gate and the city beyond. Now that he was sitting up there, Dexion understood the power of this choice: the speaker, if he was a citizen and a man, could not help but be
inspired by the spectacle of tens of thousands of Athenians gathered around him. Because the event was open to women, foreigners, and resident aliens, it attracted more spectators than any meeting of the Assembly. It exceeded the audiences for plays, dwarfed Olympic crowds, and put processions at Delos in the shade. Indeed, few cities in all the Greek world were populous enough to attract such a throng. In its sheer bulk it spread in all directions, covering the gates and the city walls, crowding the roofs, filling the trees. When it roared, it was as if the great Earthshaker was ripping open the husk of the world.

  To this Pericles had now added a final, crowning ornament: above the walls, glittering at the city’s heart, rose his renovated Acropolis. Only in the last few weeks, as they removed the cranes from around its periphery, had the full glory of Athena’s temple been revealed. Once decried as an eyesore, as the Olympian’s monument to himself, the nearly-complete building silenced its critics. Instead of looming over the city, it seemed to float in the late morning heat, regular in its lines but shimmering in the distance, like the echo of some metrically-perfect hymn. He had not visited it yet. But if he did approach it, he could only imagine such perfection dissolving like a mirage before his eyes.

  To a poet like Dexion, whose works were by nature ephemeral, responsibility for such a permanent spectacle lay as much beyond his experience as the levelling of mountains or the diversion of rivers. It was something more proper to the power of the Great King, who dug a canal around the Mount Athos and whipped the sea when it displeased him. Yet this was not the deed of some monarchal maniac, some pompous potentate. It was the work of Greeks like himself.

  The ten generals of the Samos campaign filed onto the dais in deme order. This put Sophocles second in priority after the obscure figure of Anagyprasian Socrates. An ovation began when he appeared, and continued after he sat down. Parsing the applause, he perceived that he was most popular among the humbler classes — the thetes, the foreign-born artisans, the slaves. The aristocrats, when they acknowledged him at all, did so only politely. The idea that a mere versifier would take such an important place in government had never sat well with them.

  It was bad form to show up one’s colleagues by encouraging or acknowledging such acclaim. Instead, he sat stone-faced, listening as the cheering slackened for the next two generals who came up, peaked again, along with catcalls, with the arrival of Pericles, and subsided through Cleitophon of Thorae.

  They endured something close to silence as the generals sat for a moment, their helmets resting on their knees with the visors facing all in the same direction. (Lampides had to reverse his at the last second.) In that time Sophocles searched the crowd for Aspasia. He found her in the very front, slightly off center to the left. Though she was wrapped in a plain cloak with her head covered, there was no mistaking those eyes as they stared back from the refuge of her feminine obscurity. Just as he spotted her, she shifted her hood back, revealing more of her face to the light. As she looked at him, she bore the serenity of someone who was sure that she alone, among all those around her, knew what was about to happen.

  The crowd shifted as Pericles rose and took the rostrum. Like Aspasia, he had dressed down for the occasion — no rings, no conspicuously bleached linens. Instead, he wore just a buff-colored tunic and his general’s cloak gathered behind his shoulders. He raised his right arm as if to salute his fellow citizens. The effect was as if he had laid a blanket on the proceedings, muffling all sound. For a moment there was nothing to distract from him, not the twittering of a bird or the rattling of a wagon in its ruts, as Pericles opened his mouth to speak.

  *

  “Athenians! It is incumbent upon the man charged to stand in this place of honor to attempt to do some justice to the deeds of our gallant dead. For it is deeds that constitute the guts and sinews of our political body, not words, which come and go like the wind from Zephyrus’ cave. The men we honor here today have made their statement by the sacrifice they have lain at the feet of the people. With what we say here this morning, and our devotion to their memory, we can only hope to laud them without exposing the inadequacy of mere words.”

  The voice that came out seemed honed for the occasion: precise but never precious, powerful enough to carry to the back of the crowd but not hectoring. No one achieved this balance as well as Pericles. It left everyone in the crowd, including the most hostile partisans, listening with looks of pleasurable distraction on their faces.

  “It is often said on occasions like this that the Athenian system stands alone in the world. And it cannot be denied that in both the breadth of its support among the people, and its power to inspire uncommon quality in the common man, it is unique. But it would be wrong to say, as certain critics do, that because the people rule in Athens our city is not ruled by the best of us. For this is the advantage of our democracy — that the justice of our arrangements motivate the best to rule, and the others, by their ballots, to lend their consent to be ruled. What need have we, then, for the petty tyrannies of past ages, or those high-handed cliques of magnates who dominate in other places? What need have we to choose between second-best alternatives? We alone have squared the circle. We have fashioned a system that inspires excellence, not through fear, not through the dead hand of tradition, but through the only quality that makes for enduring strength: justice.

  “For evidence of this, look around you. See the splendor of what we have achieved since the Mede burned the altars of our ancestors. Witness the abundance that pours into our ports, and the respect Athenian arms have earned among the Greeks. Look at these things — and then look deeper. See that the buildings, inspiring as they are, and the trappings of our outward wealth, which far exceed that of any other city, are merely reflections of the quality of her people.

  “Most important of all, look beneath the soil here, in this hallowed place. See where the ashes of your ancestors lie. It would be unseemly to neglect the many by recalling the names of only a few. Instead, we honor them by remembering the places that are forever marked by their deeds: Marathon, Salamis, Plataea, Mycale, Oenophyta, Tanagra — and Samos. We recall their heroism, and marvel further at the vigor with which they made their sacrifice. We Athenians are never sparing in our defense of freedom, never selfish, because through our efforts, we lend breath and limb to the best aspirations of the Greeks. In this way, as much as in the excellence of any edifice or book, we have become the school of Greece; we teach her how excellent she may strive to be. For proof of this, look no further than the achievements others claim for themselves, yet owe much to the men who lie here. For would the Lacedaemonians have made their stand at Thermopylae, without the example of Marathon to inspire them?”

  On reflection, few in the crowd could take seriously Pericles’ candied rhetoric. Only some were properly educated, but all of them knew that claiming Athenian credit for Thermopylae was, at the very least, a presumption. But on the public side of the gap between what citizens told themselves and what they said out loud, his words played like music. Sophocles felt the discrepancy himself: skepticism at the speaker’s simpleminded flattery that, after passing through the contorted passages of his heart, manifested as a patriotic puffing out of his chest, and a smile on his face. It was there, in the way the speech flirted with his scorn yet counted on his instincts, that he felt the influence of Aspasia.

  “We will not name their names,” he continued, “lest we laud a few and forget the rest. They are all equal in their sacrifice now, from the greenest hoplite falling in the first moments of the battle to the heroes who first broke the Samian walls. Whether they fell on foreign ground or into the depths of the sea, their brothers have made sure they have all come home. It is, after all, our way. We never hesitate to cross the battlefield when our hand is forced, and every man goes home to rest in the Attic soil that gave birth to this, the purest of all races of the Hellenes.

  “Thanks to them, we have put down the adversary, and moreover, the worst kind of adversary — the one which has betraye
d his oath of alliance. What quarter, what kind of forbearance, should such an enemy expect? I say none, for the gods are surely on the side of the righteous. Yet again, the Athenians light the way for the Greeks, for we did not make Samos a graveyard for her transgressions. Instead, we left their city intact, their people alive with the freedom to rule themselves. That too, is our way. For as long as our neighbors live in peace with each other, and contribute their share to the common defense, Athens will ever be a friend and a partner. That is our pledge to the Greeks.

  “As for you, the living — it is your peculiar curse that you must now live on with the good fortune these men have vouchsafed to you. It is a responsibility we will all face for the rest of our lives, to endeavour to be worthy of those who now lie beyond indignity. We have among us the finest examples of this sort of citizen — the servants of the people who never lost sight of the goal, never lost faith, and saw our ship of state here, to safe harbor.”

  And although Pericles seemed to be speaking of all the generals on the dais, he turned to look at Dexion alone. The crowd, perceiving that this was his moment, raised a cheer that seemed to bloom from the dust of the ground to crown the heights of Mount Hymettos. Sophocles, flushing, cast his eyes downward. Keeping a modest demeanor, he let the sound of their acclaim fill every corner of him, driving out all trace of grief or doubt. The ovation was so sweet that he was prepared to believe it was just as Pericles described — the war had been fought with a singular vision that had never been challenged.

  For was Cleon himself not applauding, his face turned faithfully to the rostrum, deriving whatever public glory he could from his proximity to Pericles and Dexion?

  “It is to be wondered how many of us can aspire to this kind of courage. For it is one thing to see a father or a brother off to war from within our own walls, safe at least in the knowledge that his sacrifice, if it does come, goes for a greater purpose, and is suffered in the company of his brothers in the line. It is never easy, yet we may take comfort in a cause that lies right before our eyes, in the safety of the land all around us. But how many of us can look at the loss of an only son, in a manner so barbarous that we know the very hour of his death? How many could manage an hour of sleep knowing this son would die alone? I say few of us would have the strength to look on that prospect, and not flinch. You all know of whom I speak.”