Antigone's Wake Read online

  “Oh, not a good year for that! There was a devastating piece by Cratinus this time, set on an unknown island where the people’s heads literally swell up when they receive praise. The producer sprung for masks with inflatable bladders. There was a line in there by a whore that everyone just loved, that just killed, that went:

  Some girls open up for a well-hung man

  But what city can resist Mr. Big Brain-pan … ?

  Aspasia gave her party laugh. “The slaves are talking about another coup, where two guardsmen on top of a wall are watching a horse and rider approach the city from a distance — “

  “ — and from the size of the heads,” cried Menippus, “they can’t tell if it’s the horse or High-head who wears the saddle!”

  “That’s enough,” warned Pericles, turning anywhere for rescue. “Lysicles, tell us more about Dexion’s play.”

  “Forget the dreary mythifying, and tell us about the dances!” Aspasia commanded.

  Lysicles rolled his eyes in delectation as he downed a cup of water.

  “When has Dexion disappointed us on that score?” he resumed. “As usual, his chorus was the sharpest-looking on the stage. When he wants them to wear white chitons, they are the whitest; when black, they are like dancing shadows. And those darling little boots! Of course, Chaerephilus won the producer’s prize. Dexion himself played the harp for the odes. I’ll say this for him: I’ve been to as many festivals as I have years as a man, and I have never seen plays that seem so much like the work of one mind. He was in control of everything — you could see him watching the choristers like a drillmaster, conducting them with his eyes. Through eight odes they never fell out of synchrony, except when he wanted them to. He makes the work of everyone else seem half-baked.”

  “Do you hear that, my dear?” Aspasia addressed Pericles. “Our Dexion has the makings of a drillmaster!”

  “If Polyneices was a traitor, why do the gods make Creon suffer?” asked Alcibiades.

  “You may answer that question yourself,” replied Pericles in his didactic mode, “if you think about another: is it within the power of a mortal king to define who may be buried, and who may not?”

  “That is up to the gods.”

  “Then you know Creon’s error: by decreeing that the dead be exposed, and the living buried, he sought to enlarge the authority of men, and in so doing, he despised the gods.”

  Aspasia exchanged glances with Menippus and Lysicles as the irony seemed to congeal in the air above them: Pericles, a man of almost lordly arrogance, whose disdain for pietist niceties was almost legend, was instructing the boy on the virtues of mortal discretion. But none of them spoke. After an afternoon of testing, even the patience of Pericles had its limits.

  When the wine appeared their host made his usual excuses. Alcibiades was packed off to bed, and Menippus and Lysicles — with the discreet help of Aspasia — did their best to make it to a fifth jar of Chian red. But without the foil of chilly Pericles the fun soon went out of drinking. By the time the full moon had cleared the mountains the party had broken up, with Menippus on his way back to his home on Muses Hill, and Lysicles lurching from house to house, pounding on the doors of bewildered citizens, demanding entree to the taverns he insisted were inside.

  Aspasia was snuffing the lamps in the drinking parlor when Pericles appeared again. She had learned to recognize the expression he wore, the kind that betokened an idea was slowly and relentlessly hatching. For although his mind was not as quick as her’s, she knew that none was more thorough, sifting every conceivable pro and con. When he turned up like this he was ready to speak.

  “An interesting idea you had, about making Dexion a soldier.”

  “I wasn’t serious.”

  “Though I imagine he’d prefer to be something more dignified than a drillmaster,” he went on, as if not hearing her. “A general perhaps. What is his tribe?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He turned to leave, but seemed to be frozen when his eyes swept over her expensive dress.

  “Did you buy that in the market, or was it a gift?”

  “Would I accept any gifts, after the way you have pestered me about that?”

  “Then what are you prepared to give up?”

  “Of all the niggardly tightfisted pinchpenny meanies!”

  “I will not have it said I have used my position to enrich myself,” he declaimed, as if explaining to a child one of life’s eternal verities. “What about that new litter … why would anyone need more than one litter?”

  She looked down for something to throw at him. But as the slaves had already cleared the tables, all she could find was a single olive. She launched it, hitting Pericles in the center of his vertically-plumb forehead. Since it was one of last year’s olives, pickled and pulpy with brine, it hit with a splat, leaving a brown spot.

  “You will sell the litter or sell the dress,” he said. He then walked out without wiping his brow, for Pericles, of all people, was precisely the kind of man who, over some fine point of home economics, would never wipe away the residue when a soft, briny, year-old olive struck his forehead.

  *

  Sophocles was born in the suburb of Colonus, and still lived there. He had bought his little house with the pooled resources of his father’s inheritance, Nais’ dowry, and the modest income he made ghost-writing speeches for the courts. Prize-winnings for his plays came too infrequently, and were too uncertain, to count as steady income. Indeed, it was not so long ago that the first-place prize for drama was a wreath, a goat, and a pat on the back, for these reasons — and despite his fame — Sophocles’ modest pile could never be mistaken for the house of a rich man.

  In the warm months he rose early to do his writing in the garden, under the shade of the little plane tree. There, enveloped in the scents of mint and oregano, he would wait for inspiration, reciting the verses as they came into his mind as his slave, Bulos, set them down on a tablet of soft lead. Some days he would cover an entire sheet and send Bulos to fetch another; others, the slave would sit waiting for hours, tapping the cornel wood stylus against the frame.

  When his inspiration was particularly dry, his daughter Photia would come out with a pitcher of herbed wine. She turned sixteen that year, looking more and more like his memory of her mother. Crossing the yard she was the figure of a marriageable girl, anklets tinkling, black hair tucked in a kitchen-bun, holding the pitcher aloft as she stepped with careful grace in fancy sandals. But when she looked at the tablet, tracing the waxy etchings with a finger, she became as wondering as a child regarding some mystery of adulthood. Sophocles had indeed made his name with words. He was no different from his neighbors, though, in raising an illiterate daughter.

  Colonus was far enough from the center of town to be free of the noise and stench, but close enough for him to stroll to the marketplace several times a day. When the sun had climbed some distance above the construction cranes on the Acropolis, Dexion would leave his garden and go into town. There he would make the rounds at the usual market stalls — the wine merchant, the fish-monger, the bookseller with his racks full of imported scrolls — and send his purchases home with Bulos, because he was loathe to see his wife’s expression when she discovered how he had spent the household money.

  Sophocles himself would linger at the market for several more hours, never seeking attention but very much aware of his status as a local celebrity. Often he would encounter younger poets in the stoa, who would address him outright if they were bold, or simply orbit around him if they were not, eavesdropping from a distance.

  He had met the young Euripides this way. The long-nosed, large-eyed youth had attached himself to his idol’s shadow, staring with such plaintive ardor that Sophocles at last felt obliged to bring him in out of the cold. The young man plied him with questions, but not the ones Sophocles would have expected: what did the great Dexion wear when he composed his award-winners? What sort of stylus did he favor? What sacrifices to Dionysus did he make before
a performance?

  Never did the boy ask his views on the role of the gods in mortal life, nor about the proper sort of hero for a tragedy, nor even about the technicalities of his choreography or meter. And when that bizarre exchange was finished, Sophocles didn’t see his admirer again until four years later, when, on the boy’s first attempt, his work placed a respectable second behind a tetralogy by Neophron.

  The entire incident made Sophocles suspicious that he had been the victim of some sort of witchcraft — that some fraction of his talent had been spirited away while Euripides had distracted him. for Dexion, despite the adulation that followed him in his public life, was always sure that his most recent festival victory was his last one. Was he not saddled with the kind of good fortune that attracted malevolence? What man so honored was not secretly despised? See it behind that genial grin of the tavernkeep, the stinging spirit of Nemesis; see it in the eyes of the Dipylon whores, cockteasing from behind the orthogonals, and in the stare of the old woman who sweeps the ashes from Loxias’ shrine. Against these attacks he was obliged to wear a little bronze phallus by a chain around his neck, and never to pass an overturned beetle in the street without flipping it upright. Yet what precaution was ever enough against the determined spite of one’s own countrymen?

  And so, despite the pleasantness of such afternoons, he would return to his house in a dark mood. Photia would seek to soothe him with a plate of savories. Bulos, meanwhile, would read back the lines he had dictated that morning, and Dexion would spit in disgust, and order most of them scratched out. Nais would then come forth from her quarters, her hands and forearms broiled red, the pouch of her chiton wet with the steam of her laundering pots. In his wife’s eyes there would be a look that was faintly opprobrious, mouth twisted in bemusement at the many ways grown men found to waste their time.

  “Did you see our son in the market?”

  And he would answer, “Not in the stoa, no.”

  “Oh, the stoa,” she would say, nodding her head in such a way that she communicated her meaning: scribbling verses was work barely worthy of a man, but idling in the stoa was a rank betrayal of their marital compact. Looking at Nais, he could see the opportunity was there to despise her — the afternoon sunshine, after all, was harsh on skin that had long since puckered and sagged, and what had been the lustrous sheen of her black hair had cracked, like the facade of an unkempt fountain showing its grout. She was a handsome woman in the literal sense, in that there was now a mannish dignity about her. To penetrate her now seemed as incongruous as buggering some tough old Lacedaemonian drillmaster.

  For all her husband’s acclaim, Nais had never been to the theater. “My Dionysus grows in the fields,” she would say. “He doesn’t prance on the orchestra!” His career as a poet she accepted as any other wife might some faintly embarrassing foible of her husband, like chasing pretty boys. This lack of awe was as precious to Dexion as public admiration was unnerving. For this alone, he would continue to love her in that way, inscrutable to many, that men of legendary attractiveness loved women who were less beautiful than they.

  “You might look for him when you are out, instead of indulging your hobbies,” she said, and then waited, ready to leap down his throat if he dared deny his fatherly neglect.

  “I saw his friends near the crossroads altar this morning,” reported Photia, “though I didn’t see him.”

  “You should see nothing on those errands, girl, but the ground in front of you.”

  “The good father speaks!” Nais mocked. “Now if he could guide his son half as well!”

  This sparring over young Iophon lately dominated their conversation, now that the boy’s disappointing nature had fully revealed itself. Sophocles’ answer was always the same: a cluck of the tongue, a toss of the head, and the excuse, “He is a man now. What would you have me do about it?”

  He would nap in the men’s quarters during the hottest part of the day. When the doves resumed cooing in the eaves, and the distant pounding of hammers resumed for the evening in the foundries in the Ceramicus, he would rise, re-drape his tunic around his aging frame, and head back to the market. For despite his ambivalence about his fame, despite the hangers on and his fear of demon envy, he was a good Athenian, and could not conceive of spending less than half his time at the stoa every day. To be seen there, to converse and be talked about, to honor the wise and confound the fools — this was the proper job of a citizen.

  Nais was waiting for him outside the door.

  “Someone to see you.”

  “Who?” he asked, surprised.

  “He says he’s Menippus, son of Myronides.”

  “Pericles’ man? What does he want?”

  “Who knows?” she shrugged, then added in a dry tone, “But you might ask if he knows where your son is.”

  Menippus, who was dressed as a civilian that day, was waiting for him in the garden. Bulos — Zeus strike him — had left one of the composition tablets on the stump, and his visitor was reading the verses there with a faint grin on his face.

  “Those lines are rejected,” said Sophocles as he approached. Menippus looked up, fixing a pair of hungry eyes on his host.

  “Yes, but to glimpse the discarded lines of Dexion — is that not a greater joy than to hear the finished work of others?”

  The poet answered by collecting the tablet and clasping it, face hidden, against his chest.

  “I was at the theater last month,” Menippus resumed, allowing the eagerness of his expression to signal what had happened there. “I saw your Antigone, sir. You may count me among your admirers.”

  Sophocles frowned. “Is that what you’ve come to tell me?” Menippus snorted with amusement, thinking Behold the temperamental artisan! He was not so diffident after his play, when he rose for his dozenth curtain call.

  “My business has to do with your leadership during the Festival,” he said, “which was noted by certain others. Dexion, your city has a proposition for you.”

  Chapter II

  A TASTE OF RUE

  “But now lend yourself to me for one brief, shameless day, and then, through all your days to come, be called the most righteous of mankind.”

  — Odysseus, Philoctetes, 1. 84-5

  *

  When Menippus conveyed Pericles’ offer to make him a general, it was not the first time Dexion had been called to public service. He had held a magistracy two years before, having been endorsed by the name-archon Lysanias to serve as Treasurer of the Greeks. That job had come with substantial duties: along with nine colleagues, he was responsible for the collection of dues from Athens’ partners in the Delian League, transport of the funds to the sanctuary, and their dispersal to the appropriate subcommittees, contractors, generals, and temple-hierarchs.

  This honor left him less opportunity for his real work than he preferred, too much of his time was spent in meetings with either bored-looking aristocrats or nouveaux riches dazzled by their reflected importance. He was staggered by the many temptations the post presented him to enrich himself. for these reasons he was glad when his term of office was over.

  After the board of review audited his performance he was certified to have served his city well. On stepping down he was rewarded with a fine brass wine-pitcher and a pat on the back.

  But to be a Treasurer of the Greeks was, in essence, to do nothing more than collect money and spend it, which were things every householder did. It required no special expertise. On what grounds did Pericles believe he would make a competent military leader?

  “Dexion, you underestimate yourself,” said Menippus. “for who has led men more often than you, in circumstances where the whole city was watching?”

  “Surely you don’t mean to compare — “

  “There’s nothing to it!” declared the other, making a motion as if flicking lint from his shoulder. “Or shall I say, it is nothing a capable man like yourself can’t learn very quickly.”

  They went on like this, with the poet voicing ske
pticism and Menippus dismissing every objection, until close on sundown. Menippus made what he thought was a series of decisive arguments: if Dexion agreed to serve, he would be only one of ten generals for the year. There was no chance he would be left alone to make a single tactical decision. In any case, there would be little risk of testing his military skill during the upcoming year of his service: the Persians, still smarting from defeat off Cyprus at the hands of Cimon, were content to glower defensively from Asia. The Delian allies, moreover, were offering no inconvenient resistance to Athens’ protection. In the expert opinion of those in the know, the most that would be demanded of General Sophocles would be to accept the adulation of his peers, to supervise one of the annual shakedown cruises for new vessels, and to sport one of those nifty red overcloaks on his daily turns around the market.

  “I thank you for bringing me this offer,” he said to Menippus at last, “but I regret I cannot accept.”

  As he rewrapped his cloak to depart, Menippus stared at him with eyes full of mirth. He found the pattern of Sophocles’ protestations suggestive: even the poets of Athens knew better than to accept any suggestion that the generalship was a sinecure. Everyone understood that the job had political implications. This told Menippus what Sophocles was only beginning to accept in his heart: he would indeed rise to Pericles’ endorsement, and stand for general of his tribe.

  And why not? Appearances of modesty to the contrary, Sophocles’ soul was as fiercely competitive as any other Athenian’s. To become general of his city was a singular honor — one Pericles himself had never surpassed — and would certainly place him on a higher plane of renown than Aeschylus or any other poet likely to follow him.

  “That is disappointing. Will you promise your fellow citizens, at least, that you will reconsider?”

  “Perhaps,” said Sophocles, as he shut the garden gate and retreated indoors. He was ambivalent, bereft of words, and also feeling somehow unmanned by his indecision. Perhaps Nais would know what to do.