Antigone's Wake Read online

  He found her spinning goat’s wool in the women’s quarters. This was a task she always hated, and so took special pains to represent it as her sacrifice. When he began to explain the purpose of Menippus’ visit, she showed her impatience, cocking her lips at the abiding foolishness of men and their politics. The news that Pericles wanted him as a general did give her pause, however.

  “Couldn’t lord high Pericles be bothered to recruit you himself?”

  “Aeschylus fought at Marathon.”

  “He went as a soldier, not pretending to be a general.”

  “Is that all you have to say about it?”

  “Pericles needs allies against the demagogues,” she said. “If you are eager to have your name used that way, you don’t need my blessing.”

  “I don’t need your blessing under any circumstances!” he snapped. “And there are other advantages.” Then he stomped away, still dubious about the job but sure such an exceptional offer was worth more than a casual dismissal from the likes of her.

  He next saw Menippus in the market, carrying a mullet wrapped in burlap. Though he intended to let his refusal stand, his legs somehow stopped oil their own accord, and he was obliged to make pleasantries.

  “Truly a fine fellow,” he said, meaning the fish. “Where did you find him?”

  “At the seller by the courthouse,” said Menippus, angling it let Sophocles admire its slick, filmy visage. “And so unblemished! So many look like boxers these days, beaten to a mash.”

  “Yes, you will eat grandly this evening.”

  There was an awkward moment as Menippus wondered if he should raise the obvious issue, and Sophocles, half-wishing he would, could not force himself to make his escape.

  “And so, have you reconsidered that particular matter?”

  “I have, and I must say again that I decline.”

  Menippus shrugged. “Well, I can see the man is serious,” he said to the mullet. “You will have to help me overcome my disappointment.”

  “That, I trust he can.”

  “Yet, I see no reason to inform our other friend of this news,” said Menippus, searching Dexion’s face.

  The poet turned away, knowing the “other friend” was Pericles himself. He departed with a wave of his hand, saying, “That is your decision.”

  On his way back to his writing tablet he encountered someone else he had not expected to see. Against the steps of the Royal Stoa, surrounded by a gang of companions, reclined his son, Iophon. The boy was looking fixedly in his direction when Sophocles spotted him, but showed no sign that he was about to hail his father. Instead, Sophocles approached him.

  “There you are! Are you hoping to learn something of the law by sitting on those steps?”

  “So that’s him, is it?” asked one of the other boys, pointing with his chin.

  “Yes, that is my father,” said Iophon, shaking his head in affirmation as the young men, all pre-ephebes on the threshold of their military training, stared at Sophocles with frank admiration. It was not a look he was used to receiving from Iophon’s acquaintances.

  His son took almost entirely after his mother, from his wide, mobile lips and broad face to the soapy black locks that curled around his head. Adopting the depressing unanimity of every youthful generation, he also wore his chiton with one pale shoulder bare, like some strange species of effete workman. He was not a beautiful boy, Dexion had to grant, nor a particularly clever one. Yet on the few occasions he showed himself in the market, he did appear to be popular among his peers.

  These qualities were things his father had to deduce, like a fisherman guessing the habits of some rarely-seen species. He had, in fact, lost Iophon years before to the brotherhood of the gymnasium. It was there, in the aromatic oils and dust and flirtations of the daily workouts, that the small, wondering boy he once cherished had slipped away. In the final break, the boy came to profess, loudly and often, that the public theater was terribly dull, and that he now preferred the new custom of private literary parties that were, by design, always held in proximity to wine. The quality of his father’s fame underwhelmed him.

  Yet here he was, showing his old man off to his friends. The poet would not have been more surprised by a month of full moons.

  “Where is your red cloak?” a bud-lipped boy asked of him. When Sophocles frowned with incomprehension, the boy became impatient. “Your general’s overcloak. You’re supposed to wear one, you know!”

  “He’s probably having one custom-made,” suggested Iophon. “My father is known far and wide for the quality of his costumes.”

  “Never mind the cloak. What about his armor?” inquired another boy.

  “My grandfather was the best armorer in Colonus.”

  “Don’t forget the transverse crest!”

  “Maybe he’ll buy you a panoply, too, Iophon.”

  “Not likely. He’ll want me to go through that training nonsense,” replied Iophon.

  “You will do your training like everyone else,” Sophocles said with some irritation, fixing Iophon with the end of his index finger. “And you will show your face at home tonight, boy! Your mother has forgotten what you look like.”

  The other snapped to his feet and, without a hint of puerile mockery, saluted. “Yes, general!”

  Sophocles stalked back to Colonus cursing that fool Menippus, who had clearly been bandying Pericles’ offer around the stoa. It should not have been a surprise: merely publicizing such an offer would earn Pericles nearly as much public credit as actually having Sophocles accept it. These were deep waters he was swimming in, he realized — full of slippery, repulsive creatures.

  Yet beneath his disgust there persisted a glow of paternal happiness. Iophon had not looked at him with such pride since he was a very small boy; it was unprecedented that he would show the slightest awareness of the details of his father’s reputation, or of his family’s legacy. As patriarch, these were things he had every right to expect, but, like a penurious man, had learned to live without them. Having tasted them again, he was only aware that he wanted more.

  When he reached home he shouted for Bulos. The slave was busy at the far end of the house, sweeping the floor. Sophocles called again, threatening to administer a beating. Bulos appeared in the doorway, out of breath, making no effort to hide his annoyance.

  “Yes, master?”

  “Fetch my small tablet.”

  The slave returned with a stylus and the board he used for domestic messages. Sophocles snatched them away and, in the middle of inscribing it, glanced up at Bulos.

  “Put on your cloak,” he said. “You’re going out.”

  Moments later Bulos was on the road out of town, on his way to the house of Pericles and Aspasia in Cholargus. He would have to cross the River Cephisus on the way, and since it was spring, he was now obliged to make the crossing up to his armpits in icy water. At that price, he reasoned, it was only fair for him to get a peek at the message he was carrying.

  Waiting until he was out of sight of home, he pulled the lead from the fold in his cloak. On it his master had written just a few words:

  Sophocles says he will do it.

  *

  On a hill west of the Acropolis, in the natural amphitheater facing the shore, the Assembly of the Athenians gathered to hear the city’s business. Dexion was seated with the other generals-elect behind the rostrum, staring into the wall of citizens that spread above.

  He was used to being on stage, but here he was bare-faced, without a mask or persona to conceal himself. And there were so many faces confronting him that morning; some ingrained with despair and some livened by wealth, beautiful ones and ones disfigured by disease, ones that spoke volumes and others like closed scrolls, and eyes like lodestones attracting or repulsing, each reflecting passions that mystified and appalled him. All were on display under the morning sun, like the contents of a library blown across the slope. The stories behind every set of features screamed to be read. Where the impact of a bigger crowd on a po
litician was merely additive — the more the better — to a poet like him the effect was exponential, rising in its power, until it became an immensity both awesome and exhausting.

  The elections for generals were held in the tribal gatherings, but were subject to veto by the city Assembly. By the session’s end, just as the citizen-legislators were getting hungry and bored, the magistrates commenced ratification of the generals-elect. As usual, there was little reaction to the names of the more obscure figures — Androdikes of Cydathenaeum, Glaucon of Kerameikos, Xenophon of Melite, Lampides of Piraeus, Cleitophon of Thorae, et al. — though there was some murmuring when the name of a young philosopher, Socrates, was read. (The crowd settled when the nominee’s affiliation was specified as Anagyrous, not Alopece, the deme of the sophist.)

  This marked the fourth straight year the tribe Acamantis had elected Pericles general. A rumble of opposition rolled from among the aristocrats, which made the archons lift their eyes. But although they waited for sentiment to crystallize one way or the other, and some of the general’s allies began to applaud, neither faction managed to produce more than a brief stir. Someone shouted out his derogatory nickname — “old Squidhead,” from the prodigious height of his head — to which a defender replied with his honorific, “the Olympian.”

  Pericles’ election was allowed to stand.

  Sophocles’ nomination was greeted by a deafening roar. It went on with the ratification of the last candidate, as the general-designates were presented to the assembly as a group. With Sophocles in the very center, and Pericles inserting himself to his immediate right, the crowd cheered on with unmixed enthusiasm — no catcalls this time about Pericles’ grandiose public spending, his personal ambition, or the hubris of empire. For the imperial apologists, it was a very good day.

  The generals knelt before the presiding priest and received on their brows a daub of blood from a consecrated pig. Now Sophocles blushed like a bride bereft of her veil. He didn’t hear the prayers uttered at session’s close, and he allowed himself to be led out without paying much attention to who was tugging his arm. As the poet emerged on the street opposite the Areopagus, he realized it was Menippus who was escorting him, and that he was being led toward His Dolichocephalic Splendor.

  Pericles had already donned his cloak of office. It made an impressive display on his tall form, though the impression was somewhat undone as the smear of pig blood, dripping down his high forehead like a string of flung paint rolling down a wall.

  He was jocular by Periclean standards, smiling through his red-tinged beard, manhandling Sophocles with a mighty forearm clasp and a drum solo on his back. “My dear sweet friend, you have been too long absent from my table!” he declared as he draped a sinewy arm around Dexion’s shoulders. This was a physicality Pericles showed only rarely, but deployed well. Sophocles opened his mouth, choked, then let the tears of his acceptance wet his eyes. Pericles and Menippus looked at each other like proud parents watching their son instinctively reach for the spear.

  “I’d say that went well,” said Menippus.

  “More than well! Not since the Persians came have the people been so united about anything.”

  “Then I have done my part,” said Dexion, who was suddenly missing his composing spot under the little plane tree.

  Pericles squeezed him harder. “But how is your dear Nais … and that wonderful boy, Iophon? He is almost old enough to take the vow, is he not?”

  He stayed at the poet’s side throughout the requisite observances. The generals, like fresh ephebes, were obliged to go as a group to the north face of the Acropolis, to the sanctuary of Aglauros, goddess of new soldiers, and there, at the altar, to collectively extend their arms over the blood-crusted marble, from there they mounted the Acropolis and, after wending their way around the stockpiles of wood and stone for the ongoing reconstruction, paid homage to Athena the Guardian in her temporary shack.

  The goddess’ crack-fraught image was hewn with a blunt blade from some ancient trunk of cornel-wood. Centuries of succor had reduced her to a gnarled lump, her arms and legs merely suggested, her face an embryonic swelling. It was said she was not fashioned by human hands, but had dropped straight from the sky, whence she would ultimately return. Sophocles stood by for the sacrifice and did his part to replenish the oil for the eternal flame. But in the end the attention of his fellow initiates, who glanced at him when they thought he was not watching, rekindled his self-consciousness. He was glad when the ceremony was over and he could escape, losing himself among heaps of marble accumulated for the new Propylaea.

  He was looking out at the market through the columns of the old entrance, but hardly saw it. Instead, he was contemplating a new play. The story would be a prequel to Antigone, set in the time after the fall of Oedipus, but before the Seven Against Thebes. Last time, he had tried to convince his audience of Antigone’s courage in the face of outrageous, institutional impiety, and by all accounts he had succeeded well enough. He never entirely believed this story himself — it stank of unfinished business, its success proof only of how far a skilled liar might go in the theater. His first-place prize was, in his eyes, nothing more than a loan which future work must redeem.

  The new play would be called Polyneices and Antigone. The subject would be the forbidden love of the sister for her brother, and the tragedy the fate of Polyneices after he is fooled into an act of physical incest. When the hero recognizes the outrage of what he has allowed to be done, he knows the furies will destroy him, but goes forth to his end without reservation or complaint. Antigone, meanwhile, broils in her shame, and by the end of the play lacks only the means by which she will end her misery. Creon becomes her instrument.

  Standing above the city, the cloak of his new responsibility around his shoulders, the tragedian felt uncomfortably close to his themes. To know one’s mistake — to accept one’s transgression and embrace the inevitable — was all very well to write about, but weighed like a heavy stone on the heart of the living.

  In her shack, Athena the Guardian stood earless in the lampsmoke. Gaunt an eternally stern, biding her time until her return to the blue, she seemed to repel his prayers like the light from her polished face.

  *

  There was a persistent rumor in Athens about Dexion and Pericles that went like this: a quarter century before, when Aeschylus ruled the stage and Pericles was just one of many contending politicians, the archons broke with tradition regarding the judging of plays at the Great Dionysia. Pericles’ main rival, Cimon, had just returned from a splendid victory by land and sea over the Persians in Pamphylia. As a special honor for him and the other returning commanders, the special jury of theatrical judges was dispensed with, and the generals given the ballot.

  The result was a rare defeat for old Aeschylus. Cimon’s jury placed him second that year behind the novice Sophocles, and though there was no evidence of collusion, it was widely assumed that the result signaled Cimon’s partiality for Dexion. Given that Cimon had cultivated a grudge ever since Pericles’ father, Xanthippos, had prosecuted Cimon’s father, it was further assumed that the young poet was in Cimon’s camp, and therefore opposed to Pericles.

  But Sophocles was in political hock to nobody, and had always been on friendly terms with the Olympian. This was especially true early in their respective careers, before Pericles had, for purposes of cultivating his mystique, taken up the practice of bestowing his social graces sparingly, like some precious unguent. Back then Sophocles was already noted for his musicianship, and Pericles was an enthusiastic follower of the musico-social theories of Damon of Oa. Pericles and Sophocles would be seen together at symposia, discussing the edifying effect of a good tragic emelia or Cretan iporchima as they shared the pillowy hips of some Asiatic couch ornament, or admired some sharp-kneed lad. Dexion had, on one occasion, praised to him the looks of a particularly lovely boy, likening his smooth white haunches to a fawn’s. To this Pericles replied, “Careful, Dexion, for although I don’t say you�
�re wrong, a politician must learn to keep both hands and eyes clean!”

  After the death of Cimon, Pericles had less occasion to mix with mere poets. They did spend a spring day together during the archon-year of Philiskos, after Sophocles was heard to ask, in public, why his friend was turning the most sacred places of the Athenians into construction sites. Pericles responded by turning up personally at his door in Colonus.

  “Come with me, my friend,” he said, “if you want to know how Athens will look after we are dead.”

  And so he took Sophocles on a tour of their future city. Picking their way around the scorched and venerable stones of the old Athena temple, burned by the Persians, he paced out for him the footprint of the new Parthenon, which would be either the most grand or the most bombastic in Greece. From there they traversed the sites projected for the new sanctuary of Erechtheus, and the enclosure for Athena’s sacred olive tree, and the towering new Propylaea that, vowed Pericles, would frame the splendor of the secular city from above.

  “Surely you mean the opposite, that the gate will glorify the temples from below,” corrected Sophocles.

  “I mean both,” replied the other, entirely serious.

  The sun was bending toward the gulf when the presentation finally ended. As they descended the path back into town, Sophocles found himself impressed by the breadth of Pericles’ vision, but also subtly unnerved by it.

  “It scarcely seems given to mortals to plan with such confidence,” he said.

  To which Pericles laughed, saying, “Let us claim the confidence first, and try to merit it later!”

  “Who will pay for it all? The allies?”

  “Of course.”

  “But why should they pay for our temples?”

  “Why shouldn’t they?” he asked. “When you hire a contractor, Dexion, do you care what he does with the money? Do you care if he spends it wisely, on his family, or wastes it on wine and flute girls? Of course not, as long as he performs the service you hired him for. The same principle applies here. Athens will defend the Greeks, and in exchange for that burden she wishes only to inspire them — to become what has until now existed only in dreams. And who will say which purpose will serve them best in the end? The Greeks pay for security, and they get a vision of their greatness. It seems like a bargain to me!”