Antigone's Wake Read online

  However lofty Pericles’ purposes seemed that day, Athens had a way of leveling mortal pride. While he and Dexion were descending they passed a stranger coming the other way. The man was clad in sooty rags, his person suffused by the stench of human dung, his arms and face so encrusted with grime his features were barely discernible. Yet as this creature approached he seemed to recognize Pericles; pausing, he glared as if personally swindled by him.

  He began to rebuke the general in a loud voice, “How dare you show your face in the house of the gods, Pericles! You, who would enshrine your own ambition at the temples of our ancestors! What need have we for barbarian enemies, when we have your tyranny to fear? Come now, defend yourself in the sight of ordinary citizens! Or are you too good to face a freeborn Athenian?”

  He went on like this, shouting at Pericles’ back as they reached the market, following so closely that they could feel his spittle on their necks. The other people in the street had varying reactions to the disturbance: a few were amused, glad that the Olympian was being held to account in such a public way, while others seemed embarrassed by it. Most took it in stride — as did Pericles himself, who continued to chat with Sophocles in a calm, conversational tone. Although he was not the target of the man’s anger, it was Sophocles who was most rattled by it, becoming at last unable to converse at all.

  “It is not unusual,” Pericles confided, “and the poor fellow must have his reasons.”

  “What an example for us all, Pericles!” the filthy Fury went on, “You, who foreswore the mother of your sons so you could live with a whore! How do you dare lecture any of us, with your record!”

  Coming at last to the Areopagus hill, Pericles bid Dexion a good afternoon, and then went off to the Council House with his nemesis still in tow, shouting, “You think yourself glorious, don’t you? But what does a self-important bastard like you know about glory? What did you ever do for. Athens, Pericles?”

  Sophocles learned the sequel to this incident the next day. The derelict went on haranguing Pericles until the sun went down, ranting and insulting him up and down the streets of the city. By this time they had gone a long distance from where they had met, and having arrived at Pericles’ townhouse, the man was left torchless and alone in the gutter. It was then that Old Squid-head showed his quality: just as his tormentor was about to face his retreat through a maze of deserted, unlit streets, Pericles sent a slave with a lantern to escort him to his hovel. At this kindness the man was struck dumb — either because he had lost his voice abusing Pericles, or in wonder at a leader who, in the end, seemed to think only of the safety of others.

  *

  The evening after Sophocles’s election he was invited to the great man’s house for dinner. All the other new generals were there, along with Aspasia, who was the only one in the hall without official rank but the best strategist of them all. And what a singular performance she achieved! At the same time, she ran the staff, played the couch ornament, and conducted the kind of conversational midwifery that made each guest feel as if his hesitant musings were the most interesting things ever uttered. She was poised on the couch opposite his, her face leaded and burning, dipping with languid wrist into the relishes, saying nothing at all to Sophocles with her crimson mouth but everything with her eyes. It seemed his taste for beautiful tramps was no secret to her. She shot him looks that seemed to share a private joke between them, as if her silence was evidence of some secret crush, and that her arts were no match for his. And yet he almost believed it was an accident when, as the dinner dishes were cleared away, he caught a glimpse of aureole under the top of her chiton. Dexion, flushing like a schoolboy, shifted on the cushions. Brazen Aspasia, who noticed such things, waited for him to regroup, and gave him a wink.

  Now what is this? Sophocles asked himself, not unintrigued. Damnable weakness! For he suspected, with all the foreboding of the doleful womanizer, that he had enough depravity left in him to seek an answer to his question.

  “You must come visit us sometime,” said her precisely moving lips, “with that new play you are writing. Even Pericles will drop his work for that honor.”

  Since his election it was exactly as Menippus had promised: little was demanded of Dexion but to strut around the market draped in red, receiving the salutes of the ephebes and favors from the merchants. He would come home at night with a self-satisfied glow on his face that Nais would immediately commence to mock — until he presented her with a four-foot eel that a fishmonger had shoved into his hands for nothing. At this she was struck speechless, holding the fish before her, stiff-armed, as if it would wriggle out of her grasp.

  “By the gods, how do you expect me to cook something so big?” she asked, managing at last to fashion something like a complaint.

  Her aplomb did nothing to help him face the reality that he was now a powerful public servant. Instead, his cloak of office still felt like nothing more than a costume. Nor was he inclined to invest in a new panoply of arms and armor — what would be the point, he reasoned, when the shield and spear he used as an ephebe were still perfectly good? He searched through the mess in the back storeroom of his house to dig them out. After thirty-five winters of mildew and the wet, the spear shaft had warped into a bow, and the shield had become misshapen from being compressed between the wall and an old whetstone. Trying to loft the shield with his left arm, he discovered the leather carrying-straps were nibbled to nothing by mice, and that his middle-aged wrist could no longer slip through the armhole.

  No armor was necessary at the dedication ceremony for the year’s new triremes. As he walked the road to Piraeus, he was appalled to find he merited an entourage. This included some respectable citizens, who took the transit of a general through their neighborhoods as an opportunity to make a gift of sage advice to the state. To these Dexion thought it best to nod, and agree that yes, the proper routing of gutter-water was indeed a matter of national importance, to be referred immediately to the attention of the archons. His escort also included a number of citizens of lesser means, who made neither suggestions nor demands but seemed content just to move in the proximity of power. Among them, Sophocles was pleased to glimpse his son, who watched from the margins of the crowd with a look of distracted enjoyment on his face, as if he was absorbed in a fine show. It was a look the boy had never worn at one of his father’s plays.

  Down at the shore the day had dawned with pitiless severity, the heat soaring, the few forlorn clouds in the sky hanging as if uncertain which way to cross the blue. The navy’s new ships were already launched. They were, in fact, little more than empty shells, without crews, cordage, or arms, their oarlocks plugged with leather. Unballasted, the hulls rode high in the water, their newly-pitched planks shining in the sun like the down of newborn birds. After the blessing they would be hoisted ashore again and stored for months in the arsenal to await the appointment of a private contractor to pay for their complete fitting-out. Under such circumstances Dexion thought the ceremony somewhat premature — like announcing the subject of a play without a chorus or a protagonist.

  He watched the proceedings from the generals’ box without really seeing it; he was rarely much at ease in the harbor town, where the very air was redolent of barbarity. With the growth of the Athenian navy had lately come a burgeoning of the city’s trade. The combined odors of commerce in the Middle Sea now clashed and competed from ramshackle stalls — cypress logs from Crete, Phoenician dates, Hellespontine mackerel, Cyrenian rosin, Arabian asphalt. On his way to the quay, he detected the slight mildew of animal skins loaded for freight, and of Carthaginian blankets, and Gaulish woolens, and Lycian rugs. When the breeze shifted, there was the perfume of frankincense from Tripolitan Syria, and Somalian myrrh, but also from the fringes the pall of human dung, which even the most diligent slave dealer could not cleanse from his wares.

  Far away the priests intoned and spilled offerings into the water from silver bowls; from some bronze torchier a flame kindled in Poseidon’s temple consumed
the bundled bones and sheathes of fat dedicated to the god. The poet, gazing over the water to the southwest, thought he saw a glint of sunshine from the sanctuary of Athena on Aegina. He was engrossed in looking for it again when a commotion cut through his reverie.

  It seemed at first as if the port was under attack. Young men and boys were running from the city, dispersing into every court and backstreet where people went about their daily business. As they swept toward the shore, a disconsonant buzz rose in their wake, as the citizens of Athens received whatever news had arrived with loud, public dismay.

  The closest of the self-appointed messengers was a small boy, no older than nine or ten, whose thin, naked body was sunbaked as deep black as the newly-pitched ships. The boy had managed to out-run his competitors by squeezing between the legs of anyone in his way. But when he saw Pericles himself sitting there, backed up by the full council of generals in all their official finery, he pulled up short. Then he stood mute as the Olympian rose to his feet.

  “Well then, out with it!” said Pericles. “Or must we pay to hear what you’ve been telling everyone else for free?”

  He tossed an obol in the dust. Retrieving it, the boy cracked a mercenary grin.

  “Damaged ships put in last night at Anaphlystos. They were attacked by the Samians.”

  *

  “I would tell you about the people of Samos,” Aspasia was saying to him, “but you would not believe me.”

  It was one of her peculiar habits, to talk about politics in bed. Dexion had not found it distracting in the beginning, when the newness of his position made him senseless to anything but his immediate pleasure. She had, in fact, counted on this carelessness to draw him in, as if dropping a line of breadcrumbs between the twin edifices of her built-up shoes. As he flitted up the scented path, past the tinkling silver anklets on her parted legs, he was not poet enough to think of verses sweeter than what he found at its end. And when he hesitated there, she pushed two fingers — shamelessly, fingers of her right hand — into that tender juncture, the gold of her antique ring, a Phrygian signet, cold and thrilling against the summit. She pleasured herself before his eyes, until he was as stupid-seeming as any other man, and she was amused just at that moment to ask, “Have you ever smelled the scent of pines on the streets of Priene? The great Cyrus walked those roads, and knew them worth possessing. If someone must rule it, what city deserves the honor more than Miletus, I ask you?”

  “I can think of none other,” said he.

  She continued to expound, providing historical context as he climbed up on her. “The war over Priene started last year, before Diphilos surrendered the archonship. Samos struck first, smuggling in their troops in converted merchantmen. They had driven the Milesian garrison from Mount Mycale before word of the attack — Ouch. Don’t be in such a hurry, my love — before word of the attack crossed the Meander. But what Samian has ever conducted his business in honorable fashion? They are a race of swaggering, cowardly braggarts, impressed by nothing but force — Yes, move a little side to side, that’s the way — it is a certainty they will despoil the place before they give it up.”

  “And your view has nothing to do with the fact that you were born Milesian?” he asked.

  “What an oaf you are, to impugn the motives of a woman who accommodates your cock!”

  “I stand ashamed, then.”

  “As well you should! And mark my words: the Samians are better cheats and liars than warriors. The Assembly knew it well when it voted to intervene on the side of Miletus. Ask anyone who went with our fleet to settle the matter last year — against Athenian steel, the ringleaders showed their true nature, running away to exile in Sardis. Pericles found the rest of Samos — the common people — as hungry for self-government as children. And he gave them what they wanted, so the island would be pacified and the aggression of their nobles would never again trouble Ionia.”

  “Until now.”

  “Until now,” she repeated, a bit rueful. “You must know that no one expected the exiles to return. When Pericles left, the democracy was established on a firm footing. There was no question of a reverse. If we have made any mistake, it is underestimating Persia’s hatred of the democrats. Don’t doubt it, my love. It is the satrap who is behind this rebellion. Pericles told you the truth as he knew it when he promised there would be no war.”

  He made no reply until, with a tightening in his extremities, he signaled he was reaching the end. Aspasia, who was expert in noting these signs, pushed him out and held him as he climaxed in her hand. For several moments they stared at each other, until Sophocles asked the question that was long on his mind.

  “Shall I assume, then, that you’ve invited me here on the Olympian’s behalf?”

  Aspasia smiled, regarding with learned detachment the contents of her palm.

  “Poet or slave, it is always the same,” she said, and then looked up at him with eyes half-lidded with reproach. “Assume what you want. Only know that I have peons for such work, if that was all it was.”

  “And is that the work to which you will return, while he is away?”

  She smiled. “You have such contempt for me, Dexion! It makes you most ordinary, I think. But if you must know, I will spend that time with my writing tablet.”

  “Writing tablet? Why?” Sophocles asked, testing her. It was one of the worst-kept secrets in Athens that Pericles and Aspasia collaborated on his speeches.

  “There will be a funeral oration. Men will die in this war, of course — Relax Dexion, not you! This is an important campaign, and Pericles must have his speech just right.”

  Walking back to Colonus, he went torchless, his general’s cloak balled under his arm. To be sure, he’d had more than his share of women and boys in his time, and against that experience Aspasia’s skills were no more than above average. But there was something else about the woman, he thought, that conveyed an official quality both impersonal and edifying. It was as if he had lifted Athena’s golden chiton to glimpse the goddess’ ivory ass in the Parthenon, or been lent the state barge for some private tour of the harborside stews. Was it how she spoke with that unique mid-Aegean accent, somewhere between Athenian precision and Ionian swank? Was it those little sculptor’s tits? Or was it the way she smelled of the oily stuff they used to perfume the cult statues?

  His lust. Golden Sophocles in his youth had no trouble attracting admirers, and with experience he’d learned to make his looks serve his purposes. As time passed, though, he was slow in noticing the change in how they all saw him: at some point as those soft contours eroded to crags and his beard grew, they all began to look at him differently, as a thing of distinction but not as an object of desire. Yet the gods had fashioned him with no appreciation for his mortality. When he watched the boys in the ballfields, or the arms of the girls lofting their baskets, or clambered into the beds of uptown courtesans, he was still a boy of twenty. A mature gentleman of fifty-five, he still pursued them all like a feckless virgin, eager for experience he had already gained over and over. All the while he was increasingly aware of how foolish he must seem, losing himself in those snatches that never changed, never yielded fresh secrets. He swore each time was the last. And yet when flatterers like Aspasia crooked their liveried fingers, he complied with shaking knees.

  He puzzled over this perversity all the way home. He was glad of the distraction, for in the morning he would embark for Samos. If the winds were right, he would board ship for the war he was promised would never happen, but now accepted as his obligation. In this sense, the consolation of Aspasia’s bed was unnecessary. He had been prepared to suffer his fate the moment he swore his oath before the Assembly.

  Then it occurred to him — Aspasia was spotless. For all he had seen of her, she had not a blemish, not a birthmark, not a scarlet freckle from too many turns in the sun. The thought chilled him; it seemed Pericles’ woman was statuesque in more ways than her bust or her smell. He shuddered as he reached his house, and quaked as he pulled
off his clothes, unable to control the quivering of his limbs until he reached his bed and, finding Nais there, wrapped his body, still fragrant with adultery, around his wife’s soft frame.

  She awoke with a start a few minutes later. Heart pounding, he lay frozen, waiting for her to sniff out his shame. But instead she pushed her tear-streaked face close to his, and surprised him with a kiss — a wet, affectionate nuzzle that was more adolescent than wifely.

  He stared at her. “What is it?” he asked, and waited for an answer until he suspected she was still asleep. He planted his lips on her forehead.

  “You trouble me,” Nais said suddenly.

  “That isn’t what I want.”

  “You trouble me, but what will I do if you don’t come back?”

  “I will come back.”

  Watching the gleam of her eyes in the half-moonlight, he felt a surge of relief — that she had not accused him of whoring again — and self-loathing — that he had been whoring again. But instead of saying anything more, he saw her lids close, and her head turn as she threw off the coverlet. Tor the second time that night, a woman offered him her back, pressing herself against him as he, pleasantly aroused, left behind all fear at last.

  Chapter III

  THE HIPPOCAMP SEES HIS SHADOW

  “No, let me see fear, too, established, where fear is fitting; let us not think that we can act on our desires without paying the price in pain.”

  — Menelaus, Ajax, 1. 1080

  *

  The staging beach at Keos appeared at last from out of the shadows. If Sophocles had the stomach for it, he would have risen to his feet to see it better, but the motion of the hull made him reluctant to stand. Instead, he waited until the watch fires appeared over the swells. Turning to the helmsman, he fretted, “Do you see the pull-out? I don’t see the pull-out.”