Old Men in Love

5: A STATESMAN’S DAY

Soon after daybreak Pericles came to the Athenian port and for nearly three hours conferred with harbourmasters, dockers and seamen, occasionally scratching notes on a thin wax tablet backed by wood. He then returned to the city, striding swiftly uphill between two great new walls joining the port to the Athenian citadel. The sky was clear and blue, the air warm yet fresh, the big marketplace more than usually busy. He crossed it, entered the council chambers and stood in a corner of the big lobby, glancing over his notes but able to see those who entered or left. Most councillors were as familiar to him as he to them. He steadily ignored knowing looks from many who shared his views and enquiring looks from some who did not, but beckoned to his side one at a time new councillors whose opinions were not exactly known. He talked to them about revenues to be voted for dock maintenance, for equipping warships and for building new ones. Each councillor tried, usually successfully, to hide his elation at being singled out by the nation’s greatest statesman. He listened to them as carefully as they to him, giving different reasons for increased expenditure. He told a merchant it was needed to protect trade from barbarians and pirates — an arms manufacturer that it would maintain Athenian military supremacy — a landowner that it would reduce local unemployment — a patriotic farmer that it would spread democracy abroad. Pericles thought all these reasons valid but did not expect others to be so broad-minded. He ended each speech by saying how the expenditure would profit dealers in timber, metal, sailcloth, cable, earthenware and food. All councillors were chosen from the electorate by lot so only one of his hearers belonged (like Pericles) to The Few who owned big estates. The rest were from The Many, but all Athenians profited by some commodity the navy needed and his final appeal to the profit motive clinched every previous argument. By its fourth utterance Pericles was sick of that argument and almost sick of himself. He regarded Athenian democracy as an example to every nation, present and in future, so regretted that what most united his fellow citizens was greed. “You’re tired! Come and eat with me,” said the fourth councillor, pleased to see the great statesman show signs of weakness. He gestured toward the excellent restaurant where councillors dined at public expense and could entertain guests.

“Impossible. Goodbye,” said Pericles regretfully. He was hungry but always avoided flaunting his privileges.

It was now afternoon when most Athenians had lunched and were enjoying a siesta. He liked the streets at this time for there were fewer people to greet or stare at him. He ignored starers and answered all greetings with the slightest of nods: a manner that led some to call him Zeus or The Olympian, though he knew he had coarser nicknames. The only people he sometimes spoke to in the streets were sausage sellers — fast food peddlers thought socially inferior because they sold the cheapest parts of animals in a shape supposed to be used as dildos by sexually frustrated women and impotent men. From a market stall he bought two sausages and ate them sitting on a stool in the shadow of an awning.

“Where’s your man today?” he asked the sullen woman who sold them.

“On a bender.”

“Hm?”

“Getting sloshed out of his tiny wits by drinking with equally rotten mates.”

“A pity.”

She resumed a silence in which he calmly finished his meal then went to inspect public building work.

Which was no more his business than that of any other Athenian, but by listening to complaints of tradesmen, foremen, artists and architects he left most of them in a happier frame of mind. The walls of the new concert hall had been completed but not the steep pyramidal roof. Though designed by an acoustics expert it was the subject of jokes that amused the workmen but alarmed the architect who said, “A roof like this has never been built before. It may echo worse than the inside of Dionysus’ quarry.”⁴

“It didn’t echo in the model.”

“A wood and clay model, no matter how big, cannot accurately predict the acoustics of a vast building.”

“Then all you can do is build it,” said Pericles. “Remember that you’ll be praised if it sounds good, I’ll be blamed if it does not.”

He walked back to Aspasia’s house before sunset, brooding with some satisfaction upon the day’s events. As he passed a group drinking outside a tavern one of them bawled, “Pericles! Smy pal Pericles!”

Pericles neither paused nor looked aside. Behind him a stool was knocked over, then came stumbling steps and a yell, “Don’t you know me, Pericles? Have you no word for your pal the good old sau-sau-sausager? Sausagist? Sausalogistical expert?”

Pericles resisted an urge to walk faster. After a few more maudlin appeals the drunkard behind lost his temper and yelled “Onionhead! Onionhead! You think you’re the Lord God Almighty yet your balding head is shaped exactly like an onion! You damned Olympian onionhead who thinks he runs the whole city! — the whole empire! Nya! Onionhead!” Excited children and some interested citizens now accompanied the prime minister and his critic. They excited the sausage seller to a greater range of insult.

“Skinflint! Miserly skinflint! And the richest man in Athens! He spent so much money buying our votes with plays and processions that his sons had to dress like commoners! No wonder they hated his guts, the damned miser. Listen to me, Onionhead! Stop pretending you’re deaf! You’re a miserable, miserly, onionheaded skinflint and whoremonger! Yes! Whoremonger! You live with a foreign prostitute and kiss her every morning before going to work, you unmanly queer old queen! You rotten ugly onionheaded miserly skinflint whoremonger!”

The enlarging crowd accompanying them stimulated more insults in a louder voice.

“And an atheist! You believe a damned foreign physics expert who says heaven and earth were made by accident! You don’t believe in Zeus because you think you are Zeus! For nearly thirty years you’ve tricked us Athenians into letting you do what you like with us but you’re a guttering candle now, my friend! We’re beginning to see through you — our democracy now has a REAL spokesman in parliament! — Cleon, a man of the people who’ll soon sort out you and your foreign pals and foreign experts and that foreign whore of yours, the brothel-keeper! What a hypocrite you are, passing laws against poor bastards and living in a brothel with your mistress! No wonder your two wives divorced you! No wonder your first son was a rogue and the second an idiot and God killed both of them you onionheaded, foreigner-loving, blasphemous, hypocritical, miserly multimillionaire tyrant in commoner’s clothing! But you can fool nobody now, you indecent, whoremongering utterly incompetent war leader!”

The sun had set when Pericles reached the yard before Aspasia’s house and turned round. The sausage-seller fell as silent as the watchful crowd behind him. Pericles looked thoughtfully at the dark sky overhead. A servant came from the house and stood near him.

“The moon won’t rise for another hour,” Pericles told the slave.

“Fetch a lantern and show this citizen home.”

He turned his back upon a great explosion of laughter and applause and entered the house. The sausage-seller also turned and, facing the jeering mob, stroked his beard for a while then raised his hand in the parliamentary gesture requesting permission to speak. An interested silence followed. To the slave he cried imperiously, “Lead the way, boy!” and advanced upon the crowd with a grotesque expression of lofty disdain and a swagger that caricatured the stride of Pericles. The crowd, laughing, parted to let him through, a few humorists bowing low on each side.

Inside the house Pericles embraced Aspasia and stood a while with closed eyes and his cheek against hers, sighing sometimes because the past quarter hour had been a strain. She murmured, “A bad day?”

“A good one till near the end. Now I will wash. And then enjoy, please, you. And then can we eat and be intelligently entertained? Who comes tonight?”

“Heavenly Reason. And our greatest artist and greatest playwright and wisest man.”

“Our wisest man. You mean Socrates.”

“That’s what the Priestess of Apollo called him.”

“I wonder why. He was an honest though not great stone carver. He is certainly a brave soldier and talks amusingly, but he has done nothing else I know toward the welfare of the state.”

“You think The Oracle should have mentioned you.”

“I do.”

“You’re jealous of poor old Socrates!” she said, laughing.

“Yes. Thanks for letting me admit to a weakness. You’re the only one I can do that with. Anyone else coming?”

“The Golden Mean, High Anxiety and Critias.”

“Rich men should not come here,” he said wearily. “If The Many find out they’ll think The Few are plotting against them. And The Many will be right.”

“The Few are worried about Cleon. They say he’s now too popular, too powerful.”

“I wish they would leave their political worries to me who knows how to handle them. Please come to bed. I’ll wash afterwards if you don’t mind.”