The Last Song of Orpheus

14

I dwelled in Thrace for a good many years, then, continuing the work among the harsh and rude Ciconians that I had begun before Cheiron summoned me off to the voyage for the Fleece, and I achieved much that was useful in bringing them toward civilization. Not that I remained there constantly, for an oracle I had consulted had warned me that a kind of restlessness would overcome me from time to time and, with nothing more than my lyre and the sack upon my back, I must get myself off to some distant land and take part in whatever sacred Mysteries were celebrated there. Such journeys were all part of my task. To fulfill my role in maintaining the great harmony of the universe I must go from place to place as I am told, either to teach or just to sing and play, as is needed.

During one of these absences the great war broke out between Hellas and Troy. I need not sing that tale here, the story of Agamemnon and Menelaus and Helen and Paris and Achilles and Hector and all the rest, for others have sung it as well as any mortal ever could. When all that was happening I was far away, visiting Egypt once more—a new Pharaoh ruled there now, a shriveled, fleshless boy whose soul was as dry as the desert sounds of his kingdom. He showed no sign of mortal emotion whatever and wore his double crown like the aegis of a god. This king wanted none of my songs and would have sent me away, though after a time he relented and let me stay, and even had me shown into the richly painted underground chamber where the Pharaoh whom I had known now lay buried amid all his lavish treasures.

Pharaoh’s priests shared much arcane wisdom with me, and I stayed with them for several years, to my great benefit, until finally an inner voice told me it was time to go, that the course of my destiny would now take me elsewhere. So back I went to rugged mountain-girt Thrace again. There I learned that while I was still in Egypt, renewing my studies in the lore of that ancient land, the war at Troy had ended and Odysseus of Ithaca, the wily son of my old Argo shipmate Laertes, had put ashore at my capital city of Ismarus in the early days of his long voyage home. And Odysseus had let his men sack the place, so that I found much of it wrecked upon my return.

Well, it is the will of the gods that the fortunes of cities ebb and flow; and so I led my people in a great rebuilding, and soon we had the place restored again. Then I considered the work of the spirit that still remained for me to do among the Ciconians. Thrace was then, as it had always been, under the thrall of the violent god Dionysus, who brings the frenzy of madness to men. It is well known that I myself have been sworn all my days to the tranquility and sanity of great Apollo, and I saw it as my duty to bring my people over to Apollo’s noble creed, a difficult task indeed. Now, though, I had new knowledge that I could employ. In the course of my second visit to Egypt it had become clear to me that Dionysus and Apollo are merely different aspects of the same divinity, the two sides of the image in the mirror, and I hoped to make use of that revelation as a force for the conversion of my people. But the work went slowly. The Ciconians loved their wild god.

I was interrupted now and again in my task by that restlessness of which I have spoken. On one of those journeys I encountered tireless Odysseus, ever a rover himself, who in the autumn of his years, gray-bearded and bent with age, his once-bright eyes now dimmed and his burly shoulders rounded and slumping, had left his home and wife in Ithaca to roam the world as so often he had done in his stormy youth. We met—by chance, some might say, though I know otherwise—in a tavern in Athens, the city that Theseus had founded in Attica. “The seer Teiresias told me,” he said, “that I would make one more voyage in my old age, though he did not tell me where I would go. But Poseidon, who visits me by night in dreams that shake my bed, will give me no rest until I do.”

He was thinking of going to Egypt, he said. But I saw nothing promising for that crafty man in so staid and rigid a land. He would only break himself against the immovable hieratic stillness of that unchanging place. Instead I urged him toward the west, toward the undiscovered realms beyond the sunset. What you have always chosen to do, I told him, was to follow knowledge like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought; and that is what you must do again on this new and final voyage of yours. As I spoke, an unearthly light entered his eyes, which took on again all that eagerness and hunger for experience that had driven him in earlier times, and the years seemed to drop away from him so that he seemed once more to be the potent far-seeing leader whose sagacity and guile had guided the Hellenes so well in their war against Priam’s Troy.

So I went to sea with Odysseus. He bought a ship in Athens—it was not nearly so fine as the Argo, but it would do—and put up postings for crewmen—they flocked to his banner, not a band of heroes such as the Argonauts had been, but good enough for the job—and westward off we went, past the isles of Hellas, past Italy, into the unknown.

Early in the journey he spoke to me, of his own accord, of the sacking of my city. “The wind,” he said, “drove us from Troy to your Ismarus, and we came ashore very hungry and badly in need of fresh water. You know how that is. As you might guess, we weren’t greeted with any sort of friendliness. But we had just come from the destruction of a much greater city than yours and were full of a sense of our own strength, and so we fell upon your Ciconians and took from them by force what they wouldn’t give us out of generosity. You know how it is.”

“I know how it is, yes.”

“But then”—and such a look of great sadness and regret came into those cunning eyes that for a moment I could almost believe was a genuine show of his feelings—“then, after swilling too much wine and slaughtering too many sheep, my foolish men turned mutinous and began to loot the city and seize the women, and nothing I could say would hold them back. How that angered me, to see them running wild that way!”

I understood then that look of regret that had come into his eyes: what proud Odysseus regretted was not so much the sack of my city, for which he made no apology, but rather the shameful fact that he had been unable to control his own men. He went on to tell me how the Ciconians had summoned their kinsmen from outlying districts and driven him and his men away, though not before much damage had been done. “Many of your people died. I lost some dozens of my own. And so it went. It is the way of the gods to engineer such calamities for us.”

“The way of the gods, yes,” I said. “And so it went.”

After that Odysseus and I spoke no more of the sack of Ismarus.

We kept Africa on our left as we sailed, and the coast of the Hesperian lands on our right, and in time we found ourselves passing through the Pillars of Heracles and staring at the great uncharted sea that lies beyond them. Odysseus’ weary men began to mutter at the sight of that endless expanse of water and talked of turning back. But he called them together and said, “Brothers, you who have passed through a hundred thousand perils to reach this place, do not deny yourself this last exploit. Here lies a chance to learn for yourself what lies in this unknown world on the far side of the sun, where no people dwell.” Who could resist the force of that man? He pointed toward the northwest; and all muttering ceased, and they put their shoulders to the oars, and toward the northwest we went.

So we came to the Hyperborean lands of snow and ice, and of course they were not uninhabited at all, but were home to a race of tall fair-skinned golden-haired folk. We coasted there awhile, until the unending darkness of the winter drove even long-enduring Odysseus to despair; then we turned west and found an island not quite as bleak and snowy, where we made a landing and visited with its people, who were dark and stocky but did not look at all like us, and traveled far inland to a place where they had their temple, one that was not in any way like the temples of Hellas: it was just a double ring of huge lofty stones, with equally huge crosspieces laid atop them as lintels.

The people of the island were very proud of this temple, which must have been built by giants or magicians. At first they would not let us look on while they celebrated their rites there, but then I played my lyre for them and sang, and told of the secret things in a way that showed them that all gods are the same god, and when they saw that my music obeyed the laws of the harmony of the universe they let us take part in their ceremony. It was a very strange one indeed. I will not speak of it except to say that it left me with a feeling of deep fulfillment, seeing as I did that the eternal truths held sway even here at the end of the earth.

And afterward? We sailed out into the ocean again and would have gone southward until the stars we knew had slipped below the horizon and we entered the fabled fiery territories beyond the rim of the world. But storms came up and our vessel was whirled round and round until it seemed we would be carried to the bottom; and although we survived it, brave Odysseus at last was unable to make his men carry us any farther, and perhaps, though he would never have admitted it, he had come finally to the end of his own hunger for exploration. So we turned back and searched for the entrance to our own sea, a sea that we Hellenes think is great in size but now seemed to us small and almost comical after the one on whose breast we had been traveling so long, and to Hellas we returned. Of Odysseus I heard nothing more. I think he died in his own bed in Ithaca, all his questing finally at an end. My own death, which, as I knew, awaited me in Thrace, was not nearly so peaceful.