The Mask of Apollo: A Novel

7

I DECIDED TO DO THE NATURAL THING AND MAKE for the theater. It would be a starting point; something would come to me there. I found my own way, seeing nobody I felt like asking.

Syracuse is a splendid city, taking after Corinth, which founded it. But it was warmer, greener, dustier, stank more, and already smelled of spring. There seemed more of everything—more gilding, more marble, more shops, more people. They had traits of every nation under heaven: fair Hellenes and dark Hellenes, brown hawk-faced Numidians, black thick-faced Libyans; reddish little black-haired Sikels, and every kind of cross-breed these could produce. All they had in common was their Greek dress, and fear. The place was like a kicked anthill, before they start putting it to rights. Only they did not look to me like doing it, but as if they were waiting to see what would be done to them. There was a kind of meanness with it too, as if each watched his neighbor lest he might find a foothold quicker in this slippery time, and manage to make something out of it.

The theater was empty. Even the caretaker and cleaners had gone off, leaving it unlocked. The streets had been full of people in their working clothes. I went in, and felt better for it, more myself. As I had expected, there was too much of the best of everything—colored marble, gilding, painting, over-decorated statues—a place designed to make one think, “I am playing at Syracuse,” rather than, “I am playing in Sophokles.” I had never seen such machinery as there was backstage and under it Dionysios must have turned his war engineers loose there when they had nothing else on hand. One huge device of wheels and levers left me quite at a loss; later I found it was to raise the stage or lower it by pumping water in or out of chambers below.

However, as I had guessed I would, from here I knew where to go next. I went down into the street and found the theater tavern.

One could tell it at a glance, as one always can: a barber’s stand in one corner; a set of the tragic masks on one wall; on another a scene from the Agamemnon, with actors’ names written in. Though the theater had been empty, this was cram-full; the noise came out to meet me, the sort which, in cities all over Hellas, makes an artist feel at home. No muttering and whispering, as in the streets. An actor always knows that if one city gets too hot, there are others.

The barber’s chair was free, so, having shaved that morning, I asked to be pumiced, a good long talkative job. News buys news.

The barber was a Corinthian, as every barber in Syracuse is, or claims to be. When he asked me whence I came, and so on, I told him everything, except that I knew Dion; there seemed no sense in hiding the rest. While he spread his towels he passed on the news over his shoulder; presently, to save him trouble, people got up and sat around. Some of them offered me wine. It was as unlike as possible to the city outside. Here one could feel one’s footing. Actors understand actors, as dogs do other dogs.

No one was surprised that, having come so far for nothing, I should stay to see the city before going home. The barber, who owned the tavern, introduced me to the leading actors who were there, and to some old ones who I expect sat there all day. Then he remembered that Dionysios’ chorus-trainer, who would have worked on Hectors Ransom, lived nearby, and sent someone to fetch him. Meantime, everyone told me about Dionysios’ fatal party, some adding that by habit he was a sober man, and might have lived if he had been better seasoned to it. They talked of the plays he had put on; there was a good deal of smooth backbiting among the leading men, far more than at Athens, which came, I should say, from their having had to compete for the tyrant’s favor. The man I took to most was a second-role tragedian called Menekrates. As he seemed talkative, and I had learned nothing useful yet, I asked him whether young Dionysios would be as good a patron as his father.

For a moment everyone glanced round in search of eavesdroppers; even here one was still in Syracuse. But they seemed satisfied. Menekrates smiled, flashing his white teeth; he was dark almost to blackness, with a high-bridged Numidian nose. “My dear Nikeratos, that is the riddle of the Sphinx. No one knows anything, about theater or anything else. If you want my opinion, the man who would most like to know what young Dionysios is like is the man himself. Since he left off playing with his toys, he’s not dared to be anything that a man of rank could take seriously. He won’t even laugh at a comedy till every one round him has laughed first. He cries more easily. I made him cry once. That’s as much as anyone knows. He may be sitting at this moment, like an actor without a mask, waiting for someone to write him a part.”

“Or,” said a man with a flute-player’s flat-topped fingers, “he may be taking off the mask he’s been playing in all this time, to make his bow and show his face.”

Just then the chorus-master came in, a little bouncing man who knew artists all over Greece and demanded news of them, and I had to talk theater. After all, it was the center of these men’s lives, and it was only chance that was making me any different.

What next? I was no nearer knowing than when I landed. If I had been anyone else, I could just have walked to Dion’s house and asked how I could be of service. But what kind of entrance could I make which would not seem to say, “Here I am, stranded without work after coming all this way. You hired me; now look after me.”

The barber had done, and it was noon. But Menekrates would not let me order food, and shared with me a good fish stew. Then, when we had eaten, he said that since I had come to see the sights, he would be happy to show me Syracuse, and to offer me the spare bed at his lodging.

Here was an omen at the crossroads. I had taken to the man; he liked gossip, too, and might have some useful knowledge. All over Hellas, a web of guest-friendship binds the artists of Dionysos; it went without saying that when next he came to Athens I would return his hospitality. So I could accept it without loss of pride—a great piece of luck, with my passage home to think about.

“It will have been worth your visit,” he said, “just to see the funeral. There is always a big show for an important man; but this should be the sight of a generation.”

“Of two,” said the chorus-master. “Dionysios has ruled for two, by the common reckoning.”

I asked who would arrange the rites. “Why, the heir,” he answered. “Young Dionysios.” Plainly no one doubted who the heir was. I wondered what was going on in the island stronghold. There was not much chance of my ever knowing.

After this Menekrates took me to the small street where he lodged, in a good clean room with whitewashed walls opening to a courtyard. He showed me my bed, lay down upon his own and slept at once, as everyone does there at that hour. Even so early in the year, it was getting warm. Not being used to it, I lay thinking, looking out through the window at the court with its green shade of palms and gourds.

When the shadows started lengthening, he woke up. As we splashed well-water on our faces, he said, “Let us go and see if my cousin Theoros has got home yet. He should have been purified from the death chamber by this time. We shall learn something at first hand from him.”

As we slipped along a crooked alley where two could not walk abreast, I asked who this Theoros was. He answered, “Oh, he is the great man of our family. He works for Leontis the physician, puts on his poultices and so on. For three days now he and his master and the other leading doctor, Iatrokles, have been locked up in Ortygia. My cousin (he is really my cousin’s husband) has been at her wits’ end, poor girl. She said if the Archon died they would all be executed. I told her not to fret; there was no one the old man’s life was as precious to as it was to him.”

Apollo, I thought, you have not forsaken your servant.

“He does not approve of me,” said Menekrates. “He thinks I should have had foreknowledge of so dignified a person marrying into the family, and chosen another calling. But we’ll hear something from him; he is too self-important to keep it in.”

Some children playing in the street told us he was back. We went on, and found a small room fast filling up with kindred and acquaintance. The women had hidden inside, but the door-curtain bulged with them; two little boys ran about underfoot like chickens. There was no room to sit down. Theoros, a weighty fellow with a long combed beard and a manner copied from his master, held forth beside the hearthstone. He received me civilly, but condescended to Menekrates. I saw that all the family, except for him, was quite fair and Greek. This often happens in Sicily.

I will cut Theoros’ opening narration, which followed Dionysios’ sickness from the first shiver through rigors, vomitings, sweatings, purgings, and so on, with all the treatment. He described how every time Leontis sent him outside for anything, before being let back into the sickroom he was searched to the skin by the guards. “A foolishness, when so many means of healing can be means of death, misused. But they had their rule and no one dared change it; when Iatrokles, our colleague, complained of the delay, the captain related how a guard was once put to death for handing a javelin to the Archon’s own brother, when all he wanted was to draw a siege plan in the dust for Dionysios to see. He would not have a razor near him, even to shave himself, but singed his beard with glowing charcoal. So now, as you can understand, they feared he might yet recover and make them answer for it. When he began to sink, and they heard us say it was only a matter of time, they stopped searching young Dionysios; but you could see it made them anxious. If it had been Dion, that would have been different; the rule had always been waived for him.”

There was a buzz in the room. Someone said, “Dion was not there?”

Theoros coughed, and stroked his beard. “It was difficult. A very delicate matter. On the one hand, the patient was exhausted, and just the man, as his son had no need to remind us, to overtax what strength was left. On the other, he was the Archon still. Yet to obey a sick man without discretion may be to make oneself his murderer.”

The company weighed this in a respectful pause. My question was burning my tongue, but the manners one is bred with stick. It was a white-haired old granddad, sure of his standing, who piped up, “What? What? Did Dionysios ask for Dion?”

“That again, Glaukos, is a thing more easily asked than answered.” He nodded approval of himself, till I thought I should go mad. “In the earlier phase, when the patient was full master of his faculties, he was occupied, as often happens, with trivialities, the gods having sent him no foreknowledge. He discussed his play, sent for Timaios the skene-painter, and talked a full hour with him against our advice, sending out more than once to learn if the actors had come from Athens.” Then he remembered, bowed, and said, “Ours is the privilege denied him.” I bowed back. Menekrates caught my eye and winked.

“Dion of course visited his kinsman, but found him full of these affairs. Calling us to the anteroom, he charged us to inform him at once if our prognosis altered. ‘I have seen these fevers in the field; they change quickly, either way. If he worsens, tell me directly, without fail.’ You know his manner. My principal said, afterwards, that a general he might be, but we were not his men though he seemed to think so.”

My heart sank. From the man one may infer the master, and I could see the scene.

“He was given the civil answer due to his rank. It went without saying that the heir must hear first of any change. And he said at once, ‘My uncle has never known how to spare himself. Nor has my father. It will be his death if we let them meet.’ When Dion returned, therefore, he was told the patient must have quiet. Indeed, with the fever’s evening rise he grew restless, wandering in his thoughts, giving and canceling orders, then demanding something to make him sleep. In the course of these ramblings it is likely that, as you, Glaukos, were asking, Dion’s name came up. Had we obeyed them all, we should have had the sickroom full of mercenary captains, engineers, envoys, tax-collectors, masters of horse and actors—a chaos, as our new Archon put it. He himself behaved with great propriety. As for Dion, I believe he did come back once or twice, and latterly brought his sister’s sons; and once Dionysios called out to him to come in if he wanted anything, not stand talking with the guard. But at once the patient had rambled off again, cursing us for calling ourselves doctors when we could not so much as dispense a draught of poppy. His son, who was there, begged us not to refuse this comfort, so likely to be the last. We therefore complied, and the end was peaceful.”

Peaceful for the doctors, too, I thought. If you can’t save your patient, it’s next best to know when you can stop fearing him, and start fearing his heir. They were better off than the guards.

After this everyone started telling stories of Dionysios. It seemed even those who hated him were powerless to look beyond him; how not, when no man under fifty could remember the days before he ruled? But before Menekrates and I slipped off, I overheard Theoros impart to some favored friends the last sensible words of the old tyrant. When he had had the draught, he beckoned his son and said, “If these fools let me die, even a fool like you should be able to keep hold on Syracuse. I leave you a city bound with chains of adamant.” These words he repeated, like a craftsman speaking of a good job done, and closed his eyes.

As we walked away, I thought, Whatever part did I think to play here? This is not Kreon’s Thebes, but the modern age, the hundred and third Olympiad. Well, I would stay on with Menekrates to see the funeral. It would give me a glimpse of Dion, since I could not think now of calling on him; he had trouble enough, without being touted by resting actors. I would just stand in the crowd, and see him pass.

Perhaps, I thought, he would spend more time in Athens now. I asked Menekrates his opinion. “Rather less, I should think,” he said, “unless young Dionysios is an even worse fool than his father thought. He never apprenticed him to his trade, for fear he’d want to own the business; he will need Dion at his elbow for years to come, to run the state at all. If that man is human, he must be waiting for his chance. Thank God I’ve no family of my own. I think I shall go on tour.”

“If you mean,” I said, “that Dion might seize power, I don’t think it likely. He doesn’t hold with revolutions, or civil war. I met him once.” He might hear this any day from some actor lately in Greece; it would look strange to have said nothing, unfriendly too. I told him the story, dwelling only on the theater part.

“Don’t dream,” he said, “of leaving before the funeral. No one will dare give parties, but we’ll pass the time. Not with my father’s kindred, whom I’m sure you have seen enough of. I don’t mix much with them; there was a family quarrel over my birth. As you see, I’m dark; my father’s sister, the fat frog, put it about I’d been got by our Libyan slave. Do I look like a Libyan? My father believed my mother, but the scandal soured him; he never had much use for me. When I was a man I searched the records. The Numidian strain’s from their side, and I told them so, for which they liked me no better. Well, I vowed I’d turn out the best of them, and so I have. Theoros is a servant for all his airs. Last year, when my brother stabbed a man and they had to find the blood-price, whom did they come to? Me. He’s as fair as you to look at; but inside, Numidian to the bone, savage as a desert wildcat. I am all Hellene; but they don’t look below the skin. However, it’s all one in the theater, under the mask.”

Rather than I should lack entertainment, he offered to take me to the best boy brothel in Syracuse, which he assured me would keep open. I thanked him and excused myself; I like Eros with unclipped wings, and the smiles of a slave, who might spit in one’s face if he did not fear the whip, have no power to warm me. So instead, that evening we went back to the theater tavern, finding it fuller than at noon; there Menekrates told everyone about Delphi and the crane, so that I was forced to relate the story. Then Stratokles, the chorus-master, said he had never seen the full text of Hector’s Ransom, having been given only the choral parts, and everyone demanded a recital. In no time they had me up on the barber’s stand, with an audience packed to the doors; some court gentlemen had come in who had no diversion that night, on account of the mourning, and were eager to hear the play which, as they said, Dionysios had died of.

“The verse is not bad,” said one of them. “Not quite Sophokles—except where it is Sophokles—but not bad at all. There was an oracle, you know, that the Archon wouldn’t die till he had won a victory over his betters. He’s let the Carthaginians off lightly more than once, when he could have pushed them into the sea.” Everyone started looking about in terror. The youth who had been speaking said, “He’s dead.” The green shoot bends quickest to the changing wind. “They made it worth his while, and he needed them now and then, to keep the city needing him. But this was the destined victory, after all. Two-tongued Apollo laughs last.”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “I heard the other plays and I thought the judging fair. It usually is, in Athens.” My mind went back to Theoros’ story of the old tyrant shouting for his sleeping draught, with Dion at the door. Yes, he had beaten his better at the end.

Next morning Menekrates woke me early, to go sightseeing in the cool. We were crossing the Agora, when we heard a crier calling all the citizens to the Assembly. I was surprised that under a tyranny such a thing existed, but Menekrates assured me all these forms had been kept on. “Come and watch,” he said, smiling sourly, “and you will understand. My friend Demetrios, the coppersmith, will let you stand on his roof.”

The Assembly place was down on the flats. On the way we passed the quarries where they put the Athenian prisoners in the Great War, and where so many died; they are not far from the theater. Menekrates told me Dionysios had had them carved out twice the size and there was no knowing who might be in them. “Well,” he said, “things may change, who knows? Let’s go and see.”

The Assembly field had been cleared overnight of stalls, sheep pens, cockpits and so forth. A tall rostrum in the center was hung with white, instead of purple. Menekrates had joined the citizens; from the roof of the smith I heard trumpets sound and the clank of armor. In marched about half a regiment, lining the middle of the square two or three deep. The Syracusans seemed to think nothing of it. They waited, chattering and shouldering, as women do for some spectacle others have prepared for them. I understood Menekrates’ smile.

Through a lane of soldiers the new Archon rode to the rostrum, and mounted the steps without grace. My eyes strayed to Dion, who had gone up with royal dignity behind him, and stood there with a few other men of the family. Him I would have known anywhere by his bearing and his height. As for young Dionysios, the soldiers had raised a dust, and it was too far to see faces well. But as one knows in the theater, the whole body speaks. He was thinnish, and held himself like a man with a stoop who had never before pulled back his shoulders. Sometimes he forgot, and let his neck poke forward. You could have told at a mile that he had neither looks nor charm.

He started speaking, coughing now and again from the dust. His voice matched his deportment: forced, anxious, and striving for effect, which only brought out its faults. His speech seemed empty and formal stuff, probably written by someone else. From what I could hear of it, he praised the departed, deplored his own loss and the city’s, and asked for the people’s loyalty. There was some acclamation, such as you might expect with all those soldiers standing about. I missed a good deal, since the smith had had no notion of leaving his slaves to idle while he was gone, and the bursts of clattering from the workshop often killed all other sound. It seemed no great loss.

After one such din, I found he was speaking of his father’s obsequies, which were to be worthy of Syracuse’s greatest man. The people brightened at news of a show, and there was some real applause. At this the young man picked up a little life, like a nervous actor with a good house. He stopped peeping at his notes, without which he would not have gone far till now, and, with a sudden burst of eloquence, spoke of his father’s poetic talents, the fruit of nights with the lamp while other men were reveling. (I am told this was quite true.) The hammers began again downstairs, after which I caught something about the gifted artist who should have painted the skene being at work upon a funeral pyre of no less splendor. You could tell, from the jerks and pauses, that he was now speaking extempore. After some more hammering, the loudest yet, I pulled my fingers out of my ears in time to hear “… will be spoken by the protagonist.”

Protagonist? I thought. What’s this?

Dion had been standing up there like a statue all this while. Now, even at this distance, I saw him start and look about. I knew then I had heard right.

I suppose the speech finished somehow. Menekrates met me at the door. He had been quite near the rostrum and heard everything. I was to speak the funeral oration.

“My dear,” I said, “we must both be dreaming. It should be Dionysios himself.”

“Of course it should. He can’t be such a fool as he looks. He couldn’t do it, as we’ve seen; he’s a stick; he loses his lines, he fluffs; he barely got through. At a state funeral, people expect something. The whole audience would have walked home saying, ‘Now Dion would have been worth hearing.’”

“You must be right,” I answered. “Nothing else makes sense.”

“If he’d hired an orator—and Demodoros must be spitting blood—everyone would know why. But this is a tribute to the old man’s last achievement. You could call it clever. He was gagging, you know. It came to him on stage; he was playing to the audience. By the dog, Niko, your guardian god looks after you.”

“He sent me a friend,” I answered. Indeed, I was lucky in Menekrates. He was generous by nature; not a rival, being still a second-roles actor; happy enough as my host to share the event and spread the news. Some artists would have been so jealous, especially of a foreigner, that I should have had to move out.

We returned to the lodging, so that I could be found. Just after siesta-time, when the sun was leaving the courtyard, the palace messenger arrived with my summons to Ortygia. I was to go next morning.

At the hour, therefore, when the market opens, I put on a plain white robe, since I was going to a house of mourning, and walked in the cool sunrise towards the sea. Menekrates saw me halfway. He said it was against nature, for a Syracusan, to linger before Ortygia.

There was a thick-walled fort to pass through, before one even set foot upon the causeway. The swarthy Iberian mercenaries who manned it looked at my summons, and opened the triple gates. Any one of them would have done by itself for a small town. I came out on a cobbled square by the Little Harbor, with the causeway still to cross.

I never saw at one time so many ships of war. Here I had my first sight of a quinquereme, as high as a two-floored house. Strange engines were mounted on the decks, for flinging fire, or stones, or dropping weights from mast-height to sink the enemy. Their beaks glared with huge painted eyes. There was an eye on the pennants, too; it was Dionysios’ house flag. The barracks of the galley slaves, with their walls and guards, seemed to stretch for miles.

A thirty-foot gate tower closed the landward end of the causeway. Its roof was manned by Nubian archers, polished black men with ox-hide cuirasses and thick horn bows. In front of the gate below, fair as the men above were dark, stood eight towering Gauls.

They wore Greek armor, for show, because they were on guard. I had heard a good deal about these troops, mainly from soldiers who had run away from them. It was old Dionysios’ rule that his mercenaries should fight in the panoplies of their homelands, which they felt at ease with; and the Gauls, as these men assured me, used to go into combat stark naked, singing paeans like the yowling of cat-a-mountains, tossing and catching their swords as they came on. They charged with wide, fixed blue eyes, seemingly insensible to pain and strange to the name of fear. A Gaul under six feet was reckoned a runt; altogether, one man told me, it was like facing a battle line of insane gods. Afterwards they would cut off the heads of the dead for trophies. Some said they ate the brains.

Now here they were, just as described: shaved chins and long mustaches, braided ropes of yellow hair down to their waists and bound with scarlet, long swords with curiously wrought hilts, neck and arm rings of plaited gold. I had not much time to stare; the captain shouted to me, without leaving his place by the gate, and asked my business. Just getting the drift of his vile Greek, I went up and told him. He must have topped me by a head, and I am not short. I showed him my letter; he waved it off, as if it were my fault he could not read, and in their lilting tongue ordered a man inside to ask. At last the portcullis went up. A new Gaul beckoned me. We crossed the causeway, passing between the great catapults I had seen from afar and their piles of throwing-stones. At the far end was another gateway, more Nubians on top, more Gauls below. My Gaul gave a password. This gate opened at once. I was inside Ortygia.

I had not entered a fort, but a hidden city. In fact, this had been the first Syracuse, the colonists from Corinth having perceived its strength at sight. They had held it against assault both from sea and land, till the city had burst its bounds and overflowed across to the rise upon the mainland. Dionysios had enclosed all of that in his defense walls; then for his own benefit he had cleared Ortygia of all its ordinary citizens. Each man in this teeming town was in the Archon’s personal service. It was self-sufficient; all trades needed to maintain it in peace or war were established here. I saw a street of armorers; a great clattering forge; a tannery, with a leather works as big as a small market; potters’ and fullers’ shops; and as for timber-yards, I passed three, not counting the shipwrights’.

The ground rose; going up steep cobbled streets and steps, we came to the barrack quarter. It was more like a soldiers’ town, with a street for each race: Greeks, Gauls, Campanians, Iberians, Nubians, Egyptians. We went through that of the Spartans, whose officers would not let them mix with their fellow Greeks for fear they should be corrupted. They stared from their doorways, haughty and stupid, and looking quite little beside the Gaul, which made me laugh. Now we were higher, I could make out the towers of a huge castle, jutting into the sea at the island’s toe. I asked the Gaul if that was Dionysios’ house: but he said it was the grain store. It was clear that this place could hold out forever, if it had ships to command the sea.

At last we came into a much wider street, all one side of which was a great high wall studded with watchtowers. The Gaul knocked at a postern and spoke into a grille. The oak door opened. Sun sifted through green shade; there was bird song; water plashed and tinkled. We were in a garden. I don’t know what I had expected—anything but this. It had seemed the core of Ortygia must be solid iron.

It was really a royal park; scattered among the lawns and groves were handsome houses, belonging to people of rank and office. There were a good many statues, modern ones, fluent and suave; the old man must have gone on collecting to the last. It was hard to believe in the Ortygia outside. At a fountain under a marble porch, women were drawing water in polished jars. Then I began to hear the shrilling of professional mourners, and knew we must be near the palace.

A tall portico, gilded and painted, was flanked with seated lions of red Samian marble. A guard of Gauls stood outside; but otherwise it was a palace, not a fort. So at least it seemed; but as I went through (the Gaul had passed me to a Greek chamberlain) I saw there was an inner wall fully six feet thick, before one got to the royal rooms. Outside its door of gilded bronze stood eight Gauls, the tallest yet. When they let me through, I was led into a place for all the world like the changing-room in an expensive bathhouse. There were clothes stands, shoe racks, all full—even a mirror. Two of the guards had come in with me. Up from a chair got a fat Egyptian eunuch, bowed, and started without a word to undo my girdle. I was just about to hit him over the ear, when I remembered. This little ceremony had quite slipped my mind.

The eunuch stripped me, shook out my clothes, looked at both sides of my sandals, and hung them up. Then he fitted me out from head to foot from the stands beside him. Some of the robes here were quite splendid; the one I got, second or third class I suppose, was better than my own. While he dressed me, the guards never took their eyes off him. Being used to putting on what I am given to wear, I suppose I minded less than most people.

When I was ready, the chamberlain scratched at the further door, listened, threw it open, and announced, “My lord: Nikeratos, the Athenian actor.”

I entered the presence chamber.

But, after all this, there was nothing royal about it. It was just a rich man’s room, and new-rich at that, overfilled with valuables, statues, murals, enamel inlays from Egypt, an easel with a Zeuxis on it. The excess, though vulgar, had yet a certain air of sincerity; this was not bought taste; good and gaudy were one man’s choice. By the window was the best piece in the room, a massive green marble table standing on gilded Sphinxes, Corinthian of the best period. I remember admiring it, before I really noticed who was sitting at it.

Perhaps old Dionysios was still loitering about somewhere; he can’t have been one to let go easily. At all events, the young man at his desk seemed like some clerk who would get up and ask me to wait. Luckily I have been taught how to come through doors, so these thoughts did not betray themselves. I bowed.

I can’t remember how he greeted me, or told me what I was wanted for. He was not, as you will have understood, a man of memorable words. One’s mind was inclined to wander. I reflected that this was no doubt the desk at which his father had written Hector’s Ransom, and that he himself was ill at ease here, having some homely lair of his own where he would rather be. When I looked at the room, it seemed natural he should keep me standing; when I looked at him, I remembered I was a prize protagonist of Athens, and thought I should have had a chair. I said what was proper—that I was honored, and so on—adding something about his father’s work and the loss to the theater.

“Well,” he answered, fidgeting with a scroll before him, “his last wish, almost, was to hear you in his play, so I hope it may please him to hear you speak his eulogy—at least, if the dead know anything, which we cannot tell.” He said this last like a man who liked to sound up-to-date. “Here it is; may I hear you read some?”

What’s this, I thought, an audition? But I suppose he thinks it due to him.

As I was unrolling it, he said, “I hope you can read my writing. I worked late, and there has been no time to get it copied.”

It was quite clear, and I said I wished my theater scripts were always as good. His face brightened like a child’s. I asked which passage he wanted.

“Let me see,” he said, and fumbled through it head down, like a dog in long grass. He was nearsighted. “This part,” he said.

I read a paragraph about the building of the walls of Syracuse. To my surprise the prose was excellent—an Attic style, restrained yet forceful, with beautiful speaking cadences. It almost spoke itself. Looking up, I saw him eyeing me anxiously under a front of judicial calm. Of course, I thought, I should have guessed; he did not want to test me but to hear how his own work sounded. I had met such authors before. So when I came to a passage which was muddled and fidgety and without much shape, I gave it a pleasing contour, as one can if one learns the knack.

A very good piece came next, but he held up his hand and said, “Thank you, Nikeratos. That was excellent. Do bring up that chair there; then we can talk.”

He could not wait while I did it, but ran on, “I had heard you were in Syracuse. Among all my concerns—my father’s death, my own accession—it must have stuck in my mind. For while I was addressing the Assembly, having prepared nothing at all upon the matter, it came to me as if sent by a god. I just spoke as my thoughts formed themselves. Is not that strange?”

I said nobody would have guessed it; and that is strange, if you like. I have never liked fawners, and can’t imagine that I would have flattered his father so. But in the presence of this gangling youth (for with his awkward rawness he seemed no more)—lank-haired, his mourning crop showing his pink scalp here and there, sitting fidgeting with a writing tablet, digging his nail into the wax, picking out bits and rolling them like a schoolboy, clutching at dignity, while his eyes begged like a dog’s for notice—with him it seemed trivial to stand upon one’s status rather than help him out. So I soothed him as well as I could without being familiar, since it was clear he must dread being taken lightly. In the end, he called for some sweets, which I hate at such an hour, but which he himself ate greedily, and started talking theater, bringing out truisms about the classic tragedies as if no one had thought of them before. He dug down among the stuffed dates and candied rose-leaves, holding forth about the comedy element in Alkestis; and all the while my mind’s eye retraced my steps that morning: the fort, the Iberians, the drawbridge and portcullis, the Nubians, the Gauls, the causeway with the catapults; the quinqueremes and triremes and pentekonters; the armament shops, the barracks, the walls, the grilles, the searching room. Here we sat talking banalities about Euripides, while around us the greatest power machine in Hellas—or the world—idled along by its own momentum, beside its dead engineer, its quivering levers awaiting the new master’s hand, this damp pale hand with bitten nails, rolling wax along the table.

Presently he said I would no doubt wish to pay my respects in the death chamber before I left, and clapped his hands for the chamberlain. When I had changed into my own clothes, I was led towards the wailing. Old Dionysios was lying in the banquet hall, on a catafalque hung with black and purple, in a chest lined with lead. They had packed him round with ice from Etna, to keep him fresh for the funeral. As it melted it ran into a tank below; there was a steady come and go of slaves, bringing fresh ice and emptying the tank with buckets. It had kept him from stinking; I saw his square fighting face, his black stubbly chin, his short pug nose. The hired mourners had got into the swing of it, howling and pummeling their breasts in a drugged rhythm. But at the head of the bier were others who were clearly kindred. One, who had a square face like the dead man’s, and the same dark brows, I thought must be his daughter, maybe the one who was Dion’s wife.

I took the shears on the offering table, and cut off a lock of my hair and laid it on the pile, which was big enough to stuff a mattress. I was on my way out with the chamberlain when, in the outer courtyard, a man who looked like an upper servant came up and said, “If this gentleman is Nikeratos, the tragedian of Athens, my master would like to see him about the rites.”

I followed him into the park, past the fountain, and down to a grassy terrace. Beyond was a house, not very large but perfectly proportioned, with a herm in front of it that looked like a Praxiteles. I had expected the lodging of some official; but even before I was inside, I knew. Everything spoke—the good lines, the plainness, the splendor of the few adornments.

The servant brought me to a white-walled study lined with shelves of scrolls. At a table of polished pine, by the open window, Dion was sitting. I stepped forward. “Good day,” he said, as if to a stranger. I was shocked stupid, and just stood there. I’m not sure I even replied. He dismissed the servant; then at once his whole face changed.

“My dear Nikeratos.” He got up and grasped my hand. “Forgive me that cold greeting. One moment.” He flung open the door, but the passage was empty. “I have had my man ten years; but doubtful times, doubtful men, as they say. Sit down, and let us have some wine; I have been busy since dawn, and you too, I daresay.”

He went over to a side table, where a mixer stood in a big krater packed with snow. Having poured for us both, he offered me fresh bread to dip. Nothing could have surpassed the dignity with which he did these simple services. It had a charm too, like that of a well-bred boy looking after his father’s guests.

We sat down near the table. On a trellis above the window was an old knotty vine just budding; its sharp shadows fell on the soft waxy shine of the wood, and his brown soldier’s hand which rested there.

“The other actors, I hear, went back,” he said. “You, Nikeratos, faced the change of fate with your usual courage. And it would have prospered as you deserve. Your speaking of the Eulogy would certainly bring you offers, not only hereabouts but in many other cities. I tell you this in fairness. When one comes to a man for help, one should let him know what it will cost him.”

He paused. I could find nothing to say. I feared I must be dreaming this. Had he really asked help of me?

“As for the mere money,” he said, “of course I shall cover that. But a rising artist, still young, looks first for reputation. Don’t think me ignorant of this. I know what I ask. You must judge if the cause deserves it.”

I said I would do anything. I could feel myself blushing like a boy, which seldom happened in my boyhood.

“You are a man I trust,” he said, not making a speech of it. “When I heard you had been sent for here, it seemed like the hand of God. We have the business of the rites, and no one need know of any other.”

He took from a writing box a letter folded small and sealed.

“To you, Nikeratos, who have heard us share our thoughts, I can say more than just, ‘Get this out of Sicily to Plato.’ In the first place, you won’t fear its being seditious; you know our views on violence. No, the enterprise I urge him to is one of honor to us both. It can bring good beyond reckoning to our young Archon, to this city, even to the world. But of necessity I had to write with frankness, which might give offense and spoil our hopes. Perhaps you understand me?”

I said I thought so.

“If Plato comes, as I have urged him here to do, the thought must seem to Dionysios to be his own, or he will resent it. This is natural in a young man new to power, following such a father. But Plato’s welcome depends on this, and on his welcome, everything. As you too may have heard him say, philosophy is not a tool which can be passed about like a mason’s rule; it is a fire struck from the glow of minds in search of truth. Without that fire, it is nothing.”

His voice, his face, took me straight back to that room at Delphi. The noble folly, the mad beauty of it struck me dumb. Twenty years, or thereabouts, since the golden lad in love brought his friend to Syracuse, to change the old tyrant with philosophy. (I thought of the square pug face in its bed of ice, the jaw clenched like a fist in death, the shrewd wary lines round the closed eyes.) And after everything—after that legendary clash of disparate prides, after the tricked parting, the slave market at Aigina, all these years of half-stolen meetings—now in this man of forty, a diplomat, a soldier, the flame revived when the coals were blown on; he was ready to try again.

I must have been a long time answering. He said, “Yes, speak, Nikeratos. There are few here I can share my mind with. You have met Dionysios. What do you think?”

After thinking how best to put it, I said, “Plato won’t stoop to flattery. Do you think it will matter less this time?”

He smiled, and paused. Then he said, “I see you have the funeral speech there in your hand. Have you had time yet to run it over?”

Since he preferred to change the subject, I answered, “Not much of it. Dionysios took me through a little.”

“What do you think of it?”

“Most of it is very good; he must have some of his father’s talent. There are one or two awkward passages; do you think he would notice a cut or two? This, for instance, adds nothing to the sense, and it doesn’t speak well.”

“Where?” he asked. I showed him the place. He said, “I think you had better read that just as it stands. He put that in himself.”

Our eyes met. I could not believe I had been such a fool as to need telling. When one thought, his signature was all over it.

“And yet,” he said, “when you read this to him, didn’t you improve it as best you could?”

“I daresay. He is only young; and he looked so anxious.”

“You see, Nikeratos? You are not a servile man; you look for achievement, not for favor. Yet you flattered him. I am not servile either, yet I have done the same. As you see, he copied out the speech himself; by now he thinks he wrote it, but for a few hints here and there. Well, if you and I can feel for his untried hand and his unformed mind, don’t you think Plato will? If you had heard him teach, you would know his gentleness with a beginner feeling his way. The will to learn is all he asks. And he knows how to waken that.”

I said I was sure of it. What else could I say?

“You yourself have seen Dionysios’ hunger to excel. So far, the appearance is enough for him; we may blame his education, or rather lack of it. But as Plato always says, this is the beginning from which young men come to love excellence itself. Sokrates, he says, stamped these words on the souls of all who came to him: Be what you want to seem.”

“That’s good advice,” I said. But I thought to myself, Of course it is. But like the long race, it needs staying power. In theater too, one picks out the stayers early on. If I were choosing a company, I doubt I would hire young Dionysios. However, fate did the casting; I suppose they can only direct him and hope for the best.

Dion, who had been sitting in thought, said, “His father, in what concerned his own affairs, was a judge of men. He knew a son with his own qualities would have been his rival. He feared such a son, yet wished for one. Neither wish nor fear was realized. He admitted no regrets. Whether he felt them, whether the son guessed them, who can say?”

I thought of Hector’s Ransom. Much was now explained.

“One thing is beyond doubt; the young man wants to be something in himself. As yet, he cannot tell what. So it is now Plato must come. He must, Nikeratos.” He looked dog tired. I doubt if he had slept all night. I don’t suppose he would have talked like this to me at any other time. “He has a gift from the gods of catching souls. No god has given it me. I hope I do my duty to my city, to my kin, to heaven. Plato made me love honor, and I can say I have not betrayed it. But I cannot light fires in other men. It has been a grief to me.”

“That is not true,” I said.

I could not help myself. I could have bitten out my tongue next moment. Not for having said it—it would have done well enough as a courtesy—but for saying it with my heart.

He had been looking at a golden lion he used to hold down his papers. Now he looked at me. He swallowed; I could see him thinking what one could say. I have made it sound like a painful moment; yet it was not, for through it all I saw him glad, not I daresay for the sake of the man who said it, but that someone should.

He lifted the lion from its place, set it down, and with the soldier’s firmness he always turned to when he was shy, said, “Well, though I did not share your danger at Delphi, I was there to offer the honors of the field. That gives a bond, as it does in war.” He was a great gentleman. It rescued us both.

He stood, and turned to a wall niche at the far end of the room. There was a bronze Apollo in it: a calm searching face, the two hands held out, in one the bow of death, in the other the cup of healing. “Surely,” he said, “the god you kept faith with then, whom Plato all his life has served, whom proportion pleases in men and cities—surely he led you here in the day of need.”

“I won’t fail him,” I said. “Or you. Let him be witness.”

A good exit line, but of course there was still the business of the rites, which took another hour. It was just as well; it made things easy between us.

Before I left he paid me an advance on my fee for speaking the eulogy, more than I had expected for the whole. So, knowing I ought, I picked up my courage and took Menekrates to dinner at the theater tavern. At first the actors who were drinking there looked away, but I had known that would have to be faced. I went up to Stratokles and his friends, saying I should never forget I had them to thank for my good fortune; if they had not entertained me here, Dionysios would never have known I was in Syracuse, and I hoped they would give me the pleasure of standing them all some wine. A few still looked sour, but no one left. In the end they all came round, and we spent a pleasant evening. I was glad to have done it; it seemed to me that Dion would have thought I should.

All next day I was rehearsing for the funeral, which would take place the following evening. The shop of the royal robe-maker had been at work two days and a night upon my tragic robe. It was of black dipped in purple, with foot-deep borders crusted in bullion, amethyst, agate and pearl.

The procession set forth at sunset, down from the palace through the fivefold gates of Ortygia, on through the old town and the new, then between lines of torches down into the plain again, where Timaios the skene-painter had prepared the pyre.

First walked a men’s chorus, singing the Lament for Hector from the dead man’s play, to the music of double flutes; singers and flute-players wore dead-black robes, and cypress garlands. After these came a troop of soldiers, dragging their spears, their helmets under their left arms. Then a car shaped like a warship, draped in black, with an effigy of the Spirit of Syracuse, in a pose of mourning, twice life size. Then fifty boys, singing the Women’s Chorus for Hector’s wake. After these, the priests of Dionysos, the dead man’s name-god, with their sacred emblems. Then torch-bearers, their torches made up with precious incense, for the kindling of the pyre. After that, walking before the corpse, came the male kindred, young Dionysios, and his half-brothers by Aristomache, Dion’s sister, and Dion himself.

The funeral car stood fifteen feet high, and was drawn by an elephant, taken from the Carthaginians in war. They are most fearful beasts, left over as it seems from the Titans’ age, as high as two men, gray, hairless, wrinkled, with a tail at both ends, the bigger before; one can tell the head by the great ears. It pulled patiently, guided by a man upon its neck. On a bier draped with black and purple, Dionysios lay clothed in white and wreathed with gold. In spite of the ice, he was starting to go off by this time; I got the whiff of him all the way. I walked just behind, in my tragic robe and a wreath of gilded laurel, carrying his prize vase from Athens. It was of course the usual kind, painted with a chorus and the god; against the other grave-goods it looked as simple as a kitchen pot. But it had arrived before he lost his senses; and till his eyes closed for good he never let it out of his sight.

After me came the women of the household, keening; then a great catafalque with his arms and ensigns and trophies of war. His war horse, and the other victims to be sacrificed before the pyre, were led by Gaulish warriors. Here was a glimpse of the chains of adamant; but the murmuring never got very loud. I suppose it was true that even the poor, whose children scratched in the middens while he ate off gold, preferred a hungry lifetime within his walls to one night of sack by the Carthaginians. I had heard things, by now, which made me understand it.

It was now nearly dark, with just a deep red glow where the sun had set under the sea; but the space around the pyre was lit with cressets whose flames rose six feet high, making it almost as bright as noon.

I should like to have seen Timaios’ designs for Hector’s Ransom. They must have been worth looking at. However, he had spent himself on the pyre instead, and they talk of it to this day. It was so high, the onlookers’ necks were cricked from watching the dead man hoisted. The gilded bier-stand would have served to throne a Pharaoh, the offerings to equip a banquet hall; the sides of the pyre, which sloped inward like a pyramid’s, were boarded flat and painted all over with pictures of Dionysios’ victories. Sicilians love paint. They cover their houses with it, their chariots, even their carts. These battle scenes were framed in every land of scroll and flourish, touched up with gold. To an Athenian it looked gaudy beyond words, but the Syracusans were squealing and groaning with admiration, and it has found its way into the histories as a major work of art. It was certainly remarkable, and I should think would have kept the poor of the whole city in bread and oil for a year. At all events, they settled the old man up there among the pitch and terebinth and scented oil and tinder. There he lay, waiting to hear my piece before they sent him off to meet Judge Rhadamanthos. I mounted the rostrum before the pyre. I had been rather nervous; but now the silence was so unlike grief, so like the theater, that I felt quite at home.

While he lived, you would not have found me speaking praise of a man like Dionysios, whoever wrote it. But at a funeral it is proper to remember only the good, or one offends the gods below, and calls the angry ghost to vengeance. Dion’s lines were quite honest, as far as they went. He gave him credit as a soldier and defender of the city, and used most of the speech on that. He said also that, though entrusted with supreme power by the Syracusans (as he really had been, in the beginning), he had outraged no household in the city through incontinence or vice. People assured me afterwards that this was no more than the truth, and was probably the secret of his long reign. As Hipparchos found in Athens, wronged kin and lovers are far more dangerous than demagogues; they will kill at the cost of their lives. The old man had learned from history; besides, he had been a demagogue himself.

I had worked hard over his son’s little pieces in the epitaph to make them sound like something beside Dion’s fine prose. The young man had to be kept sweet, to send for Plato.

At the close, I heard the deep murmur which is applause on such occasions. Then the victims were sacrificed; more offerings were flung; the kindred took their torches and kindled the pyre. At once huge rushing flames leaped up and hid the body, driving the crowd back with their heat. I stood with a scorched face, sweating in my tragic robe, watching Timaios’ pretty pictures curl and blacken. Then everyone went home. I remembered my father’s poor simple burial, and how we had sat round afterwards thinking, What next?

In due course I was paid, very handsomely. Dion had booked me a passage on a ship sailing next day. I had said goodbye to all my friends, except Menekrates, who was coming to see me off. I felt as good as gone, when a palace messenger came, saying that Dionysios wished to see me.

This time all the gates opened for me easily; but, once inside the palace, I was led by a different way. Presently we came to a door without pretensions, the office of some functionary, I supposed. My usher knocked, and opened. There was a pleasant smell of wood and paint, like a carpenter’s shop. Which is just what it was—and at the bench sat Dionysios the Younger, with a toy chariot before him, and a tiny brush in his hand, painting on scroll work. This time he had really done me honor. He had let me into his sanctuary.

“I was very pleased, Nikeratos,” he said, “with your speaking of the Epitaph. I have sent to Timaios’ workshop for a copy of his Siege of Motya, one of his paintings for the pyre. You may have it, in memory of the day.”

He waved his brush at it. It was on an easel against the wall, more garish than ever, seen close to, and too large to ship home without a great deal of trouble. I thanked him as if he had fulfilled my dearest wish. Dion had been quite right. It was like giving sweets to an eager child.

He invited me to go up and inspect the brushwork, which I did. But the table beside it drew my eye; I could not keep from looking. It was full of small toys—chariots and horses, carts and asses and mules, a war galley fully rigged—all painted up Sicilian style, and perfect as real things shrunk by magic. One longed to touch. All these years, when his father had been watching him like a mousing cat for some twitch of dangerous capacity, he had indulged himself with doing one thing well.

Since he would hardly have asked me here if he did not want it noticed, I praised the fineness of the work. I was curious to hear what he would say. I got more than I bargained for. He jumped up and came over to the table. He must have talked for at least an hour. He told me what woods he used, and how, and why; he showed me his gouges, chisels and glue, and his lava dust for smoothing; he pointed out the racing chariots, and the processional. His face grew lively, firm and keen; he looked a different man. Suddenly I pictured him in some nice clean shop in a good street, advising a client about the design of a chair or bed-head, successful, esteemed, content, a happy craftsman, doing the one thing he had in him.

Neither of us, I thought, is perfect casting for a philosophic king. I’m the lucky one; I need not try.

He asked me which of the models I liked best. It was hard to choose, but I pointed out a state chariot with gilded wreaths, which must have cost him most trouble. “Take it,” he said. “It’s yours. Not many people notice the finer points. I gave one not unlike it to my son, but he broke it within the day; small children don’t feel for fragile things.” The news that he was a father gave me such a start, I nearly dropped the chariot. Of course he was quite old enough, but it seemed absurd.

“I shall have less leisure for pastimes now,” he said, the sureness in his face changing to a weak conceit. “Come back, Nikeratos, when the time of mourning is over, and give us a taste of your art. Then you can sample the pleasures Syracuse affords. Our girls deserve their reputation.” The greed in his eye showed something new and none too pleasing. I remembered stories in the wineshops.

Soon after, I left, with the chariot in my hands. The last I saw of him, he was back at his workbench, peering with his weak eyes at his little tools.