The Mask of Apollo: A Novel

3

BY EVENING, WHEN IT WAS TIME TO DRESS AND go, I would just as soon have got out of it. I had slept off the shock and the wine, and for what seemed hours had listened cold sober to Anaxis, telling me what to say and still more what not to. For of course my host was the envoy of Dionysios. Perhaps, Anaxis said, he would ask me to give a recital.

“Don’t count on it,” I said. “He didn’t look the man to make a guest sing for his supper.” A citizen he had called himself, like any Athenian gentleman. Syracuse, one knew, still kept the ancient forms, but he could as well have said a prince, for it came to that. Such a man, if he is curious and has nothing else to do, may give supper to a touring actor, and will treat him with the breeding he owes himself; but that would be the end of it, as any fool could see. Very likely the place would be full of delegates and politicians, who, when they remembered I was there, would condescend with silly questions. In my heart, I cherished this meeting, sudden and strange like an act of fate; rather than spoil it with banalities, I would sooner we never met again.

It would have been something to dress in peace, without Anaxis fussing like a bride’s mother. He even brought a barber to curl my hair. I nearly lost my temper, and asked what kind of monkey he meant to make of me, when my host had seen it that morning, straight as rain. Luckily the barber walked out, saying it was too short to work on. I had trouble to escape from wearing Anthemion’s party robe, red with embroidered borders, a love-gift from Anaxis. Like many actors who wear finery enough on stage, I like a rest from it. My spare robe was quite clean, a plain dark blue; one can’t keep white fresh on tour. Having got my own way I felt kindly to Anaxis. He would have given his ears for my chance, feared I would wreck all our fortunes with my careless tongue, and yet had not got spiteful. As the time drew near, I would gladly have changed places. Gyllis of Thebes was giving a party in her room, and I was the only one not going.

Presently came the slave and led me to Dion’s house, which stood beyond the town, on the spur above the Pleistos valley. The sun was sinking, and Delphi had on its tragic robes. A blood-red light dyed the pale steeps of the Phaidriades, and filled the gorges with cinnabar and purple. From somewhere high up I heard hallooing, as if the maenads were running there. But it was long past time; it must be the young men, still hunting Meidias. They would have some light, for the moon was rising. I thought, “He must be in Thebes by now. Poor wretch, let him go.” If he had really lurked somewhere to watch his triumph, I reckoned my score was paid.

The square white house faced outward; its terrace hugged the edge of the bluff; beyond was space and the red sky. It was half dusk; on the terrace a torch in a gilded sconce burned with an upright flame. There were urns of trailing flowers, sweet-scented shrubs between the flagstones, a trellis with a vine. A young boy was singing somewhere to a kithara. The music ceased; my host rose from the shadows and came to meet me, his tall head brushing the vine above.

“Welcome, Nikeratos.” On his own ground, not stared at, he seemed ten years younger. The faded light showed him smiling; he touched my arm to lead me in. “I am glad to see you. We are out here to catch the last of the day. But we will go in when the cold begins.” It was a mild evening; I remembered he came from Sicily.

The terrace was paved with colored marbles. The low rush couches had cushions of white linen, whose embroidery looked like Egypt. There was no sign of a party; it was a good thing I had turned down Anthemion’s robe. Only one other guest was there, a man of about sixty, gray-bearded, with a heavy brow and deep-set eyes. He was squarely built, but not fleshy with it, in good hard shape for his years, like an old athlete from those days of the gentleman amateur they talk about. There were white battle-scars on his left arm. Hoplites with shields don’t get wounded there; he must have been a knight. Indeed, even standing by Dion he still looked quite distinguished. Not a Sicilian—Athens was written all over him. Not a politician—he looked too honest, and was too graceful when Dion presented me. But by accident both spoke at once, so I missed his name, and did not like to ask.

“We saw the play together,” Dion said. “Do you know that neither of us had ever seen it performed before? But we had read it … of course.”

He looked across, smiling. One could not miss it. I suppose The Myrmidons is least acted and most read of all great plays. Lovers meet at it, as if it were a shrine like that tomb in Thebes. However long ago that had been, something of it hung about them still.

“Indeed, we have,” said the other. I understood this must be a thing the whole world knew about them; there is a certain air which tells one so; but it seemed to me, too, that it had surprised him to see Dion so unbend. As if to hide this, he added, “And then the mind hears an ideal rendering, which reality seldom equals. But you, on the contrary, enriched the play for me. I shall be many times your debtor.”

We walked over to the terrace balustrade. The sunset was rusting away, but Delphi seemed still to glow from the light it had drunk before.

“I have been making Dion envious,” he went on, “by telling him how I saw you as Alkestis, last year at the Piraeus. The death scene was very fine. Her steadfastness, her loneliness … a voice receding, it seemed, with every line, as if already on her journey—that was memorable, far beyond the pathos most actors aim at.”

I was pleased, yet for some reason answered, “Who wouldn’t be lonely, dying for a wet stick like Admetos? I’m always glad to change masks for Herakles and the drunk scene, even though I do have to play it on three-inch lifts.” He made me nervous. I don’t think he meant to; some men are used to distance. It had not stopped him from giving me, once, a certain glance which said that if I had been five years younger it might have been a serious matter. I don’t think he meant to do that either. He had the nature he was born with, though he might never slip its leash.

I could tell my answer had disappointed him. But Dion smiled. One seldom saw him laugh aloud; but he had a certain smile, with the head thrown back a little, which was a laugh for him. There are men hard to be at ease with, whose walls one breaks by some stroke of chance; this was my good fortune here. And it comes, I thought, through a man who tried to kill me. Somewhere a god is working.

After more talk about the play, we went in to eat. The food was excellent, but simply cooked, and two courses only, not at all the Sicilian banquet of the proverbs. The flowers came in, small yellow roses, and the wine, the same he had sent me at the theater. He had given his best. He was always all or nothing.

A splendid lamp-cluster hung from the ceiling, Etruscan work, a sunburst with outward-soaring nymphs whose arms held up the lampbowls. You don’t get such things in a hired house unless you bring them with you. There was nothing in the room which did not serve some use, but what there was, was royal. I found it hard to take my eyes off him long enough for manners. Reclining wreathed on the supper couch, cup in hand, he could have modeled for a vase-painter drawing a feast of gods. His bare arm and shoulder were like fine bronze; he could not make an awkward gesture; the dignity actors train for was bred into his bones. And his face passed the test of motion. Often beauty grows dull or common when speech breaks the mask; but here each change, like a change of light, brought out new quality.

Presently he sent out the slave, saying we would serve ourselves; the krater was set in the middle, the dipper laid on a clean cloth, our couches pulled up nearer. “Now tell us, Nikeratos,” he said, “about your escape this morning; and if I am intruding on your mystery, forgive me; for I am a soldier among other things, and I never saw such coolness in the face of death. Were you inspired? Or do you prepare for such things in training?”

He spoke as if to a guest of honor. I paused to think. “Well, no,” I said. “After all, a theater is a sacred precinct. It’s a crime to strike a man there, let alone shed blood. We don’t train for such things, though we do reckon not to be put out easily; I’ve known a man who fell off the god-walk to change masks and play on with a broken arm. But today, I think … You saw the mask of Apollo. It’s not a face one would care to make a fool of.”

He threw a quick look at his friend, as if to say, “I was right,” then turned with his grave eager smile. “Not without cause, then, these words were in my mind: Do you think I have less divination than the swans? For they, when they know that they must die, having sung all their lives sing louder then than ever, for joy at going home to the god they serve. Men, who themselves fear death, have taken it for lamentation, forgetting no bird sings in hunger, or cold, or pain. But being Apollo’s they share his gift of prophecy, and foresee the joys of another world …” He broke off, and said to his friend, “I speak without the book.”

“Near enough,” he answered, smiling.

“No. I forgot the hoopoe.”

I had been listening with all my ears, and could hardly wait to exclaim, “What marvelous lines! Who wrote them? What is the play?”

They looked at each other. I seemed to have made them happy. Dion said, “There is the poet. They are from Plato’s dialogue Phaedo.”

The name amazed me. These were the people whose story I myself had told Anaxis! All those years ago—near twenty it must be—and here they were still meeting. But I had thought this Plato was some kind of sophist.

“The words are mine,” he was saying. “The thought was a better man’s.”

“But the words!” They were still sounding in my head. “Sir, have you more like that? Haven’t you ever thought of writing for the theater?”

He raised his brows, as if my little compliment had startled him. At last, however, he said half-smiling, “Not lately.”

“Plato!” said Dion. “What is this?”

“Strange to say, in my youth it was my first ambition. I was full of images and fantasies; they had only to knock and I would open; only to ask, and I would feed and clothe them … oh, yes, Dion, surely I told you that?” I noticed again his expressive voice, like a low-pitched aulos played by a master. But no volume with it. With that chest of his, he could have overcome it in a month, if I had had the training of him. Forcing would make it thin; it seemed he had learned that and no more. “I assure you it is so,” he said. “I once wrote a whole tragedy, and brought it as far as the Theater Bureau, to enter it for the Dionysia. From what I saw at the contest, it might have been considered; I cannot tell. But by chance, as men say who are content with ignorance, I met Sokrates in the porch—the friend, Nikeratos, who brought me to philosophy—who asked to see it, and put some questions, all too much to the purpose. I saw I had a lifetime’s work before me, to find the answers I had given so glibly. Everything was there but truth.”

“Well, sir,” I said, “even Euripides was a beginner once. Truth to nature can’t all be learned in the study; it comes half the time from getting out in front to listen. The actors will soon show you if a line speaks badly. From what I’ve just heard, I should think you’ve let your friends put you off too easily. Believe me, the theater is crying out for good new tragedies; just look at all these revivals. Why not get it out and go over it, and this time get it read by someone in the business? Would you care to let me see it, and tell you what I think?”

“Why not?” said Dion. “Then I can read it, too.”

“I burned it,” he said, “as soon as I got home.” Seeing my face he smiled—he could be a real charmer when he chose—and said, “My friend, Apollo does not ask us all for the same offering.”

Dion filled my cup. The bottom was painted with an Eros playing the lyre, pretty, flowing work, heightened with white, in the style of Italy. “Well, Nikeratos, if Plato has no play to give you, some other friend must step in as best he can. I intended asking you, but was diverted by the pleasure of our talk—”

He broke off short. We all started bolt upright. From the sky, as it seemed, outside, had sounded a scream that stopped my breath. In all my life, I don’t think I ever heard a sound so dreadful. As a meteor plunges trailing light, so plunged from some great height above us this shriek of terror, then ceased as if cut with a knife. I put down my cup, which was spilling in my hand. It was Dion who, calling the slave in, said, “What was that?”

The man beamed, like a good-news-bringer sure of his welcome. “Why, sir, that must be the godless fellow they’ve been hunting since this morning, who tried to pollute the precinct with this gentleman’s blood. The young men were saying, before they went up after him, that if they caught him they’d throw him off Aesop’s Rock.”

The wine went cold in my belly. Dion said, “Aesop’s Rock?”

“It’s called, sir, they tell me, after some old blasphemer who was sent off from there. It’s above those great white cliffs, the Phaidriades. They go all the way down.”

“Thank you,” said Dion. “You may go.” He turned to me. “They have done justice, and avenged you … What is it? You look pale.”

He is a soldier, I thought. Does he think I should have been up there, lending a hand?

“I was avenged already,” I said. “He was an artist once.”

I thought of the long hunt, the quarry stumbling and thirsty like a wolf run down; and then they must have dragged him a long way to the place, knowing what he went to.

Both of them were staring. They did not look scornful; but then I was a guest. Dion said, “He tried to take your life; yet you would have spared him?”

“I would have spared him that. After all, here I am, alive and feasting. Do you think me poor-spirited?”

His eyes opened. I have never seen such dark eyes so light a face. “You are surely joking. Poor-spirited, after what we saw today? By Zeus, no! It is greatness of soul that spares the enemy in the dust. Better than vengeance is not to share the evil.” He leaned forward glowing like a man in love. I did not fool myself; honor was his darling. My head was not fooled, at least.

“It is an old bad proverb,” he said, “that one should outdo one’s friends in kindness, and one’s enemies in cruelty. No; I have seen …” He paused, and turned to Plato: “… too much.”

Well, I thought, Sicily must be the place for that. How does such a man come out of it?

“Believe me, Nikeratos, as much as for your courage I honor you for taking no joy in vengeance.” Being shaken and sick, I could have wept at his kindness; but that he would not have honored. I said something or other, about having enough, in my work, of other men’s revenges. I saw Plato stir at this; but after all he kept silent.

“Surely,” Dion went on, “to crave revenge is to fall down before one’s enemy and eat dust at his feet. What worse can we let him do to us? In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul. The man has more profit who beggars himself for a whore. The mind neglected; the soul starved of its true food; condemned at last to some base rebirth, if, as I am persuaded, Pythagoras taught us truly. Who in his senses would give that triumph to the man who wronged him?”

These words impressed me. I had never thought of any of it, and said so, adding, in apology, “I was thinking about this wretched Meidias. All his life he wanted to be somebody, but without having to pay for it, which is always death to an artist. Now this. I couldn’t have done it to a dog. But of course you are right about the soul. You have shown me the riches of philosophy.”

“Borrowed riches,” he said, smiling and catching Plato’s eye. “It is the fate of the teacher to hear his words come limping back from the pupil’s mouth.”

“The pupil,” said Plato in that low light voice of his, “who lives what he learned, is a teacher too. A city of such pupils could teach the world.” Then, as if he had lapsed from courtesy by speaking of some private thing, he turned to me, saying, “You are clean of this death, having neither willed nor welcomed it. Remember, the man suffered it for sacrilege. It was the god’s honor they avenged.”

I drank some wine, which I could do with, and held my peace. But I was saying within me, “Is that what you think, wise man? If I had called for help up there, squeaking with fright through Apollo’s mouth so that they all laughed and despised me, they would have beaten the cover round the precinct, from duty, and then gone home. But I pleased them; they took trouble for me; this is my wreath of victory. So wise, and you can’t see it.” They were quoting Pythagoras to each other. I looked at their fine faces full of mind, and thought, “I’m only an actor; the best I do will be gone like smoke when the last graybeard dies who heard it; these are great men whose fame will very likely live forever. But for all they know, they don’t know a crowd.”

“Your cup is empty,” Dion said, dipping into the mixer. “We cannot have you melancholy. Did Achilles grieve for Hector? And here’s only a Thersites dead. Which brings me back, Nikeratos, to what I had to say. Would you like to play Achilles again, in another tragedy, at the next Lenaia?”

So it’s come, I thought. For a moment I saw Anaxis with the barber. But in Athens? “I am happy that you thought of me; but I’m not yet on the roll of leading men; and besides, the sponsors draw for them.” I had forgotten he was a foreigner. So near, so far.

“Apply again,” he said, smiling. “I think friends of mine can manage that. As for the draw, if we miss first turn we may still have the luck to get you, while your name is new on the list.”

I saw he knew what he was about. Past victors get chosen first; the draw exists, indeed, to give sponsors a fair chance at them. He was telling me that even if his choregos drew first turn, he would still choose me. The door I had knocked on for years was opening at his finger-touch. I thanked him as best I could. Even now, though, I had been too long in the business not to ask, “What is the play?”

I guessed the answer before I got it. I saw him swallow.

“The title is Hector’s Ransom, a work by my kinsman Dionysios, the Archon of Syracuse.” He would rather not have looked at me, so he gave me a soldier’s stare. “As you will know, his work has been presented at Athens in the past, and won the lesser prizes; but, like every poet, he sets his heart on the first.” He clapped his hands, and said to his slave, “Mago, bring me the book from my bedside table.”

We talked while waiting, I forget of what. I was thinking he had done it well; he knew how to ask like a gentleman. The man being his kin and ruler, he could scarcely beg my pardon. And no one could say he offered a mean reward.

The book came. He said, “Would you like my secretary to come and read it? He is a Tarentine, and reads quite well.”

“Thank you,” I said, “but it’s best to hear oneself. The torch still burns on the terrace; may I go out there?”

He hoped civilly that I would not be cold. I went into the cool garden, fresh with dew, and full of the sounds of a mountain night, trees rustling, a bell-like bird call, goat-clappers tinkling across the gorges. Pavers of moonlight washed the Phaidriades as pure as crystal. The dark foam of the olives flowed to the sea. Vine-shadows crossed the veins of the marble pavement. The torch was burning low, but I hardly needed its light.

I sat down on a couch with the book closed in my hand. In the dappled shadows of the oleander I seemed to see a waiting face. I untied the ribbon from the roll, then paused again. “Loxias,” I said, “if there’s good here it comes from you. Then I’ll play in it, and people can say what they choose. But if it’s pretentious bombast, it’s not yours, and I won’t touch it, not if I have to wait till I’m forty for another chance like this, besides losing the friendship of a man who makes one believe in men. I promise, Loxias. A man hasn’t much to give a god in thanks for saving his life; it’s the best I have.”

I unrolled the book, and read.

To Zeus on the god-walk, enter Thetis grieving for Achilles her doomed mortal son. It sounded quite well, Thetis especially. Nothing much developed, but it would pass in production well enough. Exeunt gods, enter boys’ chorus (captive women), the men’s chorus (Greeks). Center doors open, Achilles within, discovered mourning, brought out on the reveal. So far, so-so.

Scene for Achilles, lifted from Homer with a touch of Sophokles. If one is going to borrow, by all means use the best. One could do something with it; there was no bathos, at least. I read on; the plot was not badly contrived and had touches of originality, as far as it is possible with such a theme. After a scene for Phoenix and Automedon, chorus, while the actors change masks; then enter Hermes, forerunning Priam. Not a bad speech for third actor. Now for Priam, a chariot entry through the parodos, which always goes well. The chariot stops center, and Priam speaks.

I had been skimming, to get the shape of the play. Now suddenly I was held, and started reading aloud. The old man speaks of his dead son whose corpse he has come to ransom from the victor: first as the hero-king he will never be, then as the child he was. The father recalls his scrapes as a daring lad, and how he beat him. It was a marvelous transition; even I, trained to read with my head, was near to tears. There was an entry for Agamemnon: nonrecognition, cross-talk, irony, the usual thing. The play was just respectable, except for Priam. Then it breathed, and you could not fault it. The scene with Achilles would have melted bronze.

I was surprised, having heard from everywhere that Dionysios thought pretty poorly of his own son and heir. Here it was, at all events—a part one couldn’t miss with.

I went back to the supper room. They broke off their talk; Plato’s cool eye told me, in case I had not known, that I had paused in the doorway to make an entrance. “I like this play. It should act well. Did I understand you to have offered me the lead?”

“Certainly,” Dion said. “How not?”

“The lead is Priam. Achilles only feeds him.”

“Any part you choose, of course.” He looked amazed. I might have known the Achilles in his own soul would hide the rest from him. But Plato, whom I had forgotten, said, “He is quite right, Dion. The Priam has some freshness; the Achilles is everywhere derived. I did not tell you so; I doubted I could be just.”

In that moment I was as sure as if I had seen it that the tale was true about the slave market at Aigina. Aristophanes, I thought, could have done something good with that. While we discussed the play, I trifled with this thought; but one thought leads to another. This was a proud man if I ever saw one. How he must have loved Dion, if he could love him still. It quenched my laughter.

Presently Dion said, “You will want a good supporting actor. I thought of Hermippos, whom I have never seen give a bad performance.”

I ought to have foreseen this. I thought of Anaxis with his fancy cloak and his barber, fussing and nagging, simply because he trusted me not to be making what I could for myself alone—by no means a thing one can take for granted in the theater. Well, I thought, I may not be much in this company, but I’ll keep honest at my trade. “I know Hermippos. A sound artist. But my partner is Anaxis, whom you saw today.” Our contract was only for the tour; but with laymen one has to simplify.

He looked rather put out. I suppose most people think theater men live hand to mouth, taking what they can get. “Forgive me,” I said, “but we servants of the god have our honor too.”

“Say no more,” he replied at once. “Your partner is welcome.” It was Plato who had looked the more surprised.

But Dion had now started talking about plays, and I saw before long that here was a man who could teach me something. Nothing, as a rule, is more tedious than an amateur ignorant of technique and full of theories; and he was ignorant enough. But what he talked of, he knew. Most of tragedy is concerned with kingship, and the choices it compels men to; and what he said that evening has been of use to me all my life. The theater, after all, can only teach one how; men as they live must show one why.

He knew war and command, what soldiers trust in a leader, how one must be strong before one dares be merciful. His favorite poet, he said, was Sophokles, who wrote about responsibility and moral choice—Antigone and Neoptolemos weighing their own decency and honor, which they knew first-hand, against causes they were asked to take on trust. “A city,” he said, “is only a crowd of citizens. If each of them has renounced his private virtue, how can they build a public good?”

“And Euripides?” I asked. “We’ve said nothing yet of him.”

He said at once, “I only like The Troiades, which teaches mercy to the conquered, though no one shows it in the play. For the rest, his men and women are the sport of gods who behave worse than human barbarians. What can one learn from that?”

His heat surprised me. “I suppose he shows how things are, and that men have to bear them. He lived in hard times, from all one hears. Hecubas ten a drachma.”

Plato said, “He was dead before the worst.” It gave me a start, as always when one meets a man who lived it through; to me it was childhood tales. “As it happens,” he said, “I know what he wished to teach, though he died when I was still a boy. Sokrates told me. Euripides used to show him his work before he sent it in, because their purpose was the same. Sokrates told him he would never come at it by the means he used, but he said he was an artist, not a philosopher. They had this in common, that it disgusted both to see the gods debased by crude peasant folk-tales which made them out worse than the worst of men. Sokrates called it blasphemy. For this fools killed him; but they could not kill his truth, because he did not destroy without offering something better. Not so Euripides, a maker of phantoms as all poets are. The truth is one, illusion manifold, and diversity makes a play. He believed it was enough to show these gods of the field and agora as the legends make them—capricious, lustful, lying, outrageous in revenge, careless of honor—and leave the audience to its thoughts. His cure for a leaky roof was to knock the house down. Sokrates taught that since it is inconceivable the gods should be evil, they must be good. But Euripides sent home his audience—and still does—saying, ‘If those are the gods, then the gods are not.’”

I thought this over; I could see what he meant. “It’s true,” I answered, “that if we leave out The Bacchae, which is something by itself, he is not so successful with the gods as with humankind. You, sir, will know best whether he meant it so, or couldn’t help it. But you will allow, I think, his skill in the second. He was the first to show men and women as they really are.”

“Say, rather, he was the first to say they can be satisfied with what they are, and need try to be no better. ‘I know,’ says his Medea, ‘what wickedness I am about to do, but passion is stronger than good counsel.’ ‘I am helpless,’ says Phaedra, before she deceives a just king into killing his innocent son. Men are seldom helpless against their own evil wishes, and in their souls they know it. But common men love flattery not less than tyrants, if anyone will sell it them. If they are told that the struggle for the good is all illusion, that no one need be ashamed to drop his shield and run, that the coward is the natural man, the hero a fable, many will be grateful. But will the city, or mankind, be better?”

Not being a sophist, trained to bring out answers pat, I could only say, “But it’s such marvelous theater.”

Plato raised his brows; then he looked down into his wine cup. An audience of twenty thousand, sitting on its hands, could not have produced such an echoing silence. I went hot right up into my hair.

Dion leaned over, and laid his hand on my shoulder. “Plato, I won’t have even you scold Nikeratos. Haven’t we seen him risk his life only today, rather than that a god should speak unworthily? He was a pattern for us all.”

Plato replied at once with something graceful, making amends. I think he even meant it. Though he was certainly not drunk, I daresay the strength of his own thoughts had carried him away. So, though it was time to go, I stayed a little longer to show there was no offense.

When I took my leave, Dion filled my cup to drink to the Good Goddess; then, when I had done so, dried it and put it in my hand. “Please keep this,” he said, “to remember the evening by, and in thanks for a performance I shall not soon forget. I wish there had been time to get one painted with Apollo or Achilles, especially for you.”

I went out into the sinking moonlight. Fathomless shadows filled the gorges. In the bowl of the wine cup, Eros crowned with white flowers played his lyre. Behind me in the house I heard the voice of Dion, telling his friend whatever could not be said with strangers there. As for me, I knew I had met a man I would gladly die for.