The Praise Singer: A Novel

A GOOD SONG, I think. The end’s good—that came to me in one piece—and the rest will do. The boy will need to write it, I suppose, as well as hear it. Trusting to the pen; a disgrace, and he with his own name made. But write he will, never keep it in the place between his ears. And even then he won’t get it right alone. I still do better after one hearing of something new than he can after three. I doubt he’d keep even his own songs for long, if he didn’t write them. So what can I do, unless I’m to be remembered only by what’s carved in marble? Tell them in Lakedaimon, passer-by, that here, obedient to their word, we lie. They’ll remember that.

That was the year Anakreon died. He had all his songs safe in his head. He proved us that at the city feast after Marathon; anything we asked for, there it was. Aischylos … no, he wasn’t there, he was in mourning for his brother. I had sung first, of course. And Anakreon finished with something new to all of us, fifty years old. You could hear him too, short of teeth as he was by then. We Ionian poets are a long-lived breed.

Well, his songs are sung, and will be unless the barbarians come back again; and the ships at Salamis have settled that. They sing him; but the young men don’t get him right. Just a word here and there; but it would have grated his fine ear. Men forget how to write upon the mind. To hear, and keep: that is our heritage from the Sons of Homer. Sometimes I think I shall die their only heir. Themistokles asked if I had a secret art of memory; which I can forgive in a man with no education to speak of. Practice, practice, that’s all; but who wants to hear nowadays about hard work? Ah, they say, Simonides will take his secret to the grave with him. At eighty-three he can’t have much more use for it; but old men get miserly.

Well, I bow to the times. Only last year I recited for some scrivener of King Hieron’s my whole stock of Anakreon’s songs, for fear some should disappear with me. And having done that, I thought I’d best turn to and make a book of my own, lest book-taught slovens should garble me when I’m dead. I’ve not yet come down to scratching on wax myself; the boy does that, and I don’t let him demean himself with fair-copying. He must learn young what is due to us. (Yes, well, I must try to keep in mind that he’s turned forty.)

King Hieron will send us a clerk, as he would a physician or a cook. Yes, I’m well-found here, and winter warmth pays for the hot summers. I have not troubled the physician much. Best of good things, sweet health. That, every wanderer knows. Now I’ve done with wandering, give me one day at a time, on a vine-shaded Sicilian porch with a lyre beside me, and memory in my head.

Memory, that’s the thing. I’ve met few men who reached my years, and they were peasants, or else in second childhood. Who knows what each day may bring? Sometimes when all’s quiet at night I take my lamp to the book-chest. Once or twice I’ve even taken a pen in hand, when I’ve thought of a happier word. If the boy sees my marks, he keeps quiet about it. What a deal of reed-paper poems do take up, that will lie in a man’s head as small as a bee-grub in the comb. A dozen rolls. I have had to number the outsides, to know what’s in them.

I shall leave my scrolls, like the potter’s cup and the sculptor’s marble, for what they’re worth. Marble can break; the cup is a crock thrown in the well; paper burns warm on a winter night. I have seen too much pass away. So when they come to me, as they do from King Hieron down, asking about the days before they were begotten, I tell them what deserves remembrance, even if it keeps me up when I crave for bed. The true songs are still in the minds of men.