The Double Tongue (12 page)

It was the Corinthian who answered him.

‘Have you complained to the Governor? For a Roman he’s not bad. A present would be advisable but he’d send troops, perhaps even a punitive expedition. I know him as a matter of fact. I’ll drop a word. After all he’s always grumbling about his men down there in the Peloponnesus having nothing to do.’

Ionides pulled a face.

‘Roman soldiers?’

‘I see no harm in employing people according to their talent.’

‘Meaning, my good sir, that Romans can fight whereas Hellenes and even Macedonians can’t?’

‘That’s what it comes to. I’m a realist. A businessman has to be. It’s all very well for priests and gentry to worship the old gods and have the daily work done for them, but business is different. When you said Roman soldiers in that snotty way – forgive me, ladies – you were acting the way that in business would lose you a fortune. You Greeks –’

‘Aren’t you a Greek?’

‘Can’t you tell from the way I speak? I’m a Phoenician. No, you Greeks can be brave, but mostly when fighting each other.’

Aristomachus flushed red. Perhaps it was his name coming out.

‘I’m not sure that your opinion is as welcome as you are!’

It was my turn.

‘But tell us about the Romans. We see so few of them here and they come as suppliants of course. Why are they so good at fighting?’

‘Nobody knows‚’ said the Corinthian. ‘For some reason they learnt in the dawn of time a lesson that we Hellenes have never learnt, not even in these modern days.’

The Corinthian’s wife smiled sweetly at Ionides.

‘Do tell us your thoughts, High Priest.’

‘I can tell you what I think. An opinion. But I’ve no proof. It all stems from that bleeding head. When they founded Rome and began to build, they dug down on one of the seven hills and came on a freshly severed human head, still bleeding. The place is still called the Capitol which means, doesn’t it, the place of the head? Well, if there’s one thing you’d be if that happened to you, it’s scared. Dead scared. Permanently, deeply scared. You see they aren’t religious as we are, they’re simply superstitious. Think of it! Finding a human head down there in the pit you’ve just dug and are still digging. A scared Roman is the most dangerous beast in the world. They began straight away, you see. They started wars with their neighbours – one little town fighting another –
because
if you don’t push your neighbour a bit further away who knows what he might do? He has already – well someone has already – planted a fearsome omen on you and who was nearest at the time, watching? So you either push him away or make him join you, ensuring at the same time that you’ve arranged that he agrees that you are top man. Only of course, after that, to be really sure, you have to be top man over your new neighbours who were once your neighbour’s neighbours and so on. You end by pushing your fear all the way to the Red Sea in one direction and to Farthest Thule in the other! They’ll have the lot before they’ve finished. It’s fear that makes the heavens go round.’

‘High Priest, you sound – I shouldn’t say it – but you sound superstitious! “Fear makes the heavens go round!”’

‘Well,’ said the Corinthian, ‘it doesn’t make the world go round, that’s for sure. But I come back to what I said. Why not employ people according to their talent?’

It was my turn again.

‘But, good sir, you have not told us what was the lesson our Roman friends learnt in the dawn of time. Not to be afraid, surely!’

‘Dear Lady, they learnt to combine. Just that. A legion is a single beast. Under a good general, and the gods know they have good generals, a dozen legions will become the separate arms of a single body – the general’s body, if you will. They are indeed a dull lot, with a lust for slaughter which they satisfy at their festivals for the pleasure of men, women and children and call it religion. Everything in Rome is borrowed from you Greeks except, alas, the things that make them your masters.’

‘Yours too.’

‘Oh yes, High Priest. But we are a little people.’

The Phoenician big businessman turned then to Aristomachus.

‘And you, sir, what do you think of our masters?’

‘Meaning the Romans? If the Roman Governor can keep the peace on my uplands by crucifying a few outlaws and brigands I’ll at least get something back for my taxes. As for the men themselves, I’m not like our Lady Pythia and His Holiness the High Priest of Apollo. I don’t have to know them.’

‘But you don’t regret their rule? There’s always a party in Athens – think of it! Shall I call it the “underground” party? – which wants Home Rule for Hellas. That’s a fine thing to have scribbled on the walls of a cityful of professors – and on some of the finest walls too! Whoever they are they can’t be real Athenians. They have no taste and can’t spell. In fact, of course, under Roman rule Athens is actually a free city! But then, some people are never pleased with what they’ve got. If the Romans withdrew as they did not so long ago, Thebes would go through Athens as quick as boiled asparagus. Forgive me, First Lady. Your wine must come straight from Olympus. That sly child Ganymede must have been taking backhanders. It’s nectar.’

‘All the same‚’ said Ionides, ‘you can understand them, young, and not seeing why foreigners who have no science, no religion, no philosophy, no astrology and no astronomy should be so important in their lives. Come, Aristomachus! You are as Hellene as any of us – more than most in fact. Wouldn’t you agree to some slight feeling that a man should be his own master?’

‘Who says I’m not?’

‘Aristomachus dear,’ said Demareta, ‘remember what the physician said!’

‘Drinking this nectar as somebody called it, you, I think, Your Grace, it’s worth a bellyache or two. But don’t say I’m not my own master or there’ll be trouble!’

‘You are as much your own master as any of us,’ said Ionides, ‘indeed sometimes –’

‘We women are never free,’ murmured the Phoenician’s lady. ‘It’s rather nice really.’

I thought to myself, that man I was reading the other day, he was right. There are natural slaves. But I said nothing. The Corinthian evidently thought that it was his turn.

‘I’ve travelled,’ he said. ‘That’s as good an education as any. The conclusion I’ve come to in this matter of freedom is this. It’s a question of size. What size group of people are we going to belong to? I don’t think the gods have made us capable of rational judgement, which is where your philosophers go wrong. It’s a man’s instinct to belong to a group. Look at that fool Diogenes, thinking he was free when he had to beg his bread! Freedom isn’t a simple thing because people make theories about it. The thing in itself, to coin a phrase, is not a matter of thought but a matter of feeling. If you are free where you voluntarily obey the local rules then you are as free as a man can be. But if your feelings won’t stretch to a bigger entity, which makes the rules, then you don’t feel free. As I see learning, I mean education, knowing what’s what if you like, being street-wise – and for all your philosophers, that’s what it comes to – is the ability to feel a larger entity. I sense that there’s a feeling among you Greeks, an uneasy feeling, that you ought to feel for a huge area, I’ll call it Panhellenia! Now. Can you feel for anything bigger than that?’

‘You’re confusing us,’ said Aristomachus. ‘We used to be a people of cities, and landowners such as I am always had town houses as well as country ones. You can’t feel, really, for more than the city –’

‘There you are, you see‚’ said the Phoenician. ‘You believe in Panhellenia but you feel, really, for – what was your city, sir?’

‘Phocis, I suppose. I haven’t thought of it like that for years, though. My father had to sell the town house which is why we need one here.’

My turn once more.

‘Aren’t the Romans making what you, sir, called an entity? I should have thought that if you take the limits of the place where they rule it’s the largest country in the world!’

‘They have a phrase for it,’ said Ionides. ‘They call it
imperium romanum
, the Roman Empire.’

‘Well there, you see,’ said I, ‘who on earth could feel for anything as dull-sounding as that?’

‘Going round the world‚’ said the Phoenician, ‘one comes across people who feel as we are saying, feel for the oddest groupings. But I’ve come to the conclusion that people would rather be ruled by a gangster of their own, however harsh his rule, than by a good and just ruler who is a foreigner. Don’t ask me why. It’s the nature of the beast. And so, with the greatest respect to you Greek gentlemen, I have to say that I don’t believe you like Roman rule, and don’t feel for the
imperium
romanum.
What prevents you from scrawling Free Hellas or Free Panhellenica, or even Romans Go Home, on your walls is something so tenuous it would require only a hothead to set the country alight. Agreed?’

I signed to the slave for another round of drinks.

‘It’s lucky we have no Roman guests with us this evening. I don’t think they’d be at all pleased.’

‘Dear and revered Lady,’ said Aristomachus, ‘whoever would bother to tell them? Besides, Delphi is Delphi. Even the Romans acknowledge that we are the centre of the world.’

‘All the same,’ said Ionides, ‘one ought to be clear that our cases are hypothetical. We are none of us free. We don’t, despite Pythagoras, choose to be born or choose to die. It is only the Alexanders who to some extent control their fate. Indeed,’ and here he turned and smiled at me, ‘I remember once telling our First Lady that on occasion she is free and in fact is the only really free person in the world.’

‘Oh no, Ionides, not free! But it is not fitting to say more on that subject. You have travelled, sir. Have you found a fairer country than Greece?’

‘Fairer countries enough, Lady, but never fairer women.’

There was a murmur of agreement from the men and the Corinthian’s woman bridled and simpered. I, alas, had no cause to do either.

‘So,’ said the Corinthian, ‘we are agreed are we not that the Roman rule is to be borne?’

‘What,’ said Ionides softly, ‘what could we do about it if we don’t?’

‘Nothing,’ said Aristomachus.

‘Nothing,’ said the Corinthian.

‘All the same,’ said Ionides, ‘there is that quote underground unquote party in Athens. You, sir, who have travelled so much – have you not heard of the same in other Hellenic cities?’

The Phoenician peered at him over his cup.

‘Just exactly why do you want to know?’

‘You, sir, are a foreigner. You can say things we might – hesitate to say.’

‘I have heard it said. I have seen this scrawl and that, here and there.’

‘What does the Governor think?’

‘Why should he think anything? Hellas is at peace.’

‘Except for the brigands‚’ said Aristomachus.

‘Except for the pirates‚’ said Ionides.

The Corinthian’s wife turned to him.

‘Do tell us about the pirates!’

‘Just that it’s becoming unsafe to travel anywhere by sea at this end of the Mediterranean. The Romans keep the waters between us and them, little more. In the old days your country had the eastern half of the sea in their charge but not any more. You can’t afford it.’

There was then a long discussion of piracy and I was grateful, for I was tired and did not want to listen to anything or do anything but go to sleep. I heard with half an ear the Phoenician explaining how when he had ‘first started’ all you had to fear was the odd ship, sometimes no more than a pulling boat with three pairs of oars which they had to ship before they could board you. Sometimes, he said, you could get them to stay in their boat while you paid them off. It was a kind of toll, really. But then it got worse, cut-throats and in caiques under sail, smart craft that could outsail anything but a trireme. But now it was the pirates that had the triremes and sometimes a whole fleet of them, sweeping a stretch of sea, as it might be the western shore along past Smyrna, and gobbling and sinking anything in sight. Governments? The local governments didn’t do anything – hadn’t the money or should we say the financial resources, not even Delos or Rhodes. It would come to the Romans, that would be it. Not natural sailors at all but they could learn and did, as the Carthaginians learnt to their cost.

It would be wearisome to recount the monthly festivals of the oracle and my descent into the grotto, once so feared and never entirely discounted. I did sometimes give an answer in hexameters though that was never easy. It required a certain elevation of the spirit though it caused a greater stir than I was aware of at the time. The fact was that this kind of versified answer had not been used for generations. When the news reached Athens that the Pythia was using Apollo’s own language again, if only now and then, there was a whole new reason for visiting the oracle. Presently Ionides began to limit his own emendations and gave the enquirers what I had said straight. I was flattered by this and indeed I still think some of the answers were felicitous but I shall not repeat them. Ionides did on several occasions threaten to ‘publish’ them in a book. There are a number of collections of our sayings – not mine, the oracle’s – which I suppose you could say had been ‘published’ through the generations, though the Foundation was in possession of the only copies and did not allow unauthorized perusal. That was what Perseus said, ‘unauthorized perusal’. I don’t know why I found the phrase so funny and used it so often that Ionides remarked I was becoming a bore. I found after my first terrifying descent into the grotto that I still felt the awe one finds on entering a temple or even when standing before it in a state of what the Foundation calls ‘recollection’. It seemed to me that after his first – I shall dare to call it ‘rape’ of me, that he had thought that enough was enough, and broken in as I was I could now be ridden with the gentlest of touches. It made me understand that play of Euripides better than the poet himself had done! Indeed, when I saw it – for I had to sit by the priest of Dionysus at the dramatic representations – I wept behind my veilings and could not tell whether it was in joy or sorrow. These are mysteries. It may be, as Ionides used to say in his really cynical days, that all these old legends do not conceal and shadow forth profound religious truths but rather they state bluntly the great human truths which may be as valuable. But I think Ionides was changing. I detected in what he said sometimes the suggestion that all religions were not foolish nor their customs, and that the cosmos which we inhabited was a stranger place than people sometimes thought. We must not, he once said, take our modern wisdom for granted as a final thing.