The Mask of Apollo (25 page)

He was sitting at the marble desk (it would need a crane to shift that) in an ivory chair which, this time, he had quite succeeded in filling. He was dressed up to the height of Syracusan fashion, and a bit beyond. His hair had been camomiled, curled, and dusted with powdered gold; his robe, which seemed all border, was bordered with purple embroidery. I wondered if I could get at his chamber-groom and offer for his castoffs; you could have played Rhadamanthos in this one. Close up it almost knocked you down; so did his scent, which was drenched on like an old hetaira’s. He had painted his face with Athlete’s Tan and carmine, and touched up his eyes with kohl. I was surprised to find he wore all this stuff as if he were used to it, till I remembered Menekrates’ stories. Of course, it had been put away when Plato came. I daresay I was the only man in Syracuse whom it could still surprise.

He was cordial, but had nothing much to say to me; it seemed he was just giving me an audience by way of favor. Presently, as he talked about past productions in the city, praising this artist or that, I saw why I was there: to spread the news that the theater ban was over.

I wondered how Plato had been chased out of Syracuse this time, and pictured the dejection at the Academy. I must bring home some gift for Axiothea, to cheer her up.

“Only today,” said Dionysios, digging in the sweet-bowl that stood between us, “Plato was telling me how you were shipwrecked going home last time. I had not known of it.”

I related the tale, my mind busy elsewhere. So Plato still cast his spell. What? I thought. Will the bird he’s whistled to his hand neither sing for him nor fly away? Else why this naughty costume? But then, all the world knows how Alkibiades used to slip the leash, and come coaxing back to Sokrates, showing his radiant grace for password.

“And I suppose,” he said, “you lost that painting I gave you, of the Siege of Motya?”

“Alas, sir, yes.” He looked as downcast as a child, so to please him I said, “A loss to me and Athens. But I grieved even more for the model chariot, not just for the giver’s sake, but because I never saw, in that line of work, craftsmanship to equal it.”

I hoped to see his face light up as it had before; but he just looked gracious, and sent to summon his steward. The man came with his keys; he said, “Go to that old workroom of mine and fetch a model chariot.” When it came, he turned it over once or twice in his hands (I saw he still bit his nails) and said, “Well, here is one loss I can make good to you. State business gives me no time for toys.” There was dust on it. I am ashamed to confess such folly, but I felt near weeping.

No one troubled with me when I left, so I made for Dion’s house, thinking, as I went, what Dionysios had said about his state business. He had sounded full of consequence. Having met Philistos, I could see him flattering the young man, as an expert charioteer coaching a rich young blood will let him think he is driving. Dionysios was the very one for it. I don’t suppose Dion had ever stooped to such pretenses. It was not in him.

His house, when I got there, was well kept as ever, nothing shabby or run-down. Yet I felt a change, a loss of life and movement in the air around. As I reached the door, I saw this was more than idle fancy. Before, it had stood open. Now it was shut.

I knocked, and sent in my name. While I stood waiting, a young boy of seven or eight, a handsome child, slipped round the corner of the house for a peep at me. One saw the likeness at once. He was curious, I suppose, having heard my name, but dodged back when he was seen. Soon came the servant to say his master was at his studies and could see no one. No word of my coming some other time.

I walked through Ortygia, sick at heart. I had thought he would forgive me; he himself had done what he thought right, sorry it hurt me, but never turning back. This was the same. I would never have shut my door to him. But to me, man’s life is a tree with twisted roots. To a political philosopher, it must be like a diagram of Pythagoras.

Soon after, I met Speusippos in the street. I hardly dared greet him; but he crossed over, and invited me to drink with him. I took courage, therefore, to ask if Dion was very angry with me.

“Angry?” he said. “Not that I know of. Why should you think so?”

When I told him, he said the play had not been announced yet; I could see that it was news to him, and news of no great importance. He spoke kindly, however. “Don’t lose your sleep over it. If Dion knows of it, which I doubt, he can see you must work to eat. Give him credit for being just. You know, I take it, that Dionysios stopped the plays of his own accord? Neither Plato nor Dion urged it;
they
are here to get law instead of tyranny. But Dionysios found it in
The Republic
—a thing he could do at once, without trouble. You know him, like a child with new clothes.”

“Still,” I said, “Plato wrote it.”

“Yes … You know, Niko, at the Academy we aim to provide the world with statesmen. Already now cities are coming to us to draw up their constitutions. But like shoemakers, we cut to measure.
The Republic
is, shall I say, a discussion of principles, not a working code. Between you and me, I think the purpose of those passages was to startle our poets into responsibility. Half of them today have the souls of whores: give me my drachma, never mind who gets my pox. Plato is a man who would not add a grain to the weight of the world’s evil for a golden crown. When no more like him are left, men will devour each other and perish from the earth. That’s why Dion defended him to you, just as I do.”

“Well then,” I said, “if it’s not on account of the play, why does Dion shut his door to me?”

“I doubt you were singled out. He has refused himself to a good many people lately. He found if he tried to advance anyone’s interests, just the opposite happened. That was Dionysios’ way of making himself felt, without an open quarrel. He won’t, if he can help it, force Plato into taking sides; he might learn what he has no wish to know. So he pricks in ways like these. Dion found he did his friends no good by taking notice of them. That’s why he shuts his door.”

“I am sorry for it. But with me, I’m afraid he must be really angry. If not, knowing I would think so he would have sent a letter.”

Speusippos drew his black brows together, and shook his head. “No, Niko. You think so, because it is what you would do yourself. Dion is proud. Till you know that, you do not know him.”

I remembered his desk, piled with petitions and state papers. How should a man like him beg pardon of a man like me, for being no longer even a trusted servant? The thought freed me from bitterness.

Since the year of my father’s death, when I had come on as an extra, I had never been in
The Bacchae.
While a second actor, I had once been offered my father’s roles but had turned them down, more, I suppose, from superstition than from piety, for no doubt he would have thought me foolish. Now, as protagonist, I would play the god, with one short double as Tiresias the Prophet. Menekrates, as Pentheus and Queen Agave, was keen and shaping well.

It is a play about a mystery, and a mystery in itself. Ask any actor what he thinks Euripides meant by it, and he will tell you something different. Myself, I have played in it now some seven times, and still don’t claim to know more than what one man makes of it, on one day. It is even possible, I suppose, that it was written to show that the gods are not. If so, someone crept up behind the poet, and breathed down his neck when he wasn’t looking. One thing I take it we may agree upon: the god of
The Bacchae
is not supposed to be like men.

There are first-class mask-makers in Syracuse, and of course we had the best. The Dionysos was most beautiful, a delicate blond face, almost feminine, as the play describes him, but with slant eyes, darkly drawn round like a leopard’s. It seemed to me just right. Menekrates was very pleased with the Agave, and Pentheus was nearly finished.

Philistos gave no trouble. He looked in now and again at rehearsals, sat quietly in front, would come behind to say it was going well and ask if we were satisfied with the machines, for there are a good many effects, with the earthquake and so on. Of course such things are better done at Syracuse than anywhere in the world, but he seemed anxious to be cordial, and even asked the cast to a drinking party. The others went, which I did not hold against them. I begged off with the excuse that I had had a feverish flux on tour (a common complaint in Sicily, where there is much bad water) and the doctor had me under orders. He could hardly press me, if he wanted the play to go on, so I was left in peace. I was doing this role to serve the god, not as Philistos’ sycophant.

During the half-month of rehearsals, I made it my business to visit small wineshops in poor streets and find out what the people were saying. I reckoned in this way to cover ground Speusippos would miss; for he could never look like anything but a gentleman, while I, if I choose, can look like a soldier or an artisan, not by dressing up but just in small ways of sitting and standing and slicking down my hair. As a rule I said I was a skene-painter from Corinth. The accent is very easy.

From being so much in Ortygia among the soldiers and servants of the Archon, I had begun to think Dion had not a friend left in the city. I now learned otherwise. The working folk, with one accord, had blamed the theater ban on Plato, a foreign sophist of whom they only knew he was Dionysios’ latest fad, which in itself was enough to damn him. Dion, they were all sure, would do nothing so impious or so odd. Dion was a great gentleman. When the old Archon died, and he had got the young cub at heel, it had been an age of gold while it lasted. People could bring their wrongs to judgment, even against the rich; taxes had been fairly levied, and the worst extortioners had gone to the quarries. The mercenaries had been made to behave themselves in the town, instead of acting like conquerors. And so on. Everyone, they said, had had hopes of his doing great things for the city; but it seemed, when it came to the push, he was too much the gentleman.

I could not make out just what it was they thought he would do, without help from them. Subvert the mercenaries, I suppose, and form a conspiracy and seize Ortygia; but nobody seemed to have a notion how such things are really done. Used as I was at home to being told I was a fool at politics, here any Athenian, even I, seemed as expert as a man among children. However careless we may be, there are some things we take for granted grown men will do for themselves. All this they had forgotten.

They talked of Dion as of a god, whose mind they did not expect to know. But even the gods have oracles, and priests who will take them messages from common folk. Dion had no such thing. I suppose, in Sicily, it was to be expected.

I sought out Speusippos with my findings. He was glad of the information, saying he had had most success himself with the middle-class citizens, with whom, he said, the friends of Philistos were daily making headway. They did not attack Dion directly, knowing how he was respected; it was through Plato they slipped their poison in. “In the time of our fathers,” they were saying, “the Athenians sent out two armies and a battle fleet to conquer Syracuse. None got home alive but a few wretched fugitives from the mountain brush, or slaves on the run. But now, Athens sends just one sophist with a silken tongue, and look what
he
has achieved. He has wound up the Archon in his web; soon he will suck him dry and hand over the power to Dion, who, as all the world knows, has been his fancy boy.”

Speusippos said that the men of culture, who had read Plato for themselves or spoken with those who had, were not so easily led; but even they were starting to believe what they were always being told, that the reforms would be hurried breakneck in, and cause civil chaos. Dion’s most solid support, he said, lay among men whom I had seen nothing of and he not much—the ancient aristocracy of Syracuse, whose fathers had fought the older tyrant. Their rising had been brief but savage; Dionysios’ revenge no less so; they, or their widows, had passed on the blood-feud to their sons, and it smoldered still.

All this he told me, and much more that I forget, for I was now in
The Bacchae
up to my neck. I recall, though, his saying there was talk of a Carthaginian embassy coming about a peace treaty. In the old Archon’s day, Speusippos said, their envoys had always been seen by Dion; they trusted his word, and his manners were such as they admire—commanding, spare of words, and stern, for he knew their ways. Now he was getting anxious lest Dionysios should try to handle it himself. He would be no match for them; at best they would get the profit of the bargain, at worst he might lose his head and provoke them into war; they might be all too ready once they had seen his quality. Dion was doing his best, therefore, to keep their chief men ignorant of his fall from power.

I said I hoped he would succeed, wondering in my heart whether he would come to see me act, and whether, if I did well enough, it would change his heart to me and open his door again. I feared this was not his play; he might only see it as one more folk-tale of Olympians behaving worse than men. But one cannot take this deity with the head; that, I suppose, is what the play is about. I must do it as I felt it, and leave the rest to the god.

Stratokles, old Dionysios’ chorus-trainer, had stayed on in the city to put on dithyrambs, so was here at need. He was good at his work, and not above taking some direction from the protagonist, which is important in this play. Everything went so well that, lest some god should be getting jealous, we were almost relieved when the mask-maker told Menekrates his Pentheus mask had been spoiled by some apprentice spilling paint on it, and would not be ready till the day.

“At the worst,” he said, “I can wear the second mask from the Hippolytos.” (There are three: the happy, the angry and the dying.) “Pentheus is an angry young man all through; it will do well enough in a pinch, and we can say that the luck-god has had his sacrifice.”

“Amen,” I said.

Plays start at dawn in Sicily, for the heat of the day comes soon. The theater of Syracuse faces southwest, built into the slopes of Achradina. Behind these the sun comes up; one begins in the dusk of their shadow, till presently the long sun-shafts strike the stage.