The Mask of Apollo (3 page)

People are always saying what fine free lives we actors lead, able to cross frontiers and go anywhere. This is true, if it means that hired troops have nothing against us, and others respect the sacred edicts. You are likely enough to get where you are going with a whole skin, and can count there on roof and food at least from your choregos, always provided this sponsor is alive, and not exiled overnight. But for a company working its own way, to arrive is hardly enough, if you find that the men have taken to the hills, the women have battened themselves inside the houses, while a squadron of cavalry has hitched its horses in the orchestra and is chopping up the skene for cook-fires.

However, it was a fine morning. The straits of Salamis glittered against the purple island; remembering my Aischylos, I peopled the water with grinding oars and crashing prows, and rammed galleys spilling gold-turbaned Persians into the sea. Eleusis was just ahead; we would be playing there tomorrow, setting the skene today. I rode my donkey, getting the cart when I could between me and Meidias. Lamprias led on his riding mule; Demochares liked to start the day on the cart, where he could have out his sleep on the bundles and favor his morning head. I looked at him hopefully, planning to ask him if he had ever met Euripides. He looked old enough.

There is nothing really worth telling about the first part of the tour. A hundred artists could tell it for me. I had the hardest bed at the inn with the oldest straw, ran everyone’s errands, mended the costumes, put laces in the boots, combed the masks’ hair and beards, and daubed on paint when some old skene needed freshening. I did not mind, except when Meidias told people it was what I had been hired for.

He was the gall under my harness—not the fleas in the straw, nor the hard work, nor looking after Demochares. I loved the old soak, even when he drove me mad, and soon learned to manage him. In his heyday, as he let me know, he had been a great amorist; it was some while, I think, since he had taken to a youth whom he trusted not to mock him. Being the ruins of a gentleman, he was never disgusting, even in his drink; more like some old dancer who, hearing the flute, steps through his paces where the neighbors will not see. Self-respect kept him in bounds when sober; after the play, when he started drinking, he had no time for lesser interests. All it came to was that he taught me a great deal, which has been of use to me ever since, and recited me some beautiful epigrams composed by Agathon and Sophokles for youths they courted, with the name changed to mine wherever it would scan.

It was only in the morning, before the play, that he gave me any real trouble. Then he would slip off for a cup to warm him up, and, if I did not watch out, go on and finish the jar. I would run to the wineshop for him, mix in the water on the way, and keep him talking to spin it out. With luck I would have him dressed in time to get my own work done.

“The theater is in your bones,” he used to say to me. “You have the open face. Not like that oaf Meidias, who is in love with the mask he happened to be born with, and soon won’t have even that, since his fatuous conceit is already marking it. The artist flows into the mask the poet offers him; only so will the god possess him. I have seen you, my dear, when you have not seen yourself. I know.”

He spoke to comfort me. No one was kinder, when he could be kind sitting down. I never hoped of him that he would stay sober to fight my battles. He was near sixty, which seemed very old to me; but he still moved like a man who knows he looks distinguished, and behind a mask it was surprising how young he could sound, on a good day. I bore him no grudge for Meidias, who would snigger to strangers in taverns about the old man’s darling.

So things were jogging on, till the day we put on Philokles’
Hector.
It calls for Homeric battle dress, showing one’s legs to the thigh. Meidias was thin-shanked, had to wear padded tights, and still had knock-knees. He was cast as Paris.

We were playing at a little market town between Corinth and Mykenai. Such places always have the local wit who gives his own performance. Paris exits saying, “What do I care, while Helen shares my bed?” This man yelled out, “She must have got thin, to fit between those knees.” It stopped the play for some time, and worse was to come. Meidias was playing the Greek herald too, and Paris, who must be on to hear his challenge, is a stand-in bit. Backstage, Meidias gave me his kilted corselet and his mask as if he wished they were steeped in poison. Sure enough, when I came on this joker cheered, and set the whole house off.

After this they had Paris in a long robe for
Hector
, writing in a line about his unwarlike dress; and Meidias, from plaguing me in spare time, became a serious enemy.

Let us omit the daily chronicle of his devices. Sit down in any wineshop by any theater, and you will hear some actor pour out the ancient tale as if he were the first man it had happened to; but at least the listener has been bought a drink. We will pass by, then, the thorn in the boot, the sewn-up sleeve, the broken mask-string, and so forth. One morning I found a dark sticky splash and a broken wine jar by the seat where Demochares had taken the air. The wine had been neat, and I guessed who had sent it; but that time he reckoned wrong. Demochares might be too easy with himself; but he was not easy enough to let a Meidias make use of him. I think at this time he warned Lamprias we should have trouble. But Lamprias wanted to hear of no more troubles than he had; and he knew about Meidias all that signified, namely, that there was no chance till the tour was over of getting anyone else.

We had an engagement at Phigeleia, a small town near Olympia. This was an important date, because the city had hired us. They were celebrating, on the feast of their founding hero, their liberation too.

This was one of the towns which the Spartans, after they won the Great War against Athens, gave into the power of their oligarchs to keep the people quiet. Here as usual they had chosen their Council of Ten from the worst of the old landowners, who had been exiled by the democrats and had most to gain from holding them down. These Dekarchs had paid off old scores tenfold—done as they chose, helped themselves to any pretty young wife or handsome boy they fancied, or any man’s best bit of land. If anyone complained, the Spartans would send a troop there, and when they had done with him he thought he had been well off before. Then came the Theban rising; Pelopidas and the other patriots there had shown the world that Spartans are made of the same stuff as other men; and while the Sons of Herakles were rubbing their heads and running about to see what hit them, the subject cities seized their chance. The Phigeleians had been prompt in this; but as they had begun by rushing with one accord to tear in pieces the most hated Dekarch, the others with their faction had got away to the hills.

The City Council had sent us word of this beforehand, and asked for a play to suit the feast, no expense spared; some of the Dekarchs’ gold had been saved from looting. Lamprias had found just the thing for them—a
Kadmos
by Sophokles the Younger, glorifying Thebes. It was a new, middling piece, which no one has thought worth reviving; Kadmos, punished for killing the War God’s dragon, is redeemed from bondage, made king, married to Harmonia, and so on to the finale with wedding procession. For good measure Demochares, who doctored scripts well when his head was clear, had written in some prophecies for Apollo, somehow dragging in Phigeleia. The Council was delighted. We had a week rehearsing with our chorus, who were about as good as you would expect when leading democrats’ sons had been chosen first and voices afterwards.

I looked forward myself to this production, because it gave me more to do than usual. I had a few lines as an extra (one of Kadmos’ earth-born warriors) and for the whole finale I was standing in for Apollo, since Meidias, who played him, was doing Harmonia as well.

This was the first time I had worn the mask of the god.

Meidias, who sneered at all our costumes to show what he was used to, despised more than anything this Apollo mask. He said it must be all of fifty years old; and in this I found he was right. It was heavy, being carved from olive wood, but no hardship to wear, for it was finished as smooth inside as out, a real craftsman’s job. No one makes them to last, nowadays.

I remember the first time I unpacked the hampers, at Eleusis, and saw it looking up at me. It gave me a start. It was a face, I thought, more for a temple than a stage. I know I sat back on my heels, among all the litter, looking and looking. Meidias was right in calling it old-fashioned, one must allow him that. No one would say, as they do before a modern Apollo, “Delightful! What a nice young man!”

Demochares, whom I asked about it, said it had been left to Lamprias by some old actor who had thought it brought him luck. It was supposed to have been made for the first revival of Aischylos’
Eumenides
, where the god has a central role. That would be in the great days of Alkibiades and Nikias, when sponsors were sponsors, Demochares said.

Our overnight stop, before Phigeleia, had been at Olympia; I had never been there, and could not stare enough. In fact the place was stone-dead, it not being a Games year; but youth is easily pleased, and I set out with Demochares to see the sights. Like an old horse to its stable, he plodded to his favorite tavern near the river, and, seeing in my eye that I was going to move him on, said in his ripest voice, “Dear boy, you were asking me about the mask of Apollo. It has just come back to me whose workshop it came from, as I was told. Go along to the Temple of Zeus, and you will see. Let me think … yes, the west gable.”

I gave in, not sorry to get on quicker. Heat filled the wooded valley, for spring comes like summer there. Already the river was shallow in its pebbly bed; the dust was hot to the foot, the painted statues glowed. A tender Hermes, dangling grapes before the baby god he carried, made one want to stroke his russet flesh. Further on were the penalty statues, given as fines by athletes caught cheating; shoddy hack-work done cheap. The giltwork dazzled on the roofs, the white marble glared. The great altar of Zeus, uncleaned since the morning sacrifice, stank and buzzed with flies. But there are always sightseers for the temple. The porch and colonnades were noisy with guides and cheapjacks; peddlers sold copies of Zeus’s image in painted clay; quacks cried their cures; kids and rams bleated, on sale for sacrifice; a rusty-voiced rhetor declaimed
The Odyssey
while his boy passed round the plate. I went in from the hot sun to the soft, cool shadows, and gaped with the rest at the great statue inside, the gold and ivory, the throne as big as my room at home, till my eye, traveling upward, met the face of power which says, “O man, make peace with your mortality, for this too is God.”

Going out, I had to shake off a low fellow who seemed to think a free supper would be my price, and nearly forgot to look at the west gable. But a guide was herding a gaggle of rich women with their children, nurses, and big straw hats; I saw him pointing, and talking of the sculptor Pheidias. My eye followed his finger.The triangle of the gable end was full of the battle between the Greeks and Kentaurs. Theseus and Pirithoos and their men were battling to save the boys and women: men against half-men, wrestling, bashing, trampling, swinging axes; and in the midst, tall and alone, his right arm stretched above the melee, was the Apollo of the mask.

You could not mistake it. But here the mouth was closed, and the face had eyes. I walked back to see better, so lost that I bumped a lady, who scolded me. I scarcely heard. My flesh shivered with delight and awe. Even now sometimes, at Olympia, that shudder will come back to me.

He stands above the battle, needing only to be, not do. The world is still green and raw. He alone knows it is for him the Greeks are fighting; yet some light from him shines back in young Theseus’ face. The Greeks must win, because they are nearer his likeness; his prophetic eyes look far beyond. He has no favorites. He is stern, radiant, gracious and without pity. A perfect chord is the friend of him whose strings are tuned to it. Can it pity the kitharist who fumbles?

I walked back doing a speech for him, boyish nonsense in the hack verse any actor can think in. There was no time to finish it, for Demochares had drunk himself silly, and had to be got back while he could still stand. He greeted me as his lovely Hylas, making the other drinkers laugh and cheer; but I was used to that. “Hylas?” I said. “You know what happened to
him.
Herakles let him go sightseeing on his own, and the local nymphs took and drowned him. And Herakles lost his passage in the Argo. Heave-ho, shipmate. Come back on board, before the skipper casts off.”

But when I unpacked the hampers at Phigeleia, and hung the mask of Apollo on its peg, I plucked a bay-sprig to stick above it, and poured a few drops of wine on the floor below. As I went with my flickering lamp out of the old wooden skeneroom, I half thought as I turned that there were eyes in the eyeholes, watching me off.

On the morning of the performance, long before sunup the audience was pouring in. Every soul who could walk must have been there; indeed, I saw one old granddad carried from his donkey to his seat.

I made sure Demochares took his breakfast watered, buckled him into the panoply of Ares, laid out everyone’s things, and tuned my lyre, which I should have to play for the bridal song. Then I got dressed as the Theban Warrior.

Everything went quite smoothly, as far as I remember, until about two-thirds through. Lamprias and Demochares were on stage as Kadmos and Telephassa. Meidias had exited as Harmonia, to do his change for Apollo; presently he would appear and prophesy, on the god-walk above the skene. I was still on as a warrior, with nothing to do but hold a spear.

Standing upstage center by the royal door, I was looking out beyond the theater at the hillside it was carved from. Suddenly I noticed a crowd of men coming down towards it. My first thought was that the citizens of some neighbor town had come to see the play, and got here late. When I saw they all had spears and shields I still did not think much of it, supposing they were going to do a war dance at the festival. Looking back, I find this simplicity hard to credit; but when you work in Athens, you get to thinking the world stops still for a play.