The Praise Singer (11 page)

Old Phileas, the steward, was worth his weight in gold. He set me free. When I first came, he made me about as welcome as a conquering Mede. He was a square, slow-moving countryman, full of grumbles, straight out of Hesiod. I soon saw his sullenness did not come from fear of having petty misdeeds found out; he was afraid I’d spoil his good work with ignorant meddling. The land was tended, the slaves were well trained and fed, the horses sleek. I saw what this would mean to me, and took more trouble to sweeten him than I’ve done with many a prince; rode round the estate with him, praised this or that (it was wonderful how my boyhood lore came back to me) and told him my father had advised me to lean on his experience. He softened; though he grumbled still that the master would have nothing changed from his own father’s day, and if the horse-pasture was put under corn it would bring in as much again. However, I was now his audience and not his theme.

He found me a good maid to cook for me and keep house, a freewoman, cheerful, black-haired and ruddy, who, when she sang about the place, did it in tune. One day, when he came with his morning business, he looked about at the room, remarked on the well-kept furniture, and, gazing at the sideboard, said, “That Dorothea, she’s a rare admiration for you.”

I pricked an ear. Noting he had a kindness for her, I took it they were bedmates, and had not presumed on bright smiles and dainty cooking.

“She’s a good girl; whose daughter is she?”

He scratched his ear. “Well, sir, that’s a question. She’s known as Smikros the pilot’s daughter, but he claimed he’d been a two-month at sea when she was got. Then he drowned in a squall off Rhenaia, so it was all one to him. But it’s stood in her way, and the offers she’s had weren’t fit for her. She reckons she’s well placed where she is.”

His eye enlightened me. “Well,” I said, “I daresay she’s not been without a father’s care, whoever he may be. I think she and I will get on well together.”

I was right in this. Of course I was not the first; she took it easily, as something we had both been expecting. Her cheerful friendliness went on much the same; she felt that she was now in her proper place, and could manage things more to? my advantage. When I offered to buy a slave for her, she said she liked things done her own way, and would never have the patience to stand over some clumsy slut. She was the best-natured of girls, teaching me her old work songs, but always quiet when I was making a song myself. She bore no bastards-the women of the island have their ways-and it startled me when one night, as she was taking off her gown, she asked me whom I was betrothed to.

“Why, to no one. I would never have lived with you, and kept such a thing to myself.”

“Wouldn’t you, Sim? One never knows with the gentry. Every time you’ve been over to Keos, I’ve wondered if you’d come back with a bride.”

She did not mean it. She well knew I’d have told her; she just liked to hear it said. But, though I could say it, there were other things best said, too.

“My little quail, I’m not only not betrothed, I left home just to avoid it. But . . .”

“Oh, you will.” She had folded her gown, and stood up with her hands on her firm white hips. “You’ll want a son to leave the place to, and then you’ll do it. Don’t make me promises, or I might not take it so well.” She was smiling; she had her pride.

“Get into bed, or you’ll come out in gooseflesh. I’m not one for promises. Anything can happen to anyone; I saw that in Ionia. Men born in riches have ended up washing a Persian’s floors. But long ago I made my mind up not to marry, and I don’t expect to change it. You’re all I need in a woman, my honeycomb. I wish I were all you need in a man.”

She laughed and reached her hand out; but I took it in mine. “No, wait. Poets are traveling men. And I’ve barely begun my travels.”

“Why, for sure you must travel, Sim. I know that. It’s like seeing the great cities myself, to hear you come back and tell of them. While you’re gone I can get the cheeses made, and the house turned out, and set something up on the loom.”

“Like Penelope,” I said. I wanted her to understand.

“Oh no, Sim. No hangers-on for me. My father would soon see them to rights.”

“Penelope had a long time to wait. That’s what I meant.” Her hand fell quiet. I said, “Once a poet has made a name, he looks for a patron. And a patron wants his favored poet to be his house-guest most of the year.”

“I’ve heard of that.” She was thoughtful, not angry. “But this is good land. You’ll never need to eat another man’s bread.”

“Not from want, no. That’s why this land was given me. But I must go where I’ll be heard.”

“Yes, Sim,” she said, and lay thinking. I blamed myself for not having talked of all this before. Most people I met needed no telling.

“Praise-singing is like love,” I said. “You do it from the heart, or you’re a whore. If a man I despise invites me, I can say no, and wait for someone better. But one day it will come. If you feel it’s no life for you here alone, waiting for me to visit when I can, then I’ll give you a dower, and find some old grannie to keep the house for me.”

“You’ll keep the place? You’ll not sell it?” She was her father’s child, both feet firm on the ground.

“No indeed; it’s family land.”

“Why then, what kind of fool do you take me for? I’ve a good home and a good man; and what’s more, I’m respected now. You don’t know how it was sometimes in the village. But now, there’s many women married to sailors, or men who’ve gone off to fight for pay in foreign wars, would be glad to change with me. They’ve the cold bed, and hunger with it; and mostly their man won’t make a name to bring them credit. If you’ve kept from marrying so that no one can blame you for being long away, that’s fair dealing. You’ll get no scolding here, Sim. We’re folk who fill each other’s needs.”

Ah well. I’m glad I can bring back those old Euboian days, and Dorothea when she was young. As for Athens, that comes back like yesterday.

It has all gone, now. Oh yes, they will be making it very fine. By the time they’re done, my Athens will be nothing to it. At one time, they were vowing they’d keep the High City just as the Medes had left it, to witness their impi?ety. They soon got tired of that, as who would not; but one learns not to talk sense to men at such a time. When they came round, they resolved at least not to mend what the barbarians had defiled with blood and fire. It can all go for rubble, to fill in the new foundations or raise the bastions up. Then they will build their victory ode in marble. Well, they have the right.

Aischylos was in Sicily a few years back-turned fifty, which I can hardly credit yet-and said to me over a jar of Etna wine, “It was you, Simonides, who first opened my ear to song. But it was those days that taught me tragedy.”

I could not keep from smiling. “If you mean what I think, son of Euphorion, in those days you were ten years old.”

“True, master of memory. And what I saw has mixed with what I’ve heard, most of all from you; and those again with what my mind’s eye has made of them. It’s all one cloth now, I shall never tease out the threads. But it taught me tragedy, all the same.”

“Yes. I can understand it. You grew up knowing the end, as your audience knows when the play begins that it will end with Agamemnon dead. But when you were ten I was forty; when I first saw Athens, your father was hardly born. The end came to us from a bright noon sky.”

He sat staring out through the porch towards the harbor, knitting his fair thick brows above his beaky nose; a strong man still, whose greatest pride is that he fought at Marathon. I could see him setting the ancient tale to his own sonorous music. No, he never knew the lyric years.

There was building then, too. I suppose it is all forgotten now. The new High City is to be for the gods alone; no human ruler shall have a stronghold there any more. It will be a dedication of the people, a pledge of freedom from Medes and tyrants. A great conception. I shan’t live to see even the first stones laid. It’s half ruin still, half builders’ yard.

The Medes burned the gatehouse. By the time they’d cleared the fallen timbers, it was just as I remembered it when I first set foot there; a gap in the oldest wall, that the old men called King Theseus’ Gate. Like enough he would have had one there. The stones were dark with time, mottled with lichen, and with ancient stains which they used to call the blood of the Amazons. The threshold was sunny, and lizards lived there.

From this dark entry, you came out into gleaming light. (The Mysteries teach us the power of that.) Much was brand-new, but everything seemed to be, it was kept so bright, the bronzes shining like gold, the paint on the marble never left to fade. Yet in all the splendor there was something welcoming, homelike; nothing on the great hubristic Samos scale. There were the comings and goings of a great house, not a palace; though the Athenians always said that the Palace of Erechtheus used to stand on that very site where the Archon built.

He was always called The Archon. Polykrates, who lived close to Asia, never made any bones about being Tyrant. But Pisistratos was all Athenian; he respected custom and the form of law. There were still nine Archons, even though most were his kin and all of them his supporters. His big old house next the Erechthid shrine, though very handsome inside, made no outward show of opulence. It took me two years to get through the door.

They were pleasant years, though, visiting other cities, or staying with Athenian guest-friends such as Prokles and people I’d met through him. When the lyre went round with the wine, I would have some little thing ready, a lyric, or a skolion on events. Those lyres! Never in tune, passed on by some man whose hands were calloused with the bridle or the disk. Not that anyone cared, it was the song they wanted, and it would have been conceited in a young foreign guest to bring his own instrument along. After a while, though, the lyres improved, because I began to be handed them first, before they had been ill-treated.

Then at the Feast of Athene-the yearly one, not the Great-I entered the contest for the choral odes.

In Keos, men do not sing at ?supper; it is better to choose one’s choir from boys who can still be taught. But in Athens, men sing from their youth and keep it up. I used men that first time, and have done there ever since.

We put on our fresh white robes and our wreaths of wool and olive-sprays, and went up to the High City in the late summer heat to wait in the temple forecourt. Before our turn came, I looked at the seats of honor. In the midst sat the Priestess of Athene on the highest throne, between the priests of Zeus and of Apollo. Then came the priests of the other gods, and next to them the Archons.

Pisistratos had the right-hand place, with a small respectful space around his chair; but one could have picked him out without it. He was already past seventy, and Theodoras could have carved him for a Zeus. Tall and still straight, fresh-faced, with hair and beard of a pure shining silver, and bright unfaded blue eyes, he was handsome even now, and must have been remarkable when he was young. He had a festal wreath on, of gold leaves with a few real ones stuck in for modesty; and his white robe had a gold border, but not too much. I compared this regal dignity with Polykrates’ new-rich showiness, and could see why the Archon had never been without a following, whether he was in or out. He was listening, I noticed, to the present singers, like a man who knows what he is hearing.

Our turn came. I stepped up between the spotted lions by the terrace steps. My choir knew their order and moved into it neatly. One expects that nowadays; then, one often saw choirs jostling about, even arguing aloud about where to stand. I bowed to the High Priestess-here was no Polykrates who’d expect to be noticed first-took in the other hierophants with a general reverence, and made the Archon my homage. He responded gravely; I was reminded of Zeus in the Iliad, shaking his ambrosial locks to a slight sound of thunder. Yet it never quite lost a human courtesy. I lifted my wand to the flautist (one must always praise Athene with the flute, which was her own invention) and began to sing.

The ode was about Athene’s help to Perseus when he killed the Gorgon; how she borrowed for him Hermes’ winged sandals and his sword, and Hades’ hood of invisibility, and set him on his way. For all this I praised her; but I ended praising Perseus, because when he became a king, still owning Medusa’s deadly head, he hid it underground, making a dedication of his power to justice.

No doubt the Archon had had plenty of such tributes; in his long career it was agreed he had deserved them. One look had told me he had too much dignity to let compliments decide a contest for him; on the other hand, my choir had sung clearly and in tune, and I thought my ode was better than the others. As it turned out, he and the other judges thought so too. I was awarded a fine bronze tripod with gilded rings for handles, and a white bull with gilded horns. The Priestess of Athene declared me winner; the victory chariot was led up, and the men of my choir, as they pulled me around the precinct, sang me a paean.

Later, I got to know that painted chariot like my own chair at home. I have stood in it some fifty times. The Medes burned it, of course. I have a ring from its yoke-pole, bent with heat, which someone picked up among the ruins and gave me for a memento, saying I had ridden it oftener than anyone else. Yet I can still recall the wonder of that first time, and how I said to myself, not that I had pleased the Archon-I had forgotten even that-but that I was at last a victor in Athens.

After my sacred ride, I was led back to Pisistratos, who said what he had doubtless said a hundred times before with equal graciousness. He added that he hoped it would not be long before he and his friends had the pleasure of hearing me again.

The man next him said a few words of assent, which surprised me till I saw the likeness. This must be Hippias, the eldest son. He was then a little over forty. Beside his father, he put one in mind of a famous statue, copied by a sculptor not quite s?o good. I said what one ought, wondering, as I went, whether the words about hearing me again were spoken every time, or whether they were worth something.