The Pericles Commission (2 page)

“Then what was the Areopagus left with?”

“The power to hear cases of murder and heresy. That’s all.”

“So they went from being the most powerful men in Athens to a court of law?”

“Correct. The Areopagus members resent it bitterly, they loathe the democratic movement, and, above all, they hated Ephialtes.”

“Has the Areopagus tried to harm Ephialtes before this?”

“Not that I know of, only abused him verbally, which they did often and with malice.”

“Did they threaten his life?”

“Not in public. He wasn’t the type of man to admit it if he received private threats.”

“So the Areopagus hated Ephialtes, but did they hate him enough to murder him? It seems hard to believe.”

“The guilt of the Areopagus is obvious, whether my father had a hand in it or not. All that’s lacking is the proof.” He stopped his pacing once more, this time by the window, and looked down into his courtyard. He was silhouetted by the light streaming in.

I said, “Then the answer is for someone to find out who killed Ephialtes.”

“I think you must be right.”

“But keep in mind, the answer might not be as certain as you think, Pericles.”

Pericles waved his hand in dismissal. “I’m not worried about that. Now, be silent for a moment, I must think about this.”

Pericles remained silent for such a long time that I became uncomfortable. I’d begun to wonder if I should take my leave when he turned to me and said, “You seem a remarkably logical man, Nicolaos, especially for one so young. How old are you?”

“Twenty. I’ve just finished ephebe training.” Every young man, when he reaches eighteen, is required to spend two years in a training unit in the army. After that, he is expected to volunteer for service whenever the state needs him.

Something in my tone must have alerted Pericles, because he laughed humorlessly. “Ah, and did you enjoy it?”

“I did well enough.” I was careful to keep my voice and face expressionless.

In fact, I was relieved to be done with it, but it would never do to complain. I hadn’t minded too much the rough lifestyle, the deliberate starvation, and the punishments—the sergeants do that to toughen us—but I found having to be part of a squad claustrophobic. I preferred to rely only on myself.

Pericles studied me critically. “Yes, you have that starved, weathered look. Don’t worry, everyone’s like that when they finish training.”

Two years in the army had left me thin, and my normal light olive skin was dark where the armor didn’t cover me, especially my face and arms. I’d already been well muscled when I’d joined—working with my father from an early age had seen to that—but the army had taught me combat, with only a few small scars to show for my pains. I’d decided to follow the latest fashion among the young men and shaved my beard. I’d thought it would enhance my looks, but instead, where the beard had been, my skin was noticeably lighter than the rest. Now I was spending a lot of time out of doors to even the color.

“What are your plans now?” Pericles asked.

I was as free as any citizen. Free to be a young man in Athens, and free also to consider my future. I knew what I wanted, but had no idea how to achieve it. I wondered what Pericles would say if I told him I wanted his position.

“I have no particular plans.”

Pericles nodded approval. “I noticed back at the Rock of the Areopagus you didn’t panic and you didn’t run away. Instead you stayed calm, kept your head about you, and dealt with the situation as you thought best. That would be remarkable in a man twice your age. For one as young as you, it’s astonishing. I like that. I want you to investigate this crime. Find out what really happened.”

“Me?” I couldn’t believe he meant it.

“You. Athens is poised between the powerful old oligarchs, led by the Areopagus, and the Ecclesia, led by Ephialtes until this day. If you can prove he was struck down by the Areopagus, then they’ll be finished as a political force and the democracy will be safe.”

“But…when I said someone should find the killer, I wasn’t talking about
myself
!”

“I will reward you greatly if you succeed.”

Pericles was the son of an aristocratic family, and therefore wealthy. He could afford whatever sum he had in mind, and I could certainly use the money and, more to the point, I
needed
the democracy as much as he did. Did I want to investigate this murder? I knew immediately that I did; I was burning with curiosity to know what had happened.

But Pericles had something I wanted more than wealth, only it was something he probably wouldn’t care to give me. Should I ask? I decided not. Why court failure, when already before me was a fine offer he might easily retract? I began to say yes, then stopped, realizing I was being a fool. Here was an opportunity that would never come again. It was up to me whether I grabbed it with both hands, or let it pass by for fear of rejection. I took a deep breath.

“You offer great reward, sir, so I will ask for two things,” I said.

“The first?” Pericles didn’t blink. He’d been expecting me to bargain!

“Sufficient wealth to establish a modest home and a small, steady income.”

Pericles grunted. “No wish to follow in your father’s footsteps, eh?”

“None whatsoever.”

“I accept. The second?”

“You will teach me politics.”

Pericles pulled up short. His eyes widened, and he stood still for the briefest of moments.

“You’re right, Pericles. I don’t want to follow in my father’s footsteps. I want to follow in yours.”

“You surprise me. Are you sure about this? No one can simply become a successful politician, like putting on a hat. It’s the same as any craft, it takes years to learn.”

“Yes, I know.”

“Am I correct in thinking you support the democracy?”

“I’m not going to rise any other way. My father’s a sculptor, he isn’t wealthy like yours.”

“Good, because I’m hardly going to agree to train an opponent. Let me think.”

Pericles folded his arms, and considered me as if I were some horse he might buy. It was lucky I’d chosen to wear my best clothes that morning: a chitoniskos—a little chiton, of the same style as Pericles’, but stopping at the thighs rather than full length—and a small chlamys cloak pinned about my neck. My chitoniskos was new and therefore still white, with a fancy red key pattern about every edge. Pericles probably thought I was of a higher station than I was.

He held his pose for what felt an interminable time, during which I could feel my heart thudding. I looked back at him, attempting to keep my expression neutral and, I have no doubt, failing miserably.

Pericles frowned. “You must learn rhetoric. With your logical mind that should be easy.” He paused. “Your voice. There’s nothing we can do about your voice.”

I clutched my throat. “What’s wrong with my voice?” I asked, alarmed.

“But perhaps it can be trained a little, to remove the roughest edges.”

I relaxed.

“You’re young, of course. The bumptious manner will wear off with time, I hope. You’ll have to learn to fake being calm and confident. Acting is a large part of the skill, but you must learn it without ever being seen on a stage. That would be shameful. No one in their right mind would vote for an actor.”

“I’m willing to learn.”

“You realize I can teach you the basic skills, to whatever degree you can learn them, but in a democracy it’s the will of the people that decides who leads? I cannot guarantee your success as the second price.”

“Of course. I accept your commission.”

We heard commotion from the front of the house, slaves exclaiming, and running feet. Four men burst through the doorway.

“Pericles, Archestratus is saying Ephialtes is dead!” They were so agitated they were almost jumping on the spot.

Pericles waited until they had relaxed a little, then said, “It’s true. I have seen the body.” Before, in speaking to me, there’d been fear and worry in his voice. Now it was pure calm, which I knew for a pose.

“And is it true too, then, what Archestratus is saying, that he was murdered?”

“Yes,” Pericles said quietly.

One man wailed, what would become of the democracy with Ephialtes gone, another shouted revenge against the Areopagus, and the third demanded the men of Athens take arms immediately to defend the democracy. The fourth man thought for a moment, then asked who would lead the democrats now.

“Pericles,” answered the first man, calming down.

“Archestratus has a claim to leadership too,” said the second.

“What we need now is an experienced commander of war to lead us against the aristocrats,” said the third. “I would be the right man for that.”

“You’re talking civil war!” the fourth man protested.

“Yes. The Areopagus has started it, and we’ll finish it for them.”

They shouted at one another all at once.

Pericles looked at me, and I at him.

“And so it begins. Don’t fail me in this, Nicolaos. I will do my best to limit the political damage, but I can only do so much without your answer. This pot will boil, and it is a mere matter of time before it explodes.”

I walked straight to the place I love best in all the world: the Agora of Athens, the heart and soul of our city. It isn’t merely the marketplace; it’s also where men gather to talk, argue, and exchange opinions. In Athens, if it isn’t said in the Agora, then it may as well not be said at all. I wanted to observe the reaction of the people to Ephialtes’ death. Besides, it was lunchtime, no one would agree to see me during the meal, and my stomach needed attention.

I pushed my way through the crowd, picking up a fish cake from one stall and watered wine in a wooden cup from another. I nibbled at the fish cake in my left hand while I sipped the wine in my right. When the cup was empty I put it back on the stall and wandered about listening to the babble.

The open space in the middle was covered in a jumble of stalls, each little more than a rough plank resting upon a barrel at each end, with perhaps an awning to keep the vendors and their goods in the shade. I walked past the many stalls selling produce from the farms. These stalls were covered with jars and baskets of olives, olive oil, figs and grapes, corn, goat’s cheese, and, rarely, smoked goat meat. Behind every stall stood a farmer, his skin leathery and dark from years working in the sun, his hands calloused, wearing rough clothes and a floppy sheepskin  hat, shouting his products or dealing with a customer. These weren’t men to care much of politics; it was all they could do to scratch a living from the stony soil. Barely visible, fenced off from the chaos, was the Altar of the Twelve Gods. The altar was the very center of Athens, the point from which all distances were measured. It was the only place in Athens dedicated to all twelve Gods, and so especially sacred: a place of sanctuary for anyone who could make it inside the fence before their pursuers reached them. The altar stone was made of marble, flat on top and somewhat weathered, though it had been set in place only sixty years before.

The people at the stalls were too intent on trading to talk politics; haggling was in full swing all about me. When a price was agreed on, the customer would reach into his mouth and pull out the coins he had put there before he left home. Only the rich had so many coins that they needed a purse, and no man would be so foolish as to display a money bag in the Agora. The thieves would have it cut away before he took two steps, and if he was lucky that would be all they cut.

A number of women were moving between the vegetable stalls, each with a man or boy to carry for her. Since the women were barefoot and buying, I knew them to be slaves. I recognized some of the young women since I look out for them; most households have a regular slave who does the shopping each morning, and their faces are a pleasant fixture in the Agora. I always smiled at the pretty ones but never approached; it doesn’t do to interfere with someone else’s property—at least, not in public.

To one side of the farmers were the fishmongers who had hauled their catch up in carts from the port of Piraeus before dawn. Anything they hadn’t sold yet would be unfit to eat before long. They would mark down their prices after lunch and the poor would arrive to buy it. This was the one place where most of the vendors were women. The fishwives would sell the catch while the men saw to their boats, mended the nets, and went to bed in preparation for their early rise next day. A fish-wife might have plenty to say, and whatever she said would be in language strong enough to make a soldier blush, but no woman knew anything about politics. The aroma here was strong and I passed them by quickly.

Next to the fishmongers came the bronze ware, and the famous pottery of Athens, which could also be bought at its source in the deme—the suburb—of Ceramicus. Most of the pottery was newly made, painted in fashionable red figures on a black background: kraters for mixing wine, hydriai for water, pyxides for cosmetics and jewelry, pelikai for storing olive oil in the kitchen, ordinary cups and bowls. There were still secondhand dealers selling cracked or chipped examples of the older style black figure on red, but only the poor, the tasteless, or the hopelessly traditional would touch them. There were five or six middle-aged women—respectable married women—inspecting the goods at the better stalls, each accompanied by several slaves. They talked to one another, picked up the pieces, no doubt to complain about them, and put them back down. Not one was smiling. I pitied the vendors who had to deal with them.

I looked about, but there were no respectable maidens to be seen. In any case, no girl would be allowed in public without slaves and a chaperone, and any man who approached would be asking for trouble from her guard.

All the other people jostling one another in the crowded lanes were men. How many were slaves and how many citizens I couldn’t say, because in Athens the slave of a rich man might be better dressed than a poor but free laborer. Even the resident aliens, called metics, adopted Athenian dress, and more often than not the local accent too.

The haggling was less intense here. The people were muttering to one another, asking if anyone had heard any news about what had happened.

“He was set upon by ten men,” I heard one man say.

“I heard it was twenty, and they beat Ephialtes with clubs.”

“He put up a fight, though. I heard he killed two of them.”

“You’re all wrong! What I heard, he was speaking to the Council of the Areopagus, and when he angered them with his words they rushed upon him all together and beat him with their fists.”

“No, it was clubs.”

I realized with a shock that I knew what had happened, and the people of Athens did not. I felt a thrill of power and excitement, and I had to bite my lip to stay silent and not contribute to the rumors. Contrary to the general opinion, I knew for sure that the rock had not been awash with homicidal statesmen. It would have been the most fun of my life to hold court among the men as the only one present with any sure knowledge, but I knew instinctively that calling attention to myself would destroy any chance of succeeding in my mission. I told myself firmly I was there to gauge the mood, not to make a bad situation worse, and I walked on before the temptation to speak overwhelmed me.

I moved to the perimeter, where I stubbed my toe on a building stone, stumbled, swore, and lost the last handful of my lunch. The men around ignored me, except for one fellow who turned and snarled, then marched off with squashed fish cake and sticky sauce attached to his back. It happened every day. The Agora is a building site in which anyone could stumble and fall. It’s been that way for as long as I can remember.

I had walked to a highly controversial building, half risen, with a strange circular wall in place of the normal four corners at right angles. It had been designed by an architect, so it bore little resemblance to any normal structure. My father, who has to deal with architects from time to time in the course of his trade, considered it typical of their alienation from all normal sense and taste. This was the Tholos, which, when it was completed, would house the leaders of the Boule: the committee of five hundred that manages the agenda for the Ecclesia and oversees the running of the city. They would live in the Tholos when on duty, since they have to be available to the people day and night. The Boule had existed for generations, but because its members were chosen each year by lot from among the citizens, and no man could serve twice, it was part of the new democracy. There was talk too, since it was close to the Agora, of placing in the Tholos the standard weights and measures, so that any dispute in the marketplace could be settled quickly before it came to blows. That idea alone would decrease the annual murder rate by an appreciable amount.

The workmen had stopped for lunch. They sat among the formwork, rivulets of sweat making tracks down the dust on their faces and chests, in the shade of that strange circular wall. Their hands cupped small bowls of lentils and bread. I sat among them but heard nothing of value. All they talked about was women and sport.

Curiosity got the better of me. “Aren’t you men interested in the latest news? Haven’t you heard Ephialtes has been murdered?”

A small, thin man with a hook nose and sparse hair looked at me as if I were mad and said, “What do I care? I’m a slave. They treat me the same no matter who’s in charge.” His friends nodded their heads gloomily. A man in another group spat into the dust and said, “I’m a free man, but I’m so poor I gotta work for someone else. You think Ephialtes matters to me? Promising to cancel debts, was he? No? Thought not. Well, when you find me a politician who wants to cancel debts, redistribute the land, and make the poor richer I might care. In the meantime I gotta work hard to feed my kids.” He spat again. “At least the slaves here get enough to eat. I ain’t even got enough for the kids.”

I wished them luck and went on my way, coming to the statues of the Ten Heroes, each of whom lends his name to one of the ten tribes. All the people of Attica—the large region of mainland Greece that Athens controls—belong to one or the other of these tribes, and government jobs are shared equally among the men of each tribe so that no group can have too much influence.

The Ten Heroes are spread out in a line, each hero in such a noble pose that I’m sure his own mother wouldn’t have recognized him. Eight of the Ten were famous kings of old: Aegeus, Erechtheus, Pandion, Oeneus, Leos, Acamas, Cecrops, and Hippothoon; then there was Ajax, who fought at Troy, and finally Antiochus, the son of Heracles, the tribe to which my own family belonged.

These then were the famous heroes of old, their statues in the Agora, and not for the first time I wondered why Theseus, surely the greatest hero Athens ever produced, was not among them. Theseus, after all, sent himself as a sacrificial tribute to Crete, slew the Minotaur, and returned to Athens having delivered the city from subjugation at the hands of King Minos. You can’t get more heroic than that.

As I always did when I came this way, I walked around to the rear of Antiochus, to check once more on my greatest triumph as a young boy in Athens. There, scratched deep into the hero’s ass, just below the cloak line, was a large
N
. It’s very hard to cut graffiti into marble, the other boys had had to make do with ink that had soon washed off; sometimes being the son of a sculptor has its advantages.

The monument serves as the notice board of Athens; anything of importance, any official proclamation, is announced by writing it on the plinth. Someone had splashed whitewash across the plinth, obliterating everything that had been there before, replacing all those words with a single message in large letters: EPHIALTES IS MURDERED.

Men had been streaming into the Agora in the time I had been walking about, so that the normally crowded marketplace was now as fit to burst as a boil ready for the lance. They had come to hear the latest about the murder or to offer their own opinions to anyone who would listen. I pushed my way with some difficulty to the other side of the Agora, which was open-ended and so had some space for the crowd to spill out to.

This was the site of the new Stoa Poikile: the Painted Porch. Like the Tholos it was still under construction, but it was almost done, and the pressure for it to open was so strong that men were already making use of its wide, cool, covered walkway. Unlike the Tholos, everyone was already remarking how well it looked. The Stoa was a long portico with columns on the side facing the Agora, and a flat wall at the back. Two painters were using charcoal to sketch on the wall, far apart from each other, ignoring the chatter of the excited crowd about them. One had enough detail in that I could see he was about to paint a battle between the Hellenes and the Amazons; the other had barely begun.

“What’s it to be?” I asked the second man.

“The Fall of Troy,” he said, not turning. His eyes stayed on his work and his arm didn’t stop moving.

His lines were simple and direct, no fancy touches, not much detail, I marveled as the strong walls of Troy suddenly appeared beneath his confident hand. Without a pause he left the walls and began on a figure, a woman whom I guessed to be Helen.

I said, “Well, don’t put me in it.”

That stopped him. He gnashed his teeth and said, “Gah! Why must onlookers always say that?” He threw a dirty rag at me, which I dodged, and I skipped out of the porch.

It was outside the Stoa that the political argument reached a crescendo.

“The Areopagus has murdered Ephialtes!”

“Kill the bastards that murdered Ephialtes!”

“How do you know it was them?”

“Who else would have done it?”

“Serves him right for upsetting traditions. We’ve always been ruled by the smart men. He wanted to replace them with common idiots.”

“Who are you calling an idiot, you pox-faced scum?”

I left them grappling in the dirt and moved on to another argument.

“He was a dangerous revolutionary. We’re all safer without him.”

“You sound the sort of guy who might have killed him!”

“Me? Don’t be ridiculous. That sort of trouble I don’t need. Anyway, why would I when it was obvious the Areopagus would get him in the end?”

“You’re talking about the man who stopped the oligarchs from taking all our power. You want to go back to the days when the rich told everyone what to do? You don’t want to vote anymore?”

“That’s a good point. Ephialtes protected the democracy. Who’s gonna do that now?”

“Don’t forget Archestratus! He wrote the laws, you know. He’s still around.”

“But for how long? If they killed Ephialtes that means they’re gonna be looking for Archestratus too!”

“I don’t care about Archestratus. What about Pericles? What’s he say?”

“What are we going to do if the oligarchs take up their arms? What if they take back their power by force?”

“Hundreds of rich men against us thousands? Don’t be daft!”

“Yeah, but they got shields and good swords. You own a shield, do you?”

“Hades, he’s right! We ought to take over the shield factories and pass out shields and armor to everyone!”

If what I was hearing was anything to go by, Pericles’ evaluation of everyone’s reactions was correct. The one thing everyone seemed to agree on was that Ephialtes was murdered because he removed the powers of the Areopagus. The only difference of opinion centered on whether they were right to kill him for it.