The Walled Orchard (21 page)

That, then, was Cleon, perhaps the most typically Athenian of the City’s leaders during my lifetime. It’s wrong to think of him as being in the same class as Themistocles or even Pericles, since those men left Athens stronger than they had found her. But in a way they can be compared; for each one of them taught the world new tricks. It was my duty as a Comic poet to hate Cleon, and I did my best. But I met him many times and could not help liking the man.

I once saw a crowd of people down at Piraeus watching a hawk killing a dove. The foreigners wanted the dove to escape, since it was weaker and more beautiful; but the Athenians were cheering on the hawk. Then, when the hawk had killed the dove and was pulling its head off with its talons, a man stepped forward with a sling-shot and the Athenians started betting on whether he could kill the hawk, since the range was quite long and a hawk is a tough sort of a bird. The slinger had bet three obols on himself, so he put forth all his skill and a moment later the hawk was lying on its back, stone dead, with a great chunk of dove-meat still in its beak. The cheering that greeted the shot reminded me of the cheering that greeted Cleon’s return from Pylos, and also the announcement of his death at Amphipolis, rather bravely in battle, against the invincible Spartan general Brasidas, a month or so after my play was performed. He had been trying to repeat his previous stunning success, but this time he had overreached himself, and the defeat at Amphipolis cancelled out everything that he had achieved at Pylos.

I believe Aristophanes went into deep mourning for his death, just as Cratinus had done for Pericles. But unlike Cratinus he continued attacking him in his Comedies for years afterwards, and I remember sitting through a particularly dreary play of his, all about Dionysus going down to Hell to bring back a poet or some such nonsense, and a foreigner sitting next to me asking, ‘Who is this Cleon he keeps going on about?’ I closed my eyes for a moment, and wondered how I could possibly explain; about Pylos, and the informers, and the Brotherhood of the Three Obols.

‘Search me,’ I replied. ‘Never heard of him.’

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Phaedra took to coming to rehearsals with me regularly. So as not to scandalise the company, who were all very superstitious, she dressed up in a boy’s going-to-school clothes and sat there with her tablets on her lap, while I told everyone who asked that she was a cousin up from the country.

A week before the Festival, someone took a hammer to the little statue of Hermes outside my house, and pushed a cock with its head and spurs cut off under my door. This didn’t worry me at all; I replaced the old Hermes with a new one by a leading sculptor, and we had the cock, stewed in wine, for dinner. I was rather more concerned by the rumours going round that Phrynichus, who had the third Chorus that year, had got hold of one of the big speeches in the Contest Scene, and had adapted it to fit into his play. If his play was called on before mine, they told me, he was going to use that speech instead of his own, so that mine would be jeered off the stage. I consulted Philonides, who said that it had been done before, and so sat down, with a headache and three rolls of scrubbed Egyptian paper, to try and compose a substitute speech. Eventually I got one written, and gave it to the actor to learn. If Phrynichus tried it on, I would be ready for him.

The Tragedies that year included Agathon’s
Electra,
Euripides’
Teucer,
and something by Melanthius — there was a scene in it where the hero went off-stage and came back transformed by a God into a pig, with a dainty little pig’s mask and trotters, which got a bigger laugh than anything in any of the Comedies, but I can’t remember anything else about it. The Comedies were mine, Phrynichus’
Garlic-Eaters,
and Aristophanes’
Veterans of Marathon.
He had two plays that year, for he got a Chorus for his
Wasps
at the Lenaea, which did depressingly well.

Phrynichus was called on the first day. I was told the result of the ballot just before dawn, and sent Doron over to tell Philonides. Of course, I still had no idea whether I would be called on the second or the third day, and I sat through that day’s Tragedies in a fever of impatience. For some reason I kept wishing I had Phaedra with me (she was sitting with the other women, of course, on the other side of the Theatre) and at one stage I absent-mindedly reached out for the hand of the man sitting next to me. Luckily he was too wrapped up in the play to notice, since he wasn’t my type at all. As Aegisthus or Diomedes or whoever it was droned his way through his cosmic passion, it suddenly struck me that my feelings for Phaedra had undergone an unhealthy change. Instead of wishing she had never been born, I realised, I could feel a sort of smile wriggling on to my face whenever I thought of her, and a warm sensation all over my body. This was only when she wasn’t there, of course; it took only a few minutes in her company for all the old, familiar feelings of exasperation and fury to come flooding back. But that was an overstatement too. I felt that we were like two ageing boxers who work in one of those travelling fairs that sometimes pass through the country districts. Every day of their lives, they have to fight each other and put on a show of pain and violence, but if you watch closely they don’t hit each other at all; and when the people have all gone, the older one, who isn’t married, takes his tunic round to the younger one’s tent so that his wife can darn it for him.

Yet all we seemed to have in common, apart from bad luck in having been married to each other, was an unending baffle. You know how young husbands and wives are always stretching their minds to think up little treats and surprises for each other — a pretty, old-fashioned grasshopper brooch, or a new way of preparing anchovies; well, we seemed to spend just as much time and effort thinking up new snubs and insults and ways of inflicting annoyance, but never anything that hurt too much. If I heard a fishmonger make some particularly unflattering comment on the appearance of one of his women customers, I would say it over and over to myself under my breath as I walked home, for fear of forgetting it; and whenever a book arrived for me from the copyists, Phaedra would always go through it first and put a little charcoal mark beside any passage concerning Clytemnestra or Medea, or any other heroines who killed or injured their husbands. At night, we rarely did anything but sleep, and when we climbed into bed together we would lie on our sides, each grimly facing the wall on either side. But by the morning it often happened that we had turned to face each other, and usually she was lying on my arm, so that I was woken up by the numbness in it. Then we would start to bicker, still half asleep, until one of us jumped out in a rage and went to wash. And on those few occasions when one of us had the itch, the other never refused, but preferred to make nasty remarks or pretend to be asleep until the clumsy process was over. I was fairly certain that Phaedra had stopped seeing other men (although she denied it vehemently), while I could never see any point in chasing after flute-girls and housemaids, who never wash and are forever pestering you for money.

All this passed through my mind as I sat there, and I quite forgot about the hardness of the seat (I had forgotten to bring a cushion) or the dreariness of the play, or even my fear of Phrynichus. In fact, by the time I came round, the King (or whoever it was) had been killed, or blinded, or turned into whatever he was turned into, and the Chorus were into their second round of lamentation. I dismissed all thoughts of Phaedra from my mind, and started surveying the audience.

It’s probably my imagination, but I believe that I can tell just by looking at them whether an enemy line is going to stand or run, or whether an audience is likely to be friendly or not. With audiences, you can work out a great deal beforehand. If it’s been a bad year or the enemy have burnt their crops, they will be anxious to be pleased, and will roar with laughter at anything that resembles a joke. But if the vintage has gone off well, or news has just come in of a naval victory, they’ll sit there like a jury at the trial of a politician, just waiting for some little flaw or slip. If the play is good they show no mercy to the actors, and if the acting is good, it stands to reason that the play is weak and the costumes were cobbled together at the last minute out of old cloaks and sailcloth. It’s the other way round with Tragedy, of course. People like nothing better than blood and death when they’ve been gorging themselves on freshly made cheese and new wine; but if there’s been a food shortage, or the list of casualties has been read out, the prancing and howling of actors will irritate them beyond measure. This is why, when the fleet sails, the Tragedians go down to Piraeus and offer sacrifices for its safe return, while the Comic poets say a silent prayer to Poseidon for a violent thunderstorm.

But this year had been neither bad nor good; there had been as many victories as defeats in the war (or so we assured ourselves) and if the Spartans had burnt most of the barley, they had missed more than usual. So a great deal would depend on the plays, Comedies and Tragedies, that came on before mine. If an audience falls in love with the first Comedy in the Festival, they don’t give the others a fair chance. But if not, then they tend to give the benefit of the doubt to the play which is called on last. If the Tragedies have bored them, they enjoy the Comedies more; but if they are still talking about the Tragedies when the Comedy is called on, they’re quite capable of chatting away throughout the opening scene and then blaming the author for not explaining the situation properly.

Of course, the reaction of the audience is not what really matters. ‘What every playwright has nightmares about is the twelve judges. It’s a remarkable effect. A play can be booed off the stage, and the actors barely escape with their lives. But if it’s subsequently awarded the prize, then by the next day everyone is quoting it as they work in the fields, and declaring it the funniest thing ever, while the play that comes third is universally ridiculed, even if while the Chorus was on stage the audience was choking with laughter and yelling for reprises. And then, of course, there are always those people — I tend to find myself standing behind them in queues — who always disagree with the judges, praising the play that came third and saying that if the prize-winner gets a Chorus next year they’ll stay at home and make vine-props.

That year I couldn’t recognise any of the judges — in those days they really were chosen by lot from the electoral roll — which I considered on balance to be the best thing. A friend among the judges can be a blessing, but it can also be a disadvantage, while an enemy is always disastrous. I remember staring long and hard at them, trying to prise open their ribs with my eyes so that I could see the shape of their souls, but the more I stared, the less I could see. There was a very old man who kept whispering to his neighbour; I could almost hear him saying, ‘When I was a boy, of course, we had Aeschylus and Phrynichus — that’s Phrynichus the Tragic poet, of course, not this young man who writes the Comedies.’ And the man next to him would nod absently, but he never took his eyes off the stage, and instead of wriggling about in his seat he sat absolutely still, with his hands neatly folded in his lap. He would probably vote for the play with the fewest metrical errors, and I squirmed as I thought of the three fluffed caesuras in
The General.
Another one had his eyes closed, and I was filled with fury; if he dared fall asleep when my Chorus was on stage I would get a sling and knock his eyes out for him. But when the strophe ended, he moved his head and nodded, and I realised that he was paying strict attention. That’s the judge for you, my soul said smugly within me; he won’t be swayed by smart costumes or clever masks. It’s the words he’s interested in. Then his head fell on one side, and I could see that he really was asleep after all.

By the time the herald called out ‘Phrynichus, bring out your Chorus!’ I was drenched in sweat and my heart was pounding like the drum on a trireme when the drummer is setting the pace for the attack. I clamped my teeth together, for I was determined not to laugh, and sat up straight in my seat, praying that Philonides had bribed the Chorus or put sand in the leading actor’s mask. Yet when the first big joke came, I felt this strange feeling in my chest and something seemed to well up inside me, as if I had eaten beans and drunk new wine, and I heard myself laughing. A feeling of terror came over me, as I realised that the play actually was funny, and when the audience laughed it was like the sound of hooves making the earth shake, when the enemy cavalry is coming towards you and there is nowhere to run.

Then my soul spoke quietly within me, telling me that there was nothing more that I could do, at least until the play was over and I could go straight over to Philonides’ house and fix those fluffed caesuras and the joke about the sprats. I pressed my feet hard on the stone and pushed myself back in my seat, and soon I was enjoying the play. It was a good play, too, all about a man who wins the war by drawing the sun down into a jar so that the Spartan army loses its way in the dark and marches off a cliff, and there was a hilarious scene with Apollo trying to charm the lid off the jar by reciting passages from Sophocles.

I enjoyed it so much, in fact, that I forgot all about everything else, and clapped as loudly as anyone when the Chorus lined up for the anapaests. Phrynichus’ addresses to the audience were always the best part of his plays, and he had an uncanny knack of guessing, at the tune he wrote the play, what would be most topical when the Festival came round.

He started off by praising the army and the fleet, and comparing them to the men of Marathon and Salamis; then there was a rather witty invocation to Lady Garlic; then he went into one of his favourite themes, the poets.

First, inevitably, Cratinus, who by now had entered into his final illness; Phrynichus had great fun with that, saying how while Dionysus and Aphrodite were quarrelling like two wild dogs over his miserable carcase, Hermes, as God of Thieves, was sneaking up behind them to secure for himself the greatest stealer of other men’s jokes the world had ever seen. Then we were given some marvellous stuff about Ameipsias throwing away his shield at the battle of Delium and having to be rescued by Socrates, who he had made mincemeat of in one of his plays. I was grinning like an idiot by this stage, in eager anticipation of what the poet would have to say about Aristophanes. What I and several thousand others heard was this.

As if it wasn’t bad enough (Phrynichus’ Chorus-leader said) having these stray polecats jumping up on Dionysus’ altar to gobble down the offerings left there by Thespis, there was now a new poet in Athens; a cripple with a perpetual grin and nothing between his legs but a nasty rash. (It’s true I sometimes have a rash there in hot weather; God knows how Phrynichus found out about it.) We hear that his play, which you will soon be able to judge for yourselves, has some pretty bits in it. They aren’t his own, of course; Aristophanes gave them to him in exchange for his life, when he caught that bald-headed son of a goat up to the hilts in that pretty young wife of his.

It’s a strange feeling being insulted in a play, and hearing the people hooting with laughter. The man on one side of me was stuffing his cloak into his mouth and snorting, while my neighbour on the other side had a smile which would have stretched right round the coast from Piraeus to Anaphlystos. I would gladly have castrated Phrynichus just then; but I felt a strange sort of glow, almost like pride, and I wanted to turn to my neighbours and say, ‘That’s me he’s talking about.’ And when I’ve spoken to men I’ve made jokes about, they say roughly the same thing, and attribute the feeling to the power of the God Dionysus himself. Later, of course, I became hardened to remarks about me in plays, until I only noticed them when they weren’t there.