The Walled Orchard (58 page)

The votes were all cast now, and the counters were hard at work. They counted; and then they counted again; and then they conferred with the Arch on, who told them to count a third time. And now I began to laugh out loud, because the immortal Gods were obviously joining in on my joke and adding a little touch of their own, to make it superlatively funny. Finally, the Archon was satisfied, and nodded to the herald, who cleared his throat and stood up.

‘The votes cast,’ he said, ‘are as follows. For Guilty, two hundred and fifty votes; for Not Guilty, two hundred and fifty-one votes. The prisoner is therefore discharged.’

Stunned silence; then a gabble such as you only hear when there’s been a serious accident, or someone has murdered somebody in the street. For my part, I nodded to the jury, said ‘Thank you very much’, and started to walk out of the Court, feeling rather subdued. But when I was nearly at the gate, a familiar figure stood up and barred my way. For a moment I panicked and looked round for a way to escape, but my soul told me not to be stupid, and I turned and faced the man. It was the lawyer Python, the one who had offered to write me a speech.

‘Eupolis son of Euchorus,’ he said in a loud voice, ‘I hereby summon you in the presence of witnesses to answer at your trial for the sum of five drachmas, plus two obols interest at the usual rate, being the price of professional services rendered to you, and which you have failed on reasonable notice to pay. If you do not pay this just debt plus the interest aforesaid within five days of this day, I summon you to stand your trial at the Court of Debts at the old and new moon. I name Strephocles son of Xenocles and Pythias son of Conon, both of the deme of Cholleidae, as my witnesses that this summons was truly served.’

I borrowed five drachmas and two obols from someone and paid him; then I started laughing hysterically and had to be taken home.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

I
f you can remember back that far, you may recall that this was supposed to be the history of my times, written so that the deeds of great men might not be wholly forgotten, or some such brilliant idea. Perhaps I’m just unendurably self-centred, because it seems to me that what I’ve written is the history of my life, with particular reference to me. Now you’ve probably read more of this sort of thing than I have, and so you’ll know better than I do where a History is supposed to stop; or perhaps you’ve read this far in the ever-diminishing hope that sooner or later I’d break down and start recording all the speeches and battles and votes that took place during the period I’ve been covering — if so, I’d better tell you now that I’m not going to, and you can take the book back to my friend Dexitheus and explain that there’s been a misunderstanding, and I expect he’ll give you your drachma back, so long as you haven’t spilt milk all over it or torn any of the rolls. But if this is going to be the history of my life, then it stands to reason that I can’t possibly finish it until my life is over and I know what happened to me in the end; and then, of course, I won’t be able to write about it, because I’ll be dead. I know that sounds a bit Socratic, but there’s a serious point in there somewhere. For all I know the great tragic events of my life, the truly worthy subjects for dramatic treatment, all lie ahead of me, so that everything I’ve covered so far — my part in the War, my trial and my acquittal — will all be notes in the margin, put in by the copier to explain references in the main text. But I want to believe that the Gods don’t need me as a witness to any more remarkable events. For my part, I’m sick of writing this book; it’s made me remember things I wish I had forgotten completely, and reminded me that I was just as much a fool in my youth as I am now.

So I was tempted when I started work this morning to make the moment of my acquittal the last scene in this drama, taking it as a good cue for the final chorus, a little dance by a soloist, and then straight off to the party. Certainly it seemed like one at the time, particularly to a man like myself who has an innate sense of dramatic structure. It seemed to me as I walked home that day that everything appeared to fit into place; all the actors had had the right amount to say, all their exits and entrances and changes of costume and mask had worked out all right in the end, every theme introduced could be justified in terms of the play’s overall effect. Quite often, when I’ve written a play, I’m sitting there feeling complacent when the herald calls on my chorus and I suddenly think of the perfect joke or the perfect line of dialogue that would round off a scene or thatch over a gap; and then, of course, there’s nothing I can do about it, and the poor thing is doomed to be incomplete for ever. But I had no such feeling that evening, when I peeled my sandals off my unusually damp feet and fell on to the couch in my own familiar house. The funny story about Eupolis of Pallene seemed to be over, and its protagonist appeared to be free to go.

But of course it didn’t work out like that; it never does, and that’s where your great poets go wrong. One day, I want to write a great big long epic poem about what happened to all the heroes of Troy after they finally got home, regained their thrones, hung up their shields in the rafters and settled down to do a little farming. I want to make all those tired old men jump through a few more hoops, just when they thought they could change into their old clothes and have a rest. I want to make Odysseus come out of retirement to deal with a catastrophic outbreak of sheep-blight in Ithaca, or to try and get the island’s council to find the money to get the harbour properly repaired and the roads put in order. I want Menelaus to have to get up off his backside and do something about the shortage of seasonal labour in the Spartan olive-growing industry; though it may just be an excuse on his part to get out of the house and away from Helen, who has got very fat since she returned from Troy, and is always on at him to redecorate the inner room. I want Neoptolemus to wake up one morning to find that some bastard has stolen his best plough and left the gate of the sheep-fold open.

After my trial, the first thing I did, apart from getting a good night’s sleep and eating far too much breakfast, was make an attempt to straighten out my affairs, which were in a dreadful state. The bulk of my movable fortune was up in Thessaly, and for all I knew had been spent by the delightful Alexander on chariot-races for the local chieftains. I had a number of disastrous mortgages and leases to try and wriggle out of somehow, and in addition quite a few inheritances to dispute — several distant relatives of mine had died in Sicily leaving no heirs, and my claim to their property was as good as anyone else’s. In fact, when at last everything was sorted out and the best part of the money I had sent to Thessaly had quite remarkably been returned to me, I found I was better off than before, because of these inheritances. It only goes to show that the best way to get rich in a city like Athens is to live longer than anyone else.

But it all took time, and I couldn’t count on any help or co-operation from anyone. The nature of my escape from Demeas made me an object of great suspicion in Athens for a while, and when I think about it, it was a miracle that I wasn’t had up all over again on any one of a vast number of charges. After all, I had quite clearly recommended the overthrow of democracy in a public speech, and men have died just for hinting at less. But I reckon that saying it all in such an outspoken manner was such a grotesque and incredible thing to do that nobody could really believe that I had done it. And that’s something I’ve noticed about communities such as ours; if you have courage, or what looks like courage, people don’t like tangling with you. If you let them see you’re afraid of them they’ll have you; but if you make yourself look bigger than you are, they’ll leave you in peace and pick on someone else. Nevertheless, it was obvious that I shouldn’t push my luck. The best thing so far as I was concerned would be if the name Eupolis was completely forgotten, at least for a while.

Of course, this meant that anything so conspicuous as presenting a play was out of the question. Whatever I put in the anapaests, however innocuous, would be regarded as an incitement to civil war, and Demeas or someone like him would be after me like a dog after a lame hare. But this self-imposed exile from the Theatre turned out to be less of a hardship for me than I had anticipated, at least to begin with. I found that there was very little I wanted to say, and the urge to write Comedy had left me. At first I was surprised; I couldn’t imagine being Eupolis and not wanting to compose verses. But it left a larger gap in my life than I had ever dreamed it would.

For example, as a general rule, when I can’t get to sleep I don’t count sheep or make lists of the names of cities beginning with each letter of the alphabet, as other men do; I compose speeches and choruses. When I’m working out of doors, I keep from getting bored by thrashing out anapaests. Even when I’m walking down the street, I tend to walk to an iambic rhythm, with a loud clop of the right foot for a spondee and a little pause to mark the caesura. Again, I find it hard to pattern my days if I haven’t got a play in progress. Under normal conditions, you see, life is a battle to carve out a few uninterrupted hours for serious work from the rocky wastes of meaningless chores that surround me on all sides; without the excuse of a play to fiddle with, I have no excuse for not taking part in all those hundreds of pointless activities which all the other members of my species seem to regard as necessary and I abhor. I suppose politicians have the same trouble when they’re in exile, or blacksmiths or pirates when they get too old to work.

But, for a while at least, I was happy not writing; in fact, I was happy doing nothing, which anyone who knows me would regard as a contradiction in terms. I am the sort of man who is capable of doing any amount of work, just so long as it doesn’t feel like work. Anything that I’ve got to do makes me feel like I’m wearing lead boots. But after my acquittal, I did nothing at all, until Phaedra got quite sick of the sight of me in a chair and told me to go away and write something. But there was nothing for me to write, and I can no more write when I don’t feel like it than I can be sick when I don’t feel ill. I came to the conclusion that Athens was not the place for me to be, and so, four months after the trial, Phaedra and I set off for Pallene. There is, I told her, always something for a man who still has the use of his arms and legs to do in the country, and once I was in Pallene 1 would soon snap out of it.

I was wrong. Instead, there proved to be far more nothing for me to do. If I tried working in the fields, I would end up leaning on my mattock gazing at the hillside, until my steward politely asked me to go away because I was setting the slaves a bad example. If I went out with the goats it was even worse, and someone would have to be sent out after me to stop them straying and getting taken in and rebranded by an unscrupulous neighbour. There was one dreadful occasion, I remember, when I was entrusted with a load of figs and told to go and sell them in the market. I got the cart most of the way down the mountain; but then the axle broke, and the whole load went everywhere, with a tremendous smashing of jars and cascading of figs; and instead of swearing terribly and jumping down to see to it, I just sat there on the box of the broken cart thinking how funny it was, until someone else came up behind me and yelled at me to unblock the road so that he could get his cart through. In the end I got everything sorted out; but by then it was too late to go to market so I went back home again, and everyone was extremely surprised to see me.

One thing I did do that was constructive and useful was to spend a little more time with my son. This in itself was frowned on — it’s not a father’s place to go interfering with his child’s upbringing before the child has reached an age where a father’s influence is valuable. But those around me reckoned that, given the state I was in, I could do less damage to the efficient running of the household if I took the child up on to the hill and sat watching him crawl about. I say it was constructive and useful; I’m not meaning to imply it was constructive and useful to the boy, who probably didn’t recognise me. But I enjoyed it. I’d never greatly cared for children before then — anyone you can’t discuss Comic poetry with, I had always thought, is largely a waste of time. But there’s nothing like spending some time with a prattling child for putting your life in perspective. To a child, you see, everything is so terribly immediate; present discomforts are insufferable, present wants and ambitions are all-important, and the most distant future imaginable is sunset. Now I was in the middle of trying to work out what I really wanted out of my life — though I didn’t realise it at the time — and this new way of looking at time was a useful comparison. The way you measure time depends on what you do and who you are. A child, as I have just said, measures time by the day. A farmer thinks in three-year blocks; one year’s produce in the field and two years’ supplies laid up in the barn. Landless casual workers and Comic poets measure time by the year; either where this year’s work is going to be, or what he’s going to show at this year’s Festivals. This annual approach is marginally better than the child’s, but it doesn’t make for stability. The other way of looking at things, which I couldn’t help doing, was the way a man uses time when he’s unexpectedly alive after resigning himself to dying, and that’s by the minute, or the second.

But the main factor in the great rearrangement of my life was Phaedra. Almost incidentally, in the tremendous disturbances that Demeas brought into my life, I had discovered that Phaedra and I could, if we were careful, not only endure but enjoy living together. I wanted to make use of this discovery and put it to the test. For her part, Phaedra seemed mainly to want to get on with sorting out the store-cupboard or making a coverlet for the bed, and regarded all my attempts at sitting down and talking things through as irritating interruptions in her daily routine. But I persevered; and although we never had the grand debate about the nature of married life that one of those semi-philosophical writers would have inserted into the story at this point, we seemed to come to a sort of unspoken settlement; we both agreed to accept the change in our attitudes towards each other, so long as neither of us ever mentioned it out loud.

It was about this time, when I was in Pallene getting under everyone’s feet, that the political situation began to change, subtly but in such a way that even I began to feel distinctly nervous. Now the last thing in the world that I want to suggest is that my speech had anything to do with it; but perhaps my acquittal was a symptom that something was changing. At any rate, the first thing that I couldn’t help but notice was the institution of a wholly new arm of the legislature: a Council of Ten, set up to ‘advise’ the main Council. These ten men were elected, as democratically as possible, but it stands to reason that when you put a certain number of men, be it ten or a thousand, in a position of authority for any length of time, they will soon have little in common with their original mandate. One thing that amused me about the business was the fact that one of the Ten was the celebrated Sophocles, the playwright. He was well into his eighties by now, virtually blind and completely senile. He knew what he was doing, of course; he wasn’t legally incapable, as he proved at a trial about this time, when his family wanted to get control of his property and he made his defence by reading out the play he had just been writing and demanding to know whether a senile man could have written that. But he no longer lived in, or even appreciably near, the real world, and he had got it into his mind that Athens was in the grip of some great tragic cycle, such as he might write a trilogy about; and that since nothing could be done to save the old place, the kindest thing would be to hasten it towards its inevitable destruction, and so precipitate its rebirth. The other nine Councillors dealt with more mundane things, such as public order and the water supply.