I began to play the second afternoon of our arrival. So many people gathered around that it was necessary to move out of doors, into a fairly extensive courtyard. My audience was obviously amazed at the intricacy of the whole thing. I realized, as it turned out correctly, that their ears were not tuned to complex sounds. So I kept to simple lines. It was natural for me to play a selection of operatic arias. I played just what came into my head. There was a considerable proportion of Mozart in it. Naturally I was curious as to how the music would be received by my audience. In a quite strange way, mainly with argument. At the end of a number there would be a crowding round the piano, there would be a lot of gesticulation, and there would be a great deal of talk. I was soon to realize that the two things taken most seriously here were war and speech. Both were far ahead of sex in the estimation of the people. In fact sex was like food, a regular necessity but not to be fussed about. Talk ranged over the whole gamut, from private groups of half a dozen people up to the great oratorical speeches to many thousands. An immense amount of time and care went into the big speeches, for as I have already remarked persuasion was equivalent here to power. You were not permitted to murder a neighbour whom you might detest, but if you could persuade your fellow citizens that your neighbour was a danger to the community then the city itself would turn on him, imprison him, exile him, deprive him of his rights and property, and in extreme cases might even execute him. The gift of the gab was a matter of no small importance. It extended even to music.
It wasn’t long before two flutes and a lyre appeared. They were very simply but well made. A sturdy, bright-faced young fellow of eighteen or nineteen began to pipe away on one of the flutes. Soon he was joined by a girl at the lyre. She used a small piece of wood to pluck the strings. The music was in a simple 4/4 rhythm. It was highly modal in its melodic structure. That is to say the notes used depended on the pitch of the octave in which the melody happened to lie.
Let me add a word here on different systems of musical composition. They all depend on some kind of restriction. In the modern style, modern in the sense of the twentieth century, there is no restriction at all on the notes you can use. They all have equal weight. The restriction comes on the order in which the notes are to be played, the restrictions being determined in part by the order which the composer himself lays down at the beginning of his composition, and in part by certain standard rules. In tonal music, the music of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the restriction comes on the notes to be used. Only seven out of the twelve notes in the octave have equal weight. The other five appear only occasionally as accidentals. The manner in which the restriction to seven notes is made is also subject to certain rules, your particular choice being called the key in which you elect to operate. Once you have restricted yourself by a choice of key you are free to arrange your seven notes in any order you please. You are free to use the same seven notes in any octave you may please. And at any time you may change your restriction, you may modulate into another key. The style of this Greek music was more akin to the key system than to the modern serialization. It restricted the notes to be used to seven, but you had no freedom over which seven, you couldn’t choose your key to suit yourself. The seven notes were decided by the pitch of your octave. I think the practice probably came from the manufacture of the instruments themselves. The instruments produced certain notes better than others, unlike the piano which produces all its notes equally. The general effect was rather plaintive to an ear grown accustomed to the key system.
The young man turned over his flute to someone else, took hold of one of the girls, and began to dance. The motions were simple, rather static, but graceful none the less. When they had finished I went back to the piano and played three or four waltzes. There was much laughter as several of the bolder spirits tried to find the right steps. I stopped the music to give them a short demonstration, first alone, then of the positions of the two partners, with my young friend’s girl, then of the real speed of the dance with an imaginary partner. Back at the piano I played the dances at first quite slowly, then with increasing speed. The dancing was more or less a fiasco but everybody enjoyed it for all that.
This was the beginning of a reputation which I soon acquired for myself and of which I shall have more to say later on. It was made clear that I didn’t have to go to bed by myself if I didn’t want to, but I did want to. To me, it was still not much more than a month since the tragic affair in Los Angeles. The memory of those few whirlwind days was still sharp and clear. In what had started as a more or less casual liaison I had perhaps made the mistake of giving too much of myself. At any rate I was still numb from the sharp catastrophic end of a passionate situation. I saw it would be a good idea to spread the intelligence that I was suffering from a grievous bereavement. I resolved to ask Morgan to put this story around the following day.
Before dropping off to sleep I mused on one small item of information I had gleaned from the talk around me. The young flute player’s name had been Xenophon. Was this the Xenophon who was later to rescue a whole Greek army from disaster in Mesopotamia? I had no means of knowing how common the name might be so there was no clear answer. I had also discovered the name of my host, Andocides. I had a feeling the name should mean something to me and I resolved to ask Morgan about it on the morrow.
As it turned out I had no need to seek out the others, they were waiting for me the following morning. Morgan knew now exactly where he was. He knew the year and the time of year. It was 425 B.C.
‘Man, we’re right in the middle of it.’
I was still sleepy and wondered vaguely what it was we were in the middle of.
‘The war, the war between Athens and Sparta.’
‘Then why are there so many men about?’
‘Because winter is coming on. These things run more or less on a strict time-table. You know we ought to do something about it, to put an end to it.’
He was very excited, understandably so. To the classical scholar the fall of Athens in the Peloponnesian War must seem utterly tragic. Yet this was a different world now. It was inconceivable that a war between two tiny Greek cities, with a population of only a few hundred thousand, would be permitted to drag on year after year. The situation was tragic all right but not in the sense Morgan seemed to think. He had immersed himself so much in classical literature, he was thinking so much in the ancient Greek language, that he seemed to have forgotten the barbarians from the north who would soon be arriving here. Soon this delicate civilization around us would collapse like a house of cards. Financially the people would do all right of course. There were not very many of them, only a million or two, I suppose. With their great tourist attractions, the standard of living would rise sharply, but the civilization and culture would soon be lost. Above all the confidence would be lost. This was the problem, not the problem of Athens and Sparta.
An odd thought occurred to me, what was it Morgan had said? We must do something to stop it. Wasn’t that exactly what the Prime Minister had said, about the situation in Europe? In many ways we had the same situation here. A disastrous war knocking the stuffing out of both sides. In one place the year was 1917, in the other 425 B.C., but the pattern was really the same.
Morgan had now drawn up a list of prominent Athenians, men whom sooner or later we could expect to find in the city. Socrates, Euripides, and Aristophanes were the names which meant most to me. At the distance of the twentieth century these men seemed more or less contemporaries. From Morgan’s list I realized their respective ages were forty-five, fifty-five and twenty. ‘Socrates is out of town. With the army in the north.’