‘This is a beautiful day on which to meet a beautiful girl in such a garden as this.’
My Greek was still not very fluent, but I hoped it would be good enough.
‘Not many come here. You are welcome.’
I found this difficult to believe, with such a girl as this. Yet possibly she was too tall to be attractive to the average Greek male.
‘I fear I came without any knowledge that you would be here. So I brought nothing to sacrifice to the god, or even a small gift to please you.’
‘I see from your face you are a stranger.’
‘It would be a lucky man on whom you would look with favour.’
The girl threw back her head and laughed. Then she became serious and said, ‘You forget where you are. We are not now in the temple of Dionysus.’
There was nothing unfavourable in this. By now I knew enough of Greek customs to realize what was meant, or at least I thought so. Two advances, two retreats, then a decision. Enough dalliance to satisfy the human sense of dignity, not so much as to be an undue waste of time. The enormous death rate from disease and war demanded a high birth rate. I felt I knew exactly where I stood. I took the girl’s hand in mine, prepared to make a pretty speech, when to my surprise she said:
‘What you would have must be worked for. I must remind you again what place this is.’
Of course she meant she was a priestess of Apollo. Yet I was unaware of anything inhibiting about such an occupation. Perhaps the time of the year was wrong.
‘All worthwhile things must be earned. It will be my pleasure to do whatever you wish.’
‘Are you not the strange man who for months past has sacrificed himself to Dionysus?’
I was a bit sensitive to this suggestion. Just because I had been forced to use the temple down by the shore, to avoid living in a rabbit hutch, was no reason why I should be thought insane. Yet I had some idea of what the girl meant. I had been puzzled in the beginning by the attitude of the Greeks to their gods. On the face of it religion did not seem to be taken very seriously. But in at least one important respect the gods were still thought of in terms of reality. The gods represented a quintessence of human emotions and abilities. Madness, wild actions, lack of restraint, moderated by genuine spontaneity, those were the qualities of Dionysus, the qualities I appeared to possess. In a way the judgement was fair enough. Here in the temple of Apollo the ideal was of controlled form, aesthetics in general. This was the place where beauty did not need to be sensual.
‘You practice your art without licence. This is the abode of music.’
Now I saw what she was driving at. Apollo of course was the god of song and music. By not making obeisances in the temple of the god I had in effect set myself up in opposition to him. I was guilty of sacrilege, at any rate in the eyes of his priestess. If I hoped to make any further progress with her it would plainly be necessary to carry out some act of appeasement. A further assessment of the situation persuaded me appeasement would be worthwhile provided it was not too serious. I was wondering just what to suggest when she said:
‘You will remember what happened to the satyr Marsyas?’
I racked my brains as to who this satyr fellow might be. Clearly I was being compared to him, not flatteringly I suspected. Then it flashed through my mind that the fellow was supposed to have engaged Apollo in a musical contest, the one on the lyre, the other on the flute. I had a notion he came to a sticky end.
‘I would be ready to engage in any contest that seemed fitting.’
‘You are haunted by a foolish pride.’
I could not help smiling for the thought of a contest between a primitive lyre and a modern piano seemed ludicrous.
‘You cannot really mean such a contest is possible?’ I asked in frank incredulity.
For answer the girl took me into the temple. She showed me a lyre measuring about a yard across. She played a melody on it. The inference was obvious. The girl, or some other person in the temple, was indeed willing to engage in a musical trial of strength.
‘It will be necessary for me to fetch my own instrument.’
‘That was expected. You will come two days before the next full moon. You may bring what you please and you may bring whom you please. We shall begin half-way through the last third of the day.’
We walked amicably out of the front entrance of the temple. We strolled through the field to the beginning of the pathway down the mountain. There were still one or two points to be settled:
‘Who is to be the judge?’
‘We shall be the judges, you and I.’
‘And the stake? What is the winner to receive and what the loser?’
‘You have already made your request clear. What the penalty might be I will leave you to reflect upon during the coming days.’
I started down the path in excellent spirits. My only worry in such a contest would have been the judges. Anything might happen if untrained ears were permitted a vote. This way, with the girl and myself as judges, the worst that could happen would be a stalemate.
I sat down at the piano to recover the melody the girl had played. It was a beautiful thing, a little sad, but a great deal better than anything I had yet heard since coming to Greece. Someone at the temple, if not the girl herself, was very much out of the common run. I supposed they were aware of it. No doubt this was why the challenge had been issued. I began to play variations on the melody. It was certainly a beautiful thing but no better than hundreds of other melodies that could be conjured up. With the whole of European musical literature behind me there could be no question of the outcome of the contest.
I walked into Athens the following morning. My story put Alex Hamilton once again into fits of laughter. ‘Wonderful, that’s quite marvellous.’
Of course everybody soon knew about it, Alex saw to that. To him it was the joke of the year. I was not surprised to find the Greeks taking it more seriously. One or two of them, particularly I remember a chap of the name of Diagoras, came and congratulated me. They said it was high time the old superstitions were broken. From the gravity of their manner, I realized the superstitions went deeper than even they themselves supposed.
I suspect I would soon have had an ugly situation on my hands if the people hadn’t felt the god to be entirely capable of looking after himself. It was as though I had desecrated a temple, not a trivial offence.
My worry that too many people would flock on to the hill was apparently shared also by the Boule, the council of the city. A decree was quickly passed that nobody outside my personal party was to approach the temple within ten stadia, that is to say within a mile.
Only on the morning of the day itself did the full implication of the situation really become clear to me. The way I had fixed things with the priestess this was to be a private affair. There was no suggestion of a public contest. In fact that had been exactly my worry. I wanted to avoid a contest by popular acclamation. Yet in a sense this was exactly what it had become. Even worse, how could I possibly win? Even if the priestess were to come down on my side she could hardly say so in public. The populace would tear her limb from limb. And the stalemate, which I had fondly imagined would be the worst that could befall me, would become a mockery if those at the temple should declare against me. I saw I was in really serious trouble. I also saw the priestess had probably planned this from the beginning. My crime against the god was probably a serious one in her eyes. I started up the pathway in the middle morning with far less enthusiasm than I had come down it four days before.
My forebodings proved very accurate. Even in the early afternoon a considerable crowd was already gathered on the flat ground in front of the temple. They obeyed the orders of the city fathers up to a point. They were keeping about three hundred yards from the temple. I had no doubt the city fathers themselves would come even closer. I was accosted by a small, ugly-looking man: