‘Metris, what are you doing?’
‘I’m fed up with all this silly fighting. You really ought to try resolving your problems some other way. Come on, let’s take these back to the theatre.’
Bremusa and Metris hurried off, pulling the cart behind them, leaving Idomeneus and his hirelings still trying to fight their way through a wall of flowers.
Aristophanes
Aristophanes mopped perspiration off his brow. The heat was oppressive in the covered backstage area.
What’s keeping Hermogenes? Where’s Isidoros? He should be reciting by now.
Outside in the theatre, there were murmurings. The audience were becoming restive. They didn’t like to be kept waiting, not when the temperature was so high. A lot of festival wine had already been consumed. That could make an audience receptive. It could also make them hostile.
Hermogenes burst into the room. ‘Isidoros can’t go on.’
‘What? Why not?’
‘You’d better see for yourself.’
Aristophanes followed his assistant into the next room, up a flight of stairs, and along a corridor. There, in one of the dressing rooms, he was not that surprised — having already worked out that this was the most likely cause of the problem — to find Isidoros lying on a couch in a drunken stupor. The playwright looked at his prone figure with disgust.
‘Didn’t he promise he wasn’t going to do this?’ Aristophanes rounded on Hermogenes. ‘You were meant to keep him sober!’
‘I can’t do everything! He was fine when I last saw him.’
The famous lyric poet opened his eyes and raised a limp hand in greeting to the playwright. ‘Aristophanes. You’re always criticising Hyperbolus. But he’s a fine man. Very liberal with the wine. Always ready to give a man an amphora or two.’
With that, Isidoros closed his eyes and began to snore.
‘Now what do we do?’ cried Aristophanes. ‘We can’t start the play without our penises and we don’t have Isidoros to entertain the crowd while they’re waiting.’
‘You’ll have to stall,’ said Hermogenes. ‘Get out there and make excuses to the audience.’
‘What sort of excuses?’
‘You’re the creative genius,’ said Hermogenes. ‘I’ll see if there’s any sign of the old phalluses arriving.’
Hermogenes hurried off. Aristophanes made his way pensively back along the corridor and down the stairs to the side of the stage. He felt his spirit wilting. It was all very well for Hermogenes to talk about stalling. An Athenian audience was not that easy to stall. Particularly at the end of the day, when they’d already worked themselves up by watching two comedies and drinking heavily. Anyone walking out on stage with bad news was liable to get hit by a well-aimed onion. The Athenian audience could turn nasty very quickly.
Some of these people will have drunk enough wine to sink a trireme by now, he thought. Wine is a curse. It should be outlawed.
He took a deep breath and walked out on stage. Already the murmurings of discontent were growing as the audience realised the play wasn’t going to start on time. Aristophanes emerged through the skene, the small wooden building at the back of the stage, and made his way forward. The noise coming from the crowd was growing. The theatre was built to seat twelve thousand people, and there were more than that crammed in today, with some sitting in the aisles, and others standing at the back.
Aristophanes gazed out at the vast crowd, hoping to see a few friendly faces. Unfortunately, the only faces he could see were those of Hyperbolus, Euphranor and their friends, gathered near the front of the auditorium, no doubt for the purpose of heckling the production. He walked to the front of the stage. The heat was still intense.
‘Citizens of Athens! There has been an unfortunate delay —’
That was as far as he got before the first jeers started. It struck Aristophanes that after all he’d done for the city, they might have been a little more tolerant, but apparently not. He could feel sweat trickling uncomfortably down his neck.
‘We’re not quite ready to begin, and our esteemed poet, Isidoros, is currently indisposed —’
This produced a great deal of mocking laughter. Isidoros’s reputation was well known.
‘— but we’ll be starting soon. Quite soon. It’s hard to say when exactly, but not too long, I would say. Almost certainly it will be not long from now…’
Aristophanes knew he was babbling. Hyperbolus and his claque started booing, which put him off further. A few pieces of fruit began to land on the stage.
‘Aristophanes is making fools of us!’ cried someone. One of Euphranor’s many paid flunkies, most probably.
‘Booooo!’
The barrage of fruit began to intensify. The combination of the heat, the tense atmosphere in the city, and the efforts of Hyperbolus and Euphranor to ridicule Aristophanes threatened to make events spiral out of control in record time. Aristophanes wouldn’t be the first dramatist to be chased out of the Theatre of Dionysus Eleuthereus. He looked round desperately for assistance, hoping that Hermogenes might appear with news of their reserve phalluses. There was no sign of him. More vegetables began to appear onstage, including a cabbage, which could be a lethal weapon if thrown by an Athenian who’d been hardened on the battlefield.
Aristophanes tried to stall for time. ‘Meanwhile, we’ll be entertaining you with… eh… eh…’ Unfortunately, he didn’t know what they’d be entertaining them with.
‘Booooo! Booooo!’
The crowd started a slow handclap. While their emotions were unusually intense, they did have cause for complaint. The city granted certain playwrights the honour of showing their work at the festival, and they had months to prepare their plays. The least the city might expect in return was that the playwrights should be ready on time. It was highly unusual for there to be such a long delay, and the audience didn’t like it at all.
The slow handclap was one of the most humiliating moments of Aristophanes’ life. He was on the verge of fleeing the stage. Fleeing the city, perhaps. An onion caught him in the ribs, making him wince. Hyperbolus and the agents he’d distributed around the audience were now roaring at the top of their voices, mocking Aristophanes and calling for him to be expelled from the competition. He looked round desperately for inspiration, and found none.
‘We’ll be… we’ll be…’
‘We’ll be entertaining you with a performance from one of our most promising young lyric poets — Luxos of Piraeus!’ cried Luxos, rushing on to the stage, his lyre in his hand.
Aristophanes looked at Luxos wildly. Fruit and vegetables continued to rain down. He turned to the crowd. ‘Indeed! A performance from one of our most promising young poets. Please welcome Luxos!’
With that, Aristophanes fled the stage. In the wings he crashed right into Hermogenes. Hermogenes raised his eyebrows.
‘Luxos? You’re going to let him go through with it?’
‘What else could I do?’
‘They’ll kill him.’
‘Rather him than me.’ Aristophanes shuddered.
They turned to peer out from the wings, carefully keeping themselves hidden while Luxos faced the hostile crowd.
‘I really don’t think this is a good idea,’ said Hermogenes.
‘I didn’t make him invade the stage. Anyway, he wanted a chance to perform to an audience, didn’t he? Now he’s got one.’
The audience were now even more hostile. A performance from an unknown young poet was not what they’d come here for. Standing in front of the huge crowd in the amphitheatre, stretched out in a great semicircle all around him, Luxos looked tiny. And very shabby, Aristophanes suddenly noticed, with a pang of sympathy.