Dionysios was not broken-in to free Athenian speech. He lost his head and his temper. Plato was as used to respect as Dionysios was to flattery; there were high words. Dionysios was furious; perhaps he was jealous, too, of Dion’s new allegiance. He lost the argument, but planned to have the last word.
Plato, of course, would leave at once; he only needed a ship, and this Dion had found him. It sailed with sealed orders from the Archon. It must have looked like a choice revenge to have Plato betrayed into slavery by the man to whom Dion had entrusted him. When later he learned that Plato had never doubted Dion for a moment, I daresay he was astounded.
The well-off philosopher who bought Plato would not take back a drachma; he said it had been a privilege. Plato went home and kept quiet from pride; when it got about, he testified to Dion’s innocence. Old Dionysios, who cared what people thought of him, became uneasy; he wrote trying to patch things up, and saying he hoped Plato was not speaking ill of him. Plato replied that he had been too busy to recall the matter.
What Dion thought, when he heard the news, is not recorded. But his life was changed. When he was free to travel, he was already so much a man of the Academy that he seemed rather to have returned there than arrived. He was temperate as Pythagoras; he studied, he met philosophers; but in Sicily, any mission he was trusted with—war, embassy, judgment—was faultlessly discharged. If he departed from his orders for justice’s sake, it was always in the open. No conspirator would have thought of sounding Dion’s loyalty. It was as if, because Plato had not been allowed to stay in Syracuse to defend his own honor, Dion had made his whole life bear witness for his friend. As Axiothea had said, treachery was not in him—nor in Plato, who thought no cause greater than truth, and had lived through revolutions enough in Athens, each sowing hate, perfidy and revenge like dragons’ teeth, to beget the next, each changing one sort of injustice for another. They had all failed, for the simple reason that men had got no better. Hate, he had found, destroys; only love creates; a state can be redeemed only by good men spreading goodness round them, till the lump is leavened, and there are enough just men to govern. All this they told me at the Academy; and I saw sense in it, if it could be got started. If anybody could do it, Dion could.
Soon, however, it was time to forgo these pleasures. They would be casting for the Lenaia, and then rehearsals would begin.
“You must win,” said Axiothea, when I told her this. “It will draw Dionysios towards Athens and away from Sparta. That can’t but be good.”
“Can’t it?” I said. “From what I’ve seen of politics, anything you can think of can go bad; it only needs bad will. I leave all that to the experts. Artists in politics are like the whore’s child at the wedding; we remember things out of season, and get the stick.”
“Take care, Niko, how you shrug off public business. One day it may concern you whether you choose or not.”
“So may the black plague or the marsh fever. Meantime I’ll stick to what I know. The more time Dionysios spends writing plays, the less he’ll have for his tyranny; a day’s no longer for him than any other man. Besides, an artist has to know himself, which can’t do anyone harm. Can it?” I added, remembering the method.
“No, indeed.”
5
HECTOR’S RANSOM WAS PASSED BY THE SELECTORS and booked for the Lenaia, a rich Syracusan resident standing choregos. Everything went as planned, except for one hitch over the casting. Leontis, our sponsor, had drawn third turn to choose his protagonist; and the man before chose me. He said he had seen my work at Delphi. There was a hasty conference, and the other sponsor changed his mind. I don’t know what he got for it, but there was no cheese-paring in that production. When we heard who were doing the masks and costumes, painting the skene and training the chorus, and for how much, even the Persian-backed play at Delphi looked like a fit-up.
Phileas was a chorus-master who, if he had had to stand the chorus upside down, would still have achieved faultless grouping and each syllable crystal clear. I used to sit in front often just for the pleasure of watching him work. You may ask how I felt, playing lead and directing where Aischylos once did it; where Sophokles danced as a chorus boy and, later, had only to walk on as an extra in one of his own plays to bring the audience up standing. Well, the place was my second home. I could not remember a time before I had known it. It was like being the son of a great house, who has come of age. I don’t know when I have been happier.
I had lived with the play by now; I knew what the verse would give the actor, and where it would need heightening or throwing away. Just as I’d feared, Anaxis had got over-keyed and was ranting terribly as Achilles. “My dear,” I said at length, “you were splendid today, but you showed up the lines a little, if you understand me. We must cover for the old man here and there. Don’t forget that to get us to Syracuse, it’s the play that has to win.”
He took this pretty well, but complained that the third actor, Hermippos, was always trying to upset him, which was only too true. This was the man Dion had wanted instead of him. I had agreed he was a sound artist; and so I did not like to object, when Dion put him forward, that it might not answer to have a well-known second man playing third. The fee was big; there was also the golden lure of Syracuse; Hermippos had sunk his pride and accepted, but needed to show us he was somebody in case it was forgotten. This he did not by being pompous, which was not his style, but by playing the fool. He was one of the few actors to do well in both tragedy and comedy, and it was the latter which seemed to have shaped his face, which was round, with a big mouth and a button nose. On stage he behaved perfectly; but he was one of those men who, once having learned their lines, can do anything they like up to the moment when they go on. He would crack jokes with the mechanics, lay bets on races, clown about in masks from other plays, to let us all know he thought as well of himself as ever. For myself, my father taught me to think what I was about, but not to be put off by trifles. I had met Hermippos’ sort before. But Anaxis, who thought it proper never to put his mask on till he had brooded before it like an actor carved on a gravestone, was driven mad and had not the sense to hide it. This was all Hermippos needed to egg him on. It was tiresome having to keep peace, when I wanted my mind on Priam.
Sometimes I got anxious about the role. I had turned down Achilles because it was too easy; I could have got the effects in my sleep. Perhaps I ought to have taken it, and proposed for Priam some good old actor who had done the role in this or that play more times than he could count and could get the effects in his sleep, too. That would have been the safer thing. I had wanted the part because it was something new for me; it was testing; I had thoughts about it; in a word, I had pleased myself. If I was not to break faith with Dion, and throw my own chance away, I had better be good.
I have never been the sort of actor who blusters about while rehearsing Herakles, smolders for Medea, and so on. But this time I swear my bones would ache when it rained, and when I got out of a chair I leaned upon the arms. I read the Iliad through and through, coming back to the passage where Priam tries to keep Hector from the death-fight. You are our last defense, he says; when you are gone, I shall see our house in ruins, Troy sacked, the women ravished, the children dashed on the stones, before I am cut down to he where I am thrown until my own dogs eat me. A young man fallen on the field, rent with sharp bronze, looks seemly even in his blood; death can lay nothing bare that is not beautiful. But an old man’s corpse flung down, his gray hair and his beard and privates torn by curs, ah, that is the most wretched sight in all mortality. These lines always came into my mind, when I played the scene with Achilles.