“The verse is not bad,” said one of them. “Not quite Sophokles—except where it is Sophokles—but not bad at all. There was an oracle, you know, that the Archon wouldn’t die till he had won a victory over his betters. He’s let the Carthaginians off lightly more than once, when he could have pushed them into the sea.” Everyone started looking about in terror. The youth who had been speaking said, “He’s dead.” The green shoot bends quickest to the changing wind. “They made it worth his while, and he needed them now and then, to keep the city needing him. But this was the destined victory, after all. Two-tongued Apollo laughs last.”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “I heard the other plays and I thought the judging fair. It usually is, in Athens.” My mind went back to Theoros’ story of the old tyrant shouting for his sleeping draught, with Dion at the door. Yes, he had beaten his better at the end.
Next morning Menekrates woke me early, to go sightseeing in the cool. We were crossing the Agora, when we heard a crier calling all the citizens to the Assembly. I was surprised that under a tyranny such a thing existed, but Menekrates assured me all these forms had been kept on. “Come and watch,” he said, smiling sourly, “and you will understand. My friend Demetrios, the coppersmith, will let you stand on his roof.”
The Assembly place was down on the flats. On the way we passed the quarries where they put the Athenian prisoners in the Great War, and where so many died; they are not far from the theater. Menekrates told me Dionysios had had them carved out twice the size and there was no knowing who might be in them. “Well,” he said, “things may change, who knows? Let’s go and see.”
The Assembly field had been cleared overnight of stalls, sheep pens, cockpits and so forth. A tall rostrum in the center was hung with white, instead of purple. Menekrates had joined the citizens; from the roof of the smith I heard trumpets sound and the clank of armor. In marched about half a regiment, lining the middle of the square two or three deep. The Syracusans seemed to think nothing of it. They waited, chattering and shouldering, as women do for some spectacle others have prepared for them. I understood Menekrates’ smile.
Through a lane of soldiers the new Archon rode to the rostrum, and mounted the steps without grace. My eyes strayed to Dion, who had gone up with royal dignity behind him, and stood there with a few other men of the family. Him I would have known anywhere by his bearing and his height. As for young Dionysios, the soldiers had raised a dust, and it was too far to see faces well. But as one knows in the theater, the whole body speaks. He was thinnish, and held himself like a man with a stoop who had never before pulled back his shoulders. Sometimes he forgot, and let his neck poke forward. You could have told at a mile that he had neither looks nor charm.
He started speaking, coughing now and again from the dust. His voice matched his deportment: forced, anxious, and striving for effect, which only brought out its faults. His speech seemed empty and formal stuff, probably written by someone else. From what I could hear of it, he praised the departed, deplored his own loss and the city’s, and asked for the people’s loyalty. There was some acclamation, such as you might expect with all those soldiers standing about. I missed a good deal, since the smith had had no notion of leaving his slaves to idle while he was gone, and the bursts of clattering from the workshop often killed all other sound. It seemed no great loss.
After one such din, I found he was speaking of his father’s obsequies, which were to be worthy of Syracuse’s greatest man. The people brightened at news of a show, and there was some real applause. At this the young man picked up a little life, like a nervous actor with a good house. He stopped peeping at his notes, without which he would not have gone far till now, and, with a sudden burst of eloquence, spoke of his father’s poetic talents, the fruit of nights with the lamp while other men were reveling. (I am told this was quite true.) The hammers began again downstairs, after which I caught something about the gifted artist who should have painted the skene being at work upon a funeral pyre of no less splendor. You could tell, from the jerks and pauses, that he was now speaking extempore. After some more hammering, the loudest yet, I pulled my fingers out of my ears in time to hear “… will be spoken by the protagonist.”
Protagonist? I thought. What’s this?
Dion had been standing up there like a statue all this while. Now, even at this distance, I saw him start and look about. I knew then I had heard right.
I suppose the speech finished somehow. Menekrates met me at the door. He had been quite near the rostrum and heard everything. I was to speak the funeral oration.
“My dear,” I said, “we must both be dreaming. It should be Dionysios himself.”
“Of course it should. He can’t be such a fool as he looks. He couldn’t do it, as we’ve seen; he’s a stick; he loses his lines, he fluffs; he barely got through. At a state funeral, people expect something. The whole audience would have walked home saying, ‘Now Dion would have been worth hearing.’”
“You must be right,” I answered. “Nothing else makes sense.”
“If he’d hired an orator—and Demodoros must be spitting blood—everyone would know why. But this is a tribute to the old man’s last achievement. You could call it clever. He was gagging, you know. It came to him on stage; he was playing to the audience. By the dog, Niko, your guardian god looks after you.”
“He sent me a friend,” I answered. Indeed, I was lucky in Menekrates. He was generous by nature; not a rival, being still a second-roles actor; happy enough as my host to share the event and spread the news. Some artists would have been so jealous, especially of a foreigner, that I should have had to move out.
We returned to the lodging, so that I could be found. Just after siesta-time, when the sun was leaving the courtyard, the palace messenger arrived with my summons to Ortygia. I was to go next morning.
At the hour, therefore, when the market opens, I put on a plain white robe, since I was going to a house of mourning, and walked in the cool sunrise towards the sea. Menekrates saw me halfway. He said it was against nature, for a Syracusan, to linger before Ortygia.
There was a thick-walled fort to pass through, before one even set foot upon the causeway. The swarthy Iberian mercenaries who manned it looked at my summons, and opened the triple gates. Any one of them would have done by itself for a small town. I came out on a cobbled square by the Little Harbor, with the causeway still to cross.
I never saw at one time so many ships of war. Here I had my first sight of a quinquereme, as high as a two-floored house. Strange engines were mounted on the decks, for flinging fire, or stones, or dropping weights from mast-height to sink the enemy. Their beaks glared with huge painted eyes. There was an eye on the pennants, too; it was Dionysios’ house flag. The barracks of the galley slaves, with their walls and guards, seemed to stretch for miles.
A thirty-foot gate tower closed the landward end of the causeway. Its roof was manned by Nubian archers, polished black men with ox-hide cuirasses and thick horn bows. In front of the gate below, fair as the men above were dark, stood eight towering Gauls.
They wore Greek armor, for show, because they were on guard. I had heard a good deal about these troops, mainly from soldiers who had run away from them. It was old Dionysios’ rule that his mercenaries should fight in the panoplies of their homelands, which they felt at ease with; and the Gauls, as these men assured me, used to go into combat stark naked, singing paeans like the yowling of cat-a-mountains, tossing and catching their swords as they came on. They charged with wide, fixed blue eyes, seemingly insensible to pain and strange to the name of fear. A Gaul under six feet was reckoned a runt; altogether, one man told me, it was like facing a battle line of insane gods. Afterwards they would cut off the heads of the dead for trophies. Some said they ate the brains.