Since he preferred to change the subject, I answered, “Not much of it. Dionysios took me through a little.”
“What do you think of it?”
“Most of it is very good; he must have some of his father’s talent. There are one or two awkward passages; do you think he would notice a cut or two? This, for instance, adds nothing to the sense, and it doesn’t speak well.”
“Where?” he asked. I showed him the place. He said, “I think you had better read that just as it stands. He put that in himself.”
Our eyes met. I could not believe I had been such a fool as to need telling. When one thought, his signature was all over it.
“And yet,” he said, “when you read this to him, didn’t you improve it as best you could?”
“I daresay. He is only young; and he looked so anxious.”
“You see, Nikeratos? You are not a servile man; you look for achievement, not for favor. Yet you flattered him. I am not servile either, yet I have done the same. As you see, he copied out the speech himself; by now he thinks he wrote it, but for a few hints here and there. Well, if you and I can feel for his untried hand and his unformed mind, don’t you think Plato will? If you had heard him teach, you would know his gentleness with a beginner feeling his way. The will to learn is all he asks. And he knows how to waken that.”
I said I was sure of it. What else could I say?
“You yourself have seen Dionysios’ hunger to excel. So far, the appearance is enough for him; we may blame his education, or rather lack of it. But as Plato always says, this is the beginning from which young men come to love excellence itself. Sokrates, he says, stamped these words on the souls of all who came to him: Be what you want to seem.”
“That’s good advice,” I said. But I thought to myself, Of course it is. But like the long race, it needs staying power. In theater too, one picks out the stayers early on. If I were choosing a company, I doubt I would hire young Dionysios. However, fate did the casting; I suppose they can only direct him and hope for the best.
Dion, who had been sitting in thought, said, “His father, in what concerned his own affairs, was a judge of men. He knew a son with his own qualities would have been his rival. He feared such a son, yet wished for one. Neither wish nor fear was realized. He admitted no regrets. Whether he felt them, whether the son guessed them, who can say?”
I thought of Hector’s Ransom. Much was now explained.
“One thing is beyond doubt; the young man wants to be something in himself. As yet, he cannot tell what. So it is now Plato must come. He must, Nikeratos.” He looked dog tired. I doubt if he had slept all night. I don’t suppose he would have talked like this to me at any other time. “He has a gift from the gods of catching souls. No god has given it me. I hope I do my duty to my city, to my kin, to heaven. Plato made me love honor, and I can say I have not betrayed it. But I cannot light fires in other men. It has been a grief to me.”
“That is not true,” I said.
I could not help myself. I could have bitten out my tongue next moment. Not for having said it—it would have done well enough as a courtesy—but for saying it with my heart.
He had been looking at a golden lion he used to hold down his papers. Now he looked at me. He swallowed; I could see him thinking what one could say. I have made it sound like a painful moment; yet it was not, for through it all I saw him glad, not I daresay for the sake of the man who said it, but that someone should.
He lifted the lion from its place, set it down, and with the soldier’s firmness he always turned to when he was shy, said, “Well, though I did not share your danger at Delphi, I was there to offer the honors of the field. That gives a bond, as it does in war.” He was a great gentleman. It rescued us both.
He stood, and turned to a wall niche at the far end of the room. There was a bronze Apollo in it: a calm searching face, the two hands held out, in one the bow of death, in the other the cup of healing. “Surely,” he said, “the god you kept faith with then, whom Plato all his life has served, whom proportion pleases in men and cities—surely he led you here in the day of need.”
“I won’t fail him,” I said. “Or you. Let him be witness.”
A good exit line, but of course there was still the business of the rites, which took another hour. It was just as well; it made things easy between us.
Before I left he paid me an advance on my fee for speaking the eulogy, more than I had expected for the whole. So, knowing I ought, I picked up my courage and took Menekrates to dinner at the theater tavern. At first the actors who were drinking there looked away, but I had known that would have to be faced. I went up to Stratokles and his friends, saying I should never forget I had them to thank for my good fortune; if they had not entertained me here, Dionysios would never have known I was in Syracuse, and I hoped they would give me the pleasure of standing them all some wine. A few still looked sour, but no one left. In the end they all came round, and we spent a pleasant evening. I was glad to have done it; it seemed to me that Dion would have thought I should.
All next day I was rehearsing for the funeral, which would take place the following evening. The shop of the royal robe-maker had been at work two days and a night upon my tragic robe. It was of black dipped in purple, with foot-deep borders crusted in bullion, amethyst, agate and pearl.
The procession set forth at sunset, down from the palace through the fivefold gates of Ortygia, on through the old town and the new, then between lines of torches down into the plain again, where Timaios the skene-painter had prepared the pyre.
First walked a men’s chorus, singing the Lament for Hector from the dead man’s play, to the music of double flutes; singers and flute-players wore dead-black robes, and cypress garlands. After these came a troop of soldiers, dragging their spears, their helmets under their left arms. Then a car shaped like a warship, draped in black, with an effigy of the Spirit of Syracuse, in a pose of mourning, twice life size. Then fifty boys, singing the Women’s Chorus for Hector’s wake. After these, the priests of Dionysos, the dead man’s name-god, with their sacred emblems. Then torch-bearers, their torches made up with precious incense, for the kindling of the pyre. After that, walking before the corpse, came the male kindred, young Dionysios, and his half-brothers by Aristomache, Dion’s sister, and Dion himself.
The funeral car stood fifteen feet high, and was drawn by an elephant, taken from the Carthaginians in war. They are most fearful beasts, left over as it seems from the Titans’ age, as high as two men, gray, hairless, wrinkled, with a tail at both ends, the bigger before; one can tell the head by the great ears. It pulled patiently, guided by a man upon its neck. On a bier draped with black and purple, Dionysios lay clothed in white and wreathed with gold. In spite of the ice, he was starting to go off by this time; I got the whiff of him all the way. I walked just behind, in my tragic robe and a wreath of gilded laurel, carrying his prize vase from Athens. It was of course the usual kind, painted with a chorus and the god; against the other grave-goods it looked as simple as a kitchen pot. But it had arrived before he lost his senses; and till his eyes closed for good he never let it out of his sight.
After me came the women of the household, keening; then a great catafalque with his arms and ensigns and trophies of war. His war horse, and the other victims to be sacrificed before the pyre, were led by Gaulish warriors. Here was a glimpse of the chains of adamant; but the murmuring never got very loud. I suppose it was true that even the poor, whose children scratched in the middens while he ate off gold, preferred a hungry lifetime within his walls to one night of sack by the Carthaginians. I had heard things, by now, which made me understand it.
It was now nearly dark, with just a deep red glow where the sun had set under the sea; but the space around the pyre was lit with cressets whose flames rose six feet high, making it almost as bright as noon.