I should like to have seen Timaios’ designs for Hector’s Ransom. They must have been worth looking at. However, he had spent himself on the pyre instead, and they talk of it to this day. It was so high, the onlookers’ necks were cricked from watching the dead man hoisted. The gilded bier-stand would have served to throne a Pharaoh, the offerings to equip a banquet hall; the sides of the pyre, which sloped inward like a pyramid’s, were boarded flat and painted all over with pictures of Dionysios’ victories. Sicilians love paint. They cover their houses with it, their chariots, even their carts. These battle scenes were framed in every land of scroll and flourish, touched up with gold. To an Athenian it looked gaudy beyond words, but the Syracusans were squealing and groaning with admiration, and it has found its way into the histories as a major work of art. It was certainly remarkable, and I should think would have kept the poor of the whole city in bread and oil for a year. At all events, they settled the old man up there among the pitch and terebinth and scented oil and tinder. There he lay, waiting to hear my piece before they sent him off to meet Judge Rhadamanthos. I mounted the rostrum before the pyre. I had been rather nervous; but now the silence was so unlike grief, so like the theater, that I felt quite at home.
While he lived, you would not have found me speaking praise of a man like Dionysios, whoever wrote it. But at a funeral it is proper to remember only the good, or one offends the gods below, and calls the angry ghost to vengeance. Dion’s lines were quite honest, as far as they went. He gave him credit as a soldier and defender of the city, and used most of the speech on that. He said also that, though entrusted with supreme power by the Syracusans (as he really had been, in the beginning), he had outraged no household in the city through incontinence or vice. People assured me afterwards that this was no more than the truth, and was probably the secret of his long reign. As Hipparchos found in Athens, wronged kin and lovers are far more dangerous than demagogues; they will kill at the cost of their lives. The old man had learned from history; besides, he had been a demagogue himself.
I had worked hard over his son’s little pieces in the epitaph to make them sound like something beside Dion’s fine prose. The young man had to be kept sweet, to send for Plato.
At the close, I heard the deep murmur which is applause on such occasions. Then the victims were sacrificed; more offerings were flung; the kindred took their torches and kindled the pyre. At once huge rushing flames leaped up and hid the body, driving the crowd back with their heat. I stood with a scorched face, sweating in my tragic robe, watching Timaios’ pretty pictures curl and blacken. Then everyone went home. I remembered my father’s poor simple burial, and how we had sat round afterwards thinking, What next?
In due course I was paid, very handsomely. Dion had booked me a passage on a ship sailing next day. I had said goodbye to all my friends, except Menekrates, who was coming to see me off. I felt as good as gone, when a palace messenger came, saying that Dionysios wished to see me.
This time all the gates opened for me easily; but, once inside the palace, I was led by a different way. Presently we came to a door without pretensions, the office of some functionary, I supposed. My usher knocked, and opened. There was a pleasant smell of wood and paint, like a carpenter’s shop. Which is just what it was—and at the bench sat Dionysios the Younger, with a toy chariot before him, and a tiny brush in his hand, painting on scroll work. This time he had really done me honor. He had let me into his sanctuary.
“I was very pleased, Nikeratos,” he said, “with your speaking of the Epitaph. I have sent to Timaios’ workshop for a copy of his Siege of Motya, one of his paintings for the pyre. You may have it, in memory of the day.”
He waved his brush at it. It was on an easel against the wall, more garish than ever, seen close to, and too large to ship home without a great deal of trouble. I thanked him as if he had fulfilled my dearest wish. Dion had been quite right. It was like giving sweets to an eager child.
He invited me to go up and inspect the brushwork, which I did. But the table beside it drew my eye; I could not keep from looking. It was full of small toys—chariots and horses, carts and asses and mules, a war galley fully rigged—all painted up Sicilian style, and perfect as real things shrunk by magic. One longed to touch. All these years, when his father had been watching him like a mousing cat for some twitch of dangerous capacity, he had indulged himself with doing one thing well.
Since he would hardly have asked me here if he did not want it noticed, I praised the fineness of the work. I was curious to hear what he would say. I got more than I bargained for. He jumped up and came over to the table. He must have talked for at least an hour. He told me what woods he used, and how, and why; he showed me his gouges, chisels and glue, and his lava dust for smoothing; he pointed out the racing chariots, and the processional. His face grew lively, firm and keen; he looked a different man. Suddenly I pictured him in some nice clean shop in a good street, advising a client about the design of a chair or bed-head, successful, esteemed, content, a happy craftsman, doing the one thing he had in him.
Neither of us, I thought, is perfect casting for a philosophic king. I’m the lucky one; I need not try.
He asked me which of the models I liked best. It was hard to choose, but I pointed out a state chariot with gilded wreaths, which must have cost him most trouble. “Take it,” he said. “It’s yours. Not many people notice the finer points. I gave one not unlike it to my son, but he broke it within the day; small children don’t feel for fragile things.” The news that he was a father gave me such a start, I nearly dropped the chariot. Of course he was quite old enough, but it seemed absurd.
“I shall have less leisure for pastimes now,” he said, the sureness in his face changing to a weak conceit. “Come back, Nikeratos, when the time of mourning is over, and give us a taste of your art. Then you can sample the pleasures Syracuse affords. Our girls deserve their reputation.” The greed in his eye showed something new and none too pleasing. I remembered stories in the wineshops.
Soon after, I left, with the chariot in my hands. The last I saw of him, he was back at his workbench, peering with his weak eyes at his little tools.
8
THE FOLLOWING DAY I SET SAIL FOR HOME, BY way of Tarentum. Dion sent for me again before I left, to give me a letter for Archytas, the chief man of the city, and leader of the Pythagoreans there. It was to urge him, Dion said, to join in persuading Plato, his guest-friend of long standing. I undertook to deliver it without fail. Something in Dion’s face assured me it was a forceful letter, and told me, too, that there lived on within the statesman, general and scholar a beautiful lordly boy who was not used to hearing no.
I had been lucky with weather on the outward journey. The homeward trip looked like being just as good. I hate even now to talk of it. Whenever I cross a gangplank it comes back to me. I have turned down good engagements, time and again, because it meant a crossing in the bad season.
Not to give you at length my shipwreck story, we capsized outside Tarentum, in a gale that blew down off the hills. Before this happened, I had felt so sick I thought I would welcome death; however, I found myself swimming. I was almost spent when some men, who had found the ship’s boat floating free, hauled me on board it. In the harbor mouth, that capsized too. I half-remember coming to on the wharf, feeling worse than dead, cold all through to the core, tilted head-down to let the water run out. I don’t know who did that for me. I went off again, and woke in a bed, with a young man sitting by me. After saying I was among friends, he went out to fetch a graybeard. There were heated stones wrapped in cloth warming the bed, and sweet herbs boiling somewhere. It turned out, when I was able to understand, that I was being tended by these same Pythagoreans whose leader I had come to see. It is their rule to succor the distressed, as an offering to Zeus the Merciful.