Just then the housekeeper scratched on the door, bringing my posset. He assured me it would do me good; he had had the recipe from a priest in Egypt, who had nursed him through a fever there. It tasted odd, and rather nasty; but it was warming and I sipped it up. While I took it, he went back to the letter. Once, while I was looking out of the window as I drank and thinking my own thoughts, I felt him looking at me, and turned. I had been prepared, I suppose, because it was important business, to find him making sure of me, weighing me up. But he was thinking—thinking through me, you might say. He looked away, from courtesy; but for a moment I had felt him, as it seemed, going right through to whatever appeared to him the causes of my being, as if I were a cube or a star. Not for my sake, but for something beyond. He was suffering, and perplexed in mind, and had to break the surface somewhere. I happened to be there, opposite. All that I knew in an instant; it is only finding words that’s slow. I finished my drink, and thanked him.
Suddenly he smiled, the same smile, I daresay, which had conquered Axiothea. “Well,” he said, “I can interpret Dion’s postscript now: Trust Nikeratos, as I do.’ Tell me then, about your meeting with him, how he was looking, and all he said. We shall agree, I think, in giving him precedence over Dionysios.”
Once or twice he interrupted me, to ask if Dion seemed in good health, and what his house was like. Of course he had never been back to Sicily in all these years, but it seemed odd to be telling him. In due course I came to Dionysios, the Eulogy and the toy chariots. He questioned me closely, and often beyond what I knew. What had Dionysios read, did he study geometry or music? I said I did not know, but Dion considered he had had no education. It had seemed to me that he longed to be valued, but was not much concerned whether it was fairly earned or not.
“So many begin with that.”
I looked at his face, and this time it held no enigma. I found in it something I could understand myself. It was just the face of a good professional, measuring a piece of work and feeling the call of the god.
I went on talking; ad-libbing, really, till he felt ready to speak. While I talked of Dion, and his feelings were engaged, his face had been a courteous mask; now, as I have said, it was open to a man like me. He was tempted. It was a great role, worth taking; but he was an old hand who had played, so to speak, Sophokles in Boeotia, and been hit with half an onion. He could remember the Athens the old men talk of: war, defeat, despair; tyranny, rebellion; revenge, injustice, hope gone sick. As I spoke and he sank into himself, I could see the weights going into the balance, this side and that.
He looked at the table, with its tablets and open scroll, just as I have seen a man look at a favorite dog he had to leave behind. Then he said, trying to throw it away, “Well, Nikeratos, you have endured a good deal, but not for nothing. I daresay I shall go to Sicily.”
It was plain he wanted no speeches, so I just said it would be happy news for Dion, who had set great hopes on it.
He said rather drily, “Too many are doing that. My art, unlike yours, does better without spectators.” He paused and added, “But one does not want to end by finding one has been only a thing of words.”
As it happened, I was not long ignorant of his meaning. I had scarcely left his garden-close after taking leave of him, when Axiothea and two young men ran out from the olive trees where they had clearly been waiting. After the briefest greeting she said, “You have seen him? Did he say anything? Will he go?”
My surprise at their knowing seemed to amaze them. Nothing else, they said, was talked of here. Didn’t I know the invitation had been public? In short, Dionysios had not just sent letters by an envoy, but—as I suppose I might have expected—a kind of embassy to the Academy. All was now clear: Plato’s calm, his lack of eagerness for Archytas’ letter. I had supposed I brought him news. All this time, he had had a crowd of philosophers, students of law and civics, sophists and geometers and historians, his young men and no doubt many of their fathers, all breathing down his neck, to learn if he would go and prove his theories by demonstration. I suppose most of what I had told him of Dionysios, too, he had picked up already here and there. I admired his courtesy. Maybe I had shed some new glimmer of light upon the work ahead; but mostly I had just loaded on him the Tarentine philosophers, pushing like all the rest.
Certainly, I thought, Dion means to have his way. But I suppose that’s what makes a king.
9
AFTER THIS, I WAS BUSY FOR SOME TIME WITH my own affairs. When the choregoi drew for protagonists at the Dionysia, I was picked quite early, and cast as Orpheus in a play of that name by Eucharmos. It was a good acting role, very pathetic; my music was done off stage by a concert kitharist, but I sang myself. The play was well received; I was told later, on good authority, that I was in the running for the crown and did not lose by many votes. It went to Aristodemos, who had done a big bravura part as Ajax, perhaps a little florid, but, I don’t deny, sound on the whole.
If I do not dwell on this time, it’s not from pique at having missed the crown; I was lucky to get so near it. But I started a little love affair, of the sort that is well enough if you don’t let it take hold. If he had been anyone else’s choice, I should have known just what to advise. But getting deep in, I started to deceive myself, finding all that I wished to see, and calling the rest youthful heedlessness. So, when my Alkibiades of the Agora left me for a well-off fool with a racehorse and a house in the Kerameikos, I could not sweeten it with the thought that I had lost my peace for something worth my pains. I had known well enough, but would not know, for the sake of his laughing eyebrows and golden bloom.
Even so, once I could have taken it lightly. I could not now. I was at war with myself. All the while, when I was wasting hours in guessing where he was, planning the next supper, which had always some bitterness in the cup, brooding on a word or look—in a word, fishing for moonshine—the mask of Apollo looked at me with empty eyes. Once he gives you knowledge, you can’t unknow it; if you try, he makes you suffer. I was haunted by those scornful eyeholes, and by a youth whom only my mind’s eye had seen, climbing the slopes of Etna with the snow-light on his upturned face. He had stolen my joy in my old contentments, by showing me what men can be.
With such thoughts, I took a walk one day to the Academy in the warm green of spring. I did not seek Axiothea; she might have heard things, and would not understand. But I happened to notice in the garden the dour-faced Xenokrates, who I knew would neither question nor detain me; so I asked when Plato intended going to Syracuse. He raised his brows. Plato had been gone, he said, above a month.
Had all that time slipped by? Since the Dionysia, I thought, every day wasted. Suddenly I felt the need to shake it all off, as a wet dog shakes off water. Here in Athens, I would be meeting at every turn the youth, or his new lover, or friends who had seen my folly. The very air felt stale.
Next day, therefore, I did a round of the foreign consulates, to learn what cities were planning plays. It was not an Isthmian or Pythian year, and too early for Olympia. I hoped I had finished with small-town theaters, and was therefore passing by the Megarian proxenos’ office, when I met Eupolis coming out. I greeted him and said I was thinking of a tour. But he was already not the man he had been before he lost his teeth and spoiled his voice. He had been drinking though it was not mid-morning; and, without taking the trouble to wrap it in civility, said he wondered I did not try Sicily again, if I had had such a success there as I claimed.