We then turned to planning out our tour, on the usual terms. I would put up two-thirds of the expenses, including the hire of the third actor and extra (which I could afford, now I had not their fares to pay from Athens) and split the profits the same way. Then we went to drink to it at the barber’s tavern. It was half-empty; the few men there were drinking almost in silence, or getting quarrelsome. We walked home still pretty well sober. He was in better spirits than I; the tour was fixed up, and he was a man for living from day to day. It was I who lay awake. I felt both my heart and mind being torn in two.
Next day I set out early, knowing how long it took to get through all the gates. This time I had no pass; besides, I might find the guards all drunk or dicing. But discipline still seemed fairly good. The assets of a mercenary captain, and his future, are in his men, and he will do his best not to let them spoil.
The guards had been changed at the causeway gatehouse. Instead of the Gauls there were some Italians, who spoke a dialect strange to me: dark, curly-haired men in polished armor, with straight-sided shields and heavy six-foot throwing spears. Their drill was much smarter than the Gauls’ and their Greek less barbarous. They looked as proud as the Spartans but more at home; Spartans hate crossing water. These troops seemed as tough, and more professional. They asked my business (I had hoped for someone who knew my face) and then for tokens of my errand. Since Archytas’ letter to Dion was confidential, I showed the one to Plato, which I thought should serve my turn, seeing he was the Archon’s guest.
The captain read the name; at once his black brows knitted above his haughty nose, and his nostrils curled as if the paper stank. “Plato!” he said for his men to hear. There was a general growl, and a clank as they shook their iron-shod javelins. The captain handed the letter back as a housewife picks up a dead rat. “Well, Greekling, if you get a quiet word with Plato, just tell him this from the Roman cohort.” He drew the edge of his hand across his throat. His men supplied the sound.
They let me through. But the news that I was going to Plato was passed on along with me, and from each lot of guards I got, allowing for race and custom, much the same message. Even a Greek, who conducted me through the royal gardens, said, “If you’ve come from his precious school to fetch him home, you can drink your way through every guardhouse from here to the Euryalos. Only let me know.”
He was a big hairy Boeotian, but I felt more at home with him than with the foreigners; so I asked what Plato had been up to, to be so much hated. At home, I added, he had the name of a quiet man.
“Let him keep quiet at home, then, or someone will quiet him for good. He was brought here to corrupt the Archon and make him fit for nothing; and you can guess who hopes to gain from that. Disband the hired troops—oh, yes, that’s Plato’s counsel—and the city left as a gift for his friend Dion. I wish the old man were back. He’d have nailed his head and his four quarters to the gatehouses long before this.”
I made no answer. The long night had brought no peace to the war within me. We were getting near the palace. The Boeotian stopped, to have his say. “Have you seen these Syracusans on Assembly Day? They’ve not shifted for themselves these forty years. How long do you see them keeping off the Carthaginians, without us trained men?” He spat into the grass, saying, “Tell Plato that from me.”
We went through the outer court, and a columned porch, to a court within. “Wait here,” he said.
I waited just inside the porch, and looked about. It was a green shady place, with flowering creepers trained above, and a big square fountain pool in the center, maybe fifty feet wide. This had been drained, and the tiles scattered with clean sand. On the marble edge, a number of well-dressed men were sitting, and seemed, at first glance, to be fishing in the sand. Then I saw that the rods they held were really pointers; they were drawing geometric figures, with letters and numbers beside them. A slave was going about with a rake, to clean off finished work, and sand, to start again on.
When I had got over the oddness of this spectacle, I noticed something else; one side of the court was much busier than the other. I soon saw the cause. The fountain made a little island, a bronze palm trunk twined with a snake upon a base of serpentine; and on the slab sat Plato and Dionysios. It was the courtiers at my end, behind their backs, who were taking it easy. I saw two of them do a lewd drawing and quickly sweep it over.
Plato was turned a little my way. He was talking, sitting with his massive brow and heavy shoulders leaned rather forward, as if with their own weight; I remembered the pose. His hands were on his knees; sometimes he would lift one in a gesture so spare, but clear, that an actor could not have bettered it. Dionysios came further round, so that I partly saw his face. His lips were parted, and his countenance changed like a field of barley in a breeze, to show he was following every word.
My guard walked about looking for a chamberlain, passing on his way a couple of Gauls at the further door. The sight of them reminded me what a change this was. Nobody had searched me.
Dionysios beckoned my escort, who told his errand and presently came to fetch me. I scrambled across the balustrade, picked my way over the sand, side-stepped a diagram (Plato’s I suppose) they had been discussing, and made my bow.
Dionysios had changed greatly. Of course, last time he had been in mourning, unshaven and with cropped hair; but it was more than that. His skin looked clearer, he fidgeted less; he seemed better-favored, like a plain girl pleased with her marriage. Plato was watching him, not as I had once seen him look at Dion, close and proud; still, there was a kind of affection in his face, like a mother’s when her child is learning to walk.
“Well, Nikeratos,” Dionysios began, but then at once turned round. “Here, Plato, is a man you know, though without, I daresay, knowing his face. This is Nikeratos, the tragedian of Athens, who was protagonist in my father’s play.”
Plato greeted me with courtesy, but as a stranger. It did not offend me; I guessed the cause, and replied suitably. He complimented my performance, and congratulated me on my crown. He did, at least, seem to hear and see me; Dionysios, from first to last, talked through me at Plato, not slightingly, but as if nobody else were real to him.
“And what brings you to Syracuse?” he asked me.
Good, I thought; now we shall see. “Just the business of my calling, sir. I have come to work.”
He looked pleased with this answer. “Well, Nikeratos,” he said, going back to his opening line, “so you have lately been in Athens at the Dionysia; and I suppose, after your success at the Lenaia, you were given a leading role?”
I told him yes; he inquired the name of the poet, the theme of the play, how it had been received—things that anyone might ask. But as he went on, I began to recognize that special tone I had observed at the Academy, when they played the game of questions, leading someone on till they scored a point. Being new and half-baked at it, he sounded rather silly. With the side of my eye I glanced at Plato. He was a man who would not have fidgeted if he had sat down on an anthill; but his patience was starting to show.
“So you enacted Orpheus. Did the play treat of his descent into the underworld to ransom his wife, or of his death at the hands of the maenads?”
“The second,” I said. “Though he relates the first in a soliloquy.”
He brightened. I must have given him the right feed-line.
“Orpheus was the son of Apollo, as we are told. Is it possible that being god-begotten he should have failed to calm the maenads with his song, inspired as he was by the divinity?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But some audiences don’t want the best, and let you know it.”