No one we met believed for a moment that theater could stop in Syracuse. People laughed or shrugged, saying young Dionysios had run through a dozen crackpot whims already; we should get back to find him learning the kithara. Hadn’t we seen for ourselves that all Sicilians had theater in their blood? At this the company would all cheer up, and I myself along with them; then I would think of Dion, trying to shift from its foundations a forty-year load of tyranny, and would be at odds with myself, not knowing what to feel.
We were playing Heloros, which is about twenty miles south of Syracuse, when we heard of bandits in the hills. By now we were carrying a good deal of silver, from smaller towns which could not give us bankers’ letters. I showed the company the accounts; it was agreed I should go over to the city and get the surplus takings safely banked.
I did this business without trouble, and went to look about me. The theater tavern I avoided; by now it would be a desert of old men and embittered failures. I chose a wineshop where the gentlemen resorted; it had a cool shady courtyard with a vine. I had hardly sat down and given my order, when a voice cried, “Niko! What are you doing here?” It was Speusippos, Plato’s nephew.
He came over to my table, as usual well dressed and barbered; yet I thought at once that he was not as young as I had supposed, the wrong side of thirty. Lines showed in his face, and his mouth looked drawn.
I offered him a drink—which he refused, saying he had just been drinking with some Syracusans—and asked how long he had been in Syracuse. He said he had come out shortly after Plato, who was in need of help with his work and correspondence from someone he could trust.
I had always liked Speusippos. In spite of his hot temper, he was not the man to pick a quarrel, or drag it on. Though he was agreed to have one of the best minds at the Academy, and was an expert on the growth and properties of plants, he also studied girls and horses and the theater, and found no trouble in talking with common men. I would have been pleased to see him, but for his look of having had bad news.
He asked about the tour; I told him, since Plato had better know, how rooted the theater was in Sicily. He nodded, but I saw this was the least of his troubles. So I asked outright whether Dionysios was making good progress.
He ran his hands through his dark hair, upsetting the barber’s curls. “Progress! You met him, I believe. The progress a boy makes with his book, while someone is showing him a cockfight.”
I looked round; I had been in Sicily long enough for that. But he was no fool; the near tables were empty. “Philistos?” I asked.
“You know the man?” He had sharpened, as if eager for any scrap of knowledge about a dangerous enemy. I said I had barely seen him, but had heard things before I left.
“You’ll hear more now. And mostly praise. Can you believe it, Niko? That venal, greedy old lecher, who did as much as anyone to set up the tyranny! Now they call him a sound statesman because he wants the city kept in chains, and a good fellow because he wants to make the man whose slaves they are the slave of his own appetites.”
“Well,” I said, as one Athenian to another, “they were bred up without justice, like bats without light. It must hurt their eyes.”
“We all come from the light, Niko. The soul can remember, or forget.” For all his easy manners, he was Academy through and through.
“How much,” I asked, “does Dionysios’ soul remember?”
He gave a short laugh, then answered seriously, “Enough to open his eyes. If that were all.”
“He won’t work for it,” I said, “and wants to blame someone else?”
“You must know him well.”
“No, I’ve known actors like him. Yet Plato is still in favor?”
“He won’t hear of his leaving. Of course all Greece would know, and say the son had followed the father. But I don’t think it’s only that.”
“Nor I. So he loves him still?”
He looked down his high-bred nose. As a youth he must have been striking. Perhaps he had had some share in Plato’s love.
“You may call it that; or you can say he would like to be Plato’s best student, without working. Of course he would like to be Philistos’ best student, too. He has rolled by this time in enough logic for some to stick; he knows when two propositions exclude each other, but …”
“But he feels,” I said, “right down in his soul, that logic should make an exception just for him.”
He propped his chin in his palm and looked at me. “You are mocking us,” he said.
“What am I, to do that? A phantom in a mask, a voice of illusion.”
“You too, Niko, even you.”
A harsh Sicilian sunbeam stabbed down through the vine, picking out the lines of thought and pleasure in his face, deepened by weariness. He had meant it; in his trouble even I had power to cast him down.
“Forgive me,” I said. “‘He who mocks sorrow shall weep alone.’ But if you think me sour, talk to some Syracusan actors, and I’ll seem like honey.”
“It is your life,” he said wearily. “I know it. But somewhere the surgeon’s knife must cut, or the patient dies.”
“Artists are few among many; that I understand. But bear this in mind, Speusippos: while you, sitting in front, are watching our illusion, we are looking at reality. While you see four men, we see fifteen thousand. Twenty years I’ve played to them. One learns a little.”
He said harshly, “What do you mean? That they won’t forego the theater? Or something more?”
“Well, both. What is it you Academics say of Plato? Like his master Sokrates, he won’t sell his teaching, he’ll choose his audience. Does he think he can do that here? He must make do with what comes, just like an actor.”
“Plato was born among great affairs, and has lived with them ever since.”
Here’s another, I thought, who loves him still. I said, “Once at the Dionysia, someone in the skeneroom fell down deathly sick, and they fetched a doctor. The good man came running, took the wrong door in his haste, and found himself upstage center, standing next to Medea. Hasn’t Plato seen yet where he is?”
He fetched a deep sigh. “Oh, Niko. I think I will have that drink you offered me.”
I called the boy. When we were alone again, he said, “What do you think I was doing here before you came? I’m about the city all day, scraping acquaintance, joining hetairas’ evening parties, talking to bathmen and barbers, to learn the temper of the people. It’s the best I can do for Plato; that, and staying away from the Palace. The Archon thought we were too close; he was getting to hate me nearly as much as Dion.”
“Hate!” I said, shocked. “Has it come to that?”
“Hush,” he said, as the boy came with the wine. Then, “On your life, Niko, keep that quiet. Every day that doesn’t bring it out in daylight is something gained. So far it’s only slights, coldness and pinpricks. If it comes into the open, what can Plato do? Honor, truth, the pieties of friendship, are his very soul. To put it as low as you can, he is a gentleman. He can’t be neutral. It would be the end of this whole great mission.”