Achilles His Armour Read online

  Fiction

  achilles his armour

  the laughter of aphrodite

  habeas corpus

  cat in gloves

  the sword of pleasure

  Non-fiction

  essays in antiquity

  kenneth grahame: a biography

  the expanding eye

  Achilles

  His Armour

  Peter Green

  Flat and flexible truths are

  beat out by every hammer; but Vulcan

  and his whole forge sweat to work out

  Achilles his armour.

  sir thomas browne

  DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.

  GARDEN CITY, NEW YORK

  1967

  FOR LALAGE

  with love and gratitude

  Τίς δὲ βίος, τί δὲ τερπνόν,

  ἄτερ χρυσῆς Ἀφροδίτης;

  mimnermus

  Part One

  The Lion’s Whelp

  (441–429 b.c.)

  ’Twere best to rear no lion in the State:

  But, having reared, ’twere best to humour him.

  aristophanes, The Frogs

  Chapter 1

  The boy squatted, rocking on his heels, tossing the knucklebones in his hand. His face was flushed in concentration; his long blond hair hung forward, shaking to the movement of his wrist. Round him crouched three companions: their dark hair and swarthy skin were in sharp contrast to his. All four were dressed in white tunics, creased now and soiled with the dust that lay thick in the narrow street: but a close observer would have seen that the fair boy’s was made of finer stuff, and that the brooch which gathered it over the shoulder was of gold. The sun beat down, almost vertically in the sky; the flies droned as they scavenged among the refuse. From far away, above the creak of carts and shouts from the nearby market, came the click of chisels on stone: on the hillside, rising above clustering houses, workmen like ants could be seen swarming among columns of dazzling marble.

  The boy threw down the bones, and said, triumphantly:

  ‘A six and two fives, Adeimantus. Will your luck hold against that?’

  His voice was high and nervous, with the suggestion of a lisp. He gave the impression of having a tongue a little too big for his mouth.

  The boy he addressed shook his head and threw without hesitation. One of the others said; ‘Gods! A five and two sixes!’ The fair boy scooped up the bones again. All four were so absorbed that they failed to hear the rumbling of the heavy dray till it was almost on them. The driver, a thick-set country fellow, pulled his horses almost on to their haunches and called to them to clear the way.

  The three dark urchins scattered to the side of the road. The fair boy remained quite still for a moment, staring at the bones in his hand. Then he cast them, some feet from him, in the middle of the lane. The drayman called to his horses. The boy rose, turned, and said:

  ‘Hold in for a moment, please. You will drive over my throw.’ He held his head a little on one side as he spoke.

  The horses stamped at the ground, flinging up clouds of dust.

  ‘Damn your throw! Do you think I’ve got all day to waste?’

  A muscle twitched in the boy’s neck. He said: ‘I am Alcibiades.’

  The drayman swore. ‘You damned aristocrats. We’re free men here. What right have you got to hold me up?’ He pointed towards the hill with his whip. And what right has he got to spend our money on his temples? He cracked his whip, and the horses started forward.

  In an instant the boy flung himself down, flat in the dust, squarely in the dray’s path. Once again the driver pulled up his horses. Alcibiades walked slowly to where the bones glinted in the sun. ‘Three sixes,’ he said. He stood to the side of the road and motioned the dray forward. As it passed a whiff of the hides with which it was piled reached him. He held his nose. ‘And tell your master,’ he called, ‘that in future he can keep his stinking filth outside the city limits.’

  The driver turned, blustering in defeat. ‘Tell him yourself,’ he said; ‘I’d like to be there to hear you do it.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘Cleon,’ said the drayman, and was out of sight round a bend in the lane.

  The boys looked at one another uncertainly; then at Alcibiades, waiting for a lead. Alcibiades still held the knuckle-bones, and was breathing heavily. A drop of sweat glistened on his forehead.

  Adeimantus said: ‘It’s too late to go to Antiphon now—’

  Alcibiades laughed, a little uncertainly. ‘Old Nestor? What can you learn from him? Come down to the market. There’s a new philosopher there. He doesn’t tell you anything about the stars—he asks you questions about yourself. Wonderful. And he adores young boys. Funny, because he’s the ugliest creature you’ve ever seen. Snub nose and pot-belly. They say his wife beats him,’ he added.

  The three boys fell into step behind him. They picked their way through the twisting streets, skirting round the edge of the market behind the King’s Colonnade. High on their right the marble of the Acropolis gleamed in the sunlight; from somewhere unseen in the warren of lanes behind the Market Hill came the clink and roar of the smiths’ forges. The street was packed with people: brown farmers, their donkeys loaded with produce, grimy charcoal-burners pushing wooden trucks piled high with sacks.

  Alcibiades glanced around. Somewhere in this teeming, shouting throng Zopyrus must still be looking for him. Zopyrus was his personal slave and supposed mentor, whose duties mainly consisted in conveying him to and from school: a task in which he was singularly unsuccessful. He was an old, bent Thracian slave, who had been in Pericles’ house for nearly forty years, and had been dragged out of retirement some eight years before to take care of this unexpected addition to the family. He was garrulous, absentminded, and passionately addicted to draughts and a vile Thracian wine which could be bought in the Potters’ Quarter. Alcibiades regularly beat him at draughts, much to his annoyance; and bought him a bottle of wine whenever he was tired of school, which was often. Between the tricks of his pupil and the remonstrances of his master Zopyrus got little peace in his old age.

  Alcibiades grinned to himself. Then he saw Adeimantus and his other friends waiting, hanging on his next decision. The grin changed to a frown. ‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ he said, and was gone down the hill, to be lost in an instant among the crowd. The three looked at each other irresolutely. No one seemed sure what to do. After a moment they too went, each his own way.

  • • • • •

  He avoided the market-place again, stopping on the slope below the Areopagus to drink from the fountain and buy bread and olives from a stall. He sat in the shade of a plane tree and ate slowly, spitting the olive-stones into the dust. No one took any notice of him. His head throbbed, and he felt solitude pressing in on him. It was very hot. He kicked idly at a pebble with his bare foot. His leg was smooth and brown, its line hardly yet broken by muscle. He ran his fingers through his hair, and gazed at his wavering reflection in the water. He saw a face already thin, with long nose and wide full mouth. Sharp grey eyes stared up at him. He raised his head and looked at the people hurrying past: slaves and porters, an official making for the record office, a market inspector. They all had the same florid complexion, the same thick dark hair. They were broad in the shoulders and strong in their bowed legs; but none of them were taller than he was, and their eyes were black. He looked again at his own fine bones and fair hair, feeling the blood of a hundred intermarriages moving in him, remembering the invaders of the legends from whom his ancestors traced their descent. Simultaneously he felt superiority and fear.

  After a moment he began walking again, slowly. The stones burnt the soles of his feet. He began to c
limb the twisting road that led to the summit of the Acropolis.

  The workmen recognised him, and shouted greetings. He picked his way over scraps of marble to where the great temple of Athene stood, nearly completed now, the light stabbing back from its columns. Inside it was cool and dim after the noonday glare. At the far end stood the gigantic statue of the goddess, its wooden framework still half-exposed down one side. In front of her shield a man was slung in a basket, chiselling away busily. Alcibiades called up to him. The man waved; then shouted orders to two masons on the floor. With a creak of pulleys the basket descended. The man stepped out and stretched himself, offering Alcibiades a large hand smothered in white dust. He was about sixty, bald, and of a massive physique.

  ‘A pleasure to see you, boy,’ he said. ‘Come up with me and see how the work’s going.’ He stepped back into the basket, and after a moment’s hesitation the boy followed him. The two workmen hauled on the ropes, and they swung aloft; swayed for an instant, and then hung steady, high up under the roof.

  Alcibiades looked around, nerving himself against vertigo. Far below the masons and painters sat and talked. As his eyes became accustomed to the light, he saw a new frieze running round the walls of the temple. He stared at the unfamiliar figures—yet not so unfamiliar after all. Here were no gods or heroes, no fighting Centaurs, but the folk of Athens that he met every day. Strange and unprecedented sculpture.

  ‘But—but it’s the Festival Procession!’ he said at length. ‘Pheidias, what does it mean? Isn’t it an artist’s business to fashion the likeness of the gods?’ He stopped, confused, aware of something new and strange that linked itself in his mind with his guardian: that silent, cold, enigmatic man whom he had realised, ever since he could remember, to have been set apart and different from anyone else he knew.

  Pheidias said, twinkling: ‘Well, is it so very strange? I remember—oh, it was before you were born—when Aeschylus wrote his play about the Persian War. No mythical heroes, but the men we’d been fighting against. I fought myself. So did he: he knew what it was all about. Don’t you think there’s more in that than writing about legends? Aren’t the people you meet more real to you than—’ His arm was outstretched, pointing to the vast statue. He checked himself. ‘No, no, no. I shouldn’t be putting ideas into your head. I daresay you get enough odd notions at home. Aspasia’s a remarkable woman.’

  ‘Pheidias, I’m feeling giddy. Could we go down?’

  The old man glanced at him sharply. ‘Why yes, of course,’ he said. ‘But just look at this first.’ He shouted down to the ground, and the basket descended; then hung stationary in front of the great shield. Pheidias pointed to a battle-scene painted on it. ‘Do you see anything you recognise?’

  The boy looked carefully, then drew in his breath. That old, bald warrior, lying on the ground— He nodded. Then his eye was caught by another figure. The face was half-hidden behind its shield; but there was no mistaking the long, almost misshapen head, the immobile and visionary face of Pericles.

  Pheidias said: ‘It’s nothing, really. Just a way of signing my work.’ The basket was being lowered again.

  But it isn’t nothing, thought the boy to himself. It’s why Pericles and all our household and friends are different from the people I meet in the market. It’s why that old man, I can never remember his name—was it Anaxagoras?—was exiled the year I was born. He was a friend of Pericles, and he said the sun was a star, bigger than the whole of the Peloponnese. He said it was going to be darkened, and it was. It’s why the comic poets and ordinary people hate us so. But they can’t do without us. It’s why I hate men who want to make love to me. I oughtn’t to. Everyone does. I ought to be proud that they want me. But I hate it, I hate it. And it’s why I feel—He stopped, smothering his imagination, not letting himself think. A dark face hovered in his mind, the scent of sweet grass twisted in the hair was in his nostrils. He began to shake all over, not knowing why.

  The basket reached the ground, and Pheidias led him by the arm to a quiet corner of the temple. They sat down. The old man watched in silence till the fit passed. Then he said, gently: ‘How are things with you at home?’

  Alcibiades paused, fumbling for words. ‘I don’t know whether I want Pericles to come back or not.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m not sure. When he’s away everything seems muddled in my mind. When he’s there I know that things are clear, that they’re going on the way they’ve got to go. But I don’t know if I like him,’ he concluded naïvely.

  ‘A lot of people here think like that, boy. You’ll realise some day that the one thing they’re really afraid of is thinking.’

  ‘I know he’s the greatest man in Athens,’ said the boy. ‘I’ve always admired him. But I’m frightened of him too. Sometimes I don’t think he’s really human. But he always makes me feel it’s a fine thing to be an Athenian, that I’m glad I’m the son of my father. One day I’m going to go on with his work.’

  ‘And what do you think his work is?’

  ‘Why, everyone knows that. Athens is the greatest city in Greece. It’s our duty to keep up her tradition.’

  ‘Quite a little orator, aren’t you?’ said Pheidias. ‘Your guardian seems to have taught you better than your schoolmaster.’

  Alcibiades flushed and stammered. ‘He didn’t teach me that.’

  ‘Who did, then?’

  ‘A—Aspasia.’

  Pheidias was silent for a moment. Then he said: ‘Does she teach all of you these kind of things?’

  ‘No. Just me. Xanthippus and Paralus are silly babies, and my brother Cleinias—’ He broke off. There came before his mind’s eye an ungainly caricature of himself; a creature of violent and inexplicable moods. One day he had found Cleinias with a bird he had caught. He was tearing it to pieces. When Alcibiades had spoken to him, he had stared at him as if he didn’t know him, and then had suddenly begun screaming and screaming, as though he would never stop. Alcibiades had been only six at the time, and Cleinias was two years younger. Alcibiades had run away with his fingers in his ears, a vision of blood and mess and feathers stamped on his mind. Ever since then he had heard, from time to time, the whispers that ran around about the noble families of Athens, the strain of madness and inbreeding that was said to crop out here and there every generation or so. Wasn’t even the great Miltiades’ father known as Cimon the Idiot? And so he came to watch, not only his brutish brother and Pericles’ own slow-witted children but also himself. Yet he could express nothing of what he felt. He concluded: And my brother’s a little beast. No one would teach him anything. But supposing I’m mad? The question kept beating in his brain: supposing I’m mad too?

  Pheidias said: ‘Anyway, you’re glad to be with Aspasia, aren’t you?’

  Glad to be with Aspasia? The memories crowded his mind. Early, vague memories of a tall, dark man in armour kissing him goodbye. His father. When he had read his Homer and found the passage where Hector said goodbye to his wife, and picked up his baby son, and the son was frightened by the nodding horsehair plume of his helmet, he remembered afresh. He remembered his mother; but not as a person rather as a soft warm figure that cried and cried as the tall man went away. Months later came the news that his father had been killed—at Coronea, fighting against the Thebans, as he knew afterwards. Then his mother had cried again, more than before, and all the slaves had torn their clothes and put ashes on their hair, and no one had washed him or put him to bed. Then one day a stranger had come to the house, and he had been terribly afraid. This man was tall, too, with a golden beard and clear eyes that looked right through you. He never looked at you, but through you to the wall behind, as if he didn’t really see you at all. His head was a funny shape, it stuck out at the back, and he remembered staring at it.

  The tall man had talked for a long time to his mother, and then his mother had told him he was going away to live with him. He had not cried at all, but his mother had; all he could recall of her was a streaked, tear-stained
face. Somehow the man didn’t seem so frightening after that, and he had gone with him quite cheerfully, walking by his side through the rush and bustle of the city and feeling very grown-up. He was not quite five years old.

  Then they had come to a house that was bigger than the one he had always known; and at the door was another woman. She was dark and slim, and her hair was thick and black. As she bent down to kiss him he smelt the sweet grass that he knew from summer-afternoons by the river, when his nurse had let him play by the bank, He saw, too, that her mouth was red. His mother’s mouth had never been red. And she was smiling. Somehow his mother had always been crying. She stroked his head, and her hand was warm and smooth. Then she had straightened up again, and kissed the big man; and he had felt suddenly hurt and lonely. But he clung to her long skirt, and they all went inside. He heard her say, ‘What about the other one?’ and the man had replied, ‘Deinomache’s bringing him herself tomorrow. He’s still a baby, you know’; and he had realised that his brother was coming too, that he couldn’t get away from him. He had begun to cry. Then the woman had taken him in her arms and soothed him, and he had smelt the grass more than ever, and another smell that he didn’t know, but which was the most beautiful smell he had ever known.

  That had been the beginning. He had met Xanthippus and Paralus, children of his own age who had been as cruel to him as only young children can be to a stranger. When his brother came they transferred some of their resentfulness to him; but as they all grew Cleinias had come to side with them against him. He remembered the day when he had first realised that he was cleverer than they were, and that was why they hated him. He remembered all the strange people who came to the house, and the endless talk that went on when he was supposed to be in bed. Sometimes he would get up when the rest were asleep—the children and Amycla, the old Spartan nurse who had been Pericles’ own nurse years before—and creep out from the women’s quarter and listen. Especially he remembered a man who talked more than all the rest, in a beautiful voice, of things which Alcibiades did not understand and which yet thrilled and disturbed him. His name was Sophocles, and when Alcibiades asked Amycla who he was, she had told him he was a great poet. But he had had to go to Aspasia to find out what a poet was.