“Spit!” I said. “It’s bad luck to price the unborn calf.” On this he went through every rite of aversion he could think of. I was afraid of his working himself into such a fever he would forget to act. Poor Anaxis, I could read his mind. He dreamed of getting his father’s land back, and setting up as a gentleman.
I would be glad to make money myself. I had enough saved to eat in a bad time, if it didn’t last too long, but not the money that lets one hold out for good roles. What took my mind much more, however, was the thought of getting launched in Athens—that, and something beyond. I knew what Anaxis guessed, that if the play won it would go on in Syracuse. Dion had told me. It would mean my seeing him again.
If you ask me what kind of love this was, I asked myself the same. I had known from the first he was unattainable as a god. I was too old for the love of a boy who reveres a man; nor, like a boy, did I wish to emulate. My calling was in my blood. Yet some need in my soul had known him for what it sought.
I walked out alone, the last night I was in Delphi, trying to reason with myself. It was late; the streets were empty; the votive statues looked at me in the moonlight, the bronzes showing the whites of their agate eyes, the painted marbles with a calm, blue gaze. “What do you want, Niko?” they seemed to ask. “Can you even say?”
I had found my way to the theater, and was walking uphill beside it. The crane, that engine of the gods, poked up like a finger against a pale glimmering sky. I climbed higher, and came to a victor’s chariot-trophy done in bronze, a car and horses with a tall lad holding the reins, not in action as a sculptor would do it now, all straining muscles and flying drapes, but just quietly standing there in his long robe, waiting for the start. “Here we are,” he seemed to say, “I and my horses, trained and ready. We have made ourselves all we can be, but we are mortal. Now it is with the gods.”
I thought, Were you real, young hero, or just a sculptor’s dream? But it works too the other way. The artist conceives the perfect athlete, the youth creates him. You were real; those big-boned hands and feet persuade me. You brought someone’s dream to pass. Homer’s? Pindar’s? Plato called the poets “makers of phantoms.” Yes, but sometimes they take on flesh and come back to say, “Hail, Father.” Well, here’s one the parent need not blush for. It makes one think.
I thought of Dion. He had caught a dream from Plato, and willed himself to be. A proud creation. Yet I too had dreamed, and many more. How not? When the springs are brack, everyone’s mind is on clear water. Look what Athens, and most of Hellas, has seen in our fathers’ time and ours. First war; then weakness, tyranny, revolution; then the breaking of the tyranny, and at last the good life could begin. But men’s fires burned low; fighting the base with base weapons had shrunk their souls; before one can make the good life, one must remember what it is. There’s always one more war to win, or one more election, before the good life; meantime, they wrangle about the good, those who still believe in it. So we dream. Of what? Some man sent by the gods, first to make us believe in something, if only in him, and then to lead us. That is it. We have dreamed a king.
I thought of the delight I had felt while he talked of kingship and its choices over the wine, of justice, mercy and command. I had thought it was because I was learning how kings and heroes should be played. Not so. When I had played kings and heroes, I had been making a likeness of what I wished for, like sailors whistling for a wind; it had been a conjuration. And that which I called had come.
Now I knew my own heart, I felt at peace. It made sense that I should love him just for being; there was nothing he need do for me but be real. Beyond that, I would only ask the gods for a word with him now and then, to prove he still lived and walked the earth. In return I would do for him, if I could, whatever he needed done, like getting a prize for his kinsman’s play.
I turned home, lifting my hand in salute to the horse-boy in the chariot. He had worked for it, and so must I.
We left Delphi next day, to go on with our tour. None of the sponsors stood us as much as a drink. They did not care two straws about the theater, but would as soon have provided flute-girls if it pleased the delegates; in fact they did that too, so Gyllis of Thebes told me. However, we were paid in full, which one can’t always count on, so they were welcome to keep their wine.
It was a good thing I had told Anaxis that Dion liked his work, for he never got asked up to the house. Of course Dion should have done so if he wanted to get the best from him; I had to cover it with some he or other. It had been his bad luck to be sober in the skeneroom when I was drunk; he had taken too much trouble, and Dion had written it down as sycophancy. There were people he was helpless with; rather than own it, he took refuge in his rank as in some high acropolis, out of their reach. All his life it made him enemies, and I suppose he must have known it; but he preferred this to showing weakness. That was the man.
When we got home, we put both our names down again for the protagonists’ list at Athens. Before long, I heard that my name was on. Anaxis heard nothing, but he had very good roles, and if the play won would stand a better chance next year.
We had done well for money on our tour, between Delphi, Corinth, Thebes and Megalopolis. I could live quite well till winter, when rehearsals for the Lenaia would begin. I went about, treating old friends who had treated me, buying plays for my library, taking exercise at the gymnasium, and so on. I went most often to the one at the Academy gardens, though it was a good way from my lodging, just in case Dion, instead of sailing straight home, might be staying with Plato first. Though he never appeared, I did not give up hope of him, knowing he was not a man who liked to be stared at in the streets.
Plato’s school was not far from the gymnasium, behind a grove of plane trees. One saw his young men, freshly bathed, oiled and dressed, going off that way after exercise, talking and laughing, but no horseplay. Sometimes two would stop by the Eros statue in the grove and offer a handful of flowers plucked on their way, touching hands, which I found charming. Once or twice when there was laughter I walked near to learn the joke; but I could never make head or tail of it.
They mostly dressed very well, some richly, though without ostentation. Those who were plainly dressed wore their clothes with an air, so one could not say if it was from poverty or choice.
Among the second sort was a youth I saw often in the garden, though not in the gymnasium. His looks always caught my eye; he had a boy’s smooth chin, but a fine clear profile, too serious for his age. Meeting him one day in the path, I took the chance to ask if Dion was a guest there.
“Not now.” He had a low pleasing voice, without the roughness of his years. “You’ve missed him by a month or two. He left with Plato, for Delphi, and went on home to Syracuse. Have you come to see him?”
I passed this off, and to cover it asked some questions about the school. The boy had seemed shy, but this unlocked his tongue. “It’s not a school at all, in the sense you mean. We meet to work, and think, and discuss, and experiment; and the younger learn from the elder. From Plato, everyone learns; but anyone can disagree, if he can make it good. Join us! It will change your life. It did mine.”
Plainly, he took me for a man of leisure. Before one has become known, one can hang one’s mask up and go anywhere, free as air; nobody knows one’s face. Even now I sometimes miss it
I said, “I don’t suppose I could raise the fee. How much a year?” If he was not too high-born and rich, I was hoping to see more of him.
“Why, nothing. I’ve never paid one drachma. As Plato says, Sokrates never charged; he said he liked to choose whom he conversed with.”