The Praise Singer
A Novel
Mary Renault
Contents
Sicily
Keos
1
2
3
4
Samos
1
2
3
Athens
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
The Sacred Way
1
2
3
4
5
Author’s Note
Chronology
A Biography of Mary Renault
So I shall never waste my life-span in a vain useless hope, seeking what cannot be, a flawless man among us all who feed on the fruits of the broad earth. If I find him, I will bring you news.
But I praise and love every man who does nothing base from free will. Against necessity, even gods do not fight.
SIMONIDES
SICILY
A GOOD SONG, I think. The end’s good—that came to me in one piece—and the rest will do. The boy will need to write it, I suppose, as well as hear it. Trusting to the pen; a disgrace, and he with his own name made. But write he will, never keep it in the place between his ears. And even then he won’t get it right alone. I still do better after one hearing of something new than he can after three. I doubt he’d keep even his own songs for long, if he didn’t write them. So what can I do, unless I’m to be remembered only by what’s carved in marble? Tell them in Lakedaimon, passer-by, that here, obedient to their word, we lie. They’ll remember that.
That was the year Anakreon died. He had all his songs safe in his head. He proved us that at the city feast after Marathon; anything we asked for, there it was. Aischylos … no, he wasn’t there, he was in mourning for his brother. I had sung first, of course. And Anakreon finished with something new to all of us, fifty years old. You could hear him too, short of teeth as he was by then. We Ionian poets are a long-lived breed.
Well, his songs are sung, and will be unless the barbarians come back again; and the ships at Salamis have settled that. They sing him; but the young men don’t get him right. Just a word here and there; but it would have grated his fine ear. Men forget how to write upon the mind. To hear, and keep: that is our heritage from the Sons of Homer. Sometimes I think I shall die their only heir. Themistokles asked if I had a secret art of memory; which I can forgive in a man with no education to speak of. Practice, practice, that’s all; but who wants to hear nowadays about hard work? Ah, they say, Simonides will take his secret to the grave with him. At eighty-three he can’t have much more use for it; but old men get miserly.
Well, I bow to the times. Only last year I recited for some scrivener of King Hieron’s my whole stock of Anakreon’s songs, for fear some should disappear with me. And having done that, I thought I’d best turn to and make a book of my own, lest book-taught slovens should garble me when I’m dead. I’ve not yet come down to scratching on wax myself; the boy does that, and I don’t let him demean himself with fair-copying. He must learn young what is due to us. (Yes, well, I must try to keep in mind that he’s turned forty.)
King Hieron will send us a clerk, as he would a physician or a cook. Yes, I’m well-found here, and winter warmth pays for the hot summers. I have not troubled the physician much. Best of good things, sweet health. That, every wanderer knows. Now I’ve done with wandering, give me one day at a time, on a vine-shaded Sicilian porch with a lyre beside me, and memory in my head.
Memory, that’s the thing. I’ve met few men who reached my years, and they were peasants, or else in second childhood. Who knows what each day may bring? Sometimes when all’s quiet at night I take my lamp to the book-chest. Once or twice I’ve even taken a pen in hand, when I’ve thought of a happier word. If the boy sees my marks, he keeps quiet about it. What a deal of reed-paper poems do take up, that will lie in a man’s head as small as a bee-grub in the comb. A dozen rolls. I have had to number the outsides, to know what’s in them.
I shall leave my scrolls, like the potter’s cup and the sculptor’s marble, for what they’re worth. Marble can break; the cup is a crock thrown in the well; paper burns warm on a winter night. I have seen too much pass away. So when they come to me, as they do from King Hieron down, asking about the days before they were begotten, I tell them what deserves remembrance, even if it keeps me up when I crave for bed. The true songs are still in the minds of men.
KEOS
1
KEOS IS STERN. YOU’D not suppose so from the proverb, that it knows not the horse nor ox, but is rich in the gladdening vine-fruit, and brings forth poets. That last had not been added, when I was born. On the other hand, it is a lie that on Keos a man has to take hemlock when he reaches sixty. That was only in the old siege when the warriors had to be kept alive. Nowadays, it is just considered good manners.
Iulis, my native city, is high up the mountain, above Koressia harbor. I used to sit on a rock with my father’s sheep around me, looking at the foreign sails and wondering where they came from; they thread the Kyklades from all four corners of the world. I could seldom go down to see. My father was not a man to leave his land to a steward while he sat at ease, nor let his sons go sightseeing. My elder brother, Theasides, got leave from work much oftener than I; not because he was the heir, which would have made it heavier, but because he was good with the disk and javelin and a fine pankratiast, and had to train for the games to do the family credit. He was handsome too. My parents never told me in so many words that they preferred me out of sight, but they had no need. I seemed to have known it from my birth.
Keeping out of sight, one is a good deal alone. But if one is short of company, one can always make it. I kept, you might say, the very best company in Keos.
If a fine ship with a painted sail passed proudly by the port, keeping its mystery, for me it was the Argo with its talking prow and its crew of heroes, going north to the bewitched Kolchian shore. If a hawk hovered, I saw winged Perseus poised for his flashing swoop; grasping, like the hawk its prey, the Gorgon’s deadly head to freeze the dragon. The boulder I sat on had been flung by Herakles, playing ball as a boy. When I drove my flock to pasture, I was with Achilles on some great cattle-raid, bringing the spoils of a plundered city back to camp.
As I dreamed I sang, as far back as I can remember. I needed only to be alone, among the creatures of my thought, and the songs would come. Childish, at first; tunes picked up from the work songs of my father’s thralls, or the women weaving. They satisfied me, till I was old enough to be taken to the Apollo festival, and heard a rhapsodist chanting his bit of Homer, and some local poet taking his choir through a choral ode. I suppose I was nine or ten.
For the first time, I knew that my secret joy was a thing grown men could make a life of, even a living. I did not yet hope that for myself. I only dreamed of it, as I’d dreamed of fighting at Troy; but on the mountain I dreamed aloud. When some old ewes pushed up to see what all the noise was about, I felt like Orpheus, and wished that Keos had lions to be enchanted. Then I would go home at night, and be silent in a corner. No wonder my father thought me a sullen boy. But what could I have said to him?
Time passed; I was twelve, thirteen; I heard the singing at the festivals; I understood that these men, happy beyond imagining, had all once been boys like me, and somehow achieved their bliss. My dreams turned to wishes; but they could find no voice, except in secret on the mountain. Soon I would be a man, just one of my father’s farm-hands. A poet? I could as soon have told him I wanted to be a Scythian king. I would be lucky if he did no worse than laugh. I began to know bitterness, and despair.