He found me a good maid to cook for me and keep house, a free-woman, cheerful, black-haired and ruddy, who, when she sang about the place, did it in tune. One day, when he came with his morning business, he looked about at the room, remarked on the well-kept furniture, and, gazing at the sideboard, said, “That Dorothea, she’s a rare admiration for you.”
I pricked an ear. Noting he had a kindness for her, I took it they were bedmates, and had not presumed on bright smiles and dainty cooking.
“She’s a good girl; whose daughter is she?”
He scratched his ear. “Well, sir, that’s a question. She’s known as Smikros the pilot’s daughter, but he claimed he’d been a two-month at sea when she was got. Then he drowned in a squall off Rhenaia, so it was all one to him. But it’s stood in her way, and the offers she’s had weren’t fit for her. She reckons she’s well placed where she is.”
His eye enlightened me. “Well,” I said, “I daresay she’s not been without a father’s care, whoever he may be. I think she and I will get on well together.”
I was right in this. Of course I was not the first; she took it easily, as something we had both been expecting. Her cheerful friendliness went on much the same; she felt that she was now in her proper place, and could manage things more to my advantage. When I offered to buy a slave for her, she said she liked things done her own way, and would never have the patience to stand over some clumsy slut. She was the best-natured of girls, teaching me her old work songs, but always quiet when I was making a song myself. She bore no bastards—the women of the island have their ways—and it startled me when one night, as she was taking off her gown, she asked me whom I was betrothed to.
“Why, to no one. I would never have lived with you, and kept such a thing to myself.”
“Wouldn’t you, Sim? One never knows with the gentry. Every time you’ve been over to Keos, I’ve wondered if you’d come back with a bride.”
She did not mean it. She well knew I’d have told her; she just liked to hear it said. But, though I could say it, there were other things best said, too.
“My little quail, I’m not only not betrothed, I left home just to avoid it. But …”
“Oh, you will.” She had folded her gown, and stood up with her hands on her firm white hips. “You’ll want a son to leave the place to, and then you’ll do it. Don’t make me promises, or I might not take it so well.” She was smiling; she had her pride.
“Get into bed, or you’ll come out in gooseflesh. I’m not one for promises. Anything can happen to anyone; I saw that in Ionia. Men born in riches have ended up washing a Persian’s floors. But long ago I made my mind up not to marry, and I don’t expect to change it. You’re all I need in a woman, my honeycomb. I wish I were all you need in a man.”
She laughed and reached her hand out; but I took it in mine. “No, wait. Poets are traveling men. And I’ve barely begun my travels.”
“Why, for sure you must travel, Sim. I know that. It’s like seeing the great cities myself, to hear you come back and tell of them. While you’re gone I can get the cheeses made, and the house turned out, and set something up on the loom.”
“Like Penelope,” I said. I wanted her to understand.
“Oh no, Sim. No hangers-on for me. My father would soon see them to rights.”
“Penelope had a long time to wait. That’s what I meant.” Her hand fell quiet. I said, “Once a poet has made a name, he looks for a patron. And a patron wants his favored poet to be his house-guest most of the year.”
“I’ve heard of that.” She was thoughtful, not angry. “But this is good land. You’ll never need to eat another man’s bread.”
“Not from want, no. That’s why this land was given me. But I must go where I’ll be heard.”
“Yes, Sim,” she said, and lay thinking. I blamed myself for not having talked of all this before. Most people I met needed no telling.
“Praise-singing is like love,” I said. “You do it from the heart, or you’re a whore. If a man I despise invites me, I can say no, and wait for someone better. But one day it will come. If you feel it’s no life for you here alone, waiting for me to visit when I can, then I’ll give you a dower, and find some old grannie to keep the house for me.
“You’ll keep the place? You’ll not sell it?” She was her father’s child, both feet firm on the ground.
“No indeed; it’s family land.”
“Why then, what kind of fool do you take me for? I’ve a good home and a good man; and what’s more, I’m respected now. You don’t know how it was sometimes in the village. But now, there’s many women married to sailors, or men who’ve gone off to fight for pay in foreign wars, would be glad to change with me. They’ve the cold bed, and hunger with it; and mostly their man won’t make a name to bring them credit. If you’ve kept from marrying so that no one can blame you for being long away, that’s fair dealing. You’ll get no scolding here, Sim. We’re folk who fill each other’s needs.”
Ah well. I’m glad I can bring back those old Euboian days, and Dorothea when she was young. As for Athens, that comes back like yesterday.
It has all gone, now. Oh yes, they will be making it very fine. By the time they’re done, my Athens will be nothing to it. At one time, they were vowing they’d keep the High City just as the Medes had left it, to witness their impiety. They soon got tired of that, as who would not; but one learns not to talk sense to men at such a time. When they came round, they resolved at least not to mend what the barbarians had defiled with blood and fire. It can all go for rubble, to fill in the new foundations or raise the bastions up. Then they will build their victory ode in marble. Well, they have the right.
Aischylos was in Sicily a few years back—turned fifty, which I can hardly credit yet—and said to me over a jar of Etna wine, “It was you, Simonides, who first opened my ear to song. But it was those days that taught me tragedy.”
I could not keep from smiling. “If you mean what I think, son of Euphorion, in those days you were ten years old.”
“True, master of memory. And what I saw has mixed with what I’ve heard, most of all from you; and those again with what my mind’s eye has made of them. It’s all one cloth now, I shall never tease out the threads. But it taught me tragedy, all the same.”
“Yes. I can understand it. You grew up knowing the end, as your audience knows when the play begins that it will end with Agamemnon dead. But when you were ten I was forty; when I first saw Athens, your father was hardly born. The end came to us from a bright noon sky.”
He sat staring out through the porch towards the harbor, knitting his fair thick brows above his beaky nose; a strong man still, whose greatest pride is that he fought at Marathon. I could see him setting the ancient tale to his own sonorous music. No, he never knew the lyric years.
There was building then, too. I suppose it is all forgotten now. The new High City is to be for the gods alone; no human ruler shall have a stronghold there any more. It will be a dedication of the people, a pledge of freedom from Medes and tyrants. A great conception. I shan’t live to see even the first stones laid. It’s half ruin still, half builders’ yard.
The Medes burned the gatehouse. By the time they’d cleared the fallen timbers, it was just as I remembered it when I first set foot there; a gap in the oldest wall, that the old men called King Theseus’ Gate. Like enough he would have had one there. The stones were dark with time, mottled with lichen, and with ancient stains which they used to call the blood of the Amazons. The threshold was sunny, and lizards lived there.
From this dark entry, you came out into gleaming light. (The Mysteries teach us the power of that.) Much was brand-new, but everything seemed to be, it was kept so bright, the bronzes shining like gold, the paint on the marble never left to fade. Yet in all the splendor there was something welcoming, homelike; nothing on the great hubristic Samos scale. There were the comings and goings of a great house, not a palace; though the Athenians always said that the Palace of Erechtheus used to stand on that very site where the Archon built.