“Like to like. It’s not every man to whom good fortune gives good grace.” And I led round the talk to the pleasures of life in Athens, the good company, the Archons’ open hands, and so on. Before I’d half done, his green eyes slanted round at me, and he began to laugh.
“Stop, dear man!” He leaned from his supper-couch to grasp my shoulder. “Enough! I can take the next verse myself. I was to have come to Athens, and said all this to you. Anakreon, my dear fellow, can’t you persuade Simonides?’ What collectors these autarchs are.”
“Me!” I said, too startled to join the laughter. “But I thought—”
“Oh, that. I don’t think he even knows you’ve been here before. No one has liked to tell him what he missed. A good deal was happening in those days, you know, a host of people passing through. He first learned of you from Athens. Now you’re a treasure he’s panting to acquire. You’d have heard from him by now, but as it happens he’s in Naxos, visiting his old friend Lygdamis. Only just before he left, he urged me to go and bid for you.”
This time I laughed too; then I said, “But you didn’t come.”
“No.” He pushed his hair back, tilting his rose-wreath drunkenly. He was sober enough, though. “I put him off; I’m not sure why. Mostly from a feel in my skin, that all this”—he waved his hand towards the window and the spread of the town below—“can’t last much longer. No reasons; or too many. When the fruit is sweetest, it falls. One can’t tell the day.”
I looked round the beautiful room, and at the window above the teeming harbor, the shops full of foreign luxuries, the well-dressed crowds. Just across the strait were the hills of Persian-held Ionia, so near it seemed one could shout across and be heard. But that had been so for many years.
“He didn’t press me,” Anakreon said. “He thought that I might be jealous.”
“Do not tempt me into hubris, son of Apollo. Or your father will be after me.”
He laughed, and lifted his wine-cup. Then he grew serious. “Hubris. That’s what they are saying about the Tyrant. Well, yes and no. You know, he would never have burned those hostages. He gambled with them, and won. He always wins. The fruit hangs down full of juice, riper and heavier …” He dipped the rhyton into the masterpiece of a wine-cooler, wiped it with a drawn-thread napkin, and filled my cup. “But I ask myself, am I getting some warning from a god, or just feeling my skin too tight, like a sloughing snake? Does it concern any man but me?”
“Indeed. It concerns me, I can promise you.”
“Yes, we have been concerned for one another. Now, as I see it, if you go back and say that Anakreon feels beholden to his patron, but will be honored to visit Athens as your guest, just to pay his respects—that won’t set you back at court, will it? Then we can see.”
“Why, I shall be the happiest of men. Will you really come?”
“How not, when Simonides invites me? I shall come to Athens and say all I’ve been told to say, which you have not yet heard the half of.” He straightened his wreath, making a solemn face.
“But,” I said, “you have heard my piece; and what do you say to me?”
“Oh, once I’m in Athens, I suppose Hipparchos will do his business with me himself. Then my refusal will come from me, not you, and cast no shadow on you. After all, you did persuade me to come.”
“Refusal!” I felt as if I’d seen one of my father’s best sheep fall down a cliff, and I expect I showed it. “I thought you were saying yes.”
“I am sorry,” he said, with a smile that would have softened bronze. “I thought so too, until just this moment. No, it won’t do. He has been very good to me, you know. And in return I have offered praise which I can’t recant without dishonor.”
There is never an answer to that. I tried none. He pushed at his wreath, and it tilted over again.
“And then, of course, I’m in love.”
“Again?” Disappointment had made me cross.
“Come, come, my dear. A furnace is no cooler for last year’s fire … Maiden-faced boy, heedless of my pursuing, And all unknowing my soul’s charioteer. That is no longer quite true. But he would never leave his ancestral home for me, why should he? Yes, well, I’ve a good-healing heart, as soldiers tell you they have good-healing flesh. I could go now, and know I had left my patron at his height of fortune, not waited like a ship-rat to smell the leaky plank. And yet, and yet … Bear with me, my dear. Ionia was my world, and only this is left of it. I think I will see it out.”
There was no answer to that, either. I was not fool enough to spoil the rest of the evening. We drank and talked and drank and sang, and dawn was near when he lit me to my bed, having long since sent off the gracious Persian to get his beauty sleep.
Next day he asked some very pleasant people to meet me. My presence was never explained; it was enough, it seemed, that Simonides was visiting Anakreon. The noble Samian, his soul’s charioteer, was not on view. “Only a fool,” he said to me in private, “will show a purse of gold to a shipload of pirates. I could tell you things …” It was a good party, and next day I took ship for Athens.
Hipparchos was so charmed to hear of Anakreon’s visit that I got anxious, and warned him not to expect too much. One never liked the thought of disappointing him. All I’d managed to do, I said, was tempt Anakreon with the glory and fame of Athens, so that he longed to visit it; and had ventured to promise it would surpass his hopes.
This would ensure him a dazzling fee for his recital, a small return for his help and kindness. Often I wonder that bards will be so silly as to bicker with their peers, and lower themselves with jealousy; when, if we are friends, we can not only learn from one another, but do each other useful good turns like this.
He came to Athens the next month. Everyone had a triumph. He did: he performed at Hipparchos’ house before everyone worthy the privilege, enchanting our ears, melting our hearts, and leading us at will from mirth to tears. I had one: he thanked me publicly for having led him, like a guiding Hermes from Olympos, to the delights of this splendid city. Even Hipparchos had one: Anakreon told him that the graces of his court (with its famous ornament, the great Simonides) made a singer who had failed to visit it seem only half a Greek. After their private interview, my patron came to me in the sweetest of tempers, saying, “Well, you did your part, my dear Simonides. He would come, without a doubt, but for his obligations. He didn’t say that in so many words, but it was plain to me. Wasn’t it charming, the little song he made about Kallias at the hunt?” (Kallias, a dashing horseman, was the current friend, as I’d remembered to tell Anakreon.) “I shan’t repeat all his praise of you, it would make you too proud to live with. Mark my words, we shall see him in Athens yet.”
Besides all this, it was a triumph for Polykrates, when his favorite poet returned to say how they’d tried in vain to steal him away to Athens, but Samos had his heart. I have lived a long time; but in the art of pleasing everyone while betraying no one, I have never met anyone to touch Anakreon.
6
I KEPT MY LAND, and cared for it. It was part of my freedom; and I felt its people my charge. I told Hipparchos at the outset that I had a family estate I should sometimes need to visit; one must start as one means to go on. He said with his easy good manners that of course I must look after my inheritance; hinting, just as politely, that he would rather it was not when he was giving an important party, or entertaining some foreign guest of honor. He gave me good notice of such things; one always knew where one was with him. I in turn would give good notice to Dorothea; now that I came less often, she liked to prepare a feast. It was coming to seem more her house than mine, and I would not spoil her hospitality by taking her unprepared.