She called me last. After the skolions and catches, I gave her something new, a hymn to violet-eyed Aphrodite. Then I was king of the feast, till it broke up soon after. It was understood on such nights that the victor would be waiting to enjoy the prize.
No pleasure comes free. On the night of the javelin-thrower I lay awake; he was a handsome fellow, whom I knew she’d wanted; I guessed he was learning more about the management of his javelin than he’d ever known. Well, it is all gone by. Aphrodite herself could not raise my old spear now, and I can scarcely recall the rage of that wakeful night. Yet her beauty lives for me as clear as ever, her room with its treasures, her laugh, her friendship. Often, still, I find myself thinking, I must tell Lyra that.
We were gossips from the first, exchanging my court news for hers from the city. Between Hippias’ gravity and Hipparchos’ boys, courtesans scarcely passed the doors of either Archon. It had been different, old men said, in Pisistratos’ prime. Only performers and musicians were hired for the suppers now, and it was seldom that even dancing-girls were asked to sit with the guests. So Lyra valued my fresh bits of news, more than some of her costlier presents. I was glad therefore to bring her word that Onomakritos had been exiled, a scandal that shook the court for days.
As guardian of the oracles, he had great consequence with Hippias, who never so much as received a foreign envoy without consulting him first. He and his scrolls had been moved to the temple of Athene, and he was made free of the inner sanctuary as if he were a priest. This suited him well; he was a solemn man. Most of us got used to him; but not the young poet, Lasos of Hermione. It was his nature to dislike pomposity, and he let it show. So, when he had offered to present a dithyramb in honor of Theseus’ victorious return from Crete, and it had been accepted, Onomakritos produced some ancient oracle which said the day should not be honored by any ruler; it was most unlucky, King Aigeus having taken his death-leap then, on seeing his son’s black sail.
The feast was called off, and Lasos was enraged; he had already rehearsed his chorus. He came bursting into my house at breakfast-time, burning with his wrongs. I shared my food and wine with him—he had been too angry to sleep or eat—and said, to calm him, that between us we could surely get the piece put on to celebrate some other deed of Theseus. In respect of Aigeus’ death, the oracle did make a kind of sense.
“What kind of sense?” He ran his fingers through his fair hair; he was a stocky, pink-faced Argive. “It was a lucky day for Theseus, it made him King. And for Athens too, he was a better king than his father. No, it was spite, Simonides. It’s my belief that old fraud makes half his oracles up.”
“I’ve seen the scrolls; they look a hundred years old to me.”
“They look dirty, you mean. From old inscriptions I’ve seen, a few generations back they had a different way of writing, more like Phoenician. They’re hard to read. Not his. He makes them up, I swear.”
It was true that those I’d seen, I’d had no trouble in reading. “All the same,” I said, “you might find yourself well out of it after all. Suppose you sang your dithyramb, and by chance some piece of bad luck did happen. Or Hippias got some notion stuck in his mind, about rulers being put out of the way. Then, if anyone were ever mad enough to try such a thing, your song would have an unhappy echo.” I put this carefully; it was the fruit of Lyra’s gossip.
After some thought, he said I might be right, but if so it was the fault of that old dog-face, and it was time he was shown up. When, on the day he would have sung his dithyramb, we had an untimely hailstorm, I said that Onomakritos did seem to have smelled out an unfavorable day. But I might as well have saved my breath.
I was surprised when he began professing to Hippias a keen interest in ancient oracles; it seemed he had taken on a contest against a master. Most people took it for mere sycophancy, and I got a number of unsought compliments for not having stooped to it. I had my own suspicions, so thought it better to hold my peace, for Lasos’ sake. Onomakritos was far from a bad poet, if rather portentous as a man; and stood well not only with Hippias, but with Hipparchos too, having composed a whole Dionysiac rite for him with action, music and words. If he’d stayed in Athens, I shouldn’t wonder if he would have gone on to tragedy. He was a dangerous enemy; and I feared that Lasos, whom I liked upon the whole, would get the worst of it.
However, Hippias received very well his modest seekings, and at last was so pleased with his new pupil that he took him to the sanctuary to see the oracular scrolls. From there he rushed panting to my house, crying in the doorway, “I knew it, Simonides! I knew it!”
As it happened, I had just got half of a good line, and had had the rest almost in reach before he scattered my thoughts. I felt like telling him to jump off the Rock, but resigned myself to listen.
“You were right, some of those scrolls are old: the Pythians, the Orphics, the Mousaios. I asked to look at them; but no one’s to look at them any more, in case they crumble. Only Onomakritos, and guess why. Because he’s recopying them!”
Keeping my patience, I said that it seemed best, if they were to be read by men to come.
“Copying, he says. Hippias read me some of the Mousaios. Why, the old charlatan’s style is stamped all over it! The very plod of his feet. Listen to this.”
He had a sound memory, did Lasos. (How seldom one finds it now!) He had kept a dozen lines from a single hearing. They were very gnomic, about a lightning-flash from Macedon which would burn the Great King’s throne. I had to admit that, apart from their being nonsense, they did have an Onomakritan sound.
“Oh, some were crazier still. About Atlantis rising in the west, and aspiring to rule the moon, sending up heroes in flying chariots. And a thunderbolt that burned a whole city of men. I can’t give you above two lines of that, but they have his mark. He must be plotting something, just working up to it.”
“So what will you do? Tell Hippias?”
“No use. He has the ear of a cow. And I expect the old scrolls have all been tampered with to match. Never mind. From now on I see my way.” On which he took leave of me, and I tried to make a flying bird from the shed feathers of my shot-down song.
I had no quarrel of my own with Onomakritos; we had been judges together in one of the Homer contests, and worked on the recension. So I minded my own business. The Isthmian Games came on soon after; and the boxing was won by the son of one of my own tenants, young Glaukos of Karystos. His father found out by chance how strong he was; told him to fit a plowshare to the shaft, and came on him hammering it in with his naked fist. I’d encouraged him to enter; he was a sweet-natured boy whom I’d known from childhood, had never used his strength for bullying, had trained hard for the games, and looked almost godlike in the glow of victory. I made him an ode as a gift; I still think it is one of my best. After all this, Lasos’ feud slipped my mind; and the war was over before I knew it.
The inner shrine of Athene’s temple, before the Medes burned it down, was pretty full, and looked like an ancient lumber-room. It was less than thirty years old; but besides the sacred scrolls, it had all the goddess’s old clothes, discarded when the maidens rerobed her; any number of ritual vessels and emblems for processions; and a great scrap-heap of old iron and bronze, battle-trophies offered in thanksgiving. Nowadays they build treasuries to house such things, but then they were heaped up halfway to the roof, ships’ beaks and shields and helmets and so forth, from the Megarian and Salaminian wars. Behind all this stuff, it seems, Lasos had made himself a lair with a spyhole in it. He had seen Onomakritos visiting the place at daybreak, early enough to need a lamp, and bringing a fire-pot to kindle it. Lasos got up still earlier, feeling his way to his ambush in the dark.