“He was strong.” He rubbed the dog’s ears to quiet it. “He never exercised, but he was as strong as an ox. Nothing ever ailed him.”
“It’s the lean man lives long. Believe me, he is dead.”
He sat looking before him, like a sick man weak from a fever that is leaving him. “Come, eat,” I said, “or my brother’s wife will be on at me. What was wrong with the supper, Sim, that the great Anakreon wouldn’t touch it?”
A smile flickered on his face. “Sim? Do they truly call you that at home? Do they truly dare?” After that he picked at the food; before long I got most of it into him, and the posset too. In the end he grew quite garrulous, as men do sometimes after a shock.
“His fate, Simonides, what an implacable fate! It was resolved to have him. It had marked him down, as the hunter marks the deer with the longest horns, because he has the shell for a lyre and is impatient to finish it. What drove him? What madness, to trust that man. He had even insulted him already; I know, I was there. He had sent an envoy to Samos, some business about ships. The man behaved like an envoy from king to king. Well, Polykrates had done things in his day, we all know that; but he looked as pure as lilies, anywhere near Oroites. The man stank, and had done for years. The greed of a crocodile, murder for any whim, oppression; cruelty most of all. Well, he may pay for it yet, now that Kambyses is dying.”
“What?” I cried, jumping nearly out of my skin. “The Great King, dying? No one has heard a word of it. Is it true?”
He passed a hand across his forehead. “I am sorry. Didn’t I tell you? I’ve hardly known what I’m saying these last two days. I daresay it’s true. Sikinnos told me before he left. My gracious Persian, you used to call him. He always knew everything, I don’t know how. ‘The Great King’s wound has mortified,’ he said.”
“What wound?” This news would have made the day for Theas and his friends, and only now I heard it.
“I don’t know.” He pushed the heels of his hands against his eyes. “He didn’t say, or perhaps I wasn’t attending. I’d only just heard the other thing. What were we talking about just now?”
“Oroites’ insolent envoy.”
“Oh, yes. It happened we were on our own that evening. I’d been singing something he wanted to hear again. Bathyllos had been playing for me—you remember him? His flute-playing improved as his looks went off. When this envoy was announced, and we could hear him outside, demanding audience at once, Polykrates said … What’s that noise?”
He had gone paler, if that could be. Poor man, he was at the end of his tether. “It’s some dog out there,” I said. “It’s nothing, the house must have a dozen.”
It did seem, as I listened, that there were four or five outside. I could hear snufflings from tenor down to bass. So could Blossom. She had leaped from her master’s lap, and, squeaking softly, was pressing her pitch-black nose to the crack under the door. Now that I thought of it, some Samian dogs had trailed us down to the harbor.
“Anakreon,” I said, “you don’t think that bitch of yours …?”
“Oh, no!” He sounded quite like himself again. “It can’t be half a year … Oh, Herakles!”
“Not Herakles, I fear, but Aphrodite.” A huge deep bark sounded outside. Kean shepherd dogs are as big as wolfhounds. Blossom scrabbled eagerly at the door; she had done her duty faithfully, and thought she had a right to something for herself. Two dogs started snapping at each other; Kean watchdogs are fierce. “If I open this door,” I said, “we shall have them all in here. Can’t you pick her up?”
He grabbed her, wriggling, and reproaching his ingratitude with her melting eyes. The suitors stayed, however, and we should have been besieged all night, if they had not started to do battle for right of precedence. This drew the kennel-man, who had to get help before he could whip them off.
I looked round for the Helen who had caused the war. Like the first one, she had gone home again, and was curled at Anakreon’s side. What with sorrow and weariness and poppy-juice, sleep had at last caught up with him. He never stirred when I covered them both with the blanket.
After that, I went down to tell my brother, and anyone else who was still there, that the Great King was said to be dying. I remembered that Kambyses, who had killed so many men, had not begotten any. His only brother he had already murdered. He had no heir. Had he been a king in Homer, one would have foreseen great contests at his funeral games.
8
FOR SOME TIME, ALL eyes in Greece were turned on Persia. First we heard that Kambyses’ brother had after all survived, and assumed the throne. He passed many welcome laws, remitted taxes, and was well thought of, except that nobody ever saw him. After some months, he turned out to be a pretender. It was revealed by a concubine, and confirmed by the man who knew it best of all; he had cut the real brother’s throat on Kambyses’ orders. Having declared this, he leaped off the citadel wall, leaving Persia an anarchy. This is not a state which commends itself to Persians. Several lords made a pact together, first to kill the pretender, then to choose a king from among themselves by seeking a sign from heaven. They got into the Palace and did the deed, after which, as the world knows, Darius got the sign. It was to be that the chosen man’s horse would be the first to neigh after sunrise. So they all rode eastward together; and if Darius was the only one of them with horse-sense enough to know that a stallion will whinny when he scents his favorite mare, I should think the Persians were lucky not to get one of the others.
With all this, rumor had not much time for Samos; on the other hand, news came in faster from there. It appeared that the island was still being ruled by Polykrates’ regent whom he’d left behind to do it; and this was the same man, Maiandrios, who had been his envoy beforehand, to view Oroites’ promised gold.
Anakreon said to me, “I saw something of this. All we knew at first was that Polykrates was dead. So much we’d feared and half expected. I didn’t spend those first days in the state you found me in, when I’d just learned how he died. Before that I looked about. Maiandrios started with a great flourish about putting an end to tyranny; talked about setting up an altar to Zeus the Liberator. But I don’t remember any word about elections.”
Certainly none were held; in fact, when the opposition looked dangerous, Maiandrios invited its leaders to a conference, and chained them up in the castle dungeons. Then he moved into the fort himself, which Polykrates had never needed to do, and set about getting rid of anyone still at large whom he distrusted.
“Do you know what I think?” said Anakreon when this news came in. “He was in it from the beginning. Whose word did we have but his, about all this deceitful treasure? It’s my belief the only gold he ever saw in Sardis was what Oroites bought him with. I hope some god makes them both pay.” Maybe one did; for Darius was not long on the throne before he got rid of Oroites. Maiandrios did not rule long either; but while his tyranny lasted, the Samians looked back on Polykrates’ reign as a carefree summer.
Poets, musicians, sculptors, painters and potters were soon in flight before he had time to murder them; arriving mostly at Piraeus. Nearly all the talent from Polykrates’ court attached itself to the Archons’. Athens seemed to grow more splendid every day.
Ibykos got away by the skin of his teeth. He’d believed in Maiandrios at first, but, thinking it unseemly to court a new patron in the house of a murdered benefactor, had lived privately and not come forward with any praise. It was not long before he had word the Tyrant’s men were looking for him as a man suspected of treason; so he got off on a fishing-boat that night.
Hipparchos received him civilly, but did not ask him to remain. In the past he’d been a long time in Sikyon, down in the Argolid, a guest of the house of Kleisthenes; and ever since they’d married into the Alkmaionids, the Archons had counted them enemies. That was an undying feud, and poor old Ibykos had got himself mixed up in it.