He was never shy of me, as I’d first been of my teacher, a stranger I held in awe. Me he had known since he could remember, crowing to my songs while still in arms. His nurse would hush him, but he came in on the beat. By the time he was six, he was making songs of his own, and would sing me them with no more ado than a bird. When I began to teach him, he did not know it, thinking we were still at play. At bedtime he’d ask a song from me, as a prize for being good; and twice heard he’d have it all.
He left them no peace, his mother used to tell me, asking when Uncle Sim would be coming to stay again. Best of all, he loved me more for the music’s sake than he loved the music for mine. By that I knew which god had given him to me. So, when he was old enough to travel, I asked his father’s leave, and took him to Delos, to present him to Apollo.
He was entranced with the island, and cried out that the rocks were full of silver stars. (I didn’t steal that, I knew he would use it later.) When in the porch of Pisistratos’ temple he offered his little votive of a gilded dolphin, and the young priest bent smiling down to take it, he said, “This is for Apollo’s birthday. Will you wish him long life from me?” Yet, as he told me long after, he had a sense of what we were both about.
So far, so good. But when I was away he was learning nothing, and his faults would be settling in. Most songs he heard would be from the peasants and the women; well enough, like bread, but not as one’s only food. He went to school in Iulis to learn the lyre, but had a dull fool for a teacher, fit only to teach other fools by rote. He would soon have come to dislike it; no wonder, for he knew better himself. From being forever held back he had grown troublesome, and was always in hot water. All this I watched, fretting, till he was nearly nine; and then I talked to his parents.
His mother said, “But who will make him change his clothes when he gets wet?”
His father said, “You only see him when he’s showing off to you. I warn you, Sim, he can be as mischievous as an ape. I’m telling you for your good. He’ll plague you.”
“If he does I’ll send him back. I can afford him a steady pedagogue; I won’t let him run wild.”
“Why not wait a few years, till he’s steadier himself?”
“No. I can’t afford that, and nor can he.”
“But you are so much away!” cried Philomache.
“Oh, I shall take him with me. He’s tough as a nut. The road’s a great place for poets to learn the trade.”
She looked at her husband pleadingly. What she was pleading for, as I guessed, was his consent. The boy had been a handful at home, and getting worse.
Midylos said, “He’ll surely be in your way. You’re guest-friend to high-ranking men, these days.”
“He’s quick. He’ll take to the life faster than I did, and I was quick myself. Don’t be afraid, he’s ready.”
The end of it was, he came; on trial, they said, to see how it would answer.
He had been noisy enough on Keos; on the ship, the mate gave him a clip for climbing up the rigging; but once landed at Piraeus, he was as silent as a sponge. He had no time even to ask questions, lest he should be missing something. Riding on the pack-ass towards the city, he found his voice; by the time I’d told him all he wanted to know, I was in danger of losing mine. He had been nowhere, except that once to Delos in the quiet season. When we met some Nubians he was alarmed; he had never heard that men can be born black, and thought they were from the realm of Hades. I showed him they were carrying elephants’ teeth, which lasted him some time, until he saw his first horse. Horses are forbidden under Kean law; but he knew what it was, and shared it with me in one enraptured glance.
I lost no time in buying him a pedagogue; a man of Illyrian race, slave-born in a good house, and speaking very fair Greek. Brought up in Athens, he knew where the boy could safely go, and where not; he had done the same work before, and had been sold when his charge outgrew him. He took the boy to school and back, and taught him to look after himself. I would not have him waited on, for I seldom travel with servants; a good mule and pack-ass are less trouble and of more use. This man, Philemon, was honest and kindly, and I took care to treat him well. It made him too easygoing, as we found when his charge slipped off to Piraeus, and was nearly stolen by a Tyrian slaver. He would have walked on board—“to be shown the ship”—but for the luck of an acquaintance knowing who he was. He would never have been seen again, and for his good I beat him; but even so, he begged me not to beat Philemon, to whom he’d lied when asked where he was going. I rejoiced that he had justice in his soul, but this was no time to praise it.
As a rule, to keep him well behaved one had only to threaten him with missing the next procession or choral sacrifice, or his next piece of Homer. He never ailed, except once from eating green figs; though he had not lived as hard as I’d done at his age, on Keos no one is pampered. I knew he would be a good boy for the road.
By the time he was ten, he was traveling with me. Even then he was not a burden; over the years, he’s done far more for me than ever I did for him. Where we were guests, he would shake down among the family boys, or lay his pallet by mine. Like me, he could drink the water in most places without getting a flux. Once a scorpion bit him; he was weeping with pain, but would let no one touch it, only asking for me. He was right, in that ignorant village; I nicked the wound and sucked it, and bound it with a cloth wrung out in hot water mixed with myrrh, as a Euboian herb-wife had taught me. When the pain was gone, he said it was a pity Philoktetes had not had me there to heal his wounded foot; I might even have cured Achilles. To this day, he has the white scar of my knife upon his ankle-bone.
On the road he’d make his songs, as I used to do; I had to remind myself that I’d been five years older. I got on with my thoughts, and asked no questions; sometimes he’d read one in my eye, and say, “It’s not finished yet.” Sometimes it never was; he would say, “It didn’t come out right.” I hoped he’d not thrown away something better than he knew; though it is my faith that such things return to one, when their time has come to be born. So I let him alone, unless he was short of a word and came to me for it.
I had a great shock to come, though. I suppose I’m hardly yet over it. Coming in from the city, and by chance entering quietly, I heard his voice, and looked around the door. He was cross-legged on a stool, bent over a wax writing-tablet, chanting softly to himself; so taken up with his task that he did not hear me. I was surprised; as a rule he’d had enough of school when lessons were over. He gazed at the wax with his stylos poised, and hummed the same phrase two or three times over; then again with a different word. On that he rubbed at the wax, and wrote something. It was only then that I knew what he was doing. It shook me to my roots.
“Bacchylides!” I said. “What are you writing there?”
He jumped nearly out of his skin. He could not have looked more guilty if he had been caught robbing my money-chest.
And so he should, I thought. I could hardly believe what I’d heard and seen. I took a deep breath, to prepare my words. How could he ever become a bard, if he rotted his memory with writing, instead of printing his songs inside his skull? It was an offense to the Muse; if it took on, it would be the death of poetry. If he could not remember his Homer or his Sappho or his Anakreon, he must come to his teacher, as it was a pupil’s duty to do.