How easily men talk, how different is the acted deed. I recalled the man Charias, who had spoken to Hippias on his platform; the Alkmaionid who had exchanged a sign with Aristogeiton in the street. He must have been in the plot, and had seemed to be betraying it. So they resolved to do what they could, to make sure at least of Hipparchos, the author of their wrongs, instead of falling on Hippias first with their confederates, as they’d planned. Yet, from what I saw, I am sure he was not giving the Archon warning—more likely keeping him in talk to have him ready for them, but without telling them first what he would do. Few men can think such things through in the fearful time of action, or remember to expect the unexpected.
Bacchylides said, “He was dead almost before I understood what was really happening. It was the same with everyone, the people round, even the guards. There were only one or two of them, not near him; they’d just been keeping the precinct clear of crowds. While everyone was still stunned, or milling about, Harmodios leaped on the block where Hipparchos had been standing, and cried out, ‘Athenians! Strike for freedom! Death to the tyrants!’ Aristogeiton took it up; but the people just stared, no one came forward; then the guards rushed to Harmodios and seized him.
“You know, in war” (it is the man who is speaking now) “how they kill on the field, when the word is to give no quarter. They wrenched the blood-stained dagger out of his hand, pulled back his head by the hair and slit his throat. He had long, fair hair, and the scarlet blood poured into it. I stared in horror, and did not see how Aristogeiton got away. Someone in the crowd must have let him through, and after that he would be among people who knew nothing yet.”
Thus the man. The pale-faced boy, sitting by me on the tomb, said, “But he avenged his honor. He did do that.” Then he flung himself down on the old green-stained marble, shaken with weeping. I offered what comfort I could till he had done.
Yes, I thought; it was as Achilles’ heir that he must have seen himself; inheritor of the ancient laws, which say a man lives by his pride and shall defend it to the death: Harmodios son of Proxenos son of Harmodios, and so on back to some well-greaved Achaian at Troy. And Aristogeiton, to whom Bacchylides, concerned for his hero only, had paid so little heed? The youth had killed for pride, but the man for love: from anger at the hurt to his beloved, and that one man should have the power to do it; from fear that he had power to take the beloved away. I wondered if they had caught him yet, and guessed that Harmodios would prove more fortunate. I thought of Hippias’ face.
I said to the boy, as his sobs quietened, “The anger of Achilles. Many brave men’s souls it flung to the house of Hades, and left the flesh of heroes to feast dogs and kites.”
“That the will of Zeus might be fulfilled?” But I had no answer. Nor have I now.
Great things came after; but the city I knew was already great. In all men is evil sleeping; the good man is he who will not awaken it, in himself or in other men. In Hippias that day there had been a great awakening. So Aristogeiton found in his hard dying. So the few men of his following found, down in the Kerameikos, when the guards had found they had had daggers as well as spears.
Courage and love; it is well that they should be honored, even by men who have forgotten the truth, or never known it, or have lied about it to serve a cause. Those proud young oligarchs of my vanished city stand in the new one, cast in immortal bronze, and the democrats do them honor. Already people say that they set Athens free, though they threw her into a reign of fear, and only the Spartans and Alkmaionids broke it. They are even starting to say that Hipparchos was First Archon and Pisistratos’ heir; though it seems to me like yesterday that Hippias, all else failing him, crawled to the Medes to put him back in Athens as their governor, and was flung back from the gallant shore of Marathon, and crept off with the Medes to die.
I sat by the boy, as he wiped away his tears and begged my pardon for them; I thought of the face of Hippias; and suddenly my roots were loosened from Athens’ walls. As at Keos, as at Ephesos, as at Samos, it was time to go. We are wanderers all.
I said, “We must stay awhile, or the Archon will think we have some reason to run away. Let us go home now and sit in quiet. It’s no time to be running about the city.”
I stood up. Bacchylides slung the kithara on his shoulder, giving it a long look. It was just coming home to him that the wrath of Achilles had sent us both into exile. Yes; but before Achilles’ anger had come the hubris of Agamemnon, King of Men. It is grief to see a hero go down to the house of Hades. It is bitter to lose a friend to evil, before one loses him to death.
But I had the boy to think of just now. I said, “We shall come back again. All that I know of Athens tells me so. A city is not as great as its rulers only. It is as great as its gods. I have served them most; and I think the city knows it.”
“And its heroes,” said the boy. “You have sung them too. Perhaps it was because of you that he died so bravely.” He was feeling better now, and wanted to give some comfort back to me, in return for mine to him. “You sang it, and he did it. Have you thought of that?”
AUTHOR’S NOTE
IF THE LIVES OF Greek poets in the latter half of the sixth century are to be understood, we must be aware more of contrasts than of parallels with the condition of writers today.
It was only on the very lowest level, that of the marketplace entertainer, that the singer or reciter made his living from a public audience. Circulation of the written word was still unknown, and compositions were committed to writing only for personal reference, if at all. Many surviving fragments of the century’s great lyric poets may have been recorded only after a long circulation by word of mouth. It is certain that the whole of Homer was so transmitted for some two centuries, and may incorporate material centuries older still, over a stretch of time during which the art of writing had entirely perished; Pisistratos’ collation came just in time to rescue him for a literate society. During the Dark Age, and into the dawn of the archaic renaissance, the libraries of the bards were contained entirely within their heads.
Before the passing of the powerful aristocratic oligarchies, private means would assure both the poet’s independence and an audience of his peers: Sappho, Alkaios, Solon, had no need of patronage. This situation was changed by the advent of the “tyrants.”
It is little understood today that nearly all the Greek tyrants were well to the left of the oligarchies they superseded, and, though invariably of aristocratic birth themselves, emerged as champions of underprivileged majorities. The term itself had originally a neutral connotation, like the word “dictator” in Rome. Its later meaning derived from the excesses of some tyrants, once all restraints on their exercise of power had been removed. The blanket generalization that “absolute power corrupts absolutely” is a historical absurdity (compare, for instance, Nero with Marcus Aurelius); and tyrants came in all shades of personality from benign father-figures to sadistic monsters. What they had in common was that they were all heads of state, in whom resided the poet’s only hope of public performance and recognition, even though he might be a man of property. Thus his situation was quite different from that of writers in other ages of patronage, such as Shakespeare or Samuel Johnson, who could pick up a living in time of need through the theater or the printing press.
Prose composition, dependent wholly on writing, had not yet begun; and neither, therefore, had history or biography. Anyone trying to piece together the lives and characters of the archaic poets must turn to the researches of scholars, among whom the late Sir Maurice Bowra has pride of place, who have collected from all kinds of scattered sources the fragments of their work, and references or quotations by other, often much later, classical authors. Thus the record of their lives is skeletal when it is even that; and their treatment in fiction leaves the novelist with many more lacunae to fill in than when dealing with a much-chronicled figure such as Alexander the Great.