Mirrors (13 page)

He saw humanity as a five-story pyramid.

On top, the whites.

Over the next three floors, the races of dirty skin marred original purity: Australian Aborigines, American Indians, yellow Asians. Underneath them all, deformed without and within, were the blacks of Africa.

Big-S Science has always put black people in the basement.

In 1863, the Anthropological Society of London concluded that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites, and only Europeans had the ability to “humanize and civilize” them. Europe dedicated its best energies to this noble mission but did not succeed. Nearly a century and a half later, in 2007, an American, James Watson, winner of the Nobel Prize in medicine, confirmed that blacks were still less intelligent.

THE LOVE OF LOVES

King Solomon sang to the most womanly of his women. He sang to her body and to the door to her body and to the lushness of the shared bed.

The Song of Songs is not the least like the other books of the Bible of Jerusalem. Why is it there?

According to the rabbis, it is an allegory of God’s love for Israel. According to the priests, a jubilant homage to Christ’s marriage to the Church. But not a single verse mentions God, much less Christ or the Church, which emerged long after the Song was sung.

It seems more likely that this encounter between a Jewish king and a black woman was a celebration of human passion and of the diversity of our colors.

“Better than wine are the kisses of your lips,” the woman sang.

And in the version that has lasted to our days, she also sang:

“I am black, but I am beautiful,”

and she excused herself, attributing her color to her work in the sun, in the vineyards.

Other versions, however, insist the “but” was snuck in. She sang:

“I am black, and I am beautiful.”

ALEXANDER

Demosthenes mocked him:

“This boy wants altars. Well, that much we’ll give him.”

The boy was Alexander the Great. He claimed descent from Heracles and Achilles. He liked to call himself “the invincible god.” By then he had been wounded eight times and was still conquering the world.

He began by crowning himself king of Macedonia, after killing all his relatives. Anxious to become king of everything else, he lived the few years of his brief life continuously at war.

His black horse outpaced the wind. He was always first to attack, sword in hand, plume of white feathers on his head, as if each battle were a personal matter:

“I will not steal a victory,” he said.

How well he recalled the lesson of his teacher Aristotle:

“Humanity is divided into those born to rule and those born to obey.”

With an iron hand, he snuffed out rebellions and crucified or stoned the disobedient, but he was an unusual conqueror who respected those he conquered and was even willing to learn their customs. The king of kings invaded lands and seas from the Balkans to India by way of Persia and Egypt and everywhere in between, and wherever he went he sowed matrimony. His astute idea of marrying Greek soldiers to local women was unpleasant news for Athens, which heartily disapproved, but it consolidated Alexander’s prestige and power across his new map of the world.

Hephaestion always accompanied him in his warrings and wanderings. He was his right-hand man on the battlefield and his nighttime lover in victory. With thousands of invincible horsemen, long lances, flaming arrows, and Hephaestion by his side, Alexander founded seven cities, the seven Alexandrias, and it seemed as if he might go on forever.

When Hephaestion died, Alexander drank alone the wine they had shared. At dawn, thoroughly drunk, he ordered up a bonfire so immense it scorched the heavens, and he outlawed music throughout the empire.

Soon thereafter he too died, at the age of thirty-three, without having conquered all the kingdoms the world possessed.

HOMER

There was nothing, no one. Not even ghosts. Nothing but mute stones, and a sheep or two looking for grass amidst the ruins.

But the blind poet could see the great city that was no more. He saw it surrounded by walls, high on a hill overlooking the bay. And he heard the shrieks and thunder of the war that leveled it.

And he sang to it. It was the second founding of Troy, born anew by Homer’s words four and a half centuries after its destruction. And the Trojan War, consigned to oblivion, became the most famous war of all.

Historians say it was a trade war. The Trojans controlled the entrance to the Black Sea and were charging dear. The Greeks annihilated Troy to open up the route to the Orient via the Dardanelles. But all the wars ever fought, or nearly all, have been trade wars. Why did this war, so like the others, become worthy of remembering? The stones of Troy were turning to sand and nothing but sand as fated by nature, when Homer saw them and heard them speak.

Did he simply imagine what he sang?

Was it just fancy, that squadron of twelve hundred ships launched to rescue Helen, the queen born from a swan’s egg?

Did Homer make up the bit about Achilles dragging the vanquished Hector behind a chariot as he drove several times around the walls of the besieged city?

And the story of Aphrodite wrapping Paris in a mantle of magic mist when she saw he was losing, could that have been delirium or drunkenness?

And Apollo guiding the fatal arrow to Achilles’s heel?

Was it Odysseus, alias Ulysses, who built the immense wooden horse that fooled the Trojans?

What truth is there in the end of Agamemnon, the victor who returned from ten years of war to be murdered by his wife in the bath?

Those women and those men, and those goddesses and those gods who are so like us, jealous, vengeful, treasonous, did they exist?

Who knows if they existed?

All that’s certain is that they exist.

LITERARY ORIGIN OF THE DOG

Argos was the name of a hundred-eyed giant and of a Greek city four thousand years ago.

Also named Argos was the only one to recognize Odysseus when he returned to Ithaca in disguise.

Homer tells us that after plenty of war and plenty of sea Odysseus came back home dressed as a decrepit, bedraggled beggar.

No one realized it was he.

No one, except for a friend who could no longer bark or walk or even get up. Argos lay in the doorway of a shed, abandoned, tormented by ticks, awaiting death.

When he saw or perhaps smelled the beggar approach, he raised his head and wagged his tail.

HESIOD

Of Homer, nothing is known. Seven cities swear they were his birthplace. In each, perhaps, Homer recited one night in exchange for a roof and a meal.

Of Hesiod, it is said he was born in a village named Asera and that he lived in Homer’s time.

But he did not sing to the glory of warriors. His heroes were the peasants of Boeotia. He took up the lives and labors of men who wrested meager harvests from the hard earth, fulfilling the curse of merciless gods.

His poetry counseled chopping wood when Sirius first appears,
picking grapes when Sirius moves south,
threshing when Orion rises,
harvesting when the Pleiades appear,
plowing when the Pleiades disappear,
working in the nude,
and never trusting the sea, thieves, women, restless tongues, or evil
days.

THE SUICIDE OF TROY

According to Homer, it was the goddess Athena who whispered the idea in Odysseus’s ear. And the city of Troy, for ten years impervious to the Greek siege, was defeated by a horse made of wood.

Why did Priam, the Trojan king, let it in? As soon as that strange, enormous figure showed up outside the walls, smoke from the kitchens turned red and statues wept, laurels withered and the sky emptied of stars. Princess Cassandra threw a lit torch at the horse and the priest Laocoön stuck a lance in its flank. The king’s advisers counseled opening it to see what it might contain, and in all Troy there was no one who did not suspect the beast was some sort of trick.

Priam chose his downfall. He wanted to believe the goddess Athena had sent him an offering as a sign of peace. Not to offend her, he ordered the gates thrown open, and the horse was received with chants of praise and gratitude.

From its innards emerged the soldiers who razed Troy to its final stone. And the vanquished became their slaves, and the women of the vanquished became their women.