The Double Tongue (15 page)

‘I have never made up an oracle. We are, I think, going too far in our discussion of oracular inspiration, in view of what and who is sitting veiled and silent among us. But let me say I have always passed on what I heard, and where I was uncertain of what I heard I have said nothing. You know that the oracle has sometimes returned to the ancient custom of speaking in hexameters again. I am a channel only. I am no poet and could not invent these verses myself. They come from a mouth that is pure and holy and the god speaks through it.’

The silence was prolonged. It was in my mind to accuse Ionides of the ultimate blasphemy in his claim. But I did not. How could I? But there was more that kept me silent. Here was the atheist speaking: and I knew him well enough to know that he was speaking in all sincerity. He believed what he said, or I knew nothing about him. So Ionides, cynic, atheist, contriver, liar, believed in god!

I suppose we all change. I had believed in the Olympians, all twelve of them. How much did I believe now, after years of hearing Ionides inventing speeches for me? How much after years of inventing them myself? How much after years of remembering that the god had raped me, years of part-belief, of searching for a proof that all I had believed in was a living fact and if twelve gods did not live on that mountain, they did in fact, in real fact, live somewhere, in some other mode, on a far greater mountain? It was too much for me. I did not speak out but kept silent, veiling my head completely.

Ionides thought this a calculated gesture. But I did it in sheer shame.

He went on, and before I had returned to listening apparently he had managed to turn the awkward corner from religious awe to the respect due to wealth. Yes, he was saying, it was a fact that the oracle was reduced to – not to put too fine a point on it – to begging! He had not thought of boring this distinguished company with sordid financial and well, simply financial affairs! Of course if anyone wished –

Yes, they did wish. The Archon called for his stylus and tablets and wrote down a sum. The rest promised. Women proposed gifts of jewellery. It was clear that Athens for all she wore no weapons still had her resources.

‘Tourism mainly,’ said Ionides on the way back across the Field of Mars. ‘Also the university. Athens isn’t much else but a university these days. That’s a lot of course.’

‘It looks like a stonemason’s yard. All these gesticulating heroes and clean, bare altars!’

‘Which reminds me. Dear First Lady, could you not contrive sometimes at these beanfeasts – did you hear the Archon? – could you not contrive to be a little more …
mantic
?
Of course I know you
are,
but these people have to be reminded constantly that Delphi is a
living
oracle
and vital to the well-being of the country and the world.’

‘Is it?’

‘I appreciate that you’re tired. But remember the roof!’

By the time we had been ten days in Athens I was beginning to understand the reality of things Athenian. Her professors were exquisite even in their eccentricity. I had never felt myself surrounded by such a mild and amused warmth of respect and understanding. Their students were courteous. A great many of these were Romans sent to Athens to perfect their education. Some of them were more Greek than the Greeks, just as some of the Greeks, I am ashamed to say, played at being Roman. We moved in the highest ranks of society and never came near getting our million drachmas. We received genuine respect, some perhaps genuine belief, a great many protestations of affection, and very little money.

Ionides grew increasingly bitter. He was forever consulting a small roll on which he had set down the various sums already donated. One day he wished to reckon what sum they came to when put together. He was a long time about it and confessed at last that he kept getting different totals. He asked a professor of mathematics to help him, having found out that I was unable to.

‘My dear fellow,’ said the professor, ‘you should ask a shopkeeper. He’d do it in a flash on his abacus.’

But Ionides insisted, not wishing to make the smallness of our donations too obvious. So the professor did what he called adding them up. He had a simple method of counting in fives, tens and scores, and after perhaps an hour by the waterclock he achieved a result.

‘We call it counting on our fingers and toes,’ he said.

When Ionides saw the total he was silent for a while. The professor seemed about to make a further comment but changed his mind, and after thanking him we left. Ionides was moody.

‘This won’t go far,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what we can do. Dionysus is our last chance.’

It was not only our last chance but our last engagement in Athens. We were to go in procession to his altar and sacrifice there.

The procession was a small one but the crowds were big. It was really the first time I had realized that the townspeople were of a different sort. There were not many slaves. Athens prefers freed men. I suppose it is an advance in civilization. Though over this question of slavery I have a confused mind. I remember Perseus in the bookroom, happy in his work and regarding ‘freedom’ with grave mistrust. After all, if slavery is the limitation of freedom certainly there are real slaves in mines for example. But there are men who have to plough, dragging the plough themselves since they have no oxen. What I am looking for is a phrase, if I can remember it, which Ionides gave me. Yes, I remember. It is a question of degree. There is employment of one man by another. This varies right through from abject slavery to – in the case of Perseus – a chosen and enjoyed wedding between the man and his work. You could in any case say that we are all slaves of the gods or the idea of the gods, or subject, if it comes to that, to the law. Limitation is a fact of life. Yes, I am muddled. Once Ionides said ‘When you are sitting on the tripod you are the freest being in the world.’ Did I say that when he said it I burst into tears and did not know why? I do now. I was the slave of god or the idea of god. You see how learned I have become with all my reading in the bookroom! Yes, it is Plato’s, this idea.

The procession to the temple of Dionysus was at once a triumph and a disaster. As soon as our procession appeared a man shouted ‘There she is!’ A woman screamed and fell down. Then the crowd fell into a foaming frenzy – this sophisticated Athenian crowd, at the sight of a veiled woman, went mad. The tall police with their clubs closed round us and beat them off, but I believe we were in much peril of being crushed to death. I had never before appreciated disciplined men. They were wholly brutal in a matter-of-fact way. If a skull needed to be cracked it was cracked. If moving forward meant stepping on fallen bodies then these heavy men with their clubs and shields, their blank and vizored helmets, trod on them: and, borne where they wanted us to go, we must perforce step on crushed and bloodied bodies, too. We never reached the temple but returned whence we came. The bodies lay for a while where they had fallen because the dull sky let down snow. The priest of Dionysus, I later heard, had viewed the bodies and declared that the sacrifice had been made. But by then we were on our way home.

I have to say that, even taking the inclement weather into account, our departure was less splendid than our arrival. The departing guests were not so much sped as ignored. It was a small body of police that escorted us to the city limits (and still it snowed). We were met by a delegation from Eleusis at that point, or we should have been hard put to it to find the way. Ionides later revealed that the ignorant among the Athenian population, and in particular the women, believed that I, the Pythia, had caused the destruction of life in the street, though the better educated saw that it was the work of Pan, whom indeed we had ignored totally, so no wonder. The Eleusinians gave us shelter and fed us, though with an ill grace and some fear. Megara sent an escort for us and made a point of how Athens had neglected us. We could have been attacked on the road, they said. The cold weather was making the brigands very daring.

In the upshot we discovered that the Megarans were not proposing to bring us home by way of their city, but were conducting us as a goatherd might his flock to the countryside boundaries of Corinth, which had already agreed to receive us on the way home as they had received us on the way out. We entered Corinth in a snowstorm and it was an easy matter for our Corinthian friend to accommodate us because we had dwindled to a party of four. The escort sent by Megara was told at the boundary that the Corinthians would receive us but not a single Megaran. In fact, Megara and Corinth were at cross-purposes again: but then, what cities which have a common boundary aren’t?

Our wealthy Corinthian friend treated us very kindly. He would not care to have us use the ferry while the pilot was unable to see the farther shore. We were able to bathe in hot water, be massaged and then entertained to a banquet where the music was as exquisite as the food. On returning from the bath I found such a gown laid out on my bed as surely no Pythia ever wore but only, I told myself amusedly, some goddess in a Corinthian heaven. I could not wear it. That would have been unseemly. I was forced therefore to put on a drab robe which was suitable for the oracle. I wished very much that it could have been inspired by the god to give our friend some good luck or promise of long life and high fortune. But he already had the high fortune and I did not think long life was a credible promise to one who lived and ate and drank as he did. It was a pity for though in secret, as he thought, he was a devotee of strange demons and had symbols and even statues of the Olympians round his halls, he was a genuinely religious man and believed in the oracles. He had visited all the most famous ones in the world in the days, as he said, when he could not lay one drachma against another, but with fortune came fat, and with fat, indolence. He was deeply disappointed not to see me wearing his gift. I replied with thanks and said how pleased I should be to see it on a more appropriate person. One course of the meal later he clapped his hands and – behold! – the prettiest girl I have ever seen in my life walked in with a goddess gait, wearing my proffered present, that robe of cloth of gold! ‘If,’ he said, ‘I cannot persuade you, Lady, to wear what is fit for a queen, at least you will not object to receiving a crown.’ So then another slave came in, bearing a crown on a cushion. It was one of those delicate gold objects of thin branches with nodding leaves and flowers. I suppose it used no more than an ounce or two of the metal yet contrived by its delicacy to exhibit the very nature and genius of gold without ostentation. I thought that on the appropriate person, an Olympias perhaps, or even Helen, the very beauty of it would reduce the onlookers to tears. I had a sudden thought and it burst out of me, as it was bound to do, in hexameters – how before smoking Ilium Menelaus stood calling for his false wife Helen with his sword in his hand, and how she came from the smoke wearing this crown and the sword fell from his hand. It had become a poem in the extravagant modern manner. The Corinthian was all admiration, asking who had written it. Rashly, and buoyed by the verse, I admitted I had done it myself. I saw Ionides go pale and the Corinthian fall into a silence. I thought to mend matters by explaining that to know how to make hexameters was the only way to prevent the Pythia from being killed by some particularly strong communication. But could the young girl please put on the crown too? So he told her to and of course the sight was beyond admiration. I thought then that the making of this crown was the difference between Hellenes and barbarians, in that the Hellene crafts had crowned a woman with the very spirit of gold rather than the substance of it. But then the Corinthian exclaimed, saying he thought he heard his other guest in the atrium, and who should it be but the secretary of Lucius Galba, saying that his master had been delayed and would arrive later. After he had returned, the Corinthian sent the girl away with her dress and crown and asked after the success of our journey. Ionides had to admit that the return had been disappointing. The Corinthian pressed him for details, and when Ionides rather shamefacedly admitted how much we were short of the required sum he cried out, ‘This must not be!’

There and then he sent for his tablets and scribbled on them. He handed them after that to Ionides whose face went even paler, then flushed red.

‘This is godlike!’

Just then and quite clearly I heard four words spoken outside the room. I am sure they were part of the service and spoken by some man who had good and sufficient reason to say them, not knowing how they would echo in the banqueting hall.

‘It was the ferryman.’

Of course Corinth is the start of the ferry on this particular road to Delphi – indeed there are many roads that start at Corinth, even the sea route for drachmas on their way to Rome. But these words rang in my head and I was as fearful as any countrywoman who sees a raven on the wrong hand. But Ionides handed me the tablets and I saw that the Corinthian had engaged himself to make up the huge sum necessary to repair our roof. Ionides could not express his admiration and gratitude and spoke of his inability in words of such elegance that the Corinthian, his belly shaking with laughter, recommended him to say it in hexameters. There was much meaning running round the banqueting hall like water underground, and he did need a diviner. He was fondling the pretty girl in a way that made me sure she was boughten – indeed, what slaves would such a man have had born in his house – a man of no family? It made me jealous in a curious way, feeling that such beauty ought not to be treated so lightly, though the girl could not object. He let her go, telling her to run along and get out of her finery.

‘It is Macedonian work‚’ he said, ‘and very old. It is said to have belonged to the royal family even before the time of the God Alexander the Great.’

I thought to myself: the girl is gold, too, human gold, drawn out thin and fine spun. If he would give me that girl I would look after her as no mother could! But Lucius Galba, the Propraetor of southern Greece, was announced and we all stood up. He came in rather like a piece of storm. Had been delayed by the snow. The fool who guided the ship – it was the ferryman of all people – had said he could not steer a straight course with thick snow round his ears and eyes, though any landsman could have told him there was a steady north-east wind and all he had to do was keep it on the left cheek. He recollected himself and bade us lie down again. We did so as the pallium over the centre of the hall boomed and all the lights fluttered. In fact his stay was brief. He was very respectful to me, not to say servile. The Romans are very superstitious and don’t mind showing it. But it was not religious awe. I don’t think these western barbarians are capable of that. As soon as he had been served food and drink he dealt with us in a series of abrupt sentences.