The Ghosts of Athens (23 page)

I watched as he vanished behind the big sundial. Before going back in, I gave a long sideways glance at the two men in black I’d seen skulking behind a bronze urn that had been anciently set up to receive anonymous denunciations. As in Piraeus, they were covered up from head to toe. With the return of good weather, they must have found so much clothing a very sore trial. They saw me, and dodged fully out of sight. A whole party of local women shuffled past now. Also dressed all over in black, they turned for a moment to look at the residency. A few put out their right hands in the same gesture I’d seen in Piraeus. The woman in front shouted something in the shrill voice of the aged, and everyone hurried across to the other side of the square.

All considered, my stay in Athens was turning out more interesting than I’d expected.

I paused on the wide, stepped incline of the Sacred Way, and looked at the Propylaea. We were slightly past noon, and the sun was behind me. If now rather creamy from its great age, the marble of the columns and its unadorned pediment were as crisp today as when it served as gateway to the spiritual heart of the nation that had caused it to be built.

‘It was a gift of King Solomon himself,’ Nicephorus struck up again in an annoying whine that he might have hoped would be taken for erudition. ‘It follows the exact plan of his temple in Jerusalem,’ he continued in blithe ignorance of both history and Scripture. ‘For its everlasting security, angels fashioned an image of Moses that will come to life and smite the first barbarian to desecrate its sanctity.’ He pointed at a statue of what, even without the inscription on its plinth, was obviously the Emperor Julian.

‘Do you suppose he’s making this up as he goes along?’ I muttered in Latin. ‘Or does it represent some modern consensus in Athens?’

Martin’s answer was a scared look at the men in dark clothes who’d been tagging along ever since we’d left the residency, and were now trying to conceal themselves behind any convenient statue base.

‘Don’t worry,’ I whispered. ‘I don’t see how he’d dare make a move in broad daylight – not in front of the whole town assembly.’ I smiled a reassurance I didn’t really feel and led him by the hand within the darkened interior.

I listened to another comment of jaw-dropping stupidity and suppressed a snort. I smiled politely at the Count, whose response was to strike a pose and cross himself with dramatic emphasis. He’d recovered all his nerve since the previous night, and was now basking in the full worship of the great mob of the unwashed who’d also followed us from the residency. I still hadn’t made the effort to get him alone. Until then, I might as well play along. I nodded my thanks as he stood back for me to go before him through the gateway.

The day had ripened into a most glorious afternoon. There was still a faint chill about the shadows – this was an autumn day far north of Alexandria. But the previous day’s appearance of a Kentish winter had been followed by the warm brilliance of the civilised world. If I looked down from the Sacred Way, the lower part of Athens lay within the clouds of steam that rose from the narrow streets. But, however briefly, we’d had sight of a few glories. My first impression had been of how small everything was. I knew Rome and Constantinople. I’d spent a few months in Alexandria. These were, or had been, immensely large and wealthy capitals. I could now realise that every building there inspired by the ancient styles was something of a fraud. The porticos and various orders of column were simply adornments to vast structures of brick faced with marble. Truly ancient buildings were generally smaller. On the other hand, even when porticos were bricked up and buildings had been converted to unintended uses; even after two devastating barbarian raids, and the other ravages of time and depopulation, what I’d seen was still of astonishing elegance and fineness of proportion.

It would have been better had I been able to know in every case what I was seeing. I’d spent two years in Rome before the Dispensator had jollied me into my fateful trip to Constantinople. Two years, and endless questions of anyone old enough to have heard his grandfather speak of better days – and still there was much I hadn’t been able to identify. Book illustrations of a city usually come with little captions to identify the main buildings. In cities still at their best, you learn pretty soon what is what. Such you’ll find if you ever make your way to Constantinople. Had I really stood on the Unwrought Stone from where Pericles and Demosthenes had once addressed the Assembly? Or had this been part of some ruined foundation? There had still been an inscription over the door of a monastery to tell me this had once been the complex of buildings from where Aristotle and his followers had spread their uncertain light over the world. Nicephorus hadn’t been able to identify the Garden of Epicurus, and had spent more time talking rot about the
many visits
of Saint Paul than explaining the colonnade that ran along the side of a very impressive building where every inscription had been cemented over. Even Martin, with his encyclopaedic if uncritical reading, had been vague about most of what we’d seen. He might have been no better even if his guts hadn’t been playing up from a combination of stewed river frog and funk.

Nevertheless, I’d been dreaming of Athens ever since, back in Richborough, I’d first heard second-or third-hand descriptions of its wonders. Now, if I had to put up with a guide whose ignorance was matched only by a possible intention to murder me, I was finally here in the great City of Human Enlightenment.

It really was a shame about the common people. You might, by thinking hard enough, forget about those men in black. I had come out armed, after all – and there were monks wandering about as well as all the town assemblymen. But you couldn’t forget that stinking rabble. I could doubt if any of them stood above five feet. This wasn’t the smallness of the Egyptian lower classes – though ugly, they were at least in reasonable proportion. These creatures seemed to have neither thighbones nor necks. Where not in filthy, matted hair, their faces were covered in pockmarks or livid sores. You could almost see the vermin on those nasty bodies poised to hop off on to your own. Jabbering softly and pointing, they’d come after us at first at a respectful distance. Every so often, when the breeze shifted, I’d had a whiff of garlicky breath and unwashed clothing. But I’d managed to ignore them on and off. As we’d reached the Sacred Way, however, they’d increased in numbers and proximity. Plucking at his clothes and stroking his back as if he’d been some large cat, they’d flowed about Nicephorus. He’d alternated between indifference and benign smiles. Though still a few yards away, they were now doing their best to spoil what illusion I’d managed to create of being in Athens.

‘Do you suppose these parodies of humanity have
any
blood relationship to the ancients?’ I whispered to Martin, now in Celtic.

He said nothing and looked at a marble statue of someone called Arrhidaeus. The inscription told me he’d been an Archon back in the days of Augustus. There were still traces of blond paint on his hair, and he looked rather English. If the answer to my question was no, it was worth asking how these people had got here. They all looked as if they were loosely related, but couldn’t have been descended from any of the barbarians who’d been raiding and settling ever since the collapse of the Danube frontiers. The assemblymen did mostly have the size and ruddy colouring of Slavs. One or two of them might – given a year of diet and exercise – even have resembled the ancients. Certainly, when they tried to speak it properly, their Greek had a Slavic intonation. These locals, though, looked neither ancient nor barbarian. I do assure you, they looked still more degraded than the ‘Greeks’ I’d had to deal with in Alexandria.

But I now did put these thoughts from my head and looked resolutely forward. I thought nothing of the stinking crowd behind me. I thought nothing of those men in black. I even put aside thoughts of what I would, eventually, do to the murdering swine who was making such an astonishing show of ignorant piety. Here, beyond all doubt, were the matchless buildings of the Acropolis designed by Ictinus and Callicrates and adorned by Phidias, and still praised as fresh and perfect five hundred years later by Plutarch. And fresh and perfect they seemed mostly to be. As my eyes adjusted to the darkness inside the Propylaea, I could see holes on the walls where Hadrian had set up pictures of the victories he and Trajan had won beyond the Danube. It was a shame these had been taken down and shipped off to adorn the Imperial capital. But they were late additions, and I’d seen them, or good copies of them, in the Central Law Court in Constantinople.

Nicephorus opened his mouth again as we emerged blinking into the sunlight on the other side. ‘My Lord will see the Church of the Virgin,’ he cried with a good stab at the enthusiastic. ‘It was cleansed of the last stain of devil worship by command of the Emperor Justinian, and returned to its ancient purity.’

I found myself looking right, at a high wall covered in reliefs from which all traces of paint had been washed away by time, but which still showed in their original crispness the meeting of the Assembly that had sanctioned the rebuilding of the Acropolis temples after the Persians had left them in ruins. I paid no attention to the commentary and looked hard at the perfect realism of the figures. Each one might have been sculpted from life. Even now, it might have been possible to identify the leading figures. Yes – either the ancients had been consummate liars about their own appearance, or there had been some disruption in their bloodline. Or perhaps the muttering crowd still pressing in from behind was their posterity, and there had been some spontaneous degradation. Though not now, this was worth considering. There might be a whole book in it – assuming I lived long enough to write it.

I would have stayed to look more at those reliefs. But when you are passing for the first time through the treasure house of the Muses, you barely know where to look. You barely feel the urge to look too long on one masterpiece when there are so many others all about. The wall was topped with bronze statues that gleamed darkly above their marble bases.

‘That must have been the pediment for the big statue of the demon Athena,’ Martin said, pointing directly ahead.

I smiled at the slight emphasis he put on
demon
. Of all the arguments we’d had to while away loose moments, one of the more pointless was whether the gods of the Old Faith had been demons come to deceive the ancients, or had been figments of the ancient imagination. Doubting the existence of the old gods may have said nothing either way about the True God, but only ever set Martin into a sweat about my general beliefs. Saying nothing, I followed his pointed finger. Yes, the pediment must have held the statue of Athena. Like everything else that was beautiful and could be moved, this had long since been taken off to Constantinople. There, I think, it had perished in the big riots against Justinian. Unlike the Hadrian pictures, this was a decided loss. Now I was looking at the massive pediment, I could see how the absence of its statue robbed our carefully planned surroundings of complete perfection. Far over on the left was a cluster of low buildings. Normally, I’d have been straight off to look at them. But, as I said, I was in the treasure house of the Muses. Between the high wall on my right and another on my left, there was an approach to the east. This terminated in a group of more buildings of a magnificence that I now realised I’d seen duplicated in one of the central squares of Alexandria – duplicated though not matched.

I hurried forward through the forest of statues that narrowed the path. Though often ancient in their own terms, these too were mostly late additions to the original plan. One of them, indeed, had the fussy robes and porcupine hairstyling of an official from barely a generation back. I hurried forward. Martin puffed along behind, the Count behind him, the modern Athenians now some way behind us all. Nicephorus had expected me to spend time on looking at the statues, and was still spouting gibberish about how they represented a visit in ancient times of the entire Senate from Rome.

Even without the deliberate shaping of the plateau to make it obvious, I already knew that the great Temple of Athena was best viewed from the east. As I emerged at the far end of the approach, I kept looking forward. On my left were buildings that would have crowned the whole composition – but, that is, for what was on my right. I forced myself not to look. I quickened my step. I could hear Martin beginning to wheeze again. If we’d been alone, he’d surely have complained about the hurry, or just hung back to follow at his own pace. If I even bothered to note his lack of condition, it was only to blot out the far worse noise of the Count’s commentary. I circled what had been the small Temple of the Roman Majesty built by Augustus. My right foot on its lowest step, I looked up and stared west.

You need to bear in mind that conversion to a church imposes change on a building that even a skilled architect can’t fully reconcile with the original. You should also consider the altered effect of allowing the ancient paintwork to fade, and its replacement within the portico by a set of mosaics in the modern style. But, though it’s hard to find much good to say about Justinian – every disaster we now faced, after all, was an effect of his schemes of Imperial reconquest, and of his demands for uniformity of faith – he had employed good architects in Athens. And nothing short of complete ruin could have taken away the miracle worked in ancient times. I looked and looked. It doesn’t do for a member of the Imperial Council to be seen weeping in public. So I sat down on the steps of the temple Augustus had built and took off my hat. I fanned my sweating face and waited for Martin and Nicephorus and everyone else to come over and stand beside me. About a dozen hooded monks shuffled over and stopped between me and the west pediment of the temple. Their faces were hidden, but you could tell from their height that they weren’t locals. One of them pointed at the mosaic. Now, they all hurried over to stand under the portico. They might have wanted to assure each other how the mosaic had improved on the original scheme. Perhaps they just wanted to get out of the sun.