The Walled Orchard (5 page)

Philodemus conducted all my lawsuits for me, and although we lost some things we should have kept — I particularly regret five acres of vines down in the plains near Eleusis — I ended up with a personal estate of no less than sixty acres. Over half this land was hill-country and so no use for anything except scenic effect — although the land had been in our family since Theseus was a boy, apparently none of my ancestors had ever got around to removing the stones from the ground — and so my estate was in fact not nearly so impressive as it sounds; but it was easily enough to elevate me into the Cavalry class, ‘and with a little bit over in case of bad harvests’, as Philodemus put it. He was, for an Athenian, an almost divinely honest man, and apart from a few fields in Phyle and my grandfather’s stake in the silver mines he handed all my property over to me when I was old enough to take charge of it, with a written account and record of the expenses of maintenance and repair to justify his use of the income. Yet he was no more than comfortably off himself, and paid for my keep while I was in his house entirely from his own resources, as if I had been his own son, so I never had the heart to sue him for the return of the stake in the mines.

The plague did not abate for two years, and learned men (like that little general) say that it killed one man in three. It spread from the City to our men in the army and the fleet, but somehow we never managed to pass it on to the Spartans; and it nearly brought the war to a premature end. But after a while the people in the City became resigned to it — it is quite remarkable what city dwellers will put up with, so long as they feel that everyone else is having just as horrible a time as they are — and carried on their lives as best they could. They redesigned the economy of the City slightly to accommodate their changed patterns of living, so that more people got out of agriculture altogether and started to specialise in the urban industries, like sitting on juries, metalwork and burglary. In fact, quite a substantial number of men caught the plague from breaking into infected houses, which caused considerable amusement to their neighbours.

One thing I must mention is the prophecy, because it was the one great topic of discussion wherever people still met to talk. As soon as the plague became widespread, someone or other dug up an ancient oracle, which had actually been carved on stone in the time of the celebrated Solon. It went:
‘The Spartans come bringing war, and hateful Death in the vanguard.’

Most people took this as a reference to the plague, since in Solon’s time the word Death was commonly used as a synonym for plague, particularly in poetry; but some grammarians and learned teachers disputed the reading for sound philological reasons which have slipped my memory, and amended the line as follows:

‘The Spartans come bringing war, and hateful Dearth in the vanguard.’

This, they said, meant that there would soon be a famine, compared to which the plague would be about as serious as a bad cold; and of course this caused great anxiety and panic-buying of food. Those who accepted the original reading replied by saying that the learned scholars were all in the pay of the corn-dealers, who were the ones who had started the plague by catching it themselves in the first place, and that something ought to be done about what was plainly a conspiracy. The City was soon divided into two rival camps, the Dearth-men and the Death-men (we were Death-men, I remember, except for a cousin of mine called Isocles who had a share in a grain ship) and these two factions took to going round the streets after dark burning each other’s houses. This went on for a long time and ended up with a full-scale riot in the Market Square, during which several silversmiths’ stalls and a butcher’s shop were looted.

CHAPTER THREE

Not so long ago I went to the Theatre—I think it was the second day of the Lenaea — after staying up late the night before with some friends. I was so tired that I fell asleep towards the end of the first of the three Tragedies and only woke up half-way through the second. I believe the first one was a play about Oedipus, and the second was some nonsense about Odysseus; I can’t remember terribly well, to be honest with you. Anyway, when I woke up, to start with I thought we were still in the Oedipus play (it didn’t seem to matter terribly much — it was that sort of play) and when I realised that it wasn’t I was totally unable to work out what was going on.

Eventually I came to the conclusion that it was something to do with Perseus and the Gorgon, and it was on that basis that I followed it through to the final exit of the Chorus. In fact it was several weeks before someone happened to mention what the second play that day had been about, and at first I didn’t believe him.

Bearing this unfortunate experience in mind, I feel that I ought at this stage in my story to clarify exactly what is going on, just in case any of my readers has got it into his head that this book of mine is set in the middle of the Persian Wars or the dictatorship of Pisistratus. You see, I cannot in all conscience assume that you know the background to this story, even if you are an Athenian; after all, it is a well-known fact that we Athenians are not particularly good at history, and the only way we can be sure when something happened or who did what two or three generations ago is by asking a foreigner. I suppose this is because we Athenians make all the history in Greece, and just as you generally find that a weaver’s own cloak is threadbare and worn and a potter’s house is full of chipped and unglazed crockery, so we Athenians are most disdainful of our own principal export and take no great interest in it.

Now, of course, I am faced with the problem of where to start. For example, I would be perfectly happy to take you right back to the Heroic past, when the Gods walked undisguised among men and Athena competed with Poseidon as to who should be Athens’ patron deity. After all, that sort of thing is extremely easy to do — I could fill a whole roll with it and never have to stop and think once — but I suspect that you would lose interest fairly quickly and start worrying about getting your winter barley in or manuring your vines. On balance, I think the best place for me to start would be just after the end of the Great Patriotic War, when all the Greeks were united against the Persian invaders and the world was a very different place.

Even before the war we Athenians had not been able to grow enough food in Attica to feed ourselves, and when the Persians broke into Attica, destroyed the City and dug up or burned all our vines and olive trees, we were all in a rather desperate situation. As you well know, it takes five years at the very least for a vine to become sufficiently established to yield harvestable grapes, while an olive tree can easily take twenty years or more to come to maturity. The Athenian economy was based on the export of wine and oil, in return for imported grain; our only other exportable commodity was silver, and the silver mines were all owned by the State and leased out to rich men, so there was no way that that source of income could be used to feed the people.

The one thing we did have was warships. You see, shortly before the Persians invaded, a man called Themistocles was put in charge of our long-running feud with the island of Aegina, and he had used the revenues from the silver mines to build and fit out the biggest and best fleet of warships in the whole of Greece. It was this fleet that we used to evacuate the City when the Persians came, and to defeat the Persians conclusively at the battle of Salamis.

The important thing to bear in mind about a warship is that it takes a considerable number of people to man it and make it work, and all these people have to be paid or they will get out of the warship and go away. In fact, a warship (or fleet of warships) is probably the most efficient way of providing gainful employment for men with no particular skills that has yet been devised by the human brain, and Themistocles realised this. On the one hand, he had a city full of people unable to make a living off their land, and on the other hand he had a harbour crammed with redundant battleships which had recently proved themselves capable of making mincemeat out of the most powerful navy in the world.

At the time, Athens was still part of the Anti-Persian League, the confederacy of Greek cities hastily formed to resist the invaders. By all accounts it was a wonderful thing while it lasted, for it was the first time in the history of the world when the Greeks had not all been at war with each other. Having driven the Great King out of Greece, the League was obviously redundant, and there was no reason why it should not be dissolved so that everyone could go back to cutting each other’s throats, as their fathers and grandfathers had done. But for some reason the League continued to exist.

Now the best theory I have heard is that most of the cities of Greece were in roughly the same situation as Athens; their economies were in ruins because of the war, and nobody wanted to go home and face the mess. They greatly preferred drawing regular pay for fighting the Persians, and if the Persians had all gone back to Persia the only thing to be done was to follow them there. So they did; and for a while they had a perfectly splendid time sacking cities and looting treasuries. But then some of the Greeks, particularly those who lived on the islands in the Aegean and on the coast of Asia Minor, thought that it was high time they went home and started farming again, on the principle that sooner or later the supply of Persians would run out and they might as well get back to work before the soil had got completely out of hand.

By this stage, Themistocles had had his Great Idea, and so the Athenians pretended to be terribly upset at this defection by their allies, and spoke very eloquently at League meetings about avenging the fallen heroes and the desecrated temples of Athens. The islanders were profoundly embarrassed and didn’t know what to say; and then the Athenians, with a great show of relenting and making concessions, said that they quite understood, and as a special favour they, the Athenians, would carry on the Great Crusade on behalf of all the Greeks, until the Persian menace had been wiped off the face of the earth and the anger of the Gods had been fully appeased. All the islanders had to do was contribute a small sum of money each year towards general expenses, as a gesture of solidarity; we would provide the ships and the men, and the loot would be shared out equally at the end of each campaigning season.

Naturally enough the islanders thought this was eminently reasonable; either the Athenians would wipe out the Persians or the Persians would wipe out the Athenians, and either way the world would be rid of a nuisance. So they swore a great many oaths and undertook to pay a small contribution each year into the League treasury. The hat was taken round, and the Athenians used the money to build more ships and fill them with Athenian crews, until nearly every adult Athenian who disliked the idea of hard work was adequately provided for. Shortly afterwards, however, when the islanders began to notice that the Athenians hadn’t been near the Persians for some considerable time and the Great Crusade seemed to have lapsed, they stopped paying the small contribution and declared that the matter was closed.

The next thing that happened was that the Athenian navy turned up under the walls of their cities looking extremely hostile and demanding to know what had become of that year’s gesture of solidarity. When the islanders tried to explain that the war was over, the Athenians were greatly amused and replied that on the contrary, unless the Tribute (as the small contribution was now called) was paid at once, plus the incidental expenses of besieging the island and a substantial Loyalty Premium, the war would begin immediately. Now an island, being entirely surrounded by water, is particularly vulnerable to overwhelming sea power, and the islanders realised that there was nothing for it but to pay or be killed. So they paid, and with the money so obtained the Athenians built more warships and hired yet more oarsmen.

Thus was formed the Great Athenian Empire, previously known as the Anti-Persian League, and for a while it seemed as if there was nothing that anyone could do about it. The Athenians were able to buy all the imported grain they needed, and there were no political difficulties since the City was a democracy and enough of the citizens were on the payroll to constitute a majority. In addition, the professional oarsmen mostly lived in or near the City, while those Athenians who had wanted nothing to do with the idea and were struggling to get their land back into cultivation tended to live out in the villages of Attica and were usually far too busy tilling the soil to spare a whole day every few weeks to attend Assembly. When there was no serious rowing to be done, the oarsmen were able to get on with the work of reclaiming and planting out their own land, which was not too difficult with their navy pay to tide them over while the vines and olives matured, and in this way the Athenian democracy took on its unique and unmistakable form. Power lay with the poorest and most numerous section of the population, who naturally enough voted for the system that provided for them. Anyone who wanted to succeed in politics had to make friends with the oarsmen and buy their favour with appropriate measures, entertain them with clever speeches, or both. Short of giving away free wheat on the steps of the Propylaea, the scope for buying favour was limited to a few well-tried and unsubtle methods which anyone could use, and so making and listening to political speeches became the national pastime and obsession of the Athenian people. The oarsmen had plenty of leisure when there was no naval action in hand, since most of them by definition had only small holdings of land to work (if they had more than a few acres they would qualify for the Heavy Infantry or Cavalry class, who are far too grand to live off the proceeds of State piracy) and there is no better way known to man of spending an idle afternoon than sitting in Assembly with a jar of dried figs listening to clever speeches and then voting to annex a few more cities.

This new style of politics called for a new breed of politicians. There was no longer much point in striving for the high offices of State now that the real power lay with Assembly. But in theory at least, any Athenian citizen was allowed to address Assembly and propose a measure, and it soon became obvious that the way to get on in politics was to make speeches and propose measures, as often and as loudly as possible. It was also open to any Athenian citizen to prosecute any other Athenian citizen in the law courts, and Athens has a great wealth of un-Athenian Activities legislation specifically designed to be useful to politicians. By this time we Athenians had already developed our wonderful judicial system, whereby all trials are heard by mass juries of several hundred citizens; all that remained to perfect the system was the introduction of a living wage for jury service. Thus was created the Athenian professional juryman, who gets up before dawn to stand in line for a place on the jury. If he gets there early enough he is assured of entertainment of the very highest quality from the speechmakers plus a day’s wages at the end of the performance. This way of life is particularly attractive to older and less active men who can neither dig nor row, and they are extremely careful to convict anyone who threatens to destroy their livelihood by proposing political reforms. On the other hand, they are always grateful to people who do a lot of prosecuting, since for every prosecution there has to be a jury, and these people are very rarely convicted of anything, even if they are genuinely guilty.

And that, more or less, is how Athens came to have the most pure and perfect democracy the world has ever seen, in which every man had a right to be heard, the law was open to all, and nobody need go hungry if he was not too proud to play his part in the oppression of his fellow Greeks and the judicial murder of inconvenient statesmen. The by-products of the system included the perfection of oratory and a universal love among all classes of society of the spoken word in its most delicate and refined forms. No wonder we are a nation of aesthetes.

The only problem was Sparta. Ever since Zeus, whose sense of humour is not particularly attractive to us mortals, put Athens and Sparta on the same strip of land, there has been war between the two cities. Asking Athens and Sparta to live together without fighting is like expecting night to marry day, or winter to form an offensive and defensive alliance with summer. Having unquestionably the best land army in the world, the Spartans generally had the best of these wars; but since the population of Sparta was small and spent most of its time reminding its own empire in the south of Greece about the merits of absolute loyalty, it had never been able to take any lasting measures against Athens, such as burning it to the ground and sowing salt on the ashes.

Sparta had been the nominal leader of the League during the war, but as soon as it became clear that the Persians could only be defeated at sea the real leadership passed to Athens, and since the Spartans were busy with violent internal politics as soon as the war ended, there was nothing they could do to stop us building our empire in the way I have just described. As soon as they were clear of their local problems, however, they began to get seriously worried, for it was obvious that as soon as the Athenian Empire was strong enough, it would use every ounce of its new strength to stamp Sparta flat, liberate the subject races, and remove the one serious obstacle to Athenian supremacy in Greece. So, with a degree of hypocrisy remarkable even for them, the Spartans set themselves up as the champions of the oppressed and enslaved and demanded that we stop extorting tribute from our allies and disband the fleet.