Glory and the Lightning (37 page)

He paused. “Some years ago I engaged a young scribe, for my friends wished what I wrote, and said, to be recorded. So, I found an erudite youth called Phelan, of much education and refinement and an intuitive and deductive mind. I took him into my house, where he could write down my musings and my sudden thoughts, as well as my dissertations and my theories.”

Zeno rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “If I had been more discerning I should have noticed that Phelan was a youth of too much delicacy and sensitivity, and that he had a girlish appearance. He was also given to emotion and impulsiveness, and his responses were unseemly in a man. It is true that great poets and other artists can be moved to tears by the grandeur of a sunset or a statue or an epic—but Phelan could be deeply moved by the nuzzling of a lamb or a young goat, and would weep at the soft texture of linen or the sight of a young child bubbling saliva. These are womanish manifestations, but I hardly noticed them.”

Zeno watched Pericles with an inscrutable but observant eye as he spoke in his quiet and harmonious voice.

But Phelan’s extreme and even hysterical sensibility did not decrease with time, nor did his high ecstasies for all that Zeno said, even the most inconsequential. This was sometimes embarrassing to the sage, but he was by nature indulgent and kind. He, himself, had become so engrossed with the exhilarating excursions of his mind, and excursions into the minds of others, that he failed to see the obvious: Phelan was in love with him, as a woman loves a man.

“It is extraordinarily dangerous for a man to live by his mind alone,” said Zeno to the listening Pericles, “for then he can stumble on the merest pebble in his path and break his neck, a pebble that even an infant would have avoided. It is true that Phelan often made me uneasy, with his obvious adoration and worship of me—which I unwisely attributed to his youth and to a gentle lack of sophistication. Then one day I said to him, You must not constantly follow me about, Phelan, as if precious rubies were falling from my lips when all I wish is to scratch my anus in private.’ I had hoped to make him laugh, but he only blushed and looked at me with abject reverence and said, ‘Rubies, Master, fall from your lips even when you are silent.’ He turned his head suddenly and kissed my hand, then fell upon his knees, clasped his arms about my own knees, and confessed his love for me with such passion, such stammering candor, that repelled though I was I could not feel disgust but only pity and sadness.”

Zeno sighed and drew his hands across his eyes and looked at the last red rays of the sun over the purpling western hills. “I should not have been so aghast, so startled. The evidence had been before me for a long time, and I could see it all at that moment, and despised myself for my blindness. I raised up Phelan as kindly as I could, speaking calmly, but he threw his arms about me and kissed me on the lips, as a wild girl would do. It was a wanton kiss, but still it had some innocence and a childlike recklessness.” Zeno looked at Pericles, and said, almost inaudibly, “Do you understand, my pupil?”

“Yes,” said Pericles. “I have heard of all this from my several companions, though not with the honesty you have shown, my teacher, nor the pity and understanding.”

“Ah,” said Zeno, and he was relieved. He said, “And what do you think of it, Pericles?”

The boy shrugged. “I find it neither repulsive nor attractive. But you have spoken of the attack on you by armed men.”

“I find it difficult to come to an absolute decision and to act with authority,” Zeno confessed. “So, though I sweated openly and cringed inwardly at the necessity, I discharged Phelan and sent him home to his father, writing the latter that I had come to the conclusion that my ‘immortal words’ were not worth the recording, and remarking on Phelan’s extraordinary intelligence and competence and loyalty.

“Phelan left me in tears and with prayers to reconsider. Such men as Phelan have a woman’s secret intuition. It took me hours to induce him to leave my house, whereas another man would have forced him to leave within moments. There are times,” Zeno reflected, “when I believe that kindness is often cowardice rather than a noble virtue.”

When Zeno had been a youth his father had sent him to the best fencing school in Athens. Though Athenians did not make the finest soldiers, they having too much humor and satirical intelligence, they could fight almost as valiantly as the Spartan when forced to do so. “It astonished my father even more than it astonished me,” said Zeno to Pericles, “when I became an excellent swordsman, for both of us had believed that cold metal and I had no sympathy. When I was pronounced perfect by my fencing master my father gave me a fine sword of my own, keen as a razor, as viciously pointed as a woman’s tongue. It had a gold hilt set with jewels. To please my father I wore it constantly.”

He paused, and his face became melancholy. “I slept with it in my bed, even when with a woman companion. It saved my life, shortly after I had dismissed Phelan.

“For, one moonlit night my house, which I occupy now, was invaded by two armed men in cloaks and hoods. They burst open my door and advanced upon me with daggers glittering and bare in the sharp moonlight. Fortunately I was still awake or I should have been murdered in my bed. Hesitation would have cost me my life. I sprang to my feet and seized my ready sword, and rushed at the nearest man and impaled him. He fell at once, his hood falling from his head, and he died without a sound. I saw it was Phelan.

“My horror at this almost caused my own death, for I stood mute and frozen for an instant or two, seeing the dark hot blood welling from my poor secretary’s heart. Then, through the corner of my eye I saw the other man lunging upon me. I moved aside and he inflicted a slight wound on my left shoulder. A second earlier and it would have pierced my heart. Then I struck at him with my sword and it entered his belly, and he fell, clutching at himself and groaning, and his dagger flew from his hand.

“I knelt beside him and raised his head by his hair, and saw that he was some coarse ruffian or a slave, and I hated him as I could not hate Phelan, who was still a youth and this was a man of middle age and brutal. I beat his head savagely on the floor and demanded an explanation. I did not recognize myself,” Zeno added, smiling somberly, “but I believe it was Phelan’s death that enraged me, and broke my heart. The fact that Phelan had desired my extinction seemed less heinous to me than that this man, a stranger, had desired it also.

“The brute confessed that he was a slave in the house of Phelan’s father, and was devoted to the youth on whom he had lavished a father’s affection. Phelan had told him that I had insulted him ‘mortally,’ had abused him before companions in the colonnades, had ridiculed him and reviled him as a man of no intellect. And then, with invective, had dismissed him, urging him to lower his ambitions to carrying wood for the baths. He had incited this slave to rage, then had begged for advice, and the slave had assured him that only my blood would wash out my iniquities against the son of an illustrious house. Phelan had then suggested that his slave accompany him to my own house for that very purpose. So, they had come.”

Zeno was then silent for so long that Pericles finally said, “How was this explained to the city guards and the judges?”

Zeno rubbed his chin and looked towards the west where a racing purple cloud had begun to cover the falling sun, thus darkening the landscape so that the white houses and buildings shone like bare bones in the quickening gloom.

“It was of Phelan’s father that I thought,” said Zeno. “So I dragged the bodies far down the slope of my hillside and let them fall below, and I threw their daggers after them.”

Pericles looked incredulously at the small stature and slightness of his teacher.

“It is remarkable what strength can be summoned in an emergency,” said Zeno. “I was desperate not only to save the sensibilities of Phelan’s father, a friend, but to conceal from him his son’s aberration, for he is a proud man and an eminent soldier and would have died of grief to learn of his son’s—peculiarity—and also to learn that that son, without provocation, had hired a slave and had accompanied him to kill a sleeping man. I returned to my house and washed my floor with lye and water to drive away the bloodstains. At dawn I went to the temple of Ares, who was never my favorite god, to offer sacrifice for the souls of the men I had been forced to kill, and to display my gratitude for the strength Ares had chosen to give me in those most awful moments.

“After the authorities had conducted their investigations they declared that Phelan, and his slave, had been murdered by thieves when on Phelan’s way to visit me.”

Zeno fell silent again and Pericles waited. Then Zeno said, “Since that time I have never carried a sword, though it hangs on the wall of my house. I avoid circumstances and situations wherein I could be induced to display my swordsmanship in defense of my life.”

“Such circumstances and situations cannot always be avoided,” said Pericles. His fair hair shimmered like polished gold in the mingled light and darkness of the approaching storm. “You often walk to your house and refuse my father’s litter. Suppose you were truly set upon by thieves and had no means of defense. Would you die meekly? Is that not cowardice in itself?”

Zeno reluctantly laughed. “I have taught you too much logic,” he said. He looked down at the dagger fastened to his girdle. “I think I shall keep this weapon, after all, and wear it always, as do other Athenian men. Self-defense is no crime; to refuse to defend yourself is the instinct of a slave, not a man.” He sighed. “Still, it is a monstrous comment on our times that sometimes we must kill in order not to be killed.”

He suddenly stood up as if seized by restlessness and walked to the parapet outside the portico and stared at the murky west. Pericles slowly joined him and they gazed down at the city and up at the sky. All at once lightning struck a scarlet crevice in the heavens and soon thereafter thunder bellicosely roared in answer. For an instant Pericles was illuminated in vivid eerie light and Zeno looked at him with new comprehension. It was as if a white and gold statue had been precipitated into being.

Thank the gods, thought Zeno. I had thought him too controlled, too much in command of himself, too removed. Thank the gods for men who can be moved to disquietude!

The storm increased and the palms lashed and the earth exhaled a hot odor as of both panic and desire, and dark and brilliant shadows raced over the city below. Zeno touched his pupil on the shoulder and said, “Do not be too much disturbed. Life will crush your heart or turn it to stone. It is inevitable. But, you have your choice.”

Pericles lifted his eyes to the dusky height of the acropolis. “I have a dream,” he said, as if he had not heard Zeno at all. Then he turned and smiled at his teacher. “A dream of marble, but it will be alive.” From the women’s quarters the slave girls had begun to sing, accompanied by the tinkling notes of lutes, and to Zeno it sounded very brave in the face of the rising storm. It is all the answer we can return, he thought. It is all we can say to the terrible gods. Courage.

CHAPTER 4

Xanthippus, though he had the aristocrat’s and skeptic’s aversion for the common people, also had the genial man’s hatred for oppression from tyrants and governments. Once he said, “None can be free in a city unless all men are free. One slave nullifies the liberty of all.” It was, in truth, the patrician’s abstract love for freedom which drew him from the beginning to the Laws of Solon. Like many superior Athenians he knew that government must have a Constitution guaranteeing the rights of citizens. Athens had been in turmoil since the Tyrants, and Xanthippus desired to restore the pure Laws of Solon which had been appropriated by the Tyrants to oppress the people and to pervert the ideals of Solon, himself.

“The noblest concepts of men are invariably corrupted and interpreted in the light of self-serving, though the wicked are vociferous in their proclamations that they adhere to those concepts,” he told his young son. “Whatever men touch they taint, even the feet of the gods. Solon’s Constitution for our city was a document to free men from uncertainty and fear and to raise them to a rational just government, and to confer the benefits of liberty upon them, for it is only in the air of liberty that a nation can endure, prosper and increase. Law and order and the consent of the governed are what Solon desired for Athens, hence his Constitution. But you will perceive what wicked men have done to that Constitution while shouting their love for it.”

As a fastidious man he resented all attempts of an oppressive government to regulate his own personal life with its laws. “We execute spies,” he said to Pericles. “But governments are the most pervasive of spies, hence we must eternally be vigilant lest we be enslaved by bureaucrats and their busy pens and lust for power.” He had been born with a mistrust for his fellow man, and this had expanded during his lifetime. Once he said, only half in jest, “It should be permitted citizens to decide, every year, who shall in government be executed publicly for his crimes against the people.”

He called his son’s attention to one of the precepts of Solon that “a well-governed State was when the people obey the rulers and the rulers obey the laws.” Alas, however, it always ended with the rulers demanding obedience to laws which they, themselves, enthusiastically disobeyed when it was to their own benefit and increase of wealth. “Do not think this is contradictory,” said Xanthippus. “It is only human nature.”

“How, then,” asked the young Pericles, “can we enforce the rule of law on everyone, including governments?”

“Impossible,” said the cynical Xanthippus. “But each generation must scrutinize its government and insist on precepts originally noble, which have been distorted out of exigency. Are you asking for a change in human nature, my son? A man is a hungry beast and thinks only of his stomach and his genitals, and so he must be periodically restrained by objective law.”

He looked at the listening Pericles and pushed his tongue in his cheek. “We must struggle all our lives for the triumph of justice. You will remember that we were taught that when the gods removed themselves from habitations with men the goddess, Justice, was the last to leave. She will, no doubt, be the last to return.” He smiled.