Glory and the Lightning (39 page)

Xanthippus loved Gaia more dearly than he knew, and he was naturally indulgent towards women. So he shortly left her so she could go to the temple. He knew that by this time his dear friends would know of his summons and so he must avoid them to save both himself and them from embarrassment. He restlessly went to his groves of olive trees. After he had departed Gaia summoned one of her slaves and sent him with a message to the man who ardently desired her. She bathed in scented water and slaves rubbed her body with perfumed oils and brushed her hair until it shone like an autumn leaf in the sun. She arrayed herself in a soft blue peplos with one arm exposed, on which she fastened a bracelet which her heretofore disappointed suitor had sent her nestled in a bower of lilies. She felt no pang of sacrifice or aversion. Men were men, and every man offered pleasure and took it with joy and gratitude, and she knew well how to please and all the arts of love. She pondered on which art he particularly liked, and which posture. She smiled. She loved Xanthippus, and this excursion would do him no harm but much good, and he would never know. She was a dexterous woman. She prepared to enjoy herself also, for a passive woman was no real lover. Slaves changed the silken sheets of her bed and sprayed perfume about her room and she studied her perfect body contemplatively. She would even endure the perversion of flogging for Xanthippus. She prayed that the man who would visit her would prefer more exotic and tender delights. However, a woman never knew a man until she had lain with him, for all a man’s childlike simplicity. Or, she mused, was it really a brutish simplicity? No matter. She rubbed more scent on her loins and commanded a repast in the atrium when her visitor arrived. Her kitchen was famous.

“Ah, Athene,” she said aloud, “you are the goddess of wisdom, sprung from the brow of Zeus in full apparel. But Aphrodite is the most potent of all the gods, and everything that lives bows before her.”

Xanthippus, who also admired Gaia’s mind, for she had been well trained in that also, had given her a small alabaster statue of Athene Parthenos. She had it moved from her bedside and an indecent statue of Aphrodite and Adonis substituted. She smiled at the entwined lovers. She would ask no jewels; she would ask only for the life of Xanthippus. Later, if Teos desired a permanent arrangement, she would deal with that gracefully.

Xanthippus went to the Court of Justice on the Pnyx which was halfway up the acropolis. He disdained his litter and his chariot, and travelled on foot unattended. Consequently he was dusty, his feet stained and his garments disheveled when he arrived. Only his subtle countenance was serene and clear, and his carefully arranged hyacinthine locks. He wore no jewelry. He might have been a slave except for his face and his high head as he entered the court. He was smiling faintly as if remembering a jest.

The Ecclesia and the priests were waiting for him in a semi-circle in a small circular room of brown and white marble. They sat severely and solemnly in their chairs. The priests contemplated their clasped hands which lay on their knees, and they appeared to pray for wisdom and enlightenment. The judges appeared more brisk and portentous. All wore white robes, like statues. The noon sun fell in thin shafts from high small windows, and so the room was partly dim and the mosaics on the floor—white, rose and blue and yellow—were almost obscured. A large statue of blindfolded Justice with her scales stood behind the seated men and sunlight lay on her face and breast, though the rest was in shadow. Along one rounded wall was a row of marble benches for advocates and other interested men. Only two sat there today, and one was Zeno and one was Teos, one of the great dissolute citizens of Athens.

Soldiers stood at the bronze doors and one stood at the end of the row of priests and judges, and another stood at the other end. They were armed and armored and looked like still images, their eyes fixed ahead.

No one spoke when Xanthippus entered except for a robed man near the bronze double doors who announced in a voice like Nemesis: “The noble lord, Xanthippus, enters to be judged.” Xanthippus paused for a moment for he recognized Zeno and Teos, and his black brows lifted. A philosopher and a lascivious man of Athens were all who cared enough for his fate to appear in his behalf, or at least to listen! His faint smile widened. None was so ineffective as a philosopher, and Teos, notorious for his fat living and his women and his gaiety and wealth and his lack of interest in politics, was certainly the strangest of advocates for an accused man!

Xanthippus was only casually acquainted with Teos, for they had nothing in common. They met occasionally in the houses of mutual friends, but Teos’ light conversation, his elaborate attitude of ignorance of weighty matters and poetry and the arts of war, his refusal to engage in serious discussions and his obvious boredom with them, his sometimes crude jests, his flippant manner and his way of laughing boisterously at an exquisite epigram and shaking his head at gravity and his light dismissal of all injustices and his unattachment to anyone at all had sometimes offended Xanthippus who thought him light-minded and a fool and a rascal—for it was well known that Teos used bribery to manipulate government to grant his requests. He was no soldier, betrayed no concern for the fate of Athens, was good-natured to the point of ridiculousness, and appeared to prefer the company of low fellows, and even freedmen, to his peers, and could often be found drinking foul wine in dirty and crowded taverns among thieves and scoundrels from the waterfront and from filthy alleys of the city. Among such he was the merriest of companions, and when reproached by his friends for his company would say, “I have found more reality and more laughter among scoundrels than in your august presences, my dears.”

He was a man of Xanthippus’ age, handsome, slender, tall, and, to the soberer citizens of Athens, always disgustingly perfumed and manicured. Though he was no longer young his round face was as unlined as a boy’s, with jovial and plump features and mirthful sparkling eyes and a very red full mouth like a woman’s. His expression was alert and cheerful, as if he found life the gayest of experiences—which he did—and was constantly awaiting new jokes and new entertainments with an air of joyous expectation. His face never became blank or dull or sullen except when a companion uttered words of wisdom or an abstruse theory.

He wore the most elegant of clothing and was even known to affect the Egyptian fashion of elaborate gold and jeweled necklaces and his style of living in his ornate house was sybaritic and unconventional, and always filled with coarse jesting voices and shouts of laughter, and, of course, the most ribald of music. Unlike his friends, he had no library, and never wished for solitude and could not endure it, and was always surrounded by companions of his own libidinous mind and with his own taste in jokes and amusements and women. His round lively head wore an aureole of crisp black curls which sprang from his skull with seemingly an active life of their own.

He bored Xanthippus, who usually avoided him. “He is a perpetual youth,” Xanthippus would say, “with desires like a satyr and the discriminations of the basest of slaves and the intelligence of a fish.” Sometimes he had found himself impatiently disliking this happiest of men who never engaged in weighty matters and found existence without a purpose and who rejected any responsibility except for his own enjoyment. “There is a time for everything,” Xanthippus would say, “and there is a time to be a fool, but not always.” Xanthippus, who was genial enough himself, and often found life ridiculous and without an object, and liked a jest as well as any other man, was frequently angered that Teos seemed to find him heavy and ponderous and without humor. In fact, the sort of man he, Xanthippus, despised himself.

Yet here Teos, the irresponsible, the flagrant, the reprobate, the fool, the man without imagination or subtlety and who knew nothing of poetry or the intricacies of the law, sat with a profound philosopher like Zeno as advocate of Xanthippus! There was something humorous in the situation, Xanthippus told himself, but he could not as yet discern it. Certainly Teos was no close friend of his and had never found his company entertaining or desirable. As for Zeno, he was suspected by the very priests and judges before whom he sat in silent dignity—and in his unimpressive appearance.

“Where is your advocate, lord?” asked one of the judges, a severe man of massive countenance and cold eyes.

Xanthippus stood before them, and all at once he wanted to laugh. He bowed to the lonely marble bench where sat Zeno and Teos. “These are my advocates,” he said, and his neat black beard twitched. Three of the most important judges and priests studiously examined the parchments before them and their faces were sinister and momentous. They thought of their heavy purses.

“This is most irregular,” said one of the lesser priests.

“The majority of things in this world are so,” said Xanthippus.

He hated zealots, for they were the most stupid and cruel of men and would condemn a man who even slightly disagreed with them and invariably lusted for the blood of dissenters. They boasted of their love for tolerance, and asserted they would fight to the death for it, yet they were more intolerant than a mad bull who was provoked. They were the Helots of virtue, while at the same time being the most unvirtuous of men in aspects of the important affairs of life.

He looked at Teos again and Teos was smiling happily and playing with his Egyptian necklace. As for Zeno, he was full of distress and anxiety, and kept moistening his lips and twisting his philosopher’s hands.

Someone cleared his throat noisily. A priest lifted a parchment.

“Lord, Xanthippus,” he said, “you are accused of impiety and a disrespect for government and its just decisions. It is alleged that you do not believe in the gods and have no regard for their sanctity.” He looked at his fellow priests. “For this, death is the only punishment. For, who has protected Athens and all of Greece but the gods, especially Athene Parthenos, our patroness? You are accused of jesting at her virginity and making lewd implications concerning it.”

Again Xanthippus could not repress himself. He raised a long thin hand. “Surely that is a lie,” he said in his pleasant voice. “Athene does not have a lovely countenance and is not alluring, for wisdom is forbidding and is not seductive in the least. What man desires wisdom above all things? I have yet to find such a man. Men prefer the thighs of women to any dissertation of philosophy or any theory—except if they are incapable. Wisdom, in short, is the refuge of impotence.”

Even the bribed judges and priests could not prevent themselves from gasping.

One said in a hoarse voice, “You do not believe in the gods, lord?”

Xanthippus was beginning to enjoy himself, though it was a reckless and deadly game. He spread out his hands eloquently.

“Only a fool does not believe in something greater than man, for do not the stars obey inscrutable laws, and the sun and the moon? Who has laid down this law and this ineffable order? Men? But men are helpless insects, and have no knowledge of why they are here and what is their ultimate fate. Can they order, these insignificants, the wheeling of constellations and the Pleiades? What decree of man can forbid the rising of the sun and the illumination of the heavens? Who ordains the tides, and the seasons? Can any man demand of the mountains, ‘Remove yourselves? Can a man say to the sea, ‘Retreat’? Who can order the fruitfulness of the olive trees and the fields and the palms? Who has given man awareness and harnessed the winds? Has any judge forbidden a volcano to explode, or a tempest not to disturb the waters? The moon changes by law, yet no body of men can regulate the phases of her. It is impudent of men to believe themselves all-powerful and in control of their merest existence.”

Xanthippus had spoken with an eloquence and sudden passion which amazed even himself, and Zeno stared at him incredulously and for once Teos looked grave.

A priest said in a severe voice, “But it is alleged that you have jested at the very divinity which you now defend.”

Zeno rose in his small stature and lifted his hands and all looked at him, as if startled that he was present.

“A wise man jests at the impertinence of ignorant men who would tear down the gods to their own meager level and make them equal to themselves or even less.”

He looked at them and his brilliant eyes seemed to awaken light in the room and held the attention of everyone:

“Who has defined the attributes of Divinity or guessed at His nature? Who knows what is impiety to Him, or piety? A humble man who delights in the light of the sun or the moon and reverences life and marvels at the mystery of his being—though he names no gods—is surely more loved by Deity and more cherished than a sophisticated man who alleges he knows the attributes of Divinity and His nature and pompously demands that other men believe in his tiny concepts. It is through our lack of knowledge that we approach God, and through our ignorance that we begin our understanding. God has His laws, and only in humility can we perceive them, and only dimly.”

“You do not believe that the gods have laid down a system of laws for the behavior and the obedience of men, Zeno of Elea?” asked one of the priests.

Zeno smiled. “I am not being judged,” he replied. “But I will reply to your question, lord. We can find the will of God only through prayer and in solitude and in meditation. We can find His laws in the laws of nature, which He has ordained. What governs the humblest grain of sand or the merest sheaf of wheat also governs man. The law is of one piece. The suns obey Him and know His laws. Let us reflect on them. For law and order are of the nature of God, and are open to the innocent eyes of children and are confused and elaborated upon and made obscure only by the perverted sophistries of men.”

He smiled at the priests and the judges. “My friend, Xanthippus, has been accused of impiety. But the true sacrilege is the making of God in the likeness and image of man and attributing to Him all the passions and errors of mankind, and all the savagery, and believing that we can comprehend Him in the slightest. Of this crime Xanthippus is innocent. Who among you, sires, is competent to say that he knows anything about the Unknowable? Xanthippus has repeatedly asserted that this is beyond our competence, and who can deny it in truth? To differ with this truth is to be truly impious.”