Alexander at the World's End Read online

  Thinking about it, I may have made it sound as if the inevitable division of my father’s property into seven worthless shares came as a dreadful shock that dawned on us some time between the moment of his death and the morning after the funeral. Far from it; even when he was a relatively young man with only four sons, Father was obsessed by it, virtually to the exclusion of everything else.

  It coloured his whole life, and so hard did he try to find some workable solution to the problem that he neglected a great many other things, and so made the situation far worse.

  It’s worth mentioning at this point that we Greeks (or at least we Athenians, back in those days; I keep using this magic new word ‘Greeks’ as if it actually means something, but it doesn’t. And what I know about the rest of the Greeks, the ones who weren’t Athenians, could be written on the back of a potsherd with a rusty spearhead) had very strict views on how an honest man should make his living. Basically, he grew it, or for choice watched it grow, while other people did the actual hoeing and planting and pruning. The ideal was that a man inherited enough land from his father to grow enough food to qualify him for a respectable place in society — we divided people up into classes, according to how many measures of produce, wet and dry, their land produced in a year; so many measures and you could vote, so many more and you could fight for your country, and if your estate was big enough to produce five hundred measures a year, it stood to reason that there was no way you’d be able to eat all that stuff yourself without dying of chronic obesity, so you were obliged to use the surplus for the good of the community, by fitting out a warship for the fleet or financing the production of a play at one of the Festivals. That’s how come the Athenians of old had the best fleet in Greece , invented the Drama and never seemed to put on weight.

  Best of all, of course, was having enough money to be able to afford enough slaves to do all the fieldwork for you. Failing that, it was considered honourable, if tiresome, to work in the fields yourself, and some fairly rich men (Grandfather Eupolis, for example) quite enjoyed fooling about in the dust with a mattock or a pruning-knife. As far as earning a living went, though, that was it. Anybody who worked for someone else, even if he was a free man, felt that he was no better off than a slave. Nearly all the craftsmen and artisans, the smiths and carpenters and potters and wheelwrights and so forth, had their four or five scruffy acres of vines interplanted with barley and so could imagine they were really gentlemen farmers who happened to make door-hinges or sandals for a hobby. Merchants saw themselves as farmers who whiled away the parts of the year when nothing much was doing on the land by renting a space on a ship and taking a pleasure-cruise to Egypt or Italy , fetching along a few jars of wine or oil or honey just to help defray expenses. And the people who simply had no land at all, not even enough to lie down on without trespassing, had no choice but to admit that they were good-for-nothing outcasts from society and try to make a living out of politics.

  Actually, that wasn’t too hard at all. What with payment for attending Assembly and payment for sitting on juries (and we were such a savagely litigious nation that the demand for jurors usually outstripped the supply of layabouts by an alarming degree), a man could eat reasonably well and feed his family just by sitting on a stone bench all day, listening to the flower of Athenian oratory (a science in which we’re still unsurpassed in all the world; wonder why?) and doing his civic duty. If that wasn’t enough, however, there always used to be the third means by which Athens provided for her less fortunate children, namely the three obols a day she paid a man to sit in a warship and pull an oar. Since it was the moral effect of so many fine warships cruising up and down their coastlines that encouraged our loyal allies on the islands to part with the tribute money that paid for the juries and the Assemblies, the third option was necessary to provide for the other two; hence, I suppose, all those wars. At any rate, we Athenians proudly declare to all who’ll listen that Athens is the only place in the world where a man can make a living sitting on his bum being entertained by professional orators. It’s a proud boast, and one that nobody before or since has ever sought to emulate, for some reason.

  So it was understood that I and my brothers wouldn’t actually starve, whatever happened. But there’s more to life than just staying alive, the gods know; and so my poor father fretted himself half to death trying to dream up schemes whereby all eight of us would be able to live like gentlemen without having to listen to speeches. He was an ingenious man, my father, I’ll give him that. One way round the property qualifications was to own a workshop or a factory. Some of the greatest Athenians of the past had done precisely that; Nicias the General, Cleon the Orator, Hyperbolus and so on. It was respectable, so long as you simply owned the building and the slaves and didn’t actually dirty your own hands.

  So Father snooped around looking for promising businesses to invest in, in the hope that in time they’d grow successful enough to do one of us boys as his share of the inheritance. Sadly, the only businesses my father could afford to buy into were either failing or doomed from the start. Offhand I can recall the franchise in the state-owned silver mines (he bought the concession on the only chunk of rock in Laurium that didn’t have any silver in it); the trumpet factory (how many trumpets a year do you think a city the size of Athens consumes, for pity’s sake?); the sandal-making shop that would have got the contract to supply sandals to a large contingent of the Athenian army, if that contingent hadn’t been the one decimated by the Thebans at Mantinea; the charcoal-burning yard on Lemnos, which he bought shortly before Lemnos was taken away from us by the Spartans, and which he sold for the price of a second-hand hat a month or so before we got it back again.. . If he’d only kept the money he poured into these disasters and laid it aside in a temple, there’d probably have been enough to buy three of us a merchant ship each. As it was, his prudence and foresight left us when he died with nothing but the land, the stock and the farm instruments;

  even some of the slaves had had to be sold to cover his liabilities from a joint-venture trading scheme involving a shipload of prime Euxine timber that hit a submerged rock somewhere near Byzantium.

  But at least he’d seen to it that I had an education, though I’m not sure a bit and brace and a set of chisels wouldn’t have been more useful. Father had got it into his head at an early stage in my development that I was going to be the clever one, and it’s perfectly true to say that Athens has always appreciated cleverness, more so than any city in Greece . Unfortunately, cleverness is a bit like sulphur or charcoal; producing the stuff is all very well, but the by-products can make the whole district uninhabitable. Athenian cleverness is nasty stuff to be around, like tar or nitre, and people who make their living in the cleverness industry — law, philosophy and politics, as if there was any difference between them — tend to die young. Accordingly I wasn’t too keen on the idea, in spite of Father’s insistence, which is why I kept running away and hiding.

  There were three ways you could earn a living by making speeches. First, there was good old-fashioned informing, though that was going out of fashion even then. Basically, an informer made it his business to bring actions at law against those who allegedly betrayed or injured the State. If they got a conviction, they were awarded a fat slice of the convicted man’s property, while the remainder went to the Treasury to pay for such things as jurors’ wages.

  Good, honest work; but for some reason a degree of stigma went with the job, and there was always a slight risk of having your throat cut on a dark night.

  Writing speeches was far more socially acceptable, though it didn’t pay quite as well. We Athenians are tolerant people; we understand that not everybody is blessed with an inspired turn of phrase, and sometimes it’s not very fair to pitch a honey-tongued professional informer against a doddery old farmer in a talking match to the death. It was, therefore, open to the defendant to pay someone to write his speech for him.

  Slightly more prestigious was teaching philosophy, with spe
cial reference to ethics, morality and how to turn these lofty concepts arse-about-face in the course of a public address. Since a fair number of the practitioners of this art were gentlemen who studied and taught the subject either as a hobby or for wickedness, rather than as a commercial proposition, my father decided that this was the least degrading of the three options and looked around for someone to apprentice me to.

  And that, to cut a long story short, is how I came to be involved with Diogenes, the Yapping Dog, quite possibly the most unpleasant and distasteful person I’ve ever known. He had no original ideas, nothing to say, no redeeming qualities of any kind except a certain flair for meretricious annoyance and self-advertisement, and a complete and total lack of fear. He’s dead now, of course; and if I were Hercules or Theseus or some other hero from the old stories and could go down to Hell and bring back just one soul with me, it’d be Diogenes.

  Dear gods, I remember with appalling vividness the day my father took me to meet him for the first time. Being my father, he’d formulated his cunning scheme and set his heart on it as being the definitive answer to the problem of what to do about Euxenus, before stopping to consider the one basic practicality on which the success of the project depended, namely money. A last-minute glance at the household accounts made him revise quite drastically his choice of who I was to be apprenticed to. Up to that point, my father’s criteria for selection had been reputation, valuable contacts, proven rates of success, et cetera. Came the day, however, and it all boiled down to who would be prepared to take me on for the money available, and the choice suddenly dwindled down to one.

  That was the time when Diogenes was running his celebrated (or notorious)

  living-in-a-barrel gimmick. The idea was to show up the mindless materialism of us regular folks by dispensing with any vestige of luxury and retaining only the barest of essentials; to wit, one upended oil-jar, with a sort of hole-cum-door smashed in the side for him to crawl in and out of. It was a marvellous attention-grabber, which he exploited shamelessly by rolling this confounded thing from pitch to pitch, wherever there was likely to be a large, good-natured crowd, and squatting in it looking all haggard and unworldly until he’d attracted a substantial enough audience to justify a performance. Of course, he didn’t actually sleep in the wretched thing. As soon as the show was over, he’d dump it somewhere and either sneak back to his own warm, cosy house or (more usually) spend the night with one of his devoted female disciples whose husband happened to be out of town. The remarkable thing was that nobody (except me, of course) ever seemed to notice that the whole thing was a racket. In retrospect, I think it was because everybody wanted him to be genuine, and so assumed he was, without question.

  Come to think of it, nearly everything about the Yapping Dog was a lie, and a strange kind of lie at that; he went out of his way to make himself seem far worse than he actually was. When he stood up straight and combed his hair and washed (I think he did all three simultaneously about five times in his entire life) he was a reasonably tall, well-proportioned man, quite good-looking in a bland sort of a way; but somehow or other he managed to make himself look like a scrawny, ugly little dwarf. I think he smeared soot under his eyes to make them look sunken and hollow, and his deformed crouch was a masterpiece of histrionics, though he undoubtedly suffered for his art. As his accredited pupil, I was allowed to watch when nobody else was looking, and he stood up and stretched his sorely abused spine with a quite heart-rending groan.

  Anyway. Diogenes was on duty in his jar when we found him (he was never hard to track down, at least during working hours). He was sitting in the shade, half in and half out of the jar, with his other celebrated prop, the lantern (which he lit and carried round in broad daylight, claiming to be looking for an honest man. Great line. If anybody can tell me what it means, I’d be ever so grateful)

  and nibbling at a crust of stale bread which he kept handy at all times.

  ‘Diogenes,’ my father said.

  ‘Get lost.’

  My father (stolid, respectable, robustly healthy, a great eater of garlic and onions) didn’t know what to make of that, so he pretended he hadn’t heard.

  ‘Diogenes,’ he repeated.

  ‘Didn’t you hear what I just said? Gods, it must be awful to be deaf as well as stupid. Go away, you’re ruining the view.’

  My father, a born straight man, turned round to see what he was talking about.

  ‘What view?’ he said. ‘There’s just a wall.’

  ‘So?’

  Now, being a boy of tender years, I’d instinctively guessed what Diogenes’ game was within a minute of first setting eyes on him —after all, his entire persona was little more than Bad Boy — and as far as I was concerned, the best of luck to him. But I also knew my father, who was as straightforward as they come;

  insult him to his face three times and he’d just look confused, but try it a fourth time and you’d be going home with your teeth in your hat. For some reason I decided it wouldn’t be good if Father broke the strange man’s neck, so I intervened.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We’ve come to the wrong place. This isn’t Diogenes the philosopher, it’s only a chicken.’

  ‘Be quiet,’ said my father automatically; he always said ‘Be quiet’ when one of us spoke, right up till we were grown men. But Diogenes leaned forward a little and raised one grubby eyebrow.

  ‘What did you call me?’ he said.

  ‘A chicken,’ I repeated.

  ‘You think I look like a chicken?’

  I nodded. ‘A featherless biped. Sorry we disturbed you.’

  Now that, of course, was the most outrageous flattery, but I’d guessed (correctly) that Diogenes craved flattery almost as much as money. To explain: once, when Diogenes was going through one of his periodic picking-on-great-men phases — ‘monstering’, he used to call it — he took to showing up at the public lectures staged by the celebrated Plato (student of Socrates, Founder of the Academy, greatest living philosopher; a nasty bastard who picked his nose while eating dinner). Once, when Plato was lecturing on ‘What Is Man?’ and got to the bit where he contrasted/compared Man with other animals, he used this phrase ‘featherless biped’, and Diogenes took a fancy to the expression. At the next lecture, therefore, Diogenes sat in the front row, waited till Plato used The Phrase, stood up and threw a plucked chicken onto the middle of the stage.

  ‘There you go,’ he said in a loud voice. ‘Plato’s Man. ’

  I know; it loses a lot in the telling. Probably you had to be there. But that was the end of Plato’s public lectures for several months, and the poor fellow found it hard to get about during daylight for the crowds of small boys who’d materialise out of nowhere and follow him about going ‘Ter-wuck-wuck-wuck!’ and waggling their arms up and down. If it had been anybody else, I’d have felt sorry for him.

  Anyway, the flattery did the job. ‘I’ll talk to you,’ he said to me. ‘You’re obviously the brains of the family. What do you want?’

  My father cleared his throat. ‘Diogenes, I want you to consider taking my boy here as your apprentice. Of course, I’m willing—’

  ‘What did he just say?’ Diogenes interrupted.

  ‘He wants you to consider taking me as your apprentice,’ I said.

  ‘Ah. Right.’ Diogenes smiled, and scratched himself ostentatiously. That was another thing about him; all his disgusting habits were so obviously affectations that I, for one, was never offended by them. ‘He should have said so himself. All right, how much?’

  My father mentioned a sum of money. Diogenes looked at me pointedly. I repeated what Father had said. Diogenes spat.

  ‘Try again,’ he said. ‘Dammit, I wouldn’t even teach you philosophy for that.’

  My father, who was controlling his temper so ferociously that I was afraid his neck would snap, pointed out pleasantly enough that that was in fact what he wanted me to learn.

  ‘Huh?’ Diogenes grunted.

  I repeated what Father had
said, word for word. ‘The hell with that,’ Diogenes replied. ‘Any bloody fool can teach philosophy. In fact, only a bloody fool can teach philosophy. What I teach is how to be human, for which my rates are rather more than your man there is willing to pay. Sorry, kid.’

  To be honest, I was starting to get a little bit tired of Diogenes’ cabaret act.

  Either Father was going to stand there and take it, which wasn’t right since he’d done nothing to deserve it, or else pretty soon he was going to kick Diogenes halfway to Boeotia , and I didn’t want that to happen, either. ‘Suit yourself, then,’ I replied. ‘You’d have made a lousy pupil anyway.’

  Diogenes looked at me, and I recognised the look; recognition, together with a warning: This is my pitch, keep off’ He ignored the feed line, and yawned.

  ‘But,’ he said, ‘I do occasionally do charity work. All right, then.’ He stood up, three quarters upright so as to be shorter than my father. ‘You gods,’ he droned, in best hiring-fair fashion, with one hand uplifted, ‘witness that I take this boy as my apprentice and in return for his service and the woefully inadequate sum agreed upon by the parties hereto I undertake to teach him how to be a featherless biped and a good dog, amen.’ Then he looked my father straight in the eye and held out his hand for the money.

  ‘Good,’ he said, after he’d counted it (twice). ‘We start tomorrow, first light, sharp. Bring your own lunch.’

  On the way home, Father was unusually silent. Normally he’d think aloud as we walked together.

  ‘Euxenus,’ he said at last, ‘there’s a lot you can learn from that man.’

  I was surprised. In fact, I was surprised that he’d made the deal at all. ‘Yes, Father,’ I said.

  ‘That man,’ (and Diogenes was always that man in our household from that day forth), ‘is very good at what he does. In fact, that’s probably the best investment I’ll ever make on behalf of you boys.’