Alexander at the World's End Page 5

  Well, the slave with the bad knee tottered back up to the olive grove, saw that Father wasn’t there, assumed he’d gone home and set about getting in the rest of the olives. He knew he was in trouble for sloping off the previous day, and was anxious to regain a bit of lost favour by putting in a full day’s work. It was only by chance that he stayed so late at his work that he decided to stop over at the house himself; where he found my father, half off his head with fever, apparently having a heated argument with Grandfather Eupolis about the merits of Euripides’ play The Trojan Women.

  By this time, of course, it was too late in the day to think about trying to get him home, or even finding help. So Father had to spend the night there, with nothing to eat (the slave had only taken his own lunch with him, and of course he’d eaten that) and precious little in the way of warmth or comfort. As soon as it was light, the slave set off to find help. He made the mistake of hammering on Demonax’s door. Our neighbour replied that he’d already wasted enough valuable time larking about with the old fool, and he had better things to do, etc. By the time the slave gave up and left, encouraged on his way by Demonax’s two unspeakably ferocious dogs, it was already midmorning, and by the time the slave had gone back home, found someone who’d listen to him (my feckless brother Euthyphron; hardly the person you’d choose to turn to in a crisis), organised a makeshift litter and some bearers, and slogged back out to Phyle, it was dark again.

  By now Father was in terrible shape, so Euthyphron decided to take him home in the dark. I suppose it wasn’t his fault that it rained again; it rains so rarely in Attica that the risk was practically negligible. But he’d been going back and forth to Phyle since he was a little kid, he shouldn’t have got lost and spent the whole night wandering up and down, round and round in circles, until he finally blundered into the house at Pallene, soaked to the skin, about an hour before dawn.

  Even after all that, you’d have expected Father to pull through. True, he had dreadful congestion in his lungs by this stage, as well as the fever, but this was Attica , where as a rule people generally don’t die of a broken leg. We called for a doctor, and he came; a short, fat, busy little man from Halicarnassus who drained off an alarming amount of Father’s blood in a series of little bronze dishes while mumbling prayers to Asclepius in a sing-song voice that nearly drove me round the bend. His considered opinion was that the real cause of the illness was the wasp-sting. Some people, he said, react very badly to being stung, and that’s just how it goes. We pointed out that we kept bees, and Father had been stung more times than he’d eaten salted fish, but the doctor shook his head and said that bee-stings and wasp-stings had quite different effects and attacked different humours in the body. Then he siphoned off another jugful of Father’s blood just to be on the safe side, charged us a drachma, and went home.

  But we didn’t imagine for a moment that he was going to die; we knew he was very ill, but the worst we anticipated was the inconvenience of having to hang around the house listening to him argue (with incredible bitterness, most of the time)

  with the ghost of his dead father when we all had work to do. I suppose the apprehension set in when we realised that none of us knew how the estate, the family business, actually worked. Oh, we knew about its component parts, but Father had always kept a firm and exclusive grip on the overall management of it all, and we didn’t have a clue what needed to be done. Slaves and day-labourers kept turning up at the door wanting to be told what they should be doing, and we didn’t know. It was utterly thoughtless of Father, we told each other, to be lying there raving like a loon when there was so much work to be done that only he could do.We knew whose fault it would be when he recovered and found that everything was in a total mess; there’d be no point trying to explain...

  And then one of us raised the possibility — I don’t think anybody said it in so many words — of what would happen if he didn’t recover; what if he died, and left us all alone? At first that didn’t bear thinking about, and besides, he wasn’t going to die, so stop being so damn morbid. But time went on, and although his slanging match with our late grandfather grew steadily more vitriolic (we could only hear one side of it, of course, but we remembered Eupolis and were sure that at the very least he was giving as good as he got), his voice was getting steadily weaker. He didn’t recognise any of us, or even seem to be aware that there was anybody there except his own father. When he started telling the old man that it was his neglect and mental cruelty that killed our grandmother Phaedra, we were all so embarrassed we got up and left the room.

  He died on the seventh day of the fever, in the middle of a stream of abuse. It was the first time we’d ever heard him use that sort of language, or express himself so passionately about anything. In fact, after Grandfather died, I can’t remember Father ever mentioning him (aside, of course, from this occasion) in anything except a vaguely respectful tone such as you’d use about some minor god you believed in but didn’t actually know very much about.

  Well, soon enough I expect to see him again — both of them, in fact — on the other side of the blind river, that drab and featureless place where we Greeks go when we die. I’ll be able to ask them both what it was that passed between them that was important enough to blot out everything else from Father’s mind in the last hours of his life. I’ve often speculated idly about what on earth it might have been. The prospect of satisfying my curiosity on this point is, in fact, about the only thing that reconciles me to the thought of death, which in all other respects has nothing to recommend it whatsoever.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Athenian children, my illiterate young friend, are plagued from their earliest years by the poet Homer. For reasons which I have never and will never understand, we’re required to learn vast acreages of his dreary masterpieces by heart, and anybody who can’t or won’t is immediately dismissed out of hand as perverse or just plain stupid. ‘Ignorant little ratbag, doesn’t even know his Homer,’ they say, and reinforce their reproof with the backs of their hands.

  Bizarre. After all, there’s nothing in the iliad and next to nothing in the Odyssey that’s of any practical value to anybody; quite the reverse, in fact.

  Four-fifths of the Iliad is endlessly repetitive battle scenes, describing a style of fighting that would get you killed in less time than it takes to blow your nose if you tried it on a modern battlefield, and the rest of it’s an extremely dubious, if not downright blasphemous, take on the lifestyle and morals of our gods. There’s some stuff about shipbuilding and carpentry in general in the Odyssey, I grant you; but as a guide-book it’s been proven useless time after time. The gods only know how many poor fools have set off to find all the wonderful places that Homer firmly asserts are out there, somewhere between Troy and Ithaca ; according to those of them who’ve made it back in one piece, Homer got it wrong. As simple as that.

  But there was one bit in the Iliad that made one hell of an impression on me when I was a small boy; in fact, it scared me stiff, and still does. I’m not talking about those comically gory descriptions of spearpoints coming out through the backs of people’s skulls. They just make me giggle. The bit I’m talking about is the scene where Hector’s off to join the fighting and Andromache, his wife, is urging him not to go. What’ll become of me and the kids, she says, if you get yourself killed? There’s nothing worse in all the world than the fate of a woman whose husband’s killed in war. Suddenly, she’s left on her own, with nobody to protect her. At best, the people she thought were her friends ignore her, at worst they come sniffing round like wild dogs looking for easy prey. And if the city falls, what has she got to look forward to but slavery and degradation at the hands of the people who killed her husband?

  That sense of loneliness, of no longer being protected against the world by someone who you thought you could rely on to be there; I know how that feels.

  That’s how we felt, my brothers and I, when our father died. For all our splendid and expensive educations, we hadn’t got
a clue what we were supposed to do. It was like looking down as you walk along and seeing that there isn’t any ground, that in fact you’re walking on thin air over a damn great chasm. All we knew was that with Father gone we were in deep trouble — we knew that because he’d been telling us so ever since we were children. Now, in spite of his best efforts, the very catastrophe he’d worked all his life to avoid had come about, and we were the ones who were going to have to deal with it.

  My brother Eudaemon dealt with the problem by running away. He left without telling anybody on the morning after the funeral, taking with him my father’s armour and sword (no great loss; after forty years of neglect they consisted of nine parts verdigris, one part force of habit) and all the badly hidden money, just enough to pay for a passage on a ship, if you didn’t mind sleeping on top of the cargo. We tried to find out where he’d gone, and a friend of the family reported hearing that the mighty Bias (who vanished from sight at the same time, to the great sorrow of various creditors) had joined an army being raised by Philomelus of Phocia against the Thebans. It seemed logical to assume that Eudaemon had gone with him, and when we heard a while later that Philomelus and a large part of his army had been wiped out, we shot out urgent messages begging for news and offering a cash reward for any information, but no replies were forthcoming, not even obvious lies.

  My brother Eugenes, easily summed up by the phrase ‘hatefully pragmatic’, pointed out that at least this meant one less brother to share the estate with.

  With Eudaemon gone, he explained as we sat under the old fig tree outside the back door at Pallene, we would now have just over seventeen acres each rather than barely fifteen.

  ‘For gods’ sakes,’ interrupted my brother Eudemus (the sensitive one;

  apprenticed to Lysias the banker, and the only one of us with any real prospect of being able to make a decent living), ‘that’s a disgusting thing to say.’

  ‘I’m just trying to be practical,’ Eugenes replied irritably. ‘Somebody’s got to be, after all. Dammit, if it’d bring him back I’d willingly hand over my entire share to the King of the Centaurs, but it won’t. He’s gone, we’re still here. And maybe, just maybe, that could make it possible to keep the family together, so that the rest of us won’t have to go out risking our lives halfway across the world—’

  ‘Do you really think so?’ interrupted my brother Euthyphron.You may remember, he was the one who coped so remarkably badly with the job of getting my father home from Phyle. There was no malice in him, but he was an idiot.

  ‘Well,’ Eugenes replied, ‘it’s conceivable. Let’s look at this scientifically, shall we?’ He fished a wax tablet and a stylus out of the fold of his tunic.

  ‘Now then, last year we got an average return of eleven medimni per acre on barley, twenty metretes per acre for the vines and two metretes for the olives.

  Very roughly, and not allowing for interplanting barley in the vineyards, we’ve got thirty acres suitable for barley, seventy acres of vineyards and twenty of olives and other general rubbish — Grandfather’s beans, the great lupin experiment, other junk like that. Split seven ways —‘ he paused for a moment, scowling and counting on his fingers ‘— split seven ways, we each get four and a quarter acres of the barley fields, ten each of vines and two and three quarters of the leftovers, making a total of seventeen acres. Everybody with me so far?’

  Eudemus was about to make another formal protest at the distastefulness of this conversation, but the rest of us shushed him. This was interesting.

  ‘All right then,’ Eugenes went on. ‘Here’s the good bit. Four and a quarter of barley at eleven medimni the acre is forty-seven medimni. Ten of vines at twenty metretes, that’s easy enough, two hundred metretes. Two and three quarters at two, wet or dry — probably over-optimistic, but it doesn’t make much odds anyhow — call it five and a half measures for ready money. Add those all up —‘ another pause while he did just that ‘— and the total for each one of us,’ he announced triumphantly, ‘is two hundred and fifty-two and a half measures each, wet and dry. Not enough for Cavalry class, sure, but we’ll easily qualify for Heavy Infantry, and there’s no shame in that, none at all.’

  We looked at each other like men rescued at the last minute from a shipwreck.

  ‘That’s amazing,’ said my brother Eumenes, more commonly known inside the family as The Human Weasel. ‘Even splitting the estate up like that, we’re all still rich. And that’s all because Eudaemon took it into his head to totter off and get himself killed?’

  ‘Hardly,’ broke in my brother Eudorus. ‘If Eudaemon was still here, we’d have fifteen each, not seventeen. By Eugenes ’ reckoning, we’d all still be producing enough to make Heavy Infantry. And there’s the point. Father wasn’t stupid, he could do sums just as well as Eugenes can, probably better. And he still thought we were done for. So what’s changed?’

  That was typical Eudorus; hence his nickname Apometeorus, that which descends upon one from a great height. He took a delight in exterminating optimism wherever he happened to find it, like a man clearing his barns of rats. The worst thing was, he was always right.

  ‘I don’t see that,’ Eugenes replied. ‘It’s a matter of simple arithmetic.’

  Eudorus shook his head. ‘No, it’s not,’ he said. ‘You’re basing your argument on a false premise. Euxenus, you’re the tame philosopher. Explain to your brother what a false premise is.’

  Eudorus, I need hardly add, was also the eldest, which probably accounts for his pessimistic nature. He’d lived longer than any of us with Father’s obsessive conviction that we were all headed for ineluctable destitution and poverty, and so it was a fundamental article of faith with him.

  ‘I know what a false premise is, thank you very much,’ Eugenes said. ‘I just don’t think I’m guilty of one, that’s all.’

  Eudorus sighed. He had the knack of making a noise just like an icy winter wind sighing through the eaves. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘let me explain itto you so you’ll know better in future. You’re basing all these clever calculations of yours on these figures for average yield. Would you mind telling me how you arrived at those figures? I mean, is there any solid basis for them, or did the Muses tell them to you in a dream when you were herding goats on Parnes?’

  There was a slight crackle in the air, evidence of Eugenes painfully keeping his temper. ‘Simple,’ he said. ‘I looked up last year’s census in Father’s accounts, divided the yield figures by the acreages, and got the figure for the average that way.’

  Eudorus nodded. ‘Splendid,’ he said. ‘Obviously it didn’t occur to you that — to take an example at random — the long five-acre at Pallene regularly gives us sixteen measures of wheat to the acre, while Old Rocky at Phyle barely gives us six in a good year. Now you tell me, brother. Which of us gets the five-acre, and who gets stuck with Old Rocky?’

  Needless to say, there was a loud and confused chorus of replies to that question. Eudorus shut us all up with a ferocious scowl, and went on.

  ‘Another point,’ he said. ‘We get sixteen measures per acre off the five-acre because we manure it properly. We can do that because we’ve got nine mules. We can afford to keep nine mules because we’ve got a hundred and twenty acres. Now, if each of us has seventeen acres, it stands to reason — or at least, it does in the version of reality where I’m compelled to live — that we can’t each keep nine mules. In fact, we’ll be hard put to it to keep one. And what about labour?

  We get good yields because we plough three times and we harrow and we break up the clods and we make sure the terraces are kept up. When I say we”, of course, I’m referring to the slaves; the slaves which our father, with typical fat-headed generosity and respect for tradition, set free in his will. No slaves, no work-force, no triple ploughing. Result: reduced yields. Face it, brothers, the old man knew what he was talking about. This family’s finished in agriculture, and there’s no two ways about it.’

  There was a long, wretched silence;
an invariable sign that Eudorus had been talking. ‘All right, then,’ Eumenes piped up. ‘If you’re so damned clever, you tell us what we should be doing.’

  Eudorus sighed again, and I instinctively pulled my cloak up to my ears to ward off the freezing cold wind. ‘It’s pretty obvious, actually,’ he said. ‘But you’re not going to like it.’

  ‘You don’t say,’ Eugenes muttered.

  (It’s just occurred to me, my Scythian friend; I’ll bet you’re completely and utterly bemused by the fact that all my brothers’ names begin Eu-. I’m afraid you’re just going to have to live with it; we did. Once an Athenian family gets it into its collective head to have a tradition like that, you’re stuck with it.

  Be grateful that at least all the names are different. In one of the oldest and grandest Athenian families, all the men were called either Callias or Hipponicus, and had been for a thousand carefully recorded years.)

  ‘What we’ve got to do,’ Eudorus went on, ignoring him, ‘is this. The land is split between four of us — four only, no more. The other three will have to make shift for themselves as best they can. I know it’s hard, but it’s the only thing we can do. It’s that, or sitting on juries for a living.’

  This time, the post-Eudorus silence was very long and quite deadly. Eventually, Euthyphron, of all people, cleared his throat nervously and said, ‘I agree with Eudorus.’

  ‘Of course you do,’ Eudorus said. ‘Because I’m right, and we all know it. Now, how are we going to do this? I propose we draw straws, but we can fish for pebbles in a hat if anybody’s got strong feelings on the matter.’

  (You’ll have noticed, I’m sure, that nobody once thought of suggesting that we do the really obvious thing, namely not split the estate up at all, just carry on living together as we’d always done with our nine mules and their abundant manure. Well, it’s probably really obvious to you, and it’s become really obvious to me now that I’m an old man who’s seen the whole world and devoted his life to philosophy. But back then we were young. More to the point, we were young Athenians. It would never have occurred to us in ten thousand years not to divide up the estate, because that was what happened when a father died. Even Eudorus’ suggestion was outrageously radical, the sort of desperate expedient people are forced into in the worst of extremes, like when starving men in a dungeon must either turn cannibal or die.)