Alexander at the World's End Read online

‘Sorry.’

  When I couldn’t stand the discomfort any longer I sat up, groaned (no need to fake that) and opened my eyes. ‘You ready?’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘All right.’ And I recited —

  ‘Woe to the neck of the dog, to the sharp steel claws of the eagle!

  Woe to the land where the pig is preferred to the natural son!

  Further repent your grief, as the rays of the sun curl upwards;

  Behold as the stone peels back, revealing the olive within.’

  There was a long silence.

  (Admit it, Phryzeutzis, you’re impressed; it sounds just like the sort of thing the oracles of the gods come out with, and it doesn’t mean anything. Or rather, it could mean anything you want it to, which is the secret of a truly great oracle. Let me confess: I was only able to do this sort of thing because my brother Euthyphron and I used to spend hours making the stuff up as a game when we were kids. He was better at it than me, so you can see how good he was.)

  ‘That’s amazing,’ the man said eventually. ‘How the hell did you know that?’

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t me, remember, it was the demon. Did it make any sense to you?

  It sounded like complete rubbish to me.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ the man said vehemently; and he went on to explain. The dog, he said, was the Egyptian god Anubis, and that referred to the stake he was thinking of buying in a partnership trading wine for Egyptian wheat. The steel claws of the eagle were arrowheads (steel heads; eagle equals feathers equals the fletchings on the arrow) and arrows mean archers, and archers mean the King of Persia, because he’s shown as a running archer on the backs of his coins; Egypt was a possession of the Persian Empire; so beware of Persian intervention against Greek trading interests in Egypt. The bit about the pig, the man said, was brilliant; it referred to Judaea , where they don’t eat pork but where the Persian governor had just had to execute his own son for joining a conspiracy —

  hence the pig survives, but the son doesn’t; the pig is preferred. Now, so far the oracle seemed to be advising him against the venture; but then it said repent your grief, followed by the bit about the olive being inside the stone, instead of the other way round — in other words, ignore your misgivings and do the opposite of what you were intending to do, namely not go ahead with the project. ‘That’s absolutely amazing,’ the man repeated. ‘Thank you. Now I understand!’

  For about two heartbeats I just sat there with my mouth open, staring. I was dumbstruck. (For example, the pig and son bit — I just put that in because it sounded good; in Greek, pig is huos and son is huios. I didn’t even know Judaea had a Persian governor.) ‘You see?’ I somehow managed to croak. ‘Didn’t I tell you?’

  In the end I had to refuse their money and go away, to somewhere I could lie down in the shade and rest my aching head. I made fifteen drachmas in a couple of hours, but it was hard work; not making up the drivel, but listening to the poor fools explaining why it was so absolutely right.

  Mind you, the odd thing was that it was right, as often as not. For example, the man with the trading venture to Egypt made a point of seeking me out when he got back and giving me twenty drachmas and a solid silver bowl embossed with lions and goats; he’d got rid of all his stock and quadrupled his money, in spite of being quite viciously persecuted by Persian customs officials. He wasn’t the only one to get an apparently spot-on oracle, not by a long way.

  I think the gods have a sick sense of humour. I think that’s how we know they exist.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ‘Now you’ve got some money again,’ Diogenes said, ‘we can continue with your education.’

  We were sitting outside my house in the City, enjoying the sun. I’d had a busy morning — woken up at the crack of dawn by a nervous merchant, one of my regular customers, who hadn’t been able to sleep after hearing a rumour about Italian pirates infesting the straits of Rhegium; next, another merchant (two thirds of my customers were merchants, either individual traders or ship-owners) wanting to know if there was going to be any call for bone-handled bath-oil scrapers, because he knew where there was a consignment of twelve gross going cheap; a lovelorn middle-aged widow, desperate to know if her handsome young boyfriend was only after her money; another merchant... Not that I was complaining, far from it. By luck or innate shrewdness I’d stumbled on the secret of making money by fraudulent prophesy. It was quite simple: give the impression that you don’t need the money and you actually find the whole business of forecasting the future both irksome and distasteful, and you’ll have them queuing up outside your door.

  ‘That’s very kind of you,’ I replied, smothering a yawn, ‘but now that I’ve got the money I don’t need the education.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Really. Just ask yourself which one of us lives in a jar, and you’ll see what I mean.’

  Of course, Diogenes didn’t really live in a jar, as I think I mentioned earlier. That said, he didn’t live in a large, comfortable house a hundred yards back from the Painted Cloister, either; he had a cosy but definitely cramped little house just up the hill from the Mint, unhappily downwind of the Areopagus tannery. ‘You forget,’ he said, ‘I choose to live in a jar. I’m like a snail, I carry my house with me wherever I go.’

  ‘And you leave a trail of slime to show where you’ve been. Yes, it’s a good analogy.’ I poured more wine into his cup. ‘I’ll be honest, though, I owe it all to you. You taught me how to lie and cheat. I’m just better at it than you are, that’s all.’

  Diogenes smiled. ‘Don’t you believe it,’ he said. ‘If all I was interested in was money, I’d be so rich by now the Great King would be coming to me asking for a loan. That’s the trouble with you, you judge people by your own pathetic standards.’

  I nodded. ‘That’s right,’ I said. ‘Actually, though, you’ve raised an interesting point there. How shall I put it? We both share the same basic philosophy, yes?’

  ‘The one you stole from me. Agreed.’

  ‘The one my father bought from you.’

  ‘Hired, not bought.’

  ‘Whatever,’ I said. ‘We both accept the truth of the contention that a man can be whatever he can deceive his neighbours into believing he is; that’s the fundamental credo of the Mysteries of the Yapping Dog. Now, I use this truth to take money away from fools. So do you, but only to a very limited extent. What is it you do want, Diogenes?’

  He lifted his hat, wiped his forehead and put his hat back on his head. ‘To teach,’ he said. ‘To disseminate the truth, both by word and example. It’s all I care about. And that’s the difference between you and me, Yapping Pup. You cheat people out of money in order to live and prosper. I do it to punish them, and by punishment to teach them. I don’t swindle a man out of a drachma. I fine him a drachma for being gullible enough to pay me money.’

  ‘Like you punished my father?’

  He shook his head. ‘That really bothers you, doesn’t it? And yet he’s one of the people I gave good value to; I showed you how to make a good living, which is exactly what he wanted.’

  I thought for a moment. ‘But you’re such a useless teacher,’ I said. ‘Teachers show people how to lead better, more virtuous lives; how to be better citizens, how to be better at their chosen trade or vocation, how to be morally better—’

  Diogenes made a rude noise, something he was very good at. ‘That’s not teaching,’ he said contemptuously, ‘that’s propagating a lie. Teaching is showing people the truth.’

  I smiled. ‘And the truth is?’

  ‘That human beings are basically foolish, wicked and cruel. That human aspirations are vanity, and human values of good and evil are shallow and false.

  That, when all is said and done, human beings are no better than the gods.’ He finished off his wine and helped himself to some more. ‘I’d have thought you’d have known that, a clever boy like you.’
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br />   ‘That’s just Yapping Dog talk,’ I said. ‘Save it for the customers.’

  He shook his head. ‘Take it or leave it,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t bother me. I tell the truth as I see it. You’re perfectly entitled to be wrong if you want to;

  after all, this is a democracy.’

  An ox-cart rumbled past, dangerously overloaded with jars of dried figs. I could see its axles bowing in the middle, so that the wheels slanted inwards. ‘So you’re saying that basically we’re all no better than animals or gods, and anybody who pretends otherwise is a liar. And yet you taught me that I could be anything I wanted, anything at all. Even a god, I seem to remember you saying once.’

  Diogenes nodded. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Provided you lie convincingly enough.

  Use your logic, boy. If all human pretensions are lies, why be cheapskate and petty and lie on a small scale, when you could equally well tell big lies;

  Olympian lies that make you so tall you can reach out and scoop up handfuls of cloud?That’s the point of what I’m telling you. Recognising the truth is all very well, but it doesn’t get you anywhere, it’s just depressing.’

  ‘I’d agree with you there,’ I said, ‘if I thought it was the truth.’

  ‘Be quiet and listen, you’re getting free education here. I must be mad, telling you this for nothing. In fact, that’s why you don’t believe me, I guess. People never believe anything they haven’t paid money for.’

  ‘You’re drifting away from the point.

  ‘Am I? Oh, yes. The point is,’ he went on, closing his eyes and leaning back against the doorpost, ‘that when enough people believe a lie, it becomes a sort of half-truth. It’s like the way they build causeways in harbours; they cut down a hundred thousand trees, sharpen the ends and hammer them into the silt, all crammed up so close together that you can walk across them, even drive a cart.

  The causeway works; it does the job of dry land where dry land isn’t but where dry land ought to be. Build a house on a causeway and pretty soon you’ll forget that you aren’t on dry land. But you’re not. Your house is resting on the tops of twenty thousand log-ends jammed into the mud; and sooner or later that mud’s going to wash away or subside, and your house is going to fall into the water.’

  He sighed. ‘You ram a hundred thousand false ideas into people’s minds, you’ll get a structure firm enough to stand on, for a while. But it isn’t real, and in the end it’ll turn out badly, no way round that.’

  ‘Not necessarily,’ I said. ‘If you do a proper job, make sure the foundations are really firm—’

  ‘Then your house may stand for a thousand years,’ he yawned drowsily. ‘And people will come to rely on it so much that when it eventually falls in, they won’t be expecting anything of the sort and so they’ll all be drowned. But you’ll be dead and long gone, so it won’t bother you; sure, as far as you’re concerned, the causeway gets the job done. It’s true during your lifetime but it turns back into a lie for your great-great-great-grandchildren.’ He opened his eyes and grinned. ‘Now that’s something you should be able to grasp, of all people.’

  I shook my head. ‘Doesn’t follow,’ I said. ‘You’re referring to Grandfather Eupolis inheriting all that property from people who died in the plague, and you’re saying it’s a lie that he was rich, because his grandchildren are back to being poor again. But Eupolis was rich; we’ve just fallen on hard times since.

  ‘Whatever.’ Diogenes leaned back and let his hat drop down over his eyes. ‘Maybe you’re right and I’m wrong. Be reasonable; you can’t expect me to use true arguments when I’m not getting paid. It’s like the people who have speeches written for lawsuits; if they were telling the truth, they wouldn’t need a lawyer.’

  I’d been in the fortune-telling business for over a year by this time. As you’ll have gathered, it was being kind to me. Still, I wasn’t happy with it. I was caught in that strange little fold of society, people with money but no land, and I didn’t like it at all. Most people in my position, my merchants and ship-owners and factory-owners, felt the same way, but there wasn’t anything we could do about it. In spite of the fact that we had more silver money than many Knights, even some Five-hundred-measurers, we still counted as Oarsmen class; we couldn’t hold political office or be on the Council, all we could do was speak and vote in Assembly. Now, in Grandfather’s time, that was enough; Assembly ruled everything, and men like the celebrated Cleon effectively ran the City that way, holding no office but getting their way simply by making speeches that people liked listening to. Back then, in fact, it was a positive handicap to hold office, because if you did, you could be held accountable and put to death if something went wrong in the City’s affairs, whereas someone who just spoke his mind in an Assembly debate was as free as the wind. Things had changed since then, though. There wasn’t any specific law or statute you could point to, but the centre of gravity had definitely shifted; and people like myself were shut out, and didn’t like it one bit. Not that it mattered a damn, of course; there were so few of us, and the share of the City’s wealth that we controlled was negligible.

  A substantial proportion of the unhappiness and evil in the world today is the fault of a man by the name of Dion, who was for many years the chamberlain, or chief adviser or grand vizier or what have you, of the mighty and absurd dictator Dionysius I of Syracuse.

  Dion was, by all accounts, a noble and virtuous man with the soul of a poet and the mind of a philosopher; but I can’t really explain about Dion without first telling you a bit about Dionysius, who’s much more fun to talk about anyhow.

  Dionysius was a ferocious, jolly man who seized power in Syracuse, the wealthiest city in Sicily, after a bloodbath and divided his time thereafter between screwing money out of his unfortunate subjects and writing plays, which he submitted to the Inspectors of Plays and Warships in Athens in the hope that one of them would be presented at the world-famous Dramatic Festivals.

  There’s a family connection here, of course, though I don’t suppose you’ll understand a word of what I’m about to tell you, poor ignorant Phryzeutzis.

  Here’s a grossly simplified explanation.

  We Athenians invented Drama. Drama is where a whole bunch of people dress up in masks and fancy costumes and get up on a platform in a special building called a theatre, and pretend to be someone else; invariably characters from our rich Greek heritage of myth and legend. In the course of this deception, they recite poetry which purports to be what the characters in the story say to each other, but which is in fact written well in advance by a poet and given to them to learn by heart. Most of the people who take part in these affairs are members of the chorus — there are about twenty of them and they all say the same words simultaneously (we’re expected to believe that people did that sort of thing, back in our mythical past) — but the four most skilful poetry-reciters pretend to be the protagonists in the story, and they’re allowed to speak on their own.

  Dramas, or plays as they’re also known, are staged twice a year in Athens , at two religious Festivals called the Lenaea and the Great Dionysia. For three days, every Athenian who can spare the time sits on a hard stone bench from dawn to dusk watching the actors and listening to the poetry; every day there are three tragedies (sad stories, which end with half the people dead and the rest utterly miserable) and one comedy (funny stories — intentionally funny stories —

  in which nobody dies, but unpopular people get beaten up with huge padded sticks fashioned to represent the male reproductive organ). My grandfather Eupolis was, according to himself, probably the greatest of all the Athenian comic poets; and to be fair to him, he did win the first prize on a number of occasions.

  Dionysius, however, wrote tragedies — purportedly unfunny plays —which was appropriate for a Syracusan. In Sicily, you see, although they’re utterly provincial and not really proper Greeks, they’ve always been mad keen on Athenian Drama; so much so that when Eupolis was stranded in Sicily as one of the very few s
urvivors of the huge Athenian army sent to conquer Syracuse in the Great Peloponnesian War (they failed, miserably, and nearly all of them died;

  served them right, it must be said, since the invasion was utterly unprovoked and only undertaken in the hope of accumulating enough plunder from the obscenely rich Sicilians to help pay for Athens’ war with Sparta). He managed to survive and escape capture in the heart of enemy territory thanks to his ability to recite by heart large chunks of the latest tragedies, as performed at the Festivals he’d himself written comedies for.

  Dionysius was, by all accounts, a pretty competent writer of plays. But he wasn’t Athenian, he was the ruler of a city that had more or less directly caused the defeat of Athens in the War, his philosophy of government was directly opposite to Athenian ideas of democracy, and on top of all that he was without question one of the nastiest pieces of work ever to hold power in a human community. As a result, his plays were always turned down flat by the Inspectors and never performed.

  This annoyed Dionysius, but it didn’t stop him writing; quite the reverse.

  Instead of having his plays performed in Athens , however, he had to make do with reading them aloud to his assembled courtiers, who were supposed to sit still and listen attentively, and then tell him how good they were afterwards.

  Which brings us on to Dion. Now, Dion really did like poetry; he genuinely liked Dionysius’ poetry. He’d have liked it even if Dionysius hadn’t been his master and a psychotic killer. But one evening, during a reading of Dionysius’

  masterpiece Jolaus, Dion made the mistake of falling asleep. Dionysius noticed, and flew into a murderous rage. At first he ordered his guards to cut Dion’s head off there and then; he changed his mind just in time, but only because it occurred to him that beheading was too quick and easy a death for someone capable of nodding off during a recital of the greatest tragedy ever. So instead, he sentenced him to hard labour for life in the stone quarries.