Alexander at the World's End Read online

When this story was first told in Athens , a lot of people suddenly went all silent and thoughtful at the mention of the stone quarries of Syracuse . That’s because it was those same quarries where the men taken prisoner by the Syracusans during the War ended up; suffice to say, none of them ever came back.

  Not one.

  Somehow or other, though, Dion managed to survive in the quarries for three years, at the end of which time Dionysius relented, pardoned him and had him cleaned up, given a decent meal and brought back in honour to the royal court.

  And to celebrate his old friend’s pardon and return, Dionysius announced, he was going to hold a grand banquet and read them all his latest play, Niobe In Chains.

  Dion, looking rather thin and rather frail, had the seat of honour for the feast and the subsequent recital, Well, to cut a long story short he sat quietly through the first half-hour of the play-reading and then stood up and started to walk slowly towards the door.

  ‘Hey,’ roared Dionysius, looking up from his roll. ‘Where the hell do you think you’re going?’

  ‘Back to the stone quarries,’ Dion replied.

  That was Dion; noble, fearless, a champion of truth and integrity, thick as a brick. Dionysius stared at him speechlessly for a couple of heartbeats; then he roared with laughter, tore up the manuscript and made Dion his chief minister.

  When Dionysius was on his deathbed (as a result, so they say, of the lethal dose of raw wine he gulped down to celebrate the news that finally one of his plays had been accepted by the Athenian Inspectors) he made him regent and Lord Protector during the infancy of the utterly worthless crown prince, who in due course became King Dionysius II.

  The younger Dionysius was said by those who knew him well to be so bland and ineffectual a man that if you dissolved him in water and drank him, you’d hardly notice the taste; in consequence, Syracuse was ruled by the noble Dion, who announced as soon as the old reprobate had been safely reduced to charcoal on his funeral pyre that the bad times were over at last and henceforth Syracuse was going to be run along the lines of the most perfect state, namely the theoretical Republic devised and written about at interminable length by the celebrated Athenian philosopher Plato.

  That’s right: Plato, the featherless biped, Diogenes’ habitual victim. Plato had been a pupil of Socrates, the legendary wizard whose little demon I pretended to keep imprisoned in my jar. After Socrates’ death (he was convicted on twelve counts of being generally guilty, and quite properly executed; according to Eupolis, he was a veritable human toad) Plato set up a thinking shop called the Academy, where rich young men went to learn wisdom and stuff, at highly competitive rates. When not lecturing or putting up with Diogenes, he wrote books of philosophy, including this same Republic that Dion admired so much. In this celebrated work, he set out his idea of the perfect society; and to be fair to him, he did have a few good ideas. For example, in Plato’s Republic, poetry was illegal. No poets were allowed inside the City, and all books of poetry were to be called in and publicly burned; specifically including (and this is why I’ve always had a soft spot for the old fool) Homer.

  The main thrust of Plato’s work, though, was that democracy isn’t a terribly good idea (it was, after all, a democracy that executed Socrates). Instead, Plato’s state was ruled by a king; but not just any king. Plato’s king had to be a philosopher; in fact, he had to be a philosopher who was more or less bullied into being a king against his will.

  Something tells me that it was this, rather than the stuff about outlawing poetry or abolishing families and replacing them with state-hired nannies, that appealed to Dion. According to Plato, the king/philosopher was to be supreme ruler, advised and guided by a select group of other philosophers who governed the people, who were to be treated more or less as slaves. I can see Dion reading this stuff and thinking Yes! Do away with ruthless oppression of the citizen body by a drunken, intemperate madman and replace it with ruthless oppression of the citizen body by a load of philosophers. Just the thing, and utterly Syracusan.

  So Dion sent a messenger to Athens begging Plato to come to Syracuse and help set up the perfect society; and if he could bring along a couple of dozen other philosophers, so much the better. To his eternal credit, Diogenes, when asked, refused to go; but he was one of the very few who stayed behind. It was, Diogenes said, like the lancing of a monumental boil, as all the philosophers left Athens in a fleet of hastily chartered bulk timber freighters, sailing west to found the perfect society among the people who’d massacred their grandfathers.

  For some reason, they didn’t even ask me. But they made a special point of inviting Plato’s most devoted and brilliant pupil, a man of my own age by the name of Aristotle; and that’s why Dion’s ghost deserves to rot for ever at the bottom of the Great Shit Lake in Hell, with giant seals gnawing his testicles.

  Aristotle; that sad, bewildered, ill-used, misunderstood, brilliant, pedantic little man, the cause of so much evil.

  He wasn’t Athenian, of course; he was the son of a doctor from a little place called Stagira , up north somewhere, and when he was young his father went to work for King Amyntas of Macedon, the father of the King Philip I’ve already mentioned. But young Aristotle knew what he wanted to be when he grew up, and when he was seventeen he made the long and dangerous journey south (oh, I can picture him, that thin, nervous, fastidious traveller, suffering the torments of the damned from dusty, rutted tracks and flea-infested mattresses) to sign up with Plato’s Academy. There he stayed, not even paying any fees because he was so brilliant and so admiring, until the time came for the whole circus to move to Syracuse .

  They had several good years there, playing perfect societies, until finally the Syracusan people (who’d put up with Dionysius, but who found that the one thing they couldn’t take was too much perfection) threw them out with prejudice and stuck young Dionysius on the throne. Dion escaped with his life, most of his philosophers and a new perspective on what was really needed for a truly perfect society, namely young Dionysius’ head on a pole in the middle of the market square. Despite several attempts, he never quite attained this state of grace;

  but he did finally manage, with the help of some non-philosophical mercenaries recruited from the pirate bands of Rhegium, to throw young Dionysius out, make himself king and rule in absolute, blood-soaked perfection for a year or so before someone with a bad attitude towards wisdom in general slit his throat for him and brought Dionysius back, quite possibly (knowing the Syracusans) in the misguided belief that he’d turn out to be as good a playwright as his old man.

  Aristotle followed his master Plato home, of course, and for a while there wasn’t quite so much talk about perfect societies and philosopher kings as there had been. Plato, in fact, never recovered from his bad experience. He lived to be nearly ninety, but he grew steadily dottier as he grew older, so much so that even Diogenes stopped teasing him. Aristotle stuck by him, out of loyalty and love and because the Academy was still a thoroughly sound commercial concern, until he died; but all the while Aristotle was thinking long, hard thoughts about such matters as human society and perfection and the sort of low-down, dirty little bastards who’d chased him out of cosy Syracuse. It was at this time that he evolved his theory of Natures, which states that every living thing has its own Nature, which defines its existence. You are, in other words, what you’re born as; and everybody who isn’t born a philosopher or a seeker after perfection is by nature a slave (physei doulos; it sounds so much neater in Greek).

  Bear with me, Phryzeutzis; even after all this time, I’m still a devoutly yapping dog, or a Cynic as we came to call ourselves when we wanted to be a little bit more respectable (the word sounds impressive but it just means ‘doggy’). None of it ought to have mattered, you see; it should just have been word-games, entertainments with lies, like King Dionysius’ plays. It was Alexander who made the evil possible, but the fact remains, if it hadn’t been for Dion, there wouldn’t have been an Alexander, and I would be home now, in At
hens , instead of here at the end of the world.

  You know Pigface (I can’t remember his real name and I couldn’t pronounce it if I could), the big, burly man who trudges round the villages with that enormous basket on his back selling bits and pieces of trash to the country people? Well, he passed through this morning just before dawn (I expect you were still fast asleep, you layabout) and I saw that he had a few Athenian-made scent bottles in with the rest of his junk; I could only just see the necks, poking up out of the straw and felt they were wrapped in, but I’d recognise Attic ware at night down a mineshaft. Well; I guess that means the place is still there, or it was a few months ago, when those pots began their commercial odyssey. I don’t suppose the man who made them ever imagined they’d end up out here, right on the pie-crust of the world. You could say the same about me, too, of course.

  There are parts of your life that move slowly, like goats going back up the hill after they’ve been milked — childhood, of course, and bad experiences, like being in the army or a nasty illness — and there are other parts that skim by, like swallows or kingflshers. As often as not they’re the good times, or else those parts of your life where one day was just like another, you had somewhere to sleep and enough to eat, and you were like a man with an old mule yoked up to his cart, letting him find his own way home.

  My years as a jobbing oracle to the wealthy and gullible traders of Attica passed like that — zip, all gone, and before I knew it I’d stopped being a cocky kid and weathered into a minor landmark, a very small part of Athens . What happened to me during that time, I wonder? Well, I did get married.

  Her name was Myrrhine, and the thing that most attracted me to her was four acres of mature vines in the Mesogaia. They were good vines; south-facing, well dug-in and laid out so as to leave enough room to plant useful raps of barley between the rows (which not only supplements your cereals yield and makes the most use of precious land, but also slows the growth of the vines and so produces better grapes). Her father even threw in the complete set of vine-props — a worthwhile consideration at the time, when good, seasoned ash prop-shafts were at a premium, what with all the good timber being used up by the spear-makers. Also included in the deal were two big wicker baskets for harvesting the grapes. I couldn’t persuade him to include the pressing-vat, but I got it at cost, with a pruning and grafting knife on top as luck-money (but it was worthless; the blade was bent and I never could get it to keep an edge).

  Myrrhine herself — well, she was sixteen when we got married, and I was eight years older. Her father was solid Heavy Infantry class, with one serving son (the other had been killed in the Theban war) and an honest enough man according to his lights. Certainly, nothing he told me about Myrrhine was a lie.

  She ate. Non-stop. Incessantly. You don’t see fat people in Attica as a rule;

  those of us who can afford to get fat don’t, because your upper classes of society have all been taught the Athenian doctrine of beauty. It’s a linguistic thing, I fancy; our word for ‘beautiful’ is also the word for ‘good’, and ‘ugly’

  also means ‘bad’, and the words also have political meanings that you simply can’t bleach out of them —kalos means beautiful, good and upper class, aischros is ugly, bad, common. In consequence, we can’t imagine things being any other way, because we can’t find the words to express it. I tell you, it plays merry hell with light comedy; the best-loved and most-used plot in modern comedy is rich boy meets lovely peasant girl, they fall in love, his dad won’t let them marry, your variation on the theme here, and at the end it turns out that she’s not a peasant after all, she’s a rich man’s daughter who was snatched from her cradle by an eagle or stolen by pirates or some such trash — it’s got to be that way, or else if she’s an Oarsman’s daughter, how can she possibly be pretty?

  Yes, I know I’m hedging round the subject. It’s deliberate. I feel really uncomfortable telling you about this, because it’s a part of my life I’m not particularly proud of. Not that I did anything wrong. I married her for the dowry, and I was the only husband they could get for her, even with five acres.

  I fulfilled my part of the bargain by taking her off her father’s hands and keeping her housed, clothed and fed (the latter element being no trifle, I’m here to tell you). She didn’t expect anything more out of the arrangement and that was just as well. I wasn’t cruel or horrible. I just kept out of her way, which wasn’t a problem for me. I took to giving consultations on the steps of Hephaestus’ temple, and when I wasn’t working I was out at the vineyard — that is, I spent about as much time at home as the average Athenian husband, who gets up an hour before dawn and goes out to the fields, comes home when it’s getting dark and very soon afterwards goes to sleep.

  But I know I made a bad job of the marriage, and it was for the simple reason that outside of the dowry, she didn’t interest me in the least. The gods alone know what she found to do all day; we had a houseboy for the domestic chores, and she simply couldn’t spin or weave to save her life, though she tried so desperately hard (but wool costs money, and she wasted so much of it I had to stop her trying). I think most of the time she just sat and ate, great handfuls of the coarse, dry barley bread I bought in the hope that it would discourage her (but no; even the stale ends I got cheap were always gone by the time I got home), washed down with a substantial proportion of the yield of her dowry. She had a little bird in a cage for a while, but one day I came home and it wasn’t there any more. The houseboy tried to convince me she’d eaten it, but my guess is she let it out for a fly round the room and it got away. That’d be entirely possible; she was the clumsiest person I ever knew, except for Aristotle of Stagira.

  She lived to the age of nineteen and died in childbirth; poor girl, she desperately wanted a baby, it was the only thing she ever asked of me, and it killed her, as everybody said it would. They told me that because she was so obese, her heart would never stand the strain of labour. Unforgivably, my main reaction when they told me she was dead was exasperation (serves her right, she should have listened), followed immediately by the numb despair caused by the knowledge that if she died childless the dowry reverted to her father.

  So that was my career in husbandry, so to speak, and a fine mess I made of it.

  Diogenes summed it up perfectly. ‘You put in just the right amount of effort,’

  he said, as we walked back together from the funeral, ‘but you made a mess of the proportions. If you’d spent a bit more effort on the girl and a bit less on the vineyard, you’d be a father and a man of property today instead of a—’

  ‘Thank you,’ I interrupted. ‘And thank you very much for waiting till now to point it out tome.’

  He shrugged. ‘I was thinking of her,’ he said. ‘She’s gone safely home now. It’d have been wrong to keep her here just to spare you from feeling guilty.’

  I didn’t speak to Diogenes for a week after that; but for once I believe he was being sincere, not just trying to be annoying for effect. I don’t know; where the monstering stopped and the philosophy began, I don’t think even he knew most of the time.

  What else did I do during that time? Well, I became a philosopher. Sounds grand, doesn’t it? But in Athens in those days you were a philosopher by default; if you could tell your right from your left without tying a hank of straw to your left foot and you weren’t a total recluse, sooner or later you’d find yourself talking philosophy with someone or other, in the queue at the cheap fish stall or while you were waiting for your shoes to be mended.

  In Eupolis’ day it had been plays; all Athenians were crazy about the theatre, they followed it avidly, the way you people follow the horse-races and the archery leagues and the cockfights, only more so — there’s much more to discuss and argue over in Drama than there is in cockflghting. But the love of the theatre gradually petered out after the War. They stopped writing Eupolis’ kind of comedy, the topical satires, and turned to the wishy-washy love-stories we’re stuck with nowadays, while traged
y died for lack of interest, because everything had already been said. So the Athenians, always yearning for something new, turned their enthusiasm towards philosophy, and soon enough they were even starting to get it muddled up with religion, which made it even more addictive.

  Now, philosophy for its own sake interests me about as much as watching iron rust, but I am (as you may have noticed) a garrulous sort, fond of nothing so much as the sound of my own voice, and since I was one of the Founders of the Cynic school of philosophy, the pupil of the one and only Yapping Dog, I’d have had a hard time steering clear of philosophical debates even if I’d been born mute or half-witted. Diogenes thought it was all desperately amusing, of course;

  it was clear proof of the validity of his theory of self-fulfilling bullshit, and he did everything he could to encourage it, sending earnest young men to follow me about writing down my maxims and apothegms on those little portable wax tablets that fit so neatly into the palm of your left hand, and attributing to me some of his wittiest and most profound (not to mention outrageous and blasphemous) sayings. I had the privilege of perfect strangers thronging round me in the street and not knowing whether they were going to fall at my feet or knock out my teeth. Still, it was very good for business and I’ll be perfectly honest, I enjoyed it. Political and social philosophy was my forte, since you didn’t need to know any arithmetic or geometry and you didn’t have to go traipsing round naming species of plants or measuring shadows or finding out what causes volcanoes.

  But I shouldn’t, I really shouldn’t ever have started taking it seriously. It was, after all, mere self-fulfilling bullshit, and I ought to have been on my guard about the self-fulfilling part. But it’s such seductive stuff; you wouldn’t be human if you didn’t have your own pet theories on how to create the perfect society. Everybody does it; you do, Phryzeutzis, I’ve heard you. ‘The world’d be a better place if we could all just get along together,’ I’ve heard you say, and that’s political philosophy, of the most pernicious and dangerous sort, I might add. Oh, it doesn’t matter fleabites if it’s just you saying it;