Alexander at the World's End Read online

  but if someone who people listen to comes out with something like that —the triter the better, because it’s easier to understand — it becomes invested with a thick furry pelt of profundity, and the idiot proposer of the notion gets a reputation for marvellously uncluttered vision and cutting clean through to the heart of the matter. And if the next thing he happens to say in an unguarded moment is along the lines of, ‘The world’d be a better place if we lined up those damned Thebans and shoved ‘em off a cliff,’ next thing you know, the City’s filled with men in armour trying to find where their regiment’s supposed to be mustering, and you can’t buy olives because the navy commissioners have bought the lot for the Fleet. Not to mention, of course, all the deaths and amputated legs and burned-out houses. Wonderful stuff, political philosophy;

  like strong wine, only cheaper.

  But of course you know it’ll never do any harm if it’s you saying it, because first you’re not important enough for anybody to take any notice of, and second, you’d never be irresponsible enough to say anything dangerous or inflammatory, like the other fools do. Oh, no. Never meant anything by it. Just harmless philosophy, that’s all.

  Of course, working conditions can colour your view of any trade or vocation.

  Think of the poor charcoal-burner, who spends his life with red eyes and tears running down his face, or the wretched man who works all day in the lime-kilns;

  or the sword-grinder, whose snot and spit come out like wet mortar because of all the fine grit-dust he breathes in as he sits behind his grinding-wheel. What about the scorched and blistered hands of the smith, or the shredded fingertips of the leatherworker, or the red-raw palms of the oarsman? The seamstress ends up blind, the potter’s knees wear out, the tanner gets tanned himself, and as for the miserable creatures who work in the mines — well, if they were mules you’d have knocked them on the head and cut them up for the dogs years ago, out of simple humanity. The farmer, of course, plies many different trades and each one mutilates a different bit of him, from the top of his sunburned head to the verrucas on his feet after he’s trodden the season’s grapes, by way of his permanently stooped shoulders and hopelessly twisted back.

  Worst afflicted of all, it goes without saying, is the poor bloody philosopher, who must exercise his calling at dinner-parties and drinking-parties, or huddled in the dust under the shade of a tree or a tall building. When he isn’t being stuffed like a barn-yard pig with rich food, his host is trying to soak him to death in neat wine; and some of the couches you find yourself lying on are just instruments of torture in disguise, like the celebrated bed of Procrustes in the old fable. Gods help you if you fall asleep after a heavy dinner on the average Athenian dining-room couch; you’ll wake up feeling as if someone had cut off your head while you were asleep and then stuck it back on with fish-glue without taking proper care to see if the seams were lined up just right.

  But the physical pain and discomfort’s nothing compared with the mental agony of a really protracted, seventeen-course dinner where your host fancies himself as a bit of a philosopher, and you daren’t sit up and point out his deplorable errors of logic unless you want to find yourself out in the street before they’ve even brought in the mullet baked in cream cheese.

  (Now, I’ve noticed, Phryzeutzis, that in these parts, the host of a feast or banquet provides all the food himself. The greater the ostentatious expense, the rule seems to be, the greater the prestige. Foolish, of course, but logical.

  Where I come from, though, the tradition was different. At an Athenian party, all the host provided was the wine — but gods help him if it ran out — and it was up to the guests to produce the food. That’s why you’d sometimes see those solemn little processions, headed by a kitchen slave bearing a huge dish covered over with a towel, as a gourmet shipped his dinner across central Athens in the cool of the early evening.)

  And yet, just as pure refined silver comes out of the hell of the mines, so true philosophy somehow drains out of the endless boozy nights we philosophers spend in the course of our arduous vocation. I can best illustrate this, I think, by telling you about a dinner party I went to in Athens when I was just beginning to be recognised as a force to be reckoned with in the cut-throat arena of political theory. Our host was a man called Memnides, a relentlessly generous patron of the sciences who’d made a lot of money in the Black Sea grain trade over the years. There were always one or two house philosophers lounging around at his place, mostly the philosophical equivalent of punch-drunk old boxers whose bodies and reactions are shot but who can still make a fight of it out of sheer technique and experience; men like Speusippus and Erastus, who’d been minor-league sparring partners of the likes of Plato, hard to injure as they’d long since spat out their last remaining tooth. Then there’d be young garlic-primed fighting-cocks like me, some new discovery from out of town, like Coriscus or Aristotle, and always at least one true heavyweight champion, such as Diogenes— All these names are whizzing over your head like the first volley of arrows on a blustery day, when the archers are still trying to gauge elevation and windage. Don’t worry about it; most of them live now only in the minds of old men like me with memories like a miser s barn, where nothing that’s truly useless ever gets thrown away. And as for the few you’d be expected to have heard of if you were an Athenian, the truth is that fame and glory attach themselves almost at random in philosophy, with no more regard for merit or originality in their choice of target than a seagull’s droppings falling from a great height. There were always plenty more to take the places of the ones who went down and stayed down, and quite soon you stopped trying to tell them apart and just thought of them by the categories they fell into — Platonist, Peripatetic, Cynic, what have you.

  As was his custom, Memnides chose the starting point of the debate, and then let it go where it wanted, provided it didn’t leave a trail of blood and bone all over the furniture. Because Diogenes and I were there, Memnides selected a topic that was pretty well certain to be political whichever way it decided to drift.

  ‘If I was the Great King,’ he said, ‘and I was to say to you, here’s five thousand families and enough money and goods to start a colony, where would you go and how’d you go about setting it up? Coriscus, your city’s a fairly recent foundation, you should have some pretty clear insights into the process. What do you reckon?’

  The part of me that wasn’t groaning, Ye gods, not again! was happy enough at the choice of subject. It was one that the conscientious philosopher practised daily, the way a musician practises scales; as he trimmed his vines or dug over his trenches, he’d be polishing up his opening remarks or racking his brains for a new and original take on the stock elements of the argument. As it happened, this was a topic that had always appealed to me, in spite of its bone-crushing banality. It was one of the few subjects in political theory that actually interested me, but I tried my best not to let my enthusiasm get in the way of my professionalism.

  ‘Well,’ said Coriscus (the out-of-towner, you may remember, and as such the only man present who might conceivably have something new to say), ‘I reckon we’ve got the balance just about right in... (damned if I can remember the name of the place; it’s nothing but a pile of overgrown masonry now anyhow, after it got under the feet of an advancing army in some war or other). ‘We believe that we have the perfect blend of the three systems of government, monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. It all happened quite by chance, of course, but we found long since that there wasn’t really anything we could do to improve on what good fortune had given us.’

  ‘Really?’ Memnides said. ‘This sounds interesting. What happened?’

  Coriscus smiled. ‘A rockslide, would you believe,’ he said. ‘We built our Council Chamber on the south-facing side of our Citadel Rock, our version of your Acropolis, if you like. It’s a sort of miniature mountain right in the middle of town with sheer cliffs on three sides, wonderful for defence and with a natural spring on top. Unfortunately there was so
me sort of fault in the rock where we built the Chamber, because one day, quite without warning, it fell off the edge into the Basket-Weavers’ Market with the whole Council still in it.

  Diogenes grinned. ‘You’re making this up,’ he said. ‘It sounds too good to be true.’

  ‘You’d believe me if you could see the Citadel Rock,’ Coriscus replied. ‘Really, we should have seen it coming, but we didn’t and that was that. Our entire government was wiped out in under a minute, and there was nobody left with the authority to hold elections or co-opt an inner council or nominate archons or anything like that.

  ‘Well, once we’d hunted through the rubble and cleared up and buried the dead —

  quite a lengthy business, I’m afraid, we specialise rather in basket-making — we realised what a fix we were in. To make matters worse, we’ve always had something of a history of infighting, ever since foundation times. Originally, you see, the land all belonged to the descendants of the founding families, and they didn’t let go without a fight. There were still enough of them left to form a substantial and influential lobby for returning to the original constitution, which was an oligarchy, of course.’

  ‘I trust you didn’t, though,’ someone interrupted. ‘That’d have been a retrograde step, surely.’

  Coriscus nodded. ‘Oh, we couldn’t have had that,’ he replied. ‘The Geomoroi —

  that’s what we called the founding families — were so unpopular with the trading community, we’d have had civil war. We do a lot of trade, being up there on the Black Sea , so there were enough merchants to make a difference.’

  ‘So what did you decide?’ Memnides prompted.

  Coriscus held out his cup for a refill. ‘I was coming to that,’ he said. ‘But first I’d better just mention how we arrived at our decision. After all, it has some bearing on what we decided, and proper scientific method—’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ someone interrupted. ‘Get on with it. This sounds interesting.’

  Memnides’ young nephew took the empty cup over to the mixing-bowl and filled it up. When he’d returned with it, Coriscus carried on.

  ‘Pretty well everybody was on the scene by this time,’ he said, ‘so the few of us who were still thinking straight sneaked round with the red ropes—’

  ‘Oh, you did that too?’ Aristotle broke in, scrabbling in his sleeve for those tablets of his, which go with him everywhere. ‘That’s interesting.’

  (They were referring to the long ropes dipped in red paint which the Athenian city watch used to stretch across the market-place and then slowly carry forward just before Assembly time, to herd people out of the market square and into Assembly. Anybody who was dilatory about going to do his duty as a citizen got a broad red stripe across his backside and had to endure the wit of his friends and acquaintances until the paint wore off. In the old days, democracy in Athens was compulsory; in fact, once when we’d just come out of a pretty nasty minor civil war, the Council decreed that anybody who hadn’t supported either faction in the recent bloodbath should be heavily fined and deprived of his rights as a citizen. Apathy, you see, just isn’t our way.)

  ‘Anyway,’ Coriscus continued, trying not to be vexed at the interruption, ‘once everybody was all together, one of the priests of Dionysus — he was the nearest thing we had to a figure of authority —got up and said that we were all going to stay where we were until we agreed by an overwhelming majority on adopting a new form of constitution. And to encourage our deliberations, he was going to post six of his temple guards round the well; anybody attempting to draw water from it before the debate closed would be thrown down it, by order of the god.

  ‘It was a hot day, and the temple guards looked like they meant business; so it was a singularly constructive and orderly debate.

  ‘I won’t bore you with the order of speeches or the detailed arguments — or at least I will, but not now; I’m going to write them all down one of these days, because some of them were pretty good. Suffice it to say, we took a vote just after mid-afternoon and got the necessary majority, and this is what we decided.

  ‘The first proposal was for a monarchy. Nobody wanted that at first, but some of the arguments in favour — continuity, consistency, a legislature that was above party squabbling or private or factional interests — were hard to deny. It was agreed that it would be nice to incorporate the good features of monarchy, provided we could dispose of the drawbacks.

  ‘Next, someone proposed democracy; full democracy, Athenian style. This was a very popular suggestion at first, until we started hearing the downside;

  ill-informed decisions based on the whim of the mob, irrational mood-swings, the tendency of the many to prey on the few unless restrained from doing so, the dangers of apathy and so on. Again, we had to face up to the facts and agree that a pure democracy — with all due respect to present company — would be a very uncomfortable place to live in, rather like building a house on the rim of an active volcano.

  ‘Someone put forward oligarchy, a proposal that got support from the usual vociferous minority. Well, we weren’t having that; but we had to agree whether we liked it or not that oligarchy does have a few things going for it, such as continuity and consistency again, the fact that the ruling group are, as it were, professional rulers rather than amateurs and so can be expected to do the right thing as opposed to the thing that’ll be popular — most of the benefits of monarchy, but without the risk of placing all your lives and property in the hands of just one man.

  ‘The obvious flaws in each of these that hadn’t yet been aired were then discussed — quite fervently, at times — and once again some points were raised that we just couldn’t ignore, even though we didn’t like many of them on an intuitive level. They were all quite basic —kings have nothing at all to keep them in line; oligarchies have peer pressure but are much more likely to encourage corruption and the growth of monopolies; democracies tend to eat their children, like absent-minded sows. One man put up the idea of an elected oligarchy, combining the two more favourable systems — once every three years or so Assembly elects a Council of two or three hundred, who rule the city like oligarchs until it’s time for the next election. The man who’d suggested it couldn’t seem to understand why we were all laughing, though several people tried to explain that yes, he’d developed a very neat fusion of the two concepts, but he’d also unerringly picked out the worst parts of both, and the result would be a perpetual shambles, with gangs of council members fighting each other tooth and nail for the good opinion of the voters, which would obviously be far more significant to them than the welfare of city or people. It would be an even worse version of the rule of the great demagogues, Cleon and Hyperbolus and Theramenes and their kind, who’d effectively destroyed the City not once but many times. Eventually the man got the message; he apologised for wasting our time and sat down again.

  ‘And then someone came up with a really good idea, or rather a series of ideas linked by a common theme: absolute power tempered by fear of death.

  ‘First, at the top of the heap, would be the kings. Not king singular; there’d be two of them, like in Sparta , one Big King who’d lead the army in war and one Little King who’d mind the store during his absence. Each king would be able to veto anything the other one proposed; five vetos against him and the offender would be dragged up to the top of Citadel Rock and chucked off, without mercy or appeal. Every ten years the Council would have the right to execute or exile either or both of them, but only in respect of things they’d done off their own hook, without the Council’s endorsement.

  ‘Now, for the Council, which was to be made up of the five hundred richest citizens, we borrowed another Athenian idea, the Lawsuit of Illegality —’

  (Ah, yes, the graphe paranomon; if someone proposes an enactment that, if passed, would change the constitution, he can be prosecuted and, if found guilty, put to death. On the other hand, if he’s acquitted and the prosecutor got less than a certain percentage of the votes of the j
ury, then the prosecutor is put to death instead. The Athenian constitution hasn’t been fiddled with much over the centuries, for some reason.)

  ‘— which we adapted slightly so that any councillor could challenge any other councillor’s proposals, with the hemlock or the long drop awaiting the loser;

  the counterbalance being that every five years Assembly could impeach and execute any councillors who’d been guilty of fudging up secret deals to avoid open confrontations that could get one or both parties killed. In addition, the kings and the councillors could raise any taxes they liked, but each year they had to present accounts to Assembly to show that all the money was accounted for and explain what it had been spent on, and if the accounts weren’t accepted, either king and the treasurer of the Council would die.

  ‘Finally, public office was to be compulsory, on pain of death; so, if you were next in line to inherit the throne or a seat on the Council you had no choice but to accept. This has the tremendous advantage that at any given time, at least nine-tenths of the Government are only there under protest, and the chances of power ever falling into the hands of somebody who wants it are kept to an acceptable minimum.

  There was a long silence.

  ‘And it actually works, does it?’ someone eventually asked. ‘I mean, you really do run your city like that?’

  ‘For the last hundred and twenty years,’ Coriscus replied.

  ‘I see,’ Aristotle murmured, rubbing his chin with his left hand and writing furiously with his right. ‘And may I ask, how many kings and councillors, in round numbers, have been put to death during that time?’

  Coriscus smiled and picked up his cup. ‘None,’ he said.

  CHAPTER FIVE