The Double Tongue Page 10

  ‘They have a phrase for it,’ said Ionides. ‘They call it imperium romanum, the Roman Empire.’

  ‘Well there, you see,’ said I, ‘who on earth could feel for anything as dull-sounding as that?’

  ‘Going round the world‚’ said the Phoenician, ‘one comes across people who feel as we are saying, feel for the oddest groupings. But I’ve come to the conclusion that people would rather be ruled by a gangster of their own, however harsh his rule, than by a good and just ruler who is a foreigner. Don’t ask me why. It’s the nature of the beast. And so, with the greatest respect to you Greek gentlemen, I have to say that I don’t believe you like Roman rule, and don’t feel for the imperium romanum. What prevents you from scrawling Free Hellas or Free Panhellenica, or even Romans Go Home, on your walls is something so tenuous it would require only a hothead to set the country alight. Agreed?’

  I signed to the slave for another round of drinks.

  ‘It’s lucky we have no Roman guests with us this evening. I don’t think they’d be at all pleased.’

  ‘Dear and revered Lady,’ said Aristomachus, ‘whoever would bother to tell them? Besides, Delphi is Delphi. Even the Romans acknowledge that we are the centre of the world.’

  ‘All the same,’ said Ionides, ‘one ought to be clear that our cases are hypothetical. We are none of us free. We don’t, despite Pythagoras, choose to be born or choose to die. It is only the Alexanders who to some extent control their fate. Indeed,’ and here he turned and smiled at me, ‘I remember once telling our First Lady that on occasion she is free and in fact is the only really free person in the world.’

  ‘Oh no, Ionides, not free! But it is not fitting to say more on that subject. You have travelled, sir. Have you found a fairer country than Greece?’

  ‘Fairer countries enough, Lady, but never fairer women.’

  There was a murmur of agreement from the men and the Corinthian’s woman bridled and simpered. I, alas, had no cause to do either.

  ‘So,’ said the Corinthian, ‘we are agreed are we not that the Roman rule is to be borne?’

  ‘What,’ said Ionides softly, ‘what could we do about it if we don’t?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Aristomachus.

  ‘Nothing,’ said the Corinthian.

  ‘All the same,’ said Ionides, ‘there is that quote underground unquote party in Athens. You, sir, who have travelled so much – have you not heard of the same in other Hellenic cities?’

  The Phoenician peered at him over his cup.

  ‘Just exactly why do you want to know?’

  ‘You, sir, are a foreigner. You can say things we might – hesitate to say.’

  ‘I have heard it said. I have seen this scrawl and that, here and there.’

  ‘What does the Governor think?’

  ‘Why should he think anything? Hellas is at peace.’

  ‘Except for the brigands‚’ said Aristomachus.

  ‘Except for the pirates‚’ said Ionides.

  The Corinthian’s wife turned to him.

  ‘Do tell us about the pirates!’

  ‘Just that it’s becoming unsafe to travel anywhere by sea at this end of the Mediterranean. The Romans keep the waters between us and them, little more. In the old days your country had the eastern half of the sea in their charge but not any more. You can’t afford it.’

  There was then a long discussion of piracy and I was grateful, for I was tired and did not want to listen to anything or do anything but go to sleep. I heard with half an ear the Phoenician explaining how when he had ‘first started’ all you had to fear was the odd ship, sometimes no more than a pulling boat with three pairs of oars which they had to ship before they could board you. Sometimes, he said, you could get them to stay in their boat while you paid them off. It was a kind of toll, really. But then it got worse, cut-throats and in caiques under sail, smart craft that could outsail anything but a trireme. But now it was the pirates that had the triremes and sometimes a whole fleet of them, sweeping a stretch of sea, as it might be the western shore along past Smyrna, and gobbling and sinking anything in sight. Governments? The local governments didn’t do anything – hadn’t the money or should we say the financial resources, not even Delos or Rhodes. It would come to the Romans, that would be it. Not natural sailors at all but they could learn and did, as the Carthaginians learnt to their cost.

  VI

  It would be wearisome to recount the monthly festivals of the oracle and my descent into the grotto, once so feared and never entirely discounted. I did sometimes give an answer in hexameters though that was never easy. It required a certain elevation of the spirit though it caused a greater stir than I was aware of at the time. The fact was that this kind of versified answer had not been used for generations. When the news reached Athens that the Pythia was using Apollo’s own language again, if only now and then, there was a whole new reason for visiting the oracle. Presently Ionides began to limit his own emendations and gave the enquirers what I had said straight. I was flattered by this and indeed I still think some of the answers were felicitous but I shall not repeat them. Ionides did on several occasions threaten to ‘publish’ them in a book. There are a number of collections of our sayings – not mine, the oracle’s – which I suppose you could say had been ‘published’ through the generations, though the Foundation was in possession of the only copies and did not allow unauthorized perusal. That was what Perseus said, ‘unauthorized perusal’. I don’t know why I found the phrase so funny and used it so often that Ionides remarked I was becoming a bore. I found after my first terrifying descent into the grotto that I still felt the awe one finds on entering a temple or even when standing before it in a state of what the Foundation calls ‘recollection’. It seemed to me that after his first – I shall dare to call it ‘rape’ of me, that he had thought that enough was enough, and broken in as I was I could now be ridden with the gentlest of touches. It made me understand that play of Euripides better than the poet himself had done! Indeed, when I saw it – for I had to sit by the priest of Dionysus at the dramatic representations – I wept behind my veilings and could not tell whether it was in joy or sorrow. These are mysteries. It may be, as Ionides used to say in his really cynical days, that all these old legends do not conceal and shadow forth profound religious truths but rather they state bluntly the great human truths which may be as valuable. But I think Ionides was changing. I detected in what he said sometimes the suggestion that all religions were not foolish nor their customs, and that the cosmos which we inhabited was a stranger place than people sometimes thought. We must not, he once said, take our modern wisdom for granted as a final thing.

  After the festival of that first month I was astonished not just by the number of presents left for me but by their variety. I have said, I think, how rich were those left by the two young Romans. But the others ranged all the way down, if that is the right direction, to some vegetables and a dead hare. As the months revolved and Ionides took jewellery to the goldsmith on my behalf I found myself rapidly becoming a wealthy woman in my own right. Now I understood why the apartments of the First Lady held a cupboard which locked, a modern chest which locked, and, most interestingly, a very, very ancient chest which screamed rather than creaked when I opened it. Ionides swore he had never seen it before and we opened it with some, shall I say, holy trepidation; for even the apartments of the Pythias had something of the grotto about them. However, scream or not, we got the box open between us and it held nothing but some bricks. They had queer signs on them which made Ionides cry out. They were the same as the Cretans had used in old times. He sent for Perseus who read them for us. He said it was a list of things and it would be reasonable to believe that the list was of what the chest had once contained; gold ingots, if that was to be believed, and images and a censer. Perseus stopped in the middle and went red in the face and I thought he would fall into an apoplexy but he did not. Instead he burst out with a kind of gasping speech. ‘Don’t you understand? Gold ingots!
This was part of the treasure which Croesus sent to the oracle. You remember – there were girdles and necklaces for the Pythia and obviously she had an ingot or two. That is’ – and it was quaint to see how the words written on the bricks had made him feel for a moment that the gold was really still there! – ‘she did have an ingot or two. The writing is the one used by the Hittites. This is all, oh, six or seven hundred years old – unimaginable!’

  I had never seen our friend Perseus so elevated. It was touching, for indeed there was no gold to be seen, but what Plato, perhaps, would call the IDEA of gold. Ionides called it that with some bitterness when he had recovered from the excitement of opening the chest with its iron bands and locks and corner pieces. He recovered himself by giving us a short lecture on the Hittites, how they discovered iron and conquered right down into Egypt because their weapons were practically modern. Ionides, I am afraid, is a typical Athenian of our times, that is to say, he is a professor. But when we had thrown away the bricks with their odd signs, dusted the chest inside and oiled the hinges, it became a fine receptacle for the money which Ionides brought back to me after his forays to the goldsmiths. I ought to add that when we found the chest the ancient key was still in the lock. But it broke after a few attempts at using it and we had to get a locksmith to make us a new one. So there I was, a woman with a fortune and no one to give it to. Nor could I spend it really, for the apartment of the First Lady was almost too full of rich things which Ionides said did not belong to the Pythia ‘but,’ said he, smiling his sad smile, ‘to the IDEA of the Pythia of which, my dear, you are an individual copy!’

  ‘And all this in the chest?’

  ‘That is yours. No one would doubt it. After all, every time they give you a present they give me one. If yours isn’t yours then – you see?’

  As far as people outside Delphi were concerned I began to understand the extraordinary nature of their belief in me. If it comes to that, belief in any Pythia! But it was as if in their mind there was one Pythia and that the original one. They might hear – and did – that there were three Ladies, as when I came to the oracle. They heard, they understood and yet they believed in the one Pythia! They had heard that two of the three Ladies had died, but somehow the news was mysteriously adapted to what they felt. If two women had died, well it meant that She, the Pythia, had not died – I cannot explain it because I never understood the transaction myself. What of myself? The ordinary – let us say – Athenian may have had his belief in the Pythia easily reconciled with its illogic because he only thought about the question a few times in his life, and notably if he had a question to ask. But I – how did I view myself? Did I believe in what I was doing? Or rather, since I was doing nothing, did I believe in what someone, something was doing to me? Women are sometimes hysterical and do and say the strangest things. But that remark is going to circle round and bite its own tail – perhaps the truth of life and living lies in the strange things women do and say when they are hysterical. Perhaps the first time I went shrouded down the steps as into my own grave I became hysterical. A medical condition. Or possessed by a god. By him. Him. It was something I brooded over. I made up my mind quite soon that the reasonable thing to do was to sacrifice to Apollo regularly. To talk to him when I chose to. If he objected to the impertinence of this approach he had every means at his disposal for making his disapproval known. There had been a brutality in his rape of me or in my hysteria. He, after all, had put me in a certain position. He owed me something: a tricky statement to make where a god may be listening! The unasked-for response might be painful – infinitely painful! But one comes to a place. Yes. It is a dry and dusty place where unease and doubts have blown about until that wind drops and they fall in unswept heaps. Yes. It is a place. The risk of that painful answer recedes. Are you there, sir? Once, you turned your back on me or I turned your back for you. God, god, god. I could call out in hexameters, in Latin, in Hittite, what difference would it make? Oh, my soul, how shall I keep silent? Ah ha, you recognize that do you not? The raped Creusa raging against the god who had raped her and begotten Ion to be priest of his temple.

  They performed that, just up the hill. I was there, as I said, with the Priest of Dionysus on one side of me and Ionides the Priest of Apollo on the other. No man understands what rape is. No one there did. The argument does not even bite its own tail but goes on circling. We pretty it up. Ionides told me beforehand what the argument of the play was, my first play, he showed it to me in writing in the bookroom but it was not like that. I knew what she meant. How shall I make it plain? He tore her. He tore my entrails and bloodied my mouth. Hysterical women.

  So there we were, with time marching on downhill. There were the Delphian games of course, running and jumping. All for the god and the prizes. It’s the tourist trade which pays for the prizes really, though they’re like everything else, not what they were. I had to put in an appearance and have never been so bored in my life. When the runners came up for their prizes full-frontally I didn’t know where to look. However it really was good for business and if Delphi looks prosperous every month when the Lady is giving out the Good Word, during the games when she is silent the place is booming. You would think buying and selling would never cease. Then, of course, winter comes. Officially – or have I said this? – it’s all over to Dionysus. Actually, Delphi dies on its feet. The place really is dead. We locals dine with each other and pretend we are just as civilized as Athenians but we can’t ever quite get over the sense that we’re not fashionable, we’re holy. That takes the top layer off party conversation. Forgive a frivolous old woman.

  Astonishingly enough it was Ionides who defined my status for me.

  ‘My dear Arieka’ – for when no one else was about he sometimes did address me by my given name – ‘there is not a woman in the district of Delphi who would dare to refuse an invitation from the First Lady! Indeed, we could increase that area. There’s no woman, not in Megara, possibly in Thebes and certainly not in Corinth where all being deep in trade they positively worship any institution older than yesterday – you’d have them across in your father’s ferry in swarms if you just crook your little finger. Shall you?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It would break up a little bit of the dreary winter. Besides – besides, it would help me.’

  ‘Would you care to explain.’

  ‘Oh dear. I don’t think I ought. On the other hand – let’s say it would help me, speaking as a pigeon fancier.’

  ‘You talk about information gathering. In the whole of this last season I can’t remember a question in which what you know about the world helped or affected the answer.’

  ‘You wound me.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘No. I don’t want you to change. You’re too honest.’

  ‘Oh if you only knew!’

  ‘Doubts? We all have them. I wasn’t meaning that. I was meaning your attitude to the whole situation. You don’t see what’s happening.’

  ‘I don’t have to.’

  ‘The Romans.’

  ‘The pirates.’

  ‘The brigands.’

  ‘The god doesn’t seem interested.’

  ‘There you are, you see. You are indeed too honest. You are restricting the god to looking for stray sheep or finding someone’s grandmother’s necklace for them.’

  ‘It’s what I’m asked.’

  ‘Arieka – First Lady – can’t you compel the god?’

  ‘I’ve never heard of such a thing! I’m not sure –’

  ‘Wait. Have you read Theocritus?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘Simaetha?’

  ‘The girl who wants her lover back? Oh, Ionides! What blasphemy!’

  ‘Of course I don’t mean magic. But somehow the god’s answers seem to lack a certain universality.’

  ‘The fault, dear Ion, is not in the god.’

  ‘But the questions?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I wonder what the world would say if i
t overheard us? Shall I tell you the truth of our situation?’

  ‘It sounds dangerous.’

  ‘It is. You are asking me to rig the questions and I am asking you to rig the answers.’

  ‘I think you’d better go.’

  ‘No. Consider.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Consider. I shan’t ask you again.’

  It was true the god had raped me. It was also true that earlier he had turned his back on me and now seemed to be doing much the same.

  ‘I can’t, Ion. It’s not a question of fearing the consequences. It’s because – I don’t know what.’

  VII

  That night after he had gone, I tried to be a philosopher without knowing how. It was the gods. Ion said they have a new god in Egypt, one the philosophers have put together out of the remains of three old gods. I made a note in my mind to ask Ion the name of the god and he told me it was Serapis. But that must be wrong. The trouble with the old gods is that if you put them together they fight. After all, the conduct of Ares and Aphrodite on the windy plain was unbecoming. You can’t get anywhere by making a bunch of gods because you’re looking in two directions at once and stuck. At some point in my thoughts I remembered how the gods had turned – but at that length of time, remembering, things change. They had turned their backs on me – or had I turned their backs for them, as for example if you have a small image of your favourite god you sometimes turn it facing away because it can’t see what you’re doing. Which would imply that, even as a girl, I hadn’t really had much belief – no, much use for the Olympians. So that void which I felt I had come across and before which I lay in grief was – a kind of god? No. A void is a void, a nothingness. My hair prickled and I felt as though the skin of my back had frozen. I was an unbeliever. I was anathema. Swiftly I rearranged my thoughts until they became acceptable – Zeus the Father of men and gods, Artemis the merciless one, Hera the jealous wife, which is why all wives as far as I can see are jealous – or contrariwise. I wish, indeed I wish, I had been a boy: not for the freedom of going anywhere but for the freedom of thinking anything, following any thought to where it ought to lead if that is what logic is. I said to myself, ask Ion. How like a woman! But I was unlike women in this, that I did not believe Ion, or only some of the time. What did Ion believe in? Very little, if anything, and it changed as he spoke, following words towards a cleverness. Anything for a laugh. But not the Olympians when considered as a Greek thing. Oh yes! In the time I had known him Ion had changed. In the early days he had daringly allowed me to see that he did not believe even in the All Father. But he would not allow this to be seen among foreigners – barbarians – because that diminished his real love, which I had found more and more was simply Hellas herself, the Greek thing, that thunderous roll of names from the early days, the like of which is nowhere else on earth. But of recent days it had seemed to me that perhaps he had come to believe a little and think, even, that being a priest as he was was something real. So no Ion or no questions from me that might disturb his tired, his ageing approach to the mystery. Let him continue to believe that, despite the Romans, one day Greece, Hellas, would be herself again.