Curiosity got the better of me. “Aren’t you men interested in the latest news? Haven’t you heard Ephialtes has been murdered?”
A small, thin man with a hook nose and sparse hair looked at me as if I were mad and said, “What do I care? I’m a slave. They treat me the same no matter who’s in charge.” His friends nodded their heads gloomily. A man in another group spat into the dust and said, “I’m a free man, but I’m so poor I gotta work for someone else. You think Ephialtes matters to me? Promising to cancel debts, was he? No? Thought not. Well, when you find me a politician who wants to cancel debts, redistribute the land, and make the poor richer I might care. In the meantime I gotta work hard to feed my kids.” He spat again. “At least the slaves here get enough to eat. I ain’t even got enough for the kids.”
I wished them luck and went on my way, coming to the statues of the Ten Heroes, each of whom lends his name to one of the ten tribes. All the people of Attica-the large region of mainland Greece that Athens controls- belong to one or the other of these tribes, and government jobs are shared equally among the men of each tribe so that no group can have too much influence.
The Ten Heroes are spread out in a line, each hero in such a noble pose that I’m sure his own mother wouldn’t have recognized him. Eight of the Ten were famous kings of old: Aegeus, Erechtheus, Pandion, Oeneus, Leos, Acamas, Cecrops, and Hippothoon; then there was Ajax, who fought at Troy, and finally Antiochus, the son of Heracles, the tribe to which my own family belonged.
These then were the famous heroes of old, their statues in the Agora, and not for the first time I wondered why Theseus, surely the greatest hero Athens ever produced, was not among them. Theseus, after all, sent himself as a sacrificial tribute to Crete, slew the Minotaur, and returned to Athens having delivered the city from subjugation at the hands of King Minos. You can’t get more heroic than that.
As I always did when I came this way, I walked around to the rear of Antiochus, to check once more on my greatest triumph as a young boy in Athens. There, scratched deep into the hero’s ass, just below the cloak line, was a large N. It’s very hard to cut graffiti into marble, the other boys had had to make do with ink that had soon washed off; sometimes being the son of a sculptor has its advantages.
The monument serves as the notice board of Athens; anything of importance, any official proclamation, is announced by writing it on the plinth. Someone had splashed whitewash across the plinth, obliterating everything
that had been there before, replacing all those words with a single message in large letters: EPHIALTES IS MURDERED.
Men had been streaming into the Agora in the time I had been walking about, so that the normally crowded marketplace was now as fit to burst as a boil ready for the lance. They had come to hear the latest about the murder or to offer their own opinions to anyone who would listen. I pushed my way with some difficulty to the other side of the Agora, which was open-ended and so had some space for the crowd to spill out to.
This was the site of the new Stoa Poikile: the Painted Porch. Like the Tholos it was still under construction, but it was almost done, and the pressure for it to open was so strong that men were already making use of its wide, cool, covered walkway. Unlike the Tholos, everyone was already remarking how well it looked. The Stoa was a long portico with columns on the side facing the Agora, and a flat wall at the back. Two painters were using charcoal to sketch on the wall, far apart from each other, ignoring the chatter of the excited crowd about them. One had enough detail in that I could see he was about to paint a battle between the Hellenes and the Amazons; the other had barely begun.
“What’s it to be?” I asked the second man.
“The Fall of Troy,” he said, not turning. His eyes stayed on his work and his arm didn’t stop moving.
His lines were simple and direct, no fancy touches, not much detail, I marveled as the strong walls of Troy suddenly appeared beneath his confident hand. Without a pause he left the walls and began on a figure, a woman whom I guessed to be Helen.
I said, “Well, don’t put me in it.”
That stopped him. He gnashed his teeth and said, “Gah! Why must onlookers always say that?” He threw a dirty rag at me, which I dodged, and I skipped out of the porch.
It was outside the Stoa that the political argument reached a crescendo.
“The Areopagus has murdered Ephialtes!”
“Kill the bastards that murdered Ephialtes!”
“How do you know it was them?”
“Who else would have done it?”
“Serves him right for upsetting traditions. We’ve always been ruled by the smart men. He wanted to replace them with common idiots.”
“Who are you calling an idiot, you pox-faced scum?”
I left them grappling in the dirt and moved on to another argument.
“He was a dangerous revolutionary. We’re all safer without him.”
“You sound the sort of guy who might have killed him!”
“Me? Don’t be ridiculous. That sort of trouble I don’t need. Anyway, why would I when it was obvious the Areopagus would get him in the end?”
“You’re talking about the man who stopped the oligarchs from taking all our power. You want to go back to the days when the rich told everyone what to do? You don’t want to vote anymore?”
“That’s a good point. Ephialtes protected the democracy. Who’s gonna do that now?”
“Don’t forget Archestratus! He wrote the laws, you know. He’s still around.”
“But for how long? If they killed Ephialtes that means they’re gonna be looking for Archestratus too!”
“I don’t care about Archestratus. What about Pericles? What’s he say?”
“What are we going to do if the oligarchs take up their arms? What if they take back their power by force?”
“Hundreds of rich men against us thousands? Don’t be daft!”
“Yeah, but they got shields and good swords. You own a shield, do you?”
“Hades, he’s right! We ought to take over the shield factories and pass out shields and armor to everyone!”
If what I was hearing was anything to go by, Pericles’ evaluation of everyone’s reactions was correct. The one thing everyone seemed to agree on was that Ephialtes was murdered because he removed the powers of the Areopagus. The only difference of opinion centered on whether they were right to kill him for it.
It wouldn’t take much to turn this lot into a mob. I wouldn’t have been a Council member in this crowd for anything. In fact, the old men of the Areopagus were not to be seen. They had wisely decided to stay safe in their homes, or they would be scurrying through the streets to the homes of their colleagues, to confer. The men who mattered among the populist politicians had not come to the Agora either. I guessed they were banging on each others’ doors. There was a power vacuum to be filled. I had little doubt that at least three conspiracies would be underway before nightfall.
I edged my way out for fear the mood might turn to rioting. There was a pile of building stone waiting to be used and I climbed up it. From the top I could see over the heads as if they were so many sheep. I could see the Panathenaic Way, which leads from the end of the Stoa to the Acropolis. It is one of the few paved roads in Athens, and no wonder, because this is the route the people of the city walk during their religious festivals. It was this path I had been walking in the morning. From where I sat I could see it reach to the base of the Acropolis and then curve right to begin winding its way round to the top. The path disappeared from view a hundred paces before the spot where Ephialtes had fallen.
“Hey, Nico!”
An ugly little boy threw himself onto my back. He almost knocked me down but I managed to stagger, reach behind and swing him before me. Like me he wore the chitoniskos tunic but his was filthy, smeared down the front with some kind of dark dirt, and ripped at the bottom.
“Guess what!” he demanded in great excitement.
“Ephialtes has been murdered. He was shot by an arrow and fell from the Rock of the Areopagus.”
He gaped. “How did you know?”
“I was there. He came within a pace of falling on me.”
My little brother gaped at me in admiration, as if being felled by a falling corpse was a sign of great
