Apollonides looked up at the gathering dusk. ‘I think we should call it a day.’
‘Thank you, all of you,’ I said fervently. ‘Take things easy tonight. You’ve earned your rest – but not too much wine, I beg you. Tomorrow we dedicate our performance to Dionysos, then we’ll set Athens laughing loud enough to be heard in Delphi!’
That won me a rousing cheer.
‘Let’s have your masks and costumes, please.’ Chrysion dragged three big baskets out from the shelter of the colonnade.
Aristarchos appeared in the archway from the inner courtyard. His personal slave Lydis was behind him, nimble and quick-witted, with a shock of unruly black hair. ‘We should probably make our way to the theatre, Philocles.’
‘Of course.’ I ducked my head obediently.
A burly slave escorted us as we followed the road around the eastern end of the Acropolis. I contemplated the scaffolding framing the new shrines rising from the ashes and rubble on the heights. Whatever you say about Pericles, and safely behind closed doors my family says a lot, he’s brought peace to our city. Peace and prosperity, enabling us to finally restore the temples burned by Persian barbarians ten years before I was born. Peace had secured the silver to refurbish the theatre where we were headed.
How dare that Carian lout accuse us of greed? Our forefathers had left those blackened ruins untouched to remind us every day that we must defeat the Persians. We saw them from first light to dusk, whenever we turned a street corner to glimpse the Acropolis high above us. That boy thought we didn’t know suffering? We had seen Attica’s farms and olive groves burned as well as our sacred city sacked. Regardless, Athens defied Darius at Marathon with only the Plataeans to help us. We cut down those invaders for the sake of all Hellenes. We defeated them at Salamis and Mycale and Eurymedon. Three generations of Athenians shed their blood in that once-endless war.
How quickly our ungrateful neighbours forgot how much they owed us. After he returned from Egypt, Kadous marched behind me when my contingent from Alopeke followed General Tolmides as he led Athens’ soldiers to quell dissent in Boeotia. We’d celebrated the capture of Chaeronea with captured wine and women. Then we’d retreated shoulder to shoulder, step by dogged step, from the bloody battlefield at Coronea, leaving Tolmides lying dead behind us.
The price of our army’s safe passage home had been Boeotia’s release from the Delian League that had once sworn such fervent unity against Persia. They’d been happy to hand over their coin, while Athenian armies spent their lives saving all Hellas from slavery. Once we had peace though, they bickered and moaned at every turn.
‘I’ve been thinking about our conversation this afternoon,’ Aristarchos remarked as we took the path leading to the theatre. ‘About these Carians and this story about the Delian League’s tributes being reassessed at this festival. How likely is it that they’ve confused the Dionysia with the Panathenaia?’
‘Unlikely,’ I conceded. Every Hellene from Sicily to the Black Sea knows when it’s a Great Panathenaic Year, just like everyone knows when to head for the Olympics or the Pythian or Nemean Games.
Aristarchos stopped walking. ‘Our allies know exactly when they must pay tribute. No one wants to risk defaulting.’
‘And no one would come all the way across the Aegean to plead poverty without good reason to believe they’d be heard.’ I recalled the young Carian’s conviction when he’d accosted me in the agora. ‘So who persuaded this Xandyberis that the Archons would listen?’
I was beginning to think whoever was stirring up trouble had miscalculated, not imagining that the Carian would enlist an Athenian to write a rousing speech for him. That risked the lie becoming the talk of the agora and a lot of people asking awkward questions. The first thing the authorities would want to know was who had started this rumour.
‘Why do you suppose your dead man’s throat was cut, if not to silence him?’ Aristarchos asked with an edge to his voice as he started walking again.
‘I think we had better find out,’ I said grimly.
But that would have to wait. By the time we reached the theatre, the approaches were thronged. The marble seats for the great and good had long since been claimed by keen folk who’d come prepared with cushions, along with the slaves sent even earlier to reserve places for the likes of Aristarchos. Lydis waved to a skinny youth in a dark tunic whom I thought I recognised from my patron’s household.
‘I’ll see you after the procession and we’ll make our own private libations.’ Aristarchos dismissed me with a courteous smile.
I hurried to the theatre’s western entrance where I’d arranged to meet Zosime and Kadous. They were already waiting for me. Distant brass pipes and cymbals heralded the approach of the torchlit procession as Kadous forced a path for us through the jostling crowd. We managed to cram ourselves onto the end of a bench, high up on the hillside.
The procession soon arrived. The well-born youths escorting the god’s statue answered cheers from the packed seats with raucous shouts. Their ribaldry was enough to make the bawdiest poet blush. Alongside those honoured to carry baskets holding more decorous offerings for the rituals, young men brandished oversized stuffed-cloth phalluses, to remind us how Dionysos’s displeasure could strike men down with sores and boils on our tenderest parts.
That was a warning of the risks of straying from the sanctified marital bed, so my mother told me and my brothers when we were still young enough for such mysteries to lie well ahead of us. Father was more inclined to joke quietly about being reminded not to drink too much wine. Either way, the god always has
