Aristarchos narrowed his eyes. ‘Other Carians are spreading this nonsense?’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t think so. My slave heard it from men fresh from the Hellespont, and a potter I know said that visitors from Crete believed the same.’
A resonant chord from a mighty concert lyre prompted everyone around us to hurry back to their seats.
‘There’s more,’ I said hastily. ‘My home, our wall was painted with insults last night, accusing me of Persian sympathies. It could be just some rival—’
The great concert lyre’s music rang through the theatre again. Everyone was settling down, expectant.
‘We’ll have to continue this later.’ Aristarchos grimaced. Then he surprised me with a conspiratorial smile. ‘I hear that our play will be seen first. That’ll give everyone a few new notions to debate.’
‘Let’s hope so.’ I scurried back to my vantage point. As a slave with a tray passed by, I grabbed a cup of Aristarchos’s wine and downed it in one swallow. Fine vintage or not, I didn’t even taste it.
A theatre slave walked up the steps to the stage. A lean man with a deep, ringing voice, he made the announcement that brought everyone who knew me to the edge of their seats.
‘Let your play commence, Philocles!’
Chapter Fourteen
Menekles strode onto the stage with his head held high. A fine Homeric hero, he cradled his helmet in the crook of one arm and sloped a spear over his other shoulder. He gazed around with satisfaction before addressing the audience in ringing tones.
‘Have you heard the glorious news? Troy’s topless towers have fallen! Who among us ever thought this great victory would come? Yet truly the day has finally dawned. We have prevailed after so much tribulation, lamentation and bloodshed. After ten long years of struggle, sacrifice and dedication, the menace in the east is no more. Now we can look forward with hope. Now we can plan with ambition. Now we can build anew!’
Apollonides ambled into view, bow-legged and with his wig carefully teased so that tufts of hair stuck out in all directions. He dragged his shield along the ground with one hand and was rubbing his cloth-covered arse with the other.
‘Where have we washed up now? Can we at least stay here until the blisters on my backside have healed? Rowing’s harder work than you think,’ he confided to the audience.
That won the play’s first cheer from the upper benches and I breathed a little easier. Hopefully acknowledging the city’s lowest ranks this early on should save our chorus from being showered with nuts and insults by those assuming a play about heroes had nothing to say about their humble lives.
Though I was still apprehensive about the ten men in those marble seats, five of whose votes would decide my fate. Would the well-born of Athens think I was mocking them? Add to that the fact that Homeric heroes like Meriones and Thersites are the stock-in-trade of tragedy. Would the judges look askance at me meddling with tradition?
As the two of them came to the end of their bickering, I held my breath as I waited for Chrysion’s cue. The chorus appeared on the dancing floor accompanied by Hyanthidas playing a bold new tune.
The Corinthian’s appearance prompted a surge of murmurs from the audience for several reasons. Firstly, the talented musician was playing two interlacing melodies, with a different dance of his fingers on each of the twin reed-tipped pipes in his mouth. That’s not something you see every day. I’d never seen Euxenos’s tootler try it, however skilled he might be at swift and swooping dances.
Secondly, Hyanthidas wasn’t wearing a pipe halter and that was taking quite a risk. As anyone who’s ever played a pipe will tell you, using two instruments together is a very different challenge to only playing one. Keeping your lips tight around two reeds as well as sustaining taut, puffed cheeks quickly makes your face ache. If your cheeks and lips cramp or quiver, you’ll shred your tune with sudden squeaks and silences.
Sustaining a single song or dance tune on twin pipes is one thing, but accompanying an entire play is a real challenge. No wonder some long-forgotten musician devised a solution, more interested in getting paid than worrying about looking a fool. All the other plays’ pipers would wear leather halters with straps running across their mouths, pierced for their twin pipes’ reeds. But Hyanthidas had sworn he didn’t need such assistance.
Thirdly, he was playing Etruscan music, and there were plenty of citizens and visitors in this audience who’d travelled westwards to Italy’s Hellenic cities. They recognised those characteristic lilts and rhythms, and eagerly nudged their neighbours. As Chrysion led the chorus in extolling the virtues of this unknown land, I watched the whole crowd sitting up straighter as whispers spread. Soon everyone was wondering where the jokes might be in stranding Homeric heroes in that wolf-ridden wilderness.
Keen interest wasn’t only kindled on the wooden benches. Down below on the marble seats, I noticed several of the great and the good sneak sideways glances at Aristarchos. All they saw was polite interest on his face. None of them would be able to guess that he’d been the one to insist my play should look westwards.
I’d originally set this story in the Chersonese, far away on the Black Sea’s northern shore. I’d written a particularly fine speech for Apollonides’s character, Thersites, speculating with calculated obscenity on the unlikelihood of Meriones ever fathering sons, if he couldn’t even guide his trireme’s jutting prow into the Hellespont’s moist and inviting opening.
But Aristarchos was adamant and, since he was paying the piper, the actors, the chorus and the writer, he got his way. Apart from losing that particular joke for Thersites, I hadn’t been overly bothered. My characters could say what I wanted when they were standing on an Etruscan shore as easily as they
