Glorious Exploits

by Ferdia Lennon

Paches and Medea get in their positions. Gelon and I sit on a rock and wait. I think of what it would be like to see the real thing in Athens, and I feel an ache, for I know I never will, but then I look around me: the quarry walls circling and the sky pressing down, thick with stars, or gods, and below equally thick with Athenians. Sure, isn’t this quarry itself an amphitheatre? A huge Athenian amphitheatre with two little Syracusans watching. They begin.

“And Euripides. When he wrote Medea. You think he knew what he’d done?”

It’s hard to imagine that there are hundreds of them, perhaps a thousand sleeping down there. You know it’s true. That somewhere in the black they exist, but where and who, and what are they thinking, feeling?

That though the city was ravaged, and bodies lay piled in the streets, and the sky was black with funeral smoke, the festival of Dionysia went on. Half the actors were dying. The audience too, yet the chorus sang; they danced.