Glorious Exploits

by Ferdia Lennon

Ah, I feel so happy today. I can’t explain it, but it’s some feeling. Those are the best ones. The ones you can’t explain, and we haven’t even fed the Athenians.

“Water and cheese,” says Gelon, “for anyone who knows lines of Euripides and can recite them! If it’s from Medea or Telephus you’ll get olives too.” “What about Sophocles?” asks a tiny creature with no teeth. “Oedipus Rex?” “Fuck Sophocles! Did Gelon mention Sophocles? You—

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.

Gelon heads straight for Homer’s chair. A rickety piece of shit the blind bard is reported to have sat on during a visit to Syracuse a few hundred years back. It’s stuck in the corner, a bronze inscription above that reads Homer’s chair. Is it Homer’s chair? Well, there are many Homer’s chairs scattered across Syracuse and can they all be Homer’s chair? Why not? The arse is capricious and does not wed for life, and so perhaps, yeah, it is Homer’s chair.

“Yeah, well, see, the thing is, you’re not directors, really, are you? You’re two unemployed potters with barely a few obols to scratch together. And those poor bastards in the quarries, they’re not actors. Even if at some point in their lives they were, that’s long gone for them now.”

this world is strange, and any talk that is to capture it is liable to strangeness and sometimes incomprehensibility.

“There’s a reason for everything,” he says quietly. “Even if the gods don’t know what they’re doing. Something does.”

for a moment, I have the feeling that the future and the past aren’t separate at all, just different snatches of a single song always sung, given consequence when heard.

Numa starts describing the plot. Well, the thing is, there is none. It’s just Hecuba, Cassandra, and a chorus of Trojan women having a terrible fucking time.

“You’ll always remember your first drink of Babylon Black.” “This is from Babylon?” “A vineyard just outside, to be exact.” “Mad. You’ve been to Babylon?” “Of course.”

“I’m the moon,” I say. “Can I cop a feel?” She looks up from her task and smiles. “Not a chance.”

Still, we walk the city shouting about a fabulous new production. How it’s the latest Euripides, and the cast are proper Athenians from the big shows back in Greece. Pretty much all we get is the same bewilderment as before.

The hearts of men are alike wherever you go. The rest is scenery.”

Common sense is common, has no imagination, and only works by precedent. It leaves the man who follows it poorer, if not in pocket, then in his heart. Fuck common sense.

I realise I didn’t think he’d be here. I never believed. I just needed to, which isn’t the same.

Yet, he reasoned, perhaps in the end it was fitting, for his master was ever in love with misfortune and believed the world a wounded thing that can only be healed by story.