Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [13]
The priest went to the gate and blessed Bion. Pater took his hand and was blessed in turn. ‘May I have your name, priest?’ he asked. Back then, men didn’t always share their names.
The priest smiled. ‘I’m Empedocles,’ he said.
He and Pater shook hands the initiates’ way. And then the priest came to me. ‘You will be a philosopher,’ he said.
He was dead wrong, but it was a nice thing to hear at the age of six or seven, or whatever I was.
‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Arimnestos,’ I answered.
2
It must seem strange to you, sitting in Heraklea, where we rule Propontis as far as the wild tribes, that in Boeotia two towns a day’s walk apart could be inveterate enemies. It’s true – we told the same jokes and we worshipped the same gods, and we all read Homer and Hesiod, praised the same athletes and cursed the same way – but Thebes and Plataea were never friends. They were big, dandified, and they thrust their big noses in where we didn’t want them. They had a ‘federation’, which was a fancy way of saying that they would run everything and the old ways could go to Tartarus, and all the small poleis could just obey.
So I was five, or perhaps six, when Pater went away and came back wounded, and the men of Thebes had the best of it. They didn’t harry our orchards or burn our crops, but we submitted and they forced little Plataea to accept their laws.
And there it might have remained, if it hadn’t been for the Daidala.
You think you know all about the Daidala, my dear – because I am master here, and I make the peasants celebrate the festival of my youth. But listen, thugater – it was on the slopes of Cithaeron that Zeus first feared to lose the love of his wife, Hera. She left him, for he is a bad husband, and he cheated on her – and you must tell me, should your husband ever forsake your bed. I’ll see to it that he returns, or he’ll wear his guts for a zone.
At any rate, she left him, and when she was gone, as is the way with men, he missed her. So he asked her back. But when you are a god, and the father of gods – aye, or when you are merely a mortal man and full of your own importance – it is hard to ask forgiveness, and harder still to be refused.
So Zeus went into Boeotia, and in those days there were kings. He found the king – a Plataean, of course – and asked him for advice.
The king thought about it for a day. If he had any sense, he asked his own wife. Then he went back to mighty-thewed Zeus, and he no doubt shrugged at the irony of it all. And he said, ‘Mighty Zeus, first among gods and men, you can win back beautiful cow-eyed Hera if you make her jealous, by making her think that you intend to replace her for ever.’ So he proposed that they make a wooden statue of a beautiful kore, a maiden in a wedding gown. And that they take it to the sacred precincts on the mountain, and imitate the manner of men and women going to a wedding.
‘Hera will come in all her glory to destroy her usurper,’ the king said. ‘And when she sees that it’s nothing but a billet of wood, she’ll be moved to laughter. And then you’ll be reconciled.’
Perhaps Zeus thought it was the silliest plan he’d ever heard, but he was desperate. To an old man like me, it seems a deeply cynical plan. But for all that, it worked. The wedding procession wound up the hillside, and Hera came and destroyed the statue with her powers. Then she saw that she had merely burned a piece of wood, and she laughed, and she and Zeus were reconciled, and celebrated their eternal marriage again.
So every town in Boeotia used to take turns to celebrate the Daidala – forty-eight towns, and in the forty-ninth year, the Great Daidala, when the fires burned like the beacons burned when the Medes came. And they would compete to celebrate with the best festival, the largest fire, the finest ornaments on the dresses, the most beautiful kore. But as Thebes’s federation gained power, so Thebes