The Mask of Apollo by Mary Renault

bad proverb,” he said, “that one should outdo one’s friends in kindness, and one’s enemies in cruelty. No; I have seen …” He paused, and turned to Plato: “… too much.”
    Well, I thought, Sicily must be the place for that. How does such a man come out of it?
    “Believe me, Nikeratos, as much as for your courage I honor you for taking no joy in vengeance.” Being shaken and sick, I could have wept at his kindness; but that he would not have honored. I said something or other, about having enough, in my work, of other men’s revenges. I saw Plato stir at this; but after all he kept silent.
    “Surely,” Dion went on, “to crave revenge is to fall down before one’s enemy and eat dust at his feet. What worse can we let him do to us? In hatred as in love, we grow like the thing we brood upon. What we loathe, we graft into our very soul. The man has more profit who beggars himself for a whore. The mind neglected; the soul starved of its true food; condemned at last to some base rebirth, if, as I am persuaded, Pythagoras taught us truly. Who in his senses would give that triumph to the man who wronged him?”
    These words impressed me. I had never thought of any of it, and said so, adding, in apology, “I was thinking about this wretched Meidias. All his life he wanted to be somebody, but without having to pay for it, which is always death to an artist. Now this. I couldn’t have done it to a dog. But of course you are right about the soul. You have shown me the riches of philosophy.”
    “Borrowed riches,” he said, smiling and catching Plato’s eye. “It is the fate of the teacher to hear his words come limping back from the pupil’s mouth.”
    “The pupil,” said Plato in that low light voice of his, “who lives what he learned, is a teacher too. A city of such pupils could teach the world.” Then, as if he had lapsed from courtesy by speaking of some private thing, he turned to me, saying, “You are clean of this death, having neither willed nor welcomed it. Remember, the man suffered it for sacrilege. It was the god’s honor they avenged.”
    I drank some wine, which I could do with, and held my peace. But I was saying within me, “Is that what you think, wise man? If I had called for help up there, squeaking with fright through Apollo’s mouth so that they all laughed and despised me, they would have beaten the cover round the precinct, from duty, and then gone home. But I pleased them; they took trouble for me; this is my wreath of victory. So wise, and you can’t see it.” They were quoting Pythagoras to each other. I looked at their fine faces full of mind, and thought, “I’m only an actor; the best I do will be gone like smoke when the last graybeard dies who heard it; these are great men whose fame will very likely live forever. But for all they know, they don’t know a crowd.”
    “Your cup is empty,” Dion said, dipping into the mixer. “We cannot have you melancholy. Did Achilles grieve for Hector? And here’s only a Thersites dead. Which brings me back, Nikeratos, to what I had to say. Would you like to play Achilles again, in another tragedy, at the next Lenaia?”
    So it’s come, I thought. For a moment I saw Anaxis with the barber. But in Athens? “I am happy that you thought of me; but I’m not yet on the roll of leading men; and besides, the sponsors draw for them.” I had forgotten he was a foreigner. So near, so far.
    “Apply again,” he said, smiling. “I think friends of mine can manage that. As for the draw, if we miss first turn we may still have the luck to get you, while your name is new on the list.”
    I saw he knew what he was about. Past victors get chosen first; the draw exists, indeed, to give sponsors a fair chance at them. He was telling me that even if his choregos drew first turn, he would still choose me. The door I had knocked on for years was opening at his finger-touch. I thanked him as best I could. Even now, though, I had been too long