The Mask of Apollo by Mary Renault Page B

had paused in the doorway to make an entrance. “I like this play. It should act well. Did I understand you to have offered me the lead?”
    “Certainly,” Dion said. “How not?”
    “The lead is Priam. Achilles only feeds him.”
    “Any part you choose, of course.” He looked amazed. I might have known the Achilles in his own soul would hide the rest from him. But Plato, whom I had forgotten, said, “He is quite right, Dion. The Priam has some freshness; the Achilles is everywhere derived. I did not tell you so; I doubted I could be just.”
    In that moment I was as sure as if I had seen it that the tale was true about the slave market at Aigina. Aristophanes, I thought, could have done something good with that. While we discussed the play, I trifled with this thought; but one thought leads to another. This was a proud man if I ever saw one. How he must have loved Dion, if he could love him still. It quenched my laughter.
    Presently Dion said, “You will want a good supporting actor. I thought of Hermippos, whom I have never seen give a bad performance.”
    I ought to have foreseen this. I thought of Anaxis with his fancy cloak and his barber, fussing and nagging, simply because he trusted me not to be making what I could for myself alone—by no means a thing one can take for granted in the theater. Well, I thought, I may not be much in this company, but I’ll keep honest at my trade. “I know Hermippos. A sound artist. But my partner is Anaxis, whom you saw today.” Our contract was only for the tour; but with laymen one has to simplify.
    He looked rather put out. I suppose most people think theater men live hand to mouth, taking what they can get. “Forgive me,” I said, “but we servants of the god have our honor too.”
    “Say no more,” he replied at once. “Your partner is welcome.” It was Plato who had looked the more surprised.
    But Dion had now started talking about plays, and I saw before long that here was a man who could teach me something. Nothing, as a rule, is more tedious than an amateur ignorant of technique and full of theories; and he was ignorant enough. But what he talked of, he knew. Most of tragedy is concerned with kingship, and the choices it compels men to; and what he said that evening has been of use to me all my life. The theater, after all, can only teach one how; men as they live must show one why.
    He knew war and command, what soldiers trust in a leader, how one must be strong before one dares be merciful. His favorite poet, he said, was Sophokles, who wrote about responsibility and moral choice—Antigone and Neoptolemos weighing their own decency and honor, which they knew first-hand, against causes they were asked to take on trust. “A city,” he said, “is only a crowd of citizens. If each of them has renounced his private virtue, how can they build a public good?”
    “And Euripides?” I asked. “We’ve said nothing yet of him.”
    He said at once, “I only like The Troiades , which teaches mercy to the conquered, though no one shows it in the play. For the rest, his men and women are the sport of gods who behave worse than human barbarians. What can one learn from that?”
    His heat surprised me. “I suppose he shows how things are, and that men have to bear them. He lived in hard times, from all one hears. Hecubas ten a drachma.”
    Plato said, “He was dead before the worst.” It gave me a start, as always when one meets a man who lived it through; to me it was childhood tales. “As it happens,” he said, “I know what he wished to teach, though he died when I was still a boy. Sokrates told me. Euripides used to show him his work before he sent it in, because their purpose was the same. Sokrates told him he would never come at it by the means he used, but he said he was an artist, not a philosopher. They had this in common, that it disgusted both to see the gods debased by crude peasant folk-tales which made them out worse than the worst of men.