The Mask of Apollo by Mary Renault Read Free Book Online

first, like that one at Olympia.”
    “My dear Niko! One can see you have been in theater since you were born. That was more than four Olympiads ago. How old were you?”
    “About seven—but it seems like yesterday.” I had been there when friends of my father’s, who had seen it, called with the news. Dionysios had entered some choral odes at the music contest. Not content with hiring first-class talent, he had not known where to stop, but had dressed them as richly as Persian satraps, adding a marquee for the show, of purple rigged with gold cords. It came, I suppose, from his never leaving Sicily. Cultivated people laughed, and all the rest cried “Hubris!” Visiting the Games was Lysias the orator, then an old man but still impressive, who had been at war with oligarchs all his life—not without cause, seeing his brother had been murdered by the Thirty, and he himself barely got away. Seizing his chance, he made a fiery speech against Dionysios and urged the crowd to show what Hellas thought of him. They duly booed off the artists, pulled the pavilion down, and looted it of everything they could carry. At this point of the tale, I drew attention to myself by squealing out with laughter. My father, who never passed a mistake until next time, had fixed the thing in my mind forever by the taking-down he gave me. Olympia, he said, was a sacred festival; if it was unlawful for Lysias to use violence there himself, he should not have done it through other men. And at an art contest, nothing should be judged but art. How would I like to be one of the artists pelted while giving their best work? He hoped I might never find out for myself. After this I had crept away. Even now, I shrank from telling Anaxis.
    “He was provincial in those days,” Anaxis said. “He is just a clerk’s son, after all. But he has bought good advice since then; and he always was a worker.”
    “I’ll read his plays,” I said, to keep him quiet. We were getting up towards the shoulder Delphi stands on. The groves were thinning. A pure bright air blew from the peaks. The place smelled of bliss, danger and gods.
    “In any case,” Anaxis was saying, “one must remember he is a Sicilian ruling Sicilians. The old stock of Corinth has run pretty thin there. Fighting back the Carthaginians all these years, they’ve learned their ways, and bred with them. It’s said Dionysios has a touch of it. The best they could hope for, as they are, would be to change a bad tyrant for a good one.”
    For a moment the dark-browed face of my boyhood’s lover came into my mind, and I wondered if he would still delight me. Then we came out from the trees, and stood upon the shoulder.
    Ask some poet to describe the awe of Delphi, and some philosopher to explain it. I work with the words of other men. I looked back down the valley, the olives winding and falling mile on mile to a rock-clipped blink of sea. Beyond a vast gulf of air were the highlands of Mount Korax, cloud-patched with sun and gloom; westward the iron cliffs of Kirphis; above us reared Parnassos, more felt than seen. Its head was hidden by its knees, the rock-towers of the Phaidriades, which themselves seemed to gore the sky. Truly, Apollo is the greatest of all chorus-masters. The town, with his temple in the midst, is tiny as a toy in all this vastness; yet all those titan heads stand around that and look towards it. They are the chorus round his altar; if he raised his arm they would sing a dithyramb. I don’t know any other deity who could bring off such a show. At Delphi, you don’t ask how they know it is the center of the earth.
    I looked up the great steeps of the Phaidriades, which stand behind the theater like a skene reaching to heaven. “Look!” I said. “Eagles!”
    “My dear Niko, they are as common here as doves. Do let us get to the inn while they have something left to eat. If this is your first visit, you need not tell the world.”
    Next morning we looked over the