Glorious Exploits

The place is Syracuse 412 BC.

So Gelon says to me, "Let's go down and feed the Athenians. The weather's perfect for feeding Athenians."

When you know that the Athenians are prisoners of war, trapped under a blazing sun in the quarries of Syracuse, this sounds callous. And it is, but Gelon is not there for fun. He is there to barter water, cheese and olives for a few lines by the poet Euripides.

According to Lampo, who is recounting all this...

Gelon's mad for Euripides. It's the main reason he comes. I think he would've been almost happy for the Athenians to have won if it meant that Euripides would've popped over and put on some plays.

Lampo is a chatty young fellow and bit of a good-natured clown, inclined to make weak, foolish jokes at inappropriate moments. "Officially," he is "scouting for actors" for Gelon. He is uninterested in Euripides and more occupied with the smell in the quarry—"something awful: thick and rotten"—and in noting the terrible state of the prisoners. He imagines "the worst spots of Hades" might have "something similar," and he remembers the evening the Athenians surrendered and there was a debate "that went on for hours" with "Diocles pacing back and forth, roaring, "Where do we put seven thousand of these bastards?" Nowhere in Sicily, never mind Syracuse, was there a prison big enough, but the steep-sided, rock-walled, easily guarded quarries were the obvious answer.

Many of the people in Syracuse have lost loved ones in the long war between Athens and the Spartans, and the Athenians are hated, but when Lampo comes across Biton in the quarry, intent on beating two men to death in revenge for the death of his son, he tries to stop him. Only the promise of a skin of wine achieves a long enough delay for one man to crawl away, and Lampo follows him and befriends him. Because this man, Paches, has green eyes and claims to know passages from Medea, Lampo cleans him up and presents him to Gelon.

"Brace yourself, Gelon. Here's your leading man!"

Gelon peers down.

"What?"

"Meet Jason. See those green eyes. Didn't you say Jason was green-eyed?"

Gelon takes in Paches. I don't think he's impressed, and in truth, the cuts Biton gave him are worse that I first thought. Paches looks a state.

"Green-eyed? What are you on about? Anyway, that poor bastard's dying."

Paches, however, manages to convince Gelon that he does know speeches from Medea, so, with another prisoner whom Gelon has found and dressed as Medea in an improvised horse-hair wig and a borrowed chiton, part of a scene can be recreated.

Later, inspired by this, and lubricated with wine after a night's drinking in Dismas' steamy, fish-reeking tavern, Gelon tells Lampo he has a proposition. They are going to be directors.

"What do they do?"

"They direct..." he hiccups. "We're going to do Medea in the quarry. But not just bits and pieces. We're going to do the whole play. Full production with chorus, masks and shit..."

"Full production," he says, voice shaking, "with chorus and music and masks. Costumes too, a proper play. Like they do in Athens. We start tomorrow."

On that same visit to Dismas, Lampo spots a new slave girl pouring the wine. He is entranced, considering her "a fucking cracker" in spite of her broken front tooth: "...it looks like a fang, and her some gorgeous wolf." He is smitten, and, later, manages to get to know her better, but he treats her with respect, bringing her gifts and planning, eventually, to buy her freedom so they can be together.

Neither Lampo nor Gelon have any money. Gelon manages to acquire armor from a small group of boys who have found it on bodies in the woods. He knows he will be able to sell the armor, and he also recruits the boys to act as the chorus in his play. Masks and costumes will come from the only theater shop in Syracuse, owned by Alekto, whose husband has disappeared. It is typical of Lampo's rich storytelling that he notes:

This was about twenty years ago, and I was just a kid at the time. There's been no sight or sound of him since. All sorts of rumours abound, but my favorite is that she killed him and used his skin to make props for the plays.

Alekto, told of the proposed play, mocks them, but she is interested and willing to help. And the money to pay her for her masks and costumes comes from a terrifying night when Gelon, after failing to sell the armor to the local blacksmith, goes to the strange ship of a foreign merchant who, he has been told, collects "stuff from the war" but likes it "with the blood and other stains" on it. To Lampo's horror, Gelon, who had cleaned the armor, makes "a long cut along his left arm" and drips blood onto the helmets and swords until they "bloom redly":

"That's enough, man... You'll kill yourself, no play's worth that."

Gelon smiles. The first in a long while, and though I've had a scare, it lifts my spirits. Such conviction in it, like there's knowledge at the root of its feeling, and he grips my hand and squeezes. Strong bastard that he is, it hurts, but I won't say a thing. The pain is welcome; friendship's what I feel.

"It's poetry we're doing," he whispers. "It wouldn't mean a thing if it was easy."

The visit they make to the merchant's ship results in a fight with a crewman, who grabs the bag of armor and tells them to come back later. At first, Lampo is too scared to go with Gelon, who is determined to return, but he follows him when he thinks of his friend being there alone. He finds Gelon chatting with the merchant and drinking from a goblet made of gold. The armor has been sold. The merchant plies them with fine wine and then asks, "How would you like to see a god?" Gelon says yes and Lampo goes along with him, but at the last moment he gets frightened and runs away. They leave the ship with bags full of money:

...more money that I've ever held in my life. Years' worth of a potter's wages piled in my palm, but the only thing I can think of is what we left on the ship, and I ask Gelon if it's true. Was there a god? "Yes," he says softly. "It was a god on that ship."

He will say nothing more, but surprises Lampo with the statement that they now have "A producer."

The preparation for the public performance is complicated and often very funny, but eventually two of Euripides' plays, Medea and The Trojan Women, are performed. Lampo describes the performances vividly, commenting on his own reactions and unwittingly showing the drama is surprisingly relevant to the situation of the prisoners:

I'm just watching Cassandra. It's a prophecy of doom, certainly, but there are flickers of hope I hadn't noticed in the rehearsal. Her mother thinks she's mental. The chorus do, too, and she probably is, but beneath the mania, there's a point she's trying to make—just 'cause their lives are fucked, it doesn't mean they've nothing left. There's always something left for the person who remembers.

Like all first performances, not everything goes smoothly: nervous actors forget their lines, someone "bounds onto the stage and trips." The reaction of the audience to these hiccups is what one might expect, but finally they are rapt. Only when the plays end do unexpected things happen, and the results of these fill the final part of the book with tension.

Lampo is a fine storyteller, and his personality shapes his accounts of all that happens. Like many foolish youngsters who suddenly have money, he squanders a lot of it, buying fine, impractical "crocodile-skin" shoes and a flashy blue chiton: a "director" naturally must look the part! He is honest about his own shortcomings and fears, and he is chivalrous (if one can use that word for an ancient Greek) in his treatment of the slave girl, Lyra. His descriptions of the world around him are rich and lifelike, full of smells, noise, excitement, and occasionally, especially when he is describing the sun and moon over the quarry, almost poetic. He speaks a rough, Irish-tinged, expletive-steeped vernacular, and although he views life with a fine sense of humor, his feelings for the plight of the prisoners, especially that of Paches, are strong enough to eventually lead him to risk everything for some of them.

The horrors endured by the prisoners in the quarry are not glossed over, but Glorious Exploits is both moving and funny and full of life. Cassandra's prophecy plays out in this book, not just for the prisoners, whose memories have been so important to Gelon, but for Lampo, too, whose own memories are recorded here.