The Walled Orchard by Tom Holt

had ever before thought of challenging the Comic poet’s right to say exactly what he wanted about who he wanted, from the Generals and the Gods down to the street-corner bird seller who sells him a diseased hoopoe and refuses to give him his money back when it dies. It is a matter of principle, and although I would be hard put to it to name a Comic poet who wouldn’t spend the next week celebrating if he heard that one of his fellow poets had just been sentenced to death, a threat to the freedom of the poet is a threat to all poets. It was just like the Persian invasions, in fact; we all stopped fighting each other and united against a common enemy.
    Naturally, Cleon never tried anything so stupid ever again, and next year it was business as usual. The only difference was that whereas before his conviction Aristophanes was just another hack Comic poet, for ever afterwards he was the man Cleon tried to muzzle, and accordingly anything by Aristophanes had to be good. This is the only explanation, apart from a total lack of taste and discrimination on the part of the Athenian public, for Aristophanes’ brilliant record of winning prizes in the Festivals.
    Now, about Aristophanes. He’s seven or eight years older than me, and he started young. His first play, The Banqueters, was put on years before he was legally old enough to be given a Chorus, and so he had to go through the charade of pretending that his uncle had written it; although as soon as the Chorus had been allotted he wasted no time in setting the record straight. But by then it was too late to stop him having his Chorus, since the Committee on Plays and Warships had already appointed him a producer, and in those days nobody would even have considered trying to back out of their duty to finance a Chorus. It was a splendid system, all told; the Committee assessed the means of all the citizens and drew up a list of those wealthy enough to equip a trireme warship for the fleet and to pay the production expenses of a play. Rich men were actually proud to be appointed (it was a sure way of letting the whole world know how rich they were) and by and large the system worked. It was a good way of doing these things, and considerably better than the way we do it now.
    I suppose that if I had met Aristophanes in the Market Square or at some literary gathering I might conceivably have got on well with him, and the whole course of my life would have been different. But I first set eyes on him among the goats above Pallene, although then, of course, I hadn’t the faintest idea who he was. I was eight at the time, so he must have been about fifteen or sixteen, and probably writing his first play. His father had a strip of maybe two and a half acres in our part of Pallene; most of their land was over in the south-east of Attica, and they had various properties on Aegina. Anyway, Aristophanes occasionally had to tear himself away from the City to do a little half-hearted agriculture, and to relieve the tedium of this he would play tricks on his neighbours.
    One day, then, I was on Hymettus with my goats, sheltering from the sun under a stunted little fig tree, which was all that was left of some desperate individual’s attempt to farm in that miserable region. In fact, there’s a story attached to that attempt, and since it’s a Pisistratus story I think I’m justified in putting it in here under the general heading of Athenian history. Pisistratus, as you know, was the dictator of Athens well over a hundred years ago; he was the first man to coin silver money, and he used State revenues to set up many poor landless people in small farms. In his day, every cultivable acre was pioneered and reclaimed, and he carried on his programme of subsidy long after there was nothing left but bare rock. He has a bad reputation these days because he ruled without the People and imposed taxes on citizens; but I have taken the trouble to find out about him over the years and my belief is