Something Old

Not everything worth reading is hot off the press. In this section, we recommend "something old" that is still well worth reading. "Something Old" can mean anything from a venerable and antique classic to a good book first published four or more years ago.     

“THE FLOWERS OF ADONIS” by Rosemary Sutcliff (first published 1969)

 

            Some months ago, in a posting called Three Novels Set in Roman Britain, I considered three historical novels by Rosemary Sutcliff (1920-1992), Eagle of the Ninth, The Silver Branch and The Lantern Bearers. I noted that Sutcliff’s prolific output was largely aimed at adolescent readers. But of her forty-odd novels, there were four or five that were intended specifically for adults. One of them I had read with pleasure. It was Sword at Sunset, a very plausible account of a Romanised Briton who fought against invading Saxons and who could have been the germ from which the legends of King Arthur grew. Having not read any of Sutcliff’s other “adult” novels, I decided to read her The Flowers of Adonis, to see if my youthful enjoyment of her work was justified.

 

The Flowers of Adonis concerns Alcibiades - or Alkibiades, as Sutcliff prefers to call him. If you know your Plutarch’s Lives, you’ll know that the Greek-speaking Plutarch organised his brief biographies as a sort of running comparison of Greece and Rome. For example, his biography of a famous Greek orator, like Demosthenes, would be followed by a biography of a famous Roman orator, Cicero. When he got to Greek Alkibiades, he paired him with the Roman Coriolanus. (You can see my account of Shakespeare’s version of Coriolanus elsewhere on this blog). Plutarch linked them because he saw them both as forceful military men who nevertheless were traitors to their country. The comparison is a little brutal. Roman Coriolanus was a haughty man who looked down on his fellow citizens and regarded them as his inferiors. Athenian Alkibiades courted, and often won, popularity. Nevertheless, both did turn against their countries for some time, although under very different circumstances. The era when Alkibiades was most famous (or infamous) was during the last phase of the Pelopponesian wars, a little before 400 BC. It was essentially a long-drawn out struggle for overlordship between the city state of Athens and the city state of Sparta and their respective allies such as Thebes and Corinth.

If you read Plutarch’s life of Alkibiades, you will find the outline of Sutcliff’s novel, although she obviously undertook much more research to get the historical details right. In brief [according to both Plutarch and Sutcliff] Alkibiades was a very handsome and very popular young man in Athens, as well as being very wealthy and a sometime disciples of Socrates. But he was also known for wild carousing and occasional boisterous practical jokes. For all that, he was made an admiral of the Athenian fleet as it set out to conquer Syracuse, in Sicily, in a bid to extend Athens’ maritime empire.

But there was a snag. He had enemies in Athens. A message was sent from Athens when he was in full voyage telling him that he had to stand trial on a charge of blasphemy. According to gossip, he and his partying mates had desecrated the sanctuary of one of the gods, and such blasphemy was a capital offence. Not wishing to be executed, Alkibiades sneaked off to Sparta, betraying Athens as he offered his military advice to the Spartan King Agis. [Sparta still had a king while by this stage Athens had a restricted form of democracy.]

Thanks to Alkibiades’ information, Spartan generals defeated the Athenians and brought Athens near to collapse. Syracuse, Corinth and other little states allied with Sparta to completely destroy the Athenian fleet. But there was another snag for Alkibiades. According to gossip (which Rosemary Sutcliffe takes as fact) the Spartan King Agis was old and feeble and incapable of begetting a child. While king and Spartan armies were away fighting, Alkibiades, a known womaniser, remained in Sparta, seduced the king’s willing wife Timea, and left her pregnant. The baby was born when King Agis returned, but Agis had been away for ten months. To save face, the king accepted the child as his own, but once again Alkibiades had made enemies, and he fled from Sparta. 

 

He now hid in the part of Persia that faced Greece. He won some favour there. He spent some years as a bandit, raiding and subduing small towns near the Hellespont, including the then-minor city Byzantium. He also acquired a very faithful mistress, the former Bythinian slave Timandra, who was to stay loyal to him until his death. Athens was able to rise again to military and naval power, though Sparta still had the upper hand. Alkibiades dreamed of being recalled to Athens, despite his treachery – and amazingly, he really was still popular enough to be recalled. He returned to Athens in triumph and was able to have the blasphemy charges against him dropped. For a short time, again given the role of admiral, he helped Athens win battles against Sparta and its navy. But bit by bit his luck ran out. He was no match for the astute Spartan general Lysander, who piece by piece destroyed the Athenian fleet, sometimes by clever deceptions, and who was finally able to besiege Athens itself and starve its inhabitants into surrender. Classic Athens was destroyed, never to rise again in its former glory, and Sparta had effectively won the Pelopponesian War.

On the run yet again, Alkibiades sought refuge under the protection of a Persian Satrap (governor of a province). Now he tried to persuade his host to incite Persia to ally with Athens and wage war on the Spartans – but the Satrap would not have a bar of it. He saw Alkibiades as a man who had betrayed first Athens, then Sparta, and who was now trying to entangle him in another war. After first advising Lysander of what he was doing, the Satrap had Alkibiades put to death.

This (with some modifications) is the story that Plutarch told and, with some fictional inventions of her own, this is essentially the story that Rosemary Sutcliff tells over 400-odd tight pages. Her novel begins and ends in Athens, on the festival when the goddess Aphrodite is believed to weep over the death of the beautiful Adonis, and when women scatter fragrant flowers through the streets. Hence that odd title The Flowers of Adonis. By making this her frame, Sutcliff is apparently lamenting the loss of Alkibiades’ beauty as a young man, his sexual potency and his charisma – for much charisma he must have had to persuade people to trust him when he so often betrayed them.

The Flowers of Adonis is told in many first-person voices, none of whom is Alkibiades himself. Sutcliff is aiming for a polyphonic effect, giving us many perspectives and hence a panoramic view of Alkibiades and how he was seen by his contemporaries. She gives her many narrators generic names. “The Citizen” is Timotheus, a lame young man who cannot leave Athens and who is therefore able to give us evidence of the way Athenians talked about Alkibiades as his reputation rose and fell and rose again over the years. “The Soldier” is Arkadius who witnesses and understands how charismatic and persuasive Alkibiades is when he rallies and leads the troops. “The Queen”, Spartan Timea, gives a first-person account of how she was infatuated with, and seduced by, Alkibiades. There are many other minor voices who speak. But the most important of all the voices, and narrating more than any other others are “The Seaman” and “The Whore”. “The Seaman” is Antiochus, the pilot who has known Alkibiades  since childhood, becomes a master strategist in Alkibiades’ naval battles, and who can read Alkibiades’ moods better than anyone. As Antiochius dies two-thirds or so through the novel, “The Whore” takes over as principal narrator. She is Alkibiades’ most constant love Timandra.

There are a number of problems with this narrative strategy. One is that (especially with “The Seaman” and “The Whore”), Sutcliff often had to use the device of her narrators just happening to overhear important plot-points being discussed by others. Another is that the various voices do not sound all that different from one another. One attempt to differentiate them doesn’t quite work. Apparently trying to show that “The Seaman” Antiochus is of a lower social class than Alkibiades, Sutcliff has him talking like a commoner – but this amounts to little more than having him say “we gets” or “I sees” instead of  “we get”, “I see” etc etc. Biggest problem, however, is that for all these witnesses, we never get to the heart of the man Alkibiades himself and his mind and motives. Because we are presented with him at two removes, we are never close to him. At times I thought how much better it would have been if told in the first person by the (ostensibly) main character Alkibiades himself, as Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian is told.

As The Flowers of Adonis is a novel for adults, there is a moderate amount of sex. In Chapter 8, the Queen of Sparta tells of the only night when her husband attempted to engage her and was simply unable to perform. She remarks “He pulled down his tunic and came to the bed, and looked down at me; and I saw that he was shaking, through all his strong thick-set body; and I thought ‘Maybe he will kill me with this; with his striving to force his son into me against the will of his flesh’. ” She is clearly implying that the king has never had sexual intercourse with a woman, and prefers the boys he sleeps with in the Spartan barracks.

The queen goes over-the-top in Chapter 9 when  Alkibiades deflowers her: “He hurt me then for I was a virgin, having been bred up to give proof  of that to My Lord the King. And Oh! The pain was sweet! I took it and drew it up into my body, writhing and gasping beneath his thrust, until his man-spear broke through and I gave him the proof that had been meant for Agis the King.” Is this one of those romantic, adulterous affairs like Tristan and Iseult or Lancelot and Guinevere? No. It’s more like Aeneas and Dido, where the Trojan cad cruelly deserts the Queen of Carthage. When Queen Timea asks Alkibiades whether he still loves her, he replies (Chapter 10) “I loved you all last summer, and that is as long as I have ever loved any woman.”

These were reasonably curt accounts of sexual intercourse [and remember, they were written by a virginal author].  But later in the novel there is a purple patch that could almost qualify for one of those “Bad Sex awards” which hip magazines used to feature. When Alkibiades first swyves “The Whore” Timandra, who becomes his most constant love but who had long been a prostitute, she says (Chapter 12): “But when I opened my thighs for Alkibiades, it was as though it was for the first time. And when he came up into me, the great waves of his coming were made of flame, beating, beating through all the dark woman-parts of my body, filling all of me, shimmering through me like the high notes of a flute, until the shrill white sweetness was almost past my bearing; and I clung to him, while all my body seemed to melt and I no longer knew which was his flesh and which was flesh of mine, or where his spirit ended and mine began.” Which sounds almost as bad as D. H. Lawrence usually was when he tried to talk about sex.

As a history lesson with some vivid moments, The Flowers of Adonis reads quite well and entertains. I am almost inclined to call it a chronicle. Certainly Rosemary Sutcliff put much research into it. Among many other things, she is good at showing us how much Athenian “democracy” was more a rule of Oligarchs, and what competing factions there were in the admired city. But there are too many passages where she spells out the minutiae of political and military situations and loses focus on her main character, who is absent for a number of chapters. It’s solid work, but I’d still place Sword at Sunset as a better “adult” novel than this.

 

Random Footnote: This novel was written over fifty years ago. Despite a brief forward in which she says some speculation has come into her account of Alkibiades, nowhere does Rosemary Sutcliff list all the sources, ancient and modern, which she must have consulted. Nowadays, I believe, most serious historical novels will append at least a couple of pages giving every source the author has dipped into.