Bob’s Memoir: 4,000 Years as a Free Demon
24
The Great… Again
“BOB, BOB, BOB. This won’t do. The idea of the play is solid, though it’s not true to the word of Homer. We could never sell this to the archon. Now, let me help you out some and we’ll come up with a hit,” Indougoles—‘Just call me Doug’—my acting coach and story consultant said upon reading my latest effort.
“But this is what happened. That twit Homer messed it all up!” I insisted.
“Shh. Shh! Such words are sacrilege. Or heresy. Or something like that. Even if you think something happened differently than what Homer suggests, you don’t say anything. His is the official word and no other can be tolerated. Now, let’s get back to work on your vowel sounds. Open up and make them rounder so they will reach the back of the theatre. Alpha, epsilon, iota, upsilon, omega. Now, let me hear those sounds run trippingly off the tongue.”
I carried out the exercises, listening to my acting coach/story consultant’s instructions.
And, behold, I was chosen to be in the chorus.
Theatre was the first place I discovered groupies. Every official in every government I’d known had a certain number of hangers-on, and there were always women who would cock an eyebrow at you in invitation to an assignation. But in theatre, there were women waiting in the wings, so to speak, for the stage to clear and the actors to unmask. Of course, the divos of the plays were the leading actors, but there were only three of those per performance. Depending on the play, there might be twelve to twenty in the chorus. After the actors and the choragus had taken their choice of the girls who threw themselves at us, the rest of the chorus helped themselves. There were always plenty to go around.
Girls loved the theatre and the actors. Poor girls, rich girls, young girls, old girls. Delphia. What a girl! They made it quite clear they wanted to attach themselves to the actors—preferably at the groin. You could just grab them by the pussy and they let you! They’d do anything for the actors.
I enjoyed my share of the groupies. In fact, Delphia and I were eventually married. She wasn’t technically a groupie. I’ll tell you about her sometime. But groupies were a phenomenon I did not fully understand. I chose one of my harem girls who was originally from Greece to explain to me.
“Bob, theatre is glamorous. Every girl thinks you’ll sweep her off her feet and carry her away to a fantasy world that is filled with applause and riches.”
“But it’s all fake!” I said. “We aren’t the famous people we play on stage. We aren’t nobles and kings. We have nothing but the script.”
“But you make it all look real. If you play a famous king on stage, you must be a famous king. If you play a great lover on stage, you must be a great lover. If you are seven feet tall on stage…”
“Then I must be seven feet tall. They don’t get the elevator shoes are like walking on stilts!”
“Exactly!”
“Then what should I do?”
“Take what is offered and try not to be cruel when she finds out you aren’t a famous king, or seven feet tall, or…”
“Or a great lover. Thank you,” I said.
“Oh, Bob, you are a great lover and I love you forever. Would you like me to be waiting off stage for you when you finish tonight’s show?”
“Now that, my dear, would be a wonderful idea.”
Well, I did enjoy the groupies on occasion, and sometimes I would discover one who was particularly outstanding and would fit in with my women. She would silently disappear into the infinity room, from where she would discover I was much more than I appeared to be on stage.
I’d quickly instituted a theatre program in the infinity room and many of the girls were quite taken with it. Females were not allowed on the stages at Athens until years later. There were exceptions, however, when plays about Antigone or Medea arose. No matter how you padded him, a male actor never carried the right presence onto the stage when playing a woman. In the infinity room, we had many plays and most of the actors were women. I got to be the gropee. Uh… groupie.
I fucking loved Greece! And I loved fucking in the theatre. However that worked. I got my opportunity to appear onstage as an actor instead of a member of the chorus at last, and wouldn’t you know they asked me to play Odysseus! Comedy was on the rise and the great festivals of the City of Dionysia and the Lenaia now had comedies on every day of the performances, following three tragedies and a satyr. Most of the time, the three tragedies were by the same author. Often the satyr was also by that author. But seldom was the comedy part of the unity of the other plays. Playwrights were emerging who specialized in comedy.
The play I was in was a mockery of Odysseus and remarkably consistent with what Homer had written. I was okay with it, though I felt I added some interpretation to the poetry that pointed out how ludicrous the man really was. Much of the play was about the contest between Odysseus and Poseidon, and neither was shown in a very good light. Poseidon was depicted as a tentacled monster himself, attempting to capture and destroy Odysseus. Of course, no violence took place on stage. Each time Poseidon entered, he had fewer tentacles, proclaiming that Odysseus had cut another one off.
The chorus sat around drinking wine and saluting Dionysus as they sang about the blinding of the cyclops and how the crew were all drunk when the monster tripped and fell on a spear. I thought the play went very well, but we didn’t win the contest.
“Now, Bob,” my story consultant and acting coach, Doug, said, “you can’t just bring actual women onto the stage. Not actual women. They could never stand the rigors of acting and are nowhere near strong enough to wear the masks and costumes. And their voices! The audience would know at once they aren’t real actors.”
“Doug, I’m tired of being told we can’t do something. If the play can’t be performed at the festival the way I want to do it, I’ll find someplace else to perform it,” I declared. Not that I had any real idea about where that would be. I admit, I was acting the part of a temperamental actor/director/playwright and doing it quite well.
“There’s an idea for you! Why not circumvent the whole festival rigamarole? You’ll never win a competition anyway. Your material doesn’t fit. You could self-publish your plays, as it were, and perform them anyplace you wanted,” he said. “Get your act together and take it on the road!”
“What? I can do that?”
“Even great Thespis himself did touring road shows. Oh, the regional theatres don’t seat 10,000 like the festival theatres do, but people in the sticks are crying for more entertainment. Put together your troupe of women and travel the countryside, performing wherever you wish.”
The more I thought about it, the better I liked the idea. We’d take our show on the road and perform off-Acropolis. It was a perfect solution.
I had a few hundred Greeks in the infinity room. I’d gathered them from the sailors at Troy and my journey as Odysseus. Most had joined me before theatre had become a big thing in Greece. There were festivals, but they were primarily religious, celebrating Dionysus the god of wine, women, and song—and ritual madness. The great festival of Athens was still called the Festival of Dionysus Eleuthereus. I had chuckled a bit to myself at the creation of the festival just beneath the wall of the Acropolis, which I had built. The part of the theatre that most closely resembled the ancient religious rites was the role of the chorus, singing and dancing like the Bacchae.
That was really the pinnacle of insult as far as I was concerned. The Bacchae were women, the priestesses of Dionysus (also known as Bacchus). They were the ones who drank the wine and danced into such a frenzy that they could tear a man to shreds. But were women allowed to be in the chorus that represented their role? Oh, no! Not the delicate fairer sex who would never drink to excess or fuck everything in sight or rip a man apart in a ritual madness.
I predicted we were coming to a day when women would reclaim the stage. And I was right! Don’t mind me jumping around the timeline a little to tell you that Medea by Euripides had already won the festival one year and it was a woman who played the wronged queen and wife of Jason. It would not be long before Aristophanes profaned the stage with his production of Lysistrata with a battling men’s and women’s chorus in which the women withhold sex from the men until they lay down their weapons and stop going to war. And that greatest of all the Greek theatre that has survived through the ages, Euripides’ The Bacchae celebrated the evisceration of King Pentheus of Thebes at the hands of the Priestesses of Dionysus. Women were about to come into their own as thespians, though men have attempted repeatedly to demean their participation.
I’ll get off my soapbox, to mix eras once again, and say the women of my harem loved the stage and the ability to set their fancy free with productions that especially emphasized the role of dance and music in the chorus.
I wrote and directed, usually taking a leading male role so I could be on the stage with my women. We built a touring cart that we could unfold to create a stage that resembled the festival theatres. We could roll into town in the evening and be ready to perform to our adoring audience before the sun was at its pinnacle the next day.
We selected shows for the first season and plotted a circuit of the outlying districts. It was an ambitious route, but Doug assured me he had sent ahead to each of the regional centers and they would be expecting us. I paid him his fee and we left.
We opened in Epidaurus,
We next play in Argos,
Then on to Patras.
Lotsa laughs in Patras.
Our next jump is Delphi,
Where the people are all wealthy,
Then Thebes, then Athens,
Then we open again, whence?
We open in Epidaurus!
Um… Well, you get the idea. My apologies to Cole Porter. Those years were some of the best in my memory. By packing everything into the infinity room when we were out of town, we could travel faster than most people could. When we arrived in a town, we performed. It made no difference if there were a dozen people or a thousand. We gave the show our best. The girls, of course, hopped out of the infinity room only to perform and then were back home where they were safe and ageless. I could easily strike the theatre, stow it—making it look like I’d loaded it into a wagon with a horse pulling it rather than putting it in the infinity room—and then take off. As soon as we were in a safe location, I joined the girls for a post-show celebration that typically involved a lot of wine and a lot of sex.
The first circuit was just a warmup. We headed down to Corinth and then to Sparta. Later we ventured as far north as Thessaly and Macedon. Eventually, we were the oldest roadshow in Greece, performing for more than fifty years.
And that was when everything changed.
Comedy makes fun of things: especially the rich and powerful, places, politics, society. It is the role of the comic actor to hold up a mirror to life in such a way that people see how ridiculous they are. It’s supposed to lighten things up a little and make people laugh at themselves. For the record, I don’t make fun of the poor and powerless.
We were having a good time with a play about Alexander of Macedon being a bit of a child when it came to being king. In fact, I was dressed in a diaper with a baby rattle for my scepter as I played the role. We had no idea that the king was in the audience.
I managed to get the girls back into the satchel, but I was detained by Alexander’s guards and brought before the twenty-year-old king.
“Your majesty…” I began with my deepest bow.
“Stow it,” he responded. “Do you think this is Athens where you can ridicule your leaders and pretend everyone is equal?”
“It is a gift to be able to laugh at oneself,” I defended.
“I don’t have a sense of humor,” he growled.
“My grave apologies, your highness. Please forgive the temerity of this poor playwright.” This was not going well. I might need to hightail it out of town with Alexander’s army in hot pursuit. I didn’t really want to reveal myself.
“You call that a play? First of all, there was no clear storyline at all. Making jokes about your monarch might be good for a couple of laughs, but dramaturgically, that really sucked. There were no sympathetic characters—no one the audience could truly identify with. There was no unity of place, action, or time. You were all over the boards with disconnected sketches. It was tavern quality entertainment at best, not theatre! Did you study your craft at all? You and the rest of your players were amateurish and barely adequate to take up space on the stage. You mumbled your lines, making even your jokes hard to understand. And your meter was terrible,” he said.
“I had no idea your majesty was a critic.”
“I was educated under Aristotle. Do you think he would not teach me to appreciate the fine arts? Do you need to hear me play the aulos? See me prance upon the stage? Let me tell you: The world is my stage and I will command the applause of every person in it. Too young, you think? What is near us here? Scribes! What is the nearest city south of here on the way to Athens?”
“Thebes, your highness,” volunteered a man with a pen and parchment.
“Thebes it is, then. When I sack Thebes, you will give me a play in honor of our victory.”
“I pray it is not a tragedy,” I sighed.
“Have the army ready to move at dawn. We go to sack Thebes!” Alexander shouted. “And you. Load your scenery and fall in with my company. I will show you the stage as it was meant to be!”
I could have loaded everything and sneaked away. I might even have won my way clear if I had to fight. But this young man was a master of command. He was so confident that he would simply march up and sack an important Greek city, that I thought this might be worth watching. I loaded my wagon and slept with my women. Before dawn the next day, we were rolling southward and Alexander was about to invade Greece.
He did sack Thebes. Upon doing so, he called me to his temporary headquarters in the hall of justice, one of the few buildings left standing in the city.
“Now, Bob, here is the making of a great comedy. Fools rise up against the king they have acknowledged and, through multiple acts of foolishness, they pass opportunity after opportunity to avoid disaster. When one fool suggests they stop paying tribute to Alexander, another fool asks, ‘Who is Alexander?’ A third fool says, ‘There is no Alexander. He is a myth among the people.’ As they argue among themselves about whether Alexander exists, Alexander marches into their city, lays it waste, and kills them. Now that’s funny! Write it.”
I wrote it. And we performed it in Athens in advance of Alexander’s arrival there. It was, actually, a good play and after seeing it in the comedy festival, Athens set aside all thought of armed resistance to Alexander. The gates were thrown open to him and he was met by the rulers of Athens, of Sparta, of Corinth, of Delphi, and all the other powerful men of Greece, who came to meet him there and swear their allegiance, swelling the ranks of his army. They didn’t call him their king, but they awarded him the rank of General for all Greece, which Alexander considered to be the same thing. The army prepared to march on the hated Persians who had attempted to subdue Greece years before.
In retrospect, I should have known Alexander had an axe to grind against the theatre. His father, Philip of Macedon, had been assassinated as he entered the theatre in celebration of his sister’s marriage. I found out later that Alexander had written a script and used an actor, Thessalus of Corinth, whom I’d met once or twice, to attempt a marriage negotiation for him with a mate Philip was not in favor of. But it put an end to the match with his brother that Alexander thought Philip was going to arrange.
I quickly found out that Alexander was not without a sense of humor. He was quick of wit. Most of what is remembered of him is his figure on his stallion, Bucephalus, as he led his armies into battle. But he was a clever strategist who seldom wasted a life in battle. And he commissioned many plays from me for his entertainment.
“Bob, we’re going to enter Phrygia shortly. They are paying tribute to the Achaemenids and have no king. It also has a city with a prophecy. It is said that whoever looses the knot of the Gordians will conquer all of Asia. I intend to be that man and you will write a play about how I untied the ox cart from the pole in the palace to which it is tied.”
“Is this to be a comedy?” I asked.
“Oh, yes, Bob. I assure you it will be very funny.”
Alexander practically wrote the play himself. There was no resistance to his army when we entered Phrygia, in central Anatolia. The generals had pulled back to amass a stiffer resistance farther to the south. We entered the City of Gordium and Alexander rode directly to the center of the palace and called the elders together to acknowledge him as king.
There was a lot of back and forth as they argued the terminology of whether he could be considered a king before he had conquered the Achaemenids. And, they said, there was the matter of loosing the knot. Every time the elders suggested something, Alexander refuted the argument with his charm and boyish wit.
The next day, he returned to the palace and called the city’s merchants together. They negotiated for much of the day, finally agreeing that the merchants had nothing against Alexander becoming king, but there was the matter of the knot.
On the third day, the priests came to the palace to talk to Alexander. They argued about who the gods were and whether the Persian gods were the same gods as the Greek gods. Finally, the priests, as well, said they had nothing against Alexander becoming king, but there was the matter of the knot.
“The knot, the knot, the knot!” Alexander cried out. He stood and strode over to the ox cart tied to a pole in the center of the courtyard. “All I’ve heard is that the man who solves the Gordian knot will become the ruler of all Asia. Well, here is the solution to that problem.” With that, he drew his sword and swung it mightily at the knot and split it in two with one blow. As soon as it was severed, it began to unravel of its own accord.
“Faced with the sword of Alexander, the empire of the Persians will unravel and I will conquer all the world,” he declared. “Your only excuse to avoid acknowledging me has been the knot. Your excuse is gone now. I will rule Phrygia. Now, whose head should I unknot?”
I admit that I had a lot of fun creating the comedy of the Gordian Knot. It was truly representative of the way Alexander cut through all kinds of conflict.
I found Alexander, later called ‘the Great’ to be an unstoppable force of the universe, who demanded a play from me after each of his major victories. I followed him through much of the land I had known years before: Granitas, Miletus (near Troy), Tyre, Egypt (where he established a grand city named after himself), all of Mesopotamia, northern Arabia, Persia, and on as far east as Northern India and the Caspian Sea.
At Troy, we found the city mostly gone with another town built on top of it. However, I was able to find the tomb—out where the Greeks had their encampment—of Achilles and Patroclus. I’d enacted a play—one of my few tragedies—for Alexander about the two and when they saw the tombs, Alexander laid a wreath on the tomb of Achilles and his dear friend Hephaestion laid a wreath on the tomb of Patroclus.
He listened to his army, as well, and when he heard complaints that they did not want to cross the Indus and fight the people there, he turned the armies back to the west and swept up the loose ends as he returned to Babylon. But at Ecbatana, he paused to retrieve the treasures of Persia and hold games. That was when tragedy struck.
He lost Hephaestion, a childhood friend and trusted general to a sudden illness that may have been food poisoning—or poisoned food. Okay, we’ll call a spade a spade and say they were lovers. His wives, Roxana, Stateira, Parysatis, never seemed to mind having Hephaestion around and there were rumors that Roxana’s second child, which she miscarried at Babylon, may have been his. Nonetheless, when the general died, Alexander became morose. He ordered everyone to Babylon in a massive funeral procession. The funeral bier that was built was sixty meters high! He held massive games in honor of Hephaestion and petitioned the oracle to have him declared a god. The oracle approved having him declared a Divine Hero, which satisfied Alexander.
The games included both physical and intellectual contests, and I was told to write a play in celebration of Hephaestion. It was one of the few tragedies I wrote and performed. From the stage, I beheld the first and only time I saw Alexander the Great weep.
I’d been gone from Babylon for almost two hundred years and found myself back in my same old rooms in the palace of Nebuchadnezzar. I spent time at the pool reflecting the somewhat diminished gardens. And showed them to Alexander. He was impressed, but was already drunk and had little to say. His drunkenness soon led to his death, still mourning his lover.
I have never again met such a man as Alexander the Great.
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