"Mary Renault - Greece 5 - Mask Of Apollo" - читать интересную книгу автора (Renault Mary)

carved from olive wood, but no hardship to wear, for it was finished as smooth inside as out, a real
 Generated by ABC Amber LIT Converter, http://www.processtext.com/abclit.html




craftsman's job. No one makes them to last, nowadays.

I remember the first time I unpacked the hampers, at Eleusis, and saw it looking up at me. It gave me a
start. It was a face, I thought, more for a temple than a stage. I know I sat back on my heels, among all
the litter, looking and looking. Meidias was right in calling it old-fashioned, one must allow him that. No
one would say, as they do before a modern Apollo, "Delightful! What a nice young man!"

Demochares, whom I asked about it, said it had been left to Lamprias by some old actor who had
thought it brought him luck. It was supposed to have been made for the first revival of Aischylos'
Eumenides, where the god has a central role. That would be in the great days of Alkibiades and Nikias,
when sponsors were sponsors, Demochares said.

Our overnight stop, before Phigeleia, had been at Olympia; I had never been there, and could not stare
enough. In fact the place was stone-dead, it not being a Games year; but youth is easily pleased, and I
set out with Demochares to see the sights. Like an old horse to its stable, he plodded to his favorite
tavern near the river, and, seeing in my eye that I was going to move him on, said in his ripest voice,
"Dear boy, you were asking me about the mask of Apollo. It has just come back to me whose workshop
it came from, as I was told. Go along to the Temple of Zeus, and you will see. Let me think... yes, the
west gable."

I gave in, not sorry to get on quicker. Heat filled the wooded valley, for spring comes like summer there.
Already the river was shallow in its pebbly bed; the dust was hot to the foot, the painted statues glowed.
A tender Hermes, dangling grapes before the baby god he carried, made one want to stroke his russet
flesh. Further on were the penalty statues, given as fines by athletes caught cheating; shoddy hack-work
done cheap. The giltwork dazzled on the roofs, the white marble glared. The great altar of Zeus,
uncleaned since the morning sacrifice, stank and buzzed with flies. But there are always sightseers for the
temple. The porch and colonnades were noisy with guides and cheap jacks; peddlers sold copies of
Zeus's image in painted clay; quacks cried their cures; kids and rams bleated, on sale for sacrifice; a
rusty-voiced rhetor declaimed The Odyssey while his boy passed round the plate. I went in from the hot
sun to the soft, cool shadows, and gaped with the rest at the great statue inside, the gold and ivory, the
throne as big as my room at home, till my eye, traveling upward, met the face of power which says, "O
man, make peace with your mortality, for this too is God."

Going out, I had to shake off a low fellow who seemed to think a free supper would be my price, and
nearly forgot to look at the west gable. But a guide was herding a gaggle of rich women with their
children, nurses, and big straw hats; I saw him pointing, and talking of the sculptor Pheidias. My eye
followed his finger.

The triangle of the gable end was full of the battle between the Greeks and Kentaurs. Theseus and
Pirithoos and their men were battling to save the boys and women; men against half-men, wrestling,
bashing, trampling, swinging axes; and in the midst, tall and alone, his right arm stretched above the
melee, was the Apollo of the mask.

You could not mistake it. But here the mouth was closed, and the face had eyes. I walked back to see