Seven Days in New Crete (Penguin Modern Classics) by Robert Graves Page B

emendations weren’t very numerous. The editors spent as much thought on discussing what didn’t need to be included, as on what did. They argued that it was better to record too little than too much.’
    When I questioned See-a-Bird further, he told me that the archives gave no information whatever about philosophy, advanced mathematics, physics or chemistry, nor about the motivation of any machine more complicated than the water-wheel, pulley or carpenter’s lathe. Silver plates, he said, were used for records which, though believed to be durable, were still on probation. For example, every poet on the occasion of his ‘acceptance’ was given twenty small silver plates on which to record his life’s poems; it was assumed that no poet could write enough true poems in his lifetime to cover more than twenty. He was expected to keep a record on clay-boards of all he wrote and consult his friends, from time to time, as to which of them, if any, should be transferred to silver. He might take their advice or not, as he pleased, and everyone respected him if he ‘kept his plates bright’ until he was about to become an elder, when he could judge the value of his work more objectively. If he kept his plates bright to the end, this earned him posthumous praise, whether or not a poem worthy of engraving on either silver or gold was found among his clay-boards. See-a-Bird quoted the record of Solero: ‘the Goddess tormented him greatly and when he was killed by the fall of a poplar at the shrine of Mari the Silent, a pile of clay-boards and slates were found on his cupboard-top. There now are forty plates in gold of Solero, who had kept his silver plates bright.’
    ‘Never to commit one’s poems to silver seems an easy way of getting a poetic reputation. In practice, does anyone ever use up his plates?’
    ‘The poet Robnet had used all his twenty within a year of receiving them.’
    ‘The Goddess must have tormented him pretty badly.’
    ‘She did. She also put it into the minds of his poet-friends to present him with twenty-one more plates, three from each, so that she could torment him further.’
    ‘He could surely have kept his poems on clay-boards like Solero?’
    ‘The Nymph Fand, whom he loved, wouldn’t let him do so.’
    ‘What happened then?’
    ‘He used all the new plates within six months; and then he took his life and became Fand’s servant.’
    ‘Say that again!’
    ‘When the Goddess torments a man beyond his power to suffer further he goes to her principal shrine, removes his name from her register, and expires. He’s re-born under a new name into the servants’ estate; unless, of course, as sometimes happens, he has expired completely.’
    ‘What did Fand do then?’
    ‘She took another young poet as her lover; and presently disappeared.’
    ‘You mean, that the jealous Robnet strangled her and disposed of her remains?’
    But I had said the wrong thing again and had to make another apology. No: Fand, it seems, simply disappeared.
    The New Cretans, I found, did not mine precious metals, but were still drawing on the huge hoard at Fort Worth in North America which had been discovered and excavated by the Sophocrats. Indeed, they had no need to mine for any metals. Their population was kept stable at a low figure, and large stocks of copper and malleable stainless steel were left over from the Pantisocratic, Logicalist and Sophocratic epochs, which served them for all domestic and agricultural uses.
    Our lane passed over a railway bridge and we leaned on the coping as we talked. After a time, three four-wheeled trucks in close succession crawled slowly and soundlessly underneath. They were graceful boat-shaped structures, with painted timber and basket-work curving down within an inch or two of the track. A man of the servants’ estate – one could tell them by their closely cropped heads – sat in the bows of each heavily-loaded truck, which was not power-propelled, but drawn by oxen.