The Praise Singer by Mary Renault

changeling; now I was double-changed. I knew, though I could not help it, that I was talking like some distant kinsman on a passing visit. I caught Philomache watching me almost with awe. I must tell Kleobis, I thought; it will make him laugh.
    Next day I slipped away without ceremony, bidding only Theas goodbye. “I won’t ride down with you,” he said, “you’ll be wanting to think what you’re about, and we’ll be cutting the barley. He’s only short-handed because it’s cropped well this year. I offered up a kid for you, at the turn of the moon; but don’t tell him, he hasn’t missed it.” He strode off through the silver olives.
    The flautist knew Ionia well; we spent the evening in pleasant talk, and turned in with a cup of warm neat wine, to settle us. Almost it could have been Ephesos. I slept quite well.
    The morning was fine, already smelling of autumn. The smoke of sacrifice hung in the air, sweetened with a little incense; Keos is sparing of such things. There were three or four other choirs, all Kean but one, which came from neighboring Kythnos. We poets exchanged homely gossip, as people do at country festivals. The Keans were curious about me, most of them not having heard of me before, even from my family; but they were more concerned with their own affairs.
    The choral odes opened the day; the games and the fair would follow. Robed and wreathed now, we poets stood in the temple porch behaving ourselves. The maiden choruses sat whispering, in their strict matrons’ charge; the boys dropped beetles down one another’s backs, and so on, and were tapped by us poets with our little staffs.
    The judges sat on their wooden thrones, brought out from the temple store. There was one, an oldish man, whom the others seemed to defer to. I asked someone why; he murmured that this was a guest of honor from Athens.
    The back of my neck tingled. I was to sing before an Athenian.
    Despite her wars, nobles against commons, hills against plain, Pisistratos out or in, which made this seem no place for my old master, the name of Athens rang for me, as it had in my boyhood on the Kean hills, looking towards Hymettos. I forgot the Keans, and my worries about whether they would know what I was doing. An Athenian was here.
    His name was Prokles. You never hear of him now. But his Lay of Ajax was good, and at one time you heard it everywhere.
    I kept my eye on him while the first two choirs were singing (mine would be third) and at one bad passage I saw him blink. This gave me hope.
    So much I remember well. But I’ve given my Apollo ode so many times, that my ear hears Athenians, Thessalians, Andrians, Euboians … At any rate, I was told later that the last choir sang badly because mine had put them out of heart. Well, in my time I have made good music before my betters. Why not? Our art is like a wheatfield, the tallest force up the rest. May I no longer live-not that I shall much longer in any case!-when the shortest want to cut the tallest down.
    It was the Athenian judge who crowned me with the laurel. Then the people who’d come up to greet me parted to make way; and I remembered I’d been singing before my father.
    I felt for him then, a little. He could not have borne it if his son had failed to win; on the other hand, he’d always hated to be proved wrong. Some of his acquaintances asked him, meaning it quite pleasantly, where he had been hiding me all this time; some said they had not known that he had two sons; and one put so much discretion into it, it was clear he thought me a by-blow. Theas, as usual, sailed in with the right word and got us out of it.
    After this, for some days I was taken about to meet people. But one morning, when my father was about his business, Theas fetched me to an outhouse, where his sheepdog had whelped, to look at the litter and decide which ones ?to keep. We drowned the runts; the dam seemed glad to be rid of them, and suckled the big ones happily enough. As we flung the