Prosopon

by Dionysus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The face was drying on its form by the brazier, and Phanias would not let anyone touch it.

It was early in Elaphebolion, in what would turn out to be the last good spring the Athenians had for a long time, though nobody knew it yet. Phanias had a workshop in Koile, under the Pnyx, two rooms and a yard with a fig in it, and on the shelves round the walls of the front room stood the heads he had made for the festival: kings with their hair heaped up, old men with white wool beards, a chorus of fifteen women from Lydia with their mouths open, all of them the same mouth, because a chorus sings with one mouth or not at all. They were made the way masks have always been made. You build a head in clay on a peg. You lay over it strips of linen soaked in glue, five layers, six, each pressed into the hollows with the thumb. When it has dried you dig the clay out from behind with a spoon, and what is left is a shell the weight of a loaf, a face with nobody in it. Then the plaster, then the paint, then the hair.

This one had no hair yet. It was a young man's face, beardless, with a long jaw and a crease between the eyebrows as if it had been asked a question it did not like. It was the king of Thebes. It was Pentheus.

Nikandros came in from the yard at the second hour of the night with mud on his feet and the cold on him. He had been at the theatre since dawn with the chorus, going through the entrance in the fourth episode, the one where the god leads the king out dressed as a woman, eleven times; the chorus-trainer had a stick and used it on the floor of the orchestra. Nikandros was thirty-three. He had a black beard, cut short and square, and a broken knuckle on his right hand, and a voice that the whole hillside could hear when he wanted it to and that nobody heard when he didn't.

He stopped by the brazier.

"You've done two," he said.

There were two Pentheus faces. One on the form by the fire, still grey at the edges where the plaster had not gone white; one finished on the bench, painted, the hair on it, long and yellow, a king's hair, tied back with a band. The second was a little smaller and much heavier, because Phanias had stuffed it behind with wool and stitched a backing over the wool, so that it would hold its shape in somebody's arms.

"One to wear," Phanias said, "and one to carry."

He did not look up. He was mixing the yellow for the hair in a sherd, with egg. He was forty-nine and had been making faces for the Dionysia for thirty years, for Sophocles twice, for Agathon before Agathon took his Pausanias and went north to the king of Macedon, for the old man himself, Euripides, more times than he could tell you, until the old man went north too, and died there. In the theatre the actors called Phanias the Undertaker, because by the time a face came into his hands to be painted the man it belonged to was always already dead.

Nikandros picked up the heavy one from the bench.

It is a strange thing to pick up a head. It is heavier than you think and it sits wrong in the hands. He turned it over. He turned it back. He held it at arm's length, the way you hold a letter when your eyes start to go.

The long jaw. The crease between the brows. There was a small notch in the lip on the left side, where a boy of seventeen had once gone over the shaft of a hand-cart in the street of the bronzesmiths and put his teeth through it; it had healed white. There was a mole under the right eye. In the painted face the mole was there, a single dot of brown, so small you would not see it from the fifth row. From the fiftieth row nobody would see anything but yellow hair.

Nikandros had had a beard for fourteen years. Under it the notch in his lip was still there. The mole had gone into the beard in the second year.

"Who's going to see that?" he said.

"Nobody."

"Then why?"

Phanias put down the brush and wiped his fingers on his apron, one finger at a time. "You asked for a Pentheus," he said. "I had one."

---

There is a law in Athens that nobody wrote down. It does not need to be written, because the whole city keeps it, the way the whole city keeps the festival. It says that a man may love a boy, and the boy may let himself be loved, and the city will look the other way and even smile, and give him a hare or a cockerel to give the boy, and paint the pair of them on its wine-cups. And it says that when the boy's beard comes, it ends. It ends with the first beard. The boy becomes a man and goes to the wrestling-ground in his turn and looks about him for boys of his own, and gets a wife at thirty, and all of that is good and in its season. What the law does not allow, what the barbers laugh about and the comic choruses sing about every winter at the Lenaia, is the bearded man who goes on being loved. He is the one they make the jokes for. The comic poets put Agathon on the stage clean-shaven and in a dress, and the benches roared.

Nikandros had not shaved. He had let the beard come. He had moved his bed and his two chests from his brother's house in Melite into the back room in Koile in his twentieth year, and called Phanias his teacher, which was true, since Phanias had taught him to breathe inside a mask; and the city had found other things to look at, because the Spartans were at Dekeleia and their smoke could be seen from the walls on a clear day where they burned the farms, and the fleet was always about to sail or just back or lost.

But this winter his brother Diodoros had found him a wife. She was fifteen, the daughter of a man with a share in a silver lease and a house below the Acropolis. The betrothal had been made with handshakes in the courtyard in Melite in Poseideon, and the dowry agreed, and the wedding set for Gamelion, the marriage month, ten months off. After the festival Nikandros was going back to Melite to live in his brother's house until the wedding. He had said so, in the yard, under the fig, at the beginning of the month. Phanias had listened, and then gone in, and lit the lamp, and started a head.

Nikandros put the heavy face back down on the bench, gently, as if it might wake.

"I can't carry that," he said.

"You'll carry what the play needs."

"They'll have a mask of the king's head from any workshop in the city, they'll have it by tomorrow. Smaller. Lighter. Something with a lion in it, because she thinks it's a lion."

"It's not a lion," Phanias said. "That's the point of it."

He took up the brush again and bent over the yellow. The lamp was behind him, and his own face was in the dark, and the face on the bench looked up at the ceiling with its eyes empty.

---

The god was already in the theatre. He had come into Attica long ago from Eleutherai on the frontier, from somewhere else, the way he always comes, and every year they carry his old wooden image in by torchlight and set it in its own seat by the orchestra, facing the stage, so that he can watch the plays. That is the oldest part of the festival and the least understood. Everyone thinks the plays are for the city. The city goes because the god is watching.

A few days before the plays, in the morning, came the proagon.

They held it in the Odeion that Pericles built beside the theatre, the great dark hall with the roof on its forest of columns, where the poets go up on a platform one after another and say what they will show. The actors go up with them. They go up garlanded, in their own clothes, without masks. It is the only time in the year that the city sees the faces of the men who will be its kings and mothers and gods.

The old man's son went up for the third day, Euripides the younger, with ink on his fingers. He said that his father had left three plays in Macedonia, finished, and that he had brought them home: Iphigeneia at Aulis, Alcmaeon in Corinth, and the Bacchae. He said the last word and the hall made a sound, low, the kind of sound a crowd makes when a man who is dead is mentioned in front of it. At the Lenaia two months before, the comedy that took the prize had been about the god going down into Hades to bring the old man back. The whole city had laughed at it for an afternoon. It had not brought him back.

Then the actors were named, and stood up, one after another, with ivy round their heads.

Philon, who was to be the god: young, curled, with the beautiful empty face that the god always gets, because the god likes to borrow a face that is easy to look at.

Lysikles, who was to be Teiresias and Kadmos and both the messengers, old and bald and used to it.

Nikandros, who was to be Pentheus, king of Thebes, and Agave his mother, and nobody else.

He stood. He felt the hall look at him. Two thousand men in their good cloaks, and every one of them knew what a bearded man of thirty-three was doing in a mask-maker's back room in Koile, and every one of them had decided, years ago, that it was not worth the bother of saying. He looked for his brother and found him, on the left by a column, in his best cloak, beside a heavy man with grey hair who would be the father of the girl. Diodoros raised his hand a little, the way you raise it to a man across the agora when you will not be crossing.

Phanias was not there. Phanias never went to the proagon. He said it was like going to see the bodies laid out before the funeral.

---

On the third day of the tragedies the sun came up over Hymettos into a theatre that had been full since the dark.

Fifteen thousand people on the hillside. Wine in skins. Bread and dried figs and onions in cloths. Cushions, for those who had cushions. The priest of Dionysus in his chair in the front row, and beside him, in the chair that is left for him, the god's own image, old black wood, with ivy on its head and a cup in its hand, which is to say nobody, which is to say the only spectator who had come for the right reasons.

Inside the stage-building it was dark and smelled of glue and sweat and the river-mint the actors chew to keep the throat open. The other two plays were done by the sixth hour. Between them Nikandros stood at the back with his eyes shut and breathed, in through the nose to the count of six, out through the mouth to the count of nine, as he had been taught at seventeen, in Koile, with a man's hand flat on his belly to feel it go.

Phanias was there now, at the bench by the door, with his pots of paint and his needle and thread, mending a chorus face that a boy had dropped. He did not look up. The Pentheus face that was for wearing was on its peg. The other was on the bench beside him, under a cloth.

Then the Bacchae.

---

What is it to wear a face?

It is hot. That is the first thing. The linen sits on your skull and the hair on top of it, and your own hair and beard are crushed up inside, and in a quarter of an hour the sweat is running from your scalp into your eyes and you cannot wipe it. You see through two holes the size of a thumbnail, and you see straight ahead and nothing else, so that you learn the stage with your feet. You hear your own voice come back at you from the inside of the mouth, louder and stranger than it is. And after a while, a short while, you stop being able to tell where the face ends.

Nikandros went out as the king.

He had played kings before. He knew how they are done: from the chest, heavy on the heel, the voice down in the barrel. Pentheus comes in from abroad to find his city gone mad, the women gone to the mountain, his own mother among them, and an effeminate foreigner with scented curls going about saying that he is a god. Pentheus is the one who will not. He will not dance, he will not drink, he will not put the ivy on. He will lock it up and cut its hair and chain it in the stable with the horses. He says all of this very loud. The audience on the hillside knew him at once. Every one of them had a Pentheus in his family. Most of them had one in his chest.

Philon stood in front of the king with his arms loose and his head on one side, and was patient, and the patience was worse than a smile. Nikandros shouted at him through the painted mouth, and felt fifteen thousand people hate the god a little with him, and enjoy it.

And then the fourth episode. The dressing.

There is nothing like it in any other play. The god has caught the king by the one thing in him that wants: he wants to see. He wants to see the women on the mountain at their rites, and he cannot go as a man, so he goes as a woman. They had rehearsed it eleven times with the chorus-trainer's stick on the orchestra floor. Nikandros went in through the doors as the king, and inside, in the dark, Phanias was waiting with the robe: saffron linen, down to the ankles, and a fawnskin, and a long false lock that hooked on under the snood of the mask. Phanias put it on him in the time it takes to say it. Neither of them spoke. Phanias's fingers went over the pins at his shoulders and the band in his hair the way they went over a face on a form, once, finding everything, and then the doors opened, and Philon took his wrist, and he went out.

He walked as a woman walks. They had worked on that in the yard in Koile too, half the winter, with the jar on the head. He felt the hillside take it in, and he felt the laugh coming before it came, the whole hill drawing a breath to laugh at the king in a dress.

"How do I look?" he said. The line is in the play. He said it to Philon, but he said it out, to the hill. "Do I stand like Ino? Like my mother Agave?"

The laugh came.

It came up from the front rows first, where the priests and the generals sat, and then rolled back and up through the whole theatre to the top seats under the rock, fifteen thousand people laughing at a man in a woman's dress who wanted to know whether he was pretty. Nikandros stood in it. It went over him like weather. In the barbers' shops and at the Lenaia it was the same laugh. He had heard it all his life with his own face on, and smiled with it, and gone home by the back lanes.

Philon came close to him, as the play says, and touched the false lock at his temple.

"This curl has come out of place," Philon said, "where I tucked it under the band."

He pushed it back. His fingers were cool on the linen of the face, and Nikandros felt them, which was not possible. And Philon went down on one knee in front of the whole city and straightened the pleats of the saffron robe where they hung uneven at the ankle, slowly, one fold and then the next, as the god does in the play, very tenderly, a man kneeling at another man's feet, and the laugh on the hillside began to go uncertain. It thinned. A few went on laughing in the upper rows, the way a few always do. Then they stopped too. The old man had known they would.

Nikandros looked down at the curled head of the god at his feet, through the two holes, and could not see anything else, and heard the whole hill go quiet.

They went out together through the gate, the king first. He did not come back.

---

In the dark of the stage-building there is no time. A messenger is out on the stage telling the city how the king was killed on the mountain, how his mother and her sisters pulled down the pine-tree he was sitting in to watch them, how he tore off his own snood so that she would know him, and said Mother, it's me, it's Pentheus, and she did not know him; how she set her foot against his ribs and took him by the arm and pulled. It is a long speech. Lysikles had the breath for it. Inside, the actor whose death it is has the length of that speech to become his own mother.

Phanias took the king's face off him.

It came away with a sound like a seal leaving a jar, and the air of the room hit Nikandros's wet face and beard and he gasped at it. For a moment there was nothing on him. He stood in the dark with his own face and his eyes stinging and the saffron robe still on, and Phanias stood in front of him, a hand's width away, with the Pentheus face in his two hands, the one for wearing, sweat-dark at the brow inside.

There was no time. They both knew there was no time.

Phanias put the king's face down on the bench, and picked up Agave.

Agave is the oldest kind of face in the theatre. A woman of fifty, white, the eyes wide and the mouth wide, the long dark hair down and wild, with ivy in it, and blood in it, the paint still sticky. Phanias put it over Nikandros's head and settled it, the two thumbs along the jaw, the way he had settled every face on him for sixteen years, and for an instant before the dark came down Nikandros saw him: grey, tired, the paint on his fingers, his mouth shut tight.

Then he was inside her, and blind, and Phanias was putting the thyrsus into his right hand, the long fennel stalk with the pine-cone at its tip, and into the crook of his left arm, from under the cloth, the heavy face. The second Pentheus. Stuffed with wool so it would sit in the arms. The yellow hair hung down over Nikandros's wrist, and the face was turned up at him, with its empty eyes and its notch in the lip.

On the stage Lysikles had come to the end and gone, and the chorus had taken it up. Here she comes, they were singing. Here she comes, look.

---

She comes in dancing. That is the terrible thing, and it was meant to be. She comes in from the mountain with the god still in her, laughing, in a triumph, with the head of what she thinks is a young lion in her arms, and she calls on the women of the chorus to look, and to praise her, and to call her father, and her son, so that her son can nail her lion up over the palace gate.

Nikandros went out into the sun dancing.

He could not see the hill. He saw the orchestra floor, the dust of it, and the chorus of fifteen Lydian women with one mouth falling back from him, and he heard his own voice inside Agave's mouth go up, high, wild, a voice he had worked all winter to find and had found, in the end, by thinking of his mother singing at the loom in Melite. He held the head up to the hill. He shook its yellow hair. Look, look what I caught. With my bare hands. Not with nets. And the hill, which had laughed at the king an hour before, saw a mother holding up her son's head and boasting, and it made no sound at all.

Then Kadmos. Lysikles again, in the old man's face now, with the attendants behind him carrying what they had gathered on the mountain on a bier under a cloth. And the slow part, which the old man wrote in Macedonia, in the cold, far from the city. The father brings the daughter back. He does not shout at her. He does not tell her. He asks her questions, the plainest questions, one by one, the way you would bring a child down from a fever: Look at the sky. Is it the same as it was? Who did you marry? What was the name of your son? Whose son is it in your husband's house?

Pentheus, she says.

And Lysikles put out his hand towards the thing in the crook of her arm, and said the line.

Whose face, then, is it, that you hold in your arms?

The word the old man wrote there is prosōpon. It is the word for a face. It is the word for a mask.

Nikandros looked down.

The face looked back up at him. He could see nothing in the world but that, through the two holes; there was nothing else. The long jaw. The crease between the brows. In the full sun of the afternoon, a hand's breadth from Agave's eyes, the mole under the right eye that nobody in the fifth row would see. The white notch in the lip that a boy had got on the shaft of a hand-cart in the street of the bronzesmiths on a hot day in the year he was seventeen, and had run all the way to a mask-maker's yard in Koile with his mouth full of blood because it was the nearest door, and the man had sat him on a stool under the fig and held his chin in one hand and washed the cut with the other, and not let go when it was clean.

The line Agave says is It is a lion's head. So they told me, the women on the mountain. That is the line. Nikandros knew the line. It did not come.

The hill waited. Fifteen thousand people waited, and the god in his black wood in the front row, with the cup in his hand, waited. Inside the mask Nikandros's breath went in and would not go out.

Then it did. Not to the count of nine. It went out of him in a sound that was not Agave's and was not his, a sound from the bottom of the barrel where the king's voice had been, and the face in his arms was wet, and the inside of the face he wore was wet, and he did not know which had come first. He pulled the head into him. He held it against the breast of the robe, against the beard crushed up inside the woman's face, and bent over it, and rocked.

The old man did not write that. That is not in any text.

It was the hill that answered him. It began somewhere high up, under the rock, where the poor sit; a woman, or a boy; one voice; and then it was everywhere. When fifteen thousand people weep at once it is like the sea coming in on shingle. Men who had laughed at the king in the dress an hour before sat with their faces in their hands. A general in the front row wept into the fold of his cloak. Somewhere on the left, by the gangway, a man in his best cloak beside a heavy man with grey hair sat very still with his mouth open and did not wipe his face.

Nikandros found the line. He found it under all of it, the way you find the next stone in a river with your foot, and said it, It is a lion's head, and the play went on, because a play does. Agave knew her son. The god came out on the roof of the palace and pronounced his sentences, on Kadmos, on her, on the city. The old man and his daughter took leave of each other and went out by different ways into exile. And the chorus went off singing the old man's last lines, that the gods bring many things to pass that no one thought would be, and what was looked for does not happen, and for what nobody looked for the god finds a way.

---

The judges gave the prize to the dead man.

They gave it at the end of the festival, and the city cheered, and Euripides the younger stood up and held the ivy over his head with both hands and could not speak. Afterwards the company went up to the god's precinct below the theatre, by torchlight, as the winners do, to give him back what was his. The faces go to the god. They always have. They are hung on the walls of his house and on the trees of the precinct, and they grow black in the smoke of the sacrifices, and the rain gets in them, and in time they fall.

Nikandros hung up the king. The face for wearing, sweat-stained at the brow. He hung up Agave beside it. He stood a moment under the tree with the torches going and the singing and the smell of the roasting, and looked at the two of them turning a little on their cords, son and mother, both of them his, both of them empty now, and was not sorry.

The other face he carried home under his cloak.

Diodoros was waiting at the gate of the precinct. He fell in beside his brother on the road down, as far as the corner where the street goes off to Melite. He did not say anything for a long time. At the corner he stopped.

"Our mother would have liked that," he said. "The singing. What you did with her voice."

"I know."

Diodoros looked at the shape under the cloak, and looked away, and pulled his own cloak round him. "Kallistratos was in tears," he said. "The girl's father. Like a child." He seemed to be going to say more. He put his hand on Nikandros's arm instead, for a moment, hard, and took it away, and went off up the street to Melite, and did not look back, and Nikandros did not call after him.

---

The workshop in Koile was dark except for the brazier. Phanias had come home ahead of him, as he always did when a festival was over, and was sitting on his stool by the bench with nothing in his hands, which he never did. The shelves were half empty. The clay form on its peg by the fire was bare.

Nikandros put the heavy face down on the bench, on its back, with its eyes to the ceiling.

Phanias looked at it, and did not ask.

"You'll have more work after this," Nikandros said. "Everyone will want you after this."

"Everyone wanted me before this."

The brazier ticked. Out in the yard the fig moved in the wind off the sea, and somewhere over by the Pnyx a party coming home from the festival was singing the old man's chorus, badly, and losing the words.

Nikandros sat down on the floor in front of the stool, with his back against the bench, the way he had sat on the first day, at seventeen, with blood in his mouth. He took Phanias's hand, the right one, with the paint still under the nails, and put it against his own face. Against the beard. The fingers lay there and did not move.

"Do me," he said. "This one. As it is now."

Phanias sat for a long time. Then his thumb moved. It went along the line of the brow, slowly, and down the bridge of the nose, and into the beard at the corner of the mouth, until it found the notch in the lip, and stopped there, and pressed. Measuring it. The other hand came up and took the jaw, the way it took every face he had ever made.

Nikandros kept his eyes open.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Novembribus (1 November 2026), ā Dionȳsō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Dionysus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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