The Judge of Olympia

In Elis they said that the god chose the judges, and that men only held the jar.

The jar stood on a table in the agora on a grey morning in the autumn before the ninetieth festival, and the whole city had come to watch it. It was an old jar, black-glazed, with a lid of bronze worn bright where hands had lifted it for longer than anybody could remember. Into it, at dawn, the magistrates had dropped the names of every citizen of the right age and the right standing, each name scratched on a small bronze tablet. The tablets made a sound when the jar was shaken. A dry, cheerful clatter, like dice. Mara had heard that sound four times in her life, at four festivals, from the edge of the crowd, and had never once imagined being inside it.

Elis was not a great city to look at. Everybody said so, including the people of Elis, with a certain pride. It had no walls worth the name, because for as long as the games had existed the god had been its wall, and every Greek city from Sicily to the Black Sea swore by the truce that protected it. It had a long low agora with plane trees, and colonnades where old men argued, and the gymnasia where athletes trained, and beyond them the river Peneios sliding green between willows, and beyond the river the olive groves and the barley fields and the low hills. It was a city of farmers and horse-breeders and lawyers. Mostly it was a city that lived for one thing, every four years, thirty miles to the south: the sanctuary of Zeus at Olympia, and the games, which Elis ran, and judged, and guarded, and was proud of above everything else in the world.

The judges were the heart of it. The Hellanodikai, the judges of the Greeks. For ten months before every festival they lived together in their own house beside the agora and learned the rules from the guardians of the law. For the month before the games they watched every athlete train, in the gymnasia of Elis, and threw out the lazy and the unfit. At Olympia, in their purple robes, they sat at the finish of the stadion and beside the wrestling ground and at the gates of the hippodrome, and what they said was final. Kings could not overrule them. Cities could not buy them. When they handed a victor his crown of wild olive, it was as if the god himself had reached down from the temple and done it.

That was the idea, anyway.

Mara's mother had made her wear the good cloak, the one with the blue border, though Mara had pointed out that the lot did not care about cloaks. "The lot doesn't," Eurynome had said, pinning it at the shoulder with her own brooch. "The neighbours do." She was a small, square, practical woman with flour on her forearms most mornings and a voice that could stop a runaway mule. She had buried a husband and raised a family on forty olive trees and a barley field outside the city, and she had firm views on the lot, which were that it was a great honour, that it would almost certainly fall on somebody else, and that in either case Mara would be home in time to help with the pressing.

The magistrate lifted the lid. The crowd went quiet.

The first name was drawn by a boy, as custom required, a boy of about nine in a clean tunic who was so nervous he put his whole arm in up to the shoulder. He brought out a tablet and handed it up, and the magistrate read it aloud, and a man near the front, a horse-breeder with grey in his beard, went white and then red and then was pushed forward by his friends while the crowd cheered.

The second name was a lawyer. The crowd cheered him less, but politely.

The boy put his arm in again.

Mara was thinking about the olives. About whether the rain would hold off for the picking, and whether the old press would last another season, and whether the boy's arm was going to come out of that jar with anything in it at all, or whether he had got stuck. That was the last ordinary thought Mara had. Afterwards, Mara would remember it with a sort of tenderness, the way you remember the last day of a long summer.

The magistrate took the tablet, and read it, and frowned slightly, as if checking the spelling. Then he read it aloud.

It was Mara's name.

For a moment Mara did not understand. The name hung in the grey air over the agora, and people were turning round, looking, and somebody was saying it again, and somebody else was laughing, and a hand came down on Mara's shoulder, heavy and warm. It was old Kreon from the next farm, who had never said a kind word to anybody in his life, beaming.

"Go on," he said. "Go on, then. They're waiting."

The crowd opened a path. At the far end of it, beside the table and the black jar, the two who had been chosen before stood waiting, the horse-breeder and the lawyer, both looking slightly stunned, and beyond them, on the steps of the colonnade, a tall grey man in a robe of deep purple was watching Mara come with no expression at all.

That was the first time Mara saw Lykon.

Mara walked the length of the path with her head up and her back straight, as if the lot had done exactly what it was supposed to do, and took the hand of the horse-breeder, and then the lawyer, and turned to face the crowd.

It was a performance. Mara knew it was. Mara's knees were water and her heart was going like a hare's. But the crowd liked it, and cheered, louder than for the lawyer, and on the steps of the colonnade the tall man in purple tipped his head very slightly to one side, as though reconsidering something.

Later, much later, Lykon would tell Mara that it was the walk that worried him. "The ones who look as if they expected it," he said, "are the ones who think the lot was right to choose them. That is a dangerous thing for a judge to think."

They drew more names after that, until the college was full, and then there were prayers, and a sacrifice on the altar at the end of the agora, a young bull that went down without a sound, and the smoke went up straight into the grey sky, which the priests said was a good sign.

Then the magistrate handed each of the new judges a folded length of cloth.

It was purple, the deep true purple that comes from the sea snails of the coast, so expensive that most people in Elis had never touched it, and it was heavier than Mara expected, and warm from the sun on the table. Mara stood holding it while the crowd cheered and the bull's smoke drifted over the colonnades, and felt for the first time the weight of the thing that had happened.

For ten months, Mara would live in the House of the Judges. For one month after that, Mara would watch every athlete in the Greek world sweat in the gymnasia of Elis, and judge whether they were worthy of the god. And then, at the full moon of high summer, thirty miles south, under the eyes of forty thousand people and the great gold-and-ivory Zeus in his temple, Mara would sit in purple at the edge of the sand, and decide.

Eurynome found Mara afterwards, when the crowd had gone and the agora was nearly empty and the pigeons had come down to peck at the barley scattered for the sacrifice. She did not say anything for a while. She took the purple cloth, and unfolded it, and held it up against Mara's shoulders, critically, the way she did with every new cloak, and tugged at it, and frowned.

"Too long," she said. "I'll take it up."

Then she put her arms round Mara, in the middle of the agora, in front of the pigeons and the old men in the colonnade, and held on for a long time.

"Be fair," she said, into Mara's shoulder. "That's all. Your father was fair. Be fair, and come home."