Glorious Exploits

Set in Syracuse during the Peloponnesian War, a decades-long conflict between the Greek city-states of Athens and Sparta and their respective allies, the novel follows two unemployed Syracusan potters who attempt to stage the plays of the Athenian dramatist Euripides using prisoners of war as actors. The story is narrated in the first person by Lampo, a sharp-tongued, self-deprecating man with a lifelong limp.

After Athens's catastrophic failed invasion of Sicily, the Syracusan assembly imprisoned roughly 7,000 captured Athenian soldiers in the city's limestone quarries, where they are slowly starving to death. Lampo and his best friend Gelon, a handsome but grief-stricken man whose young son Helios died of illness and whose wife Desma subsequently disappeared, regularly visit the main quarry to offer food to any prisoner who can recite lines from Euripides. These visits are Gelon's way of preserving fragments of Athenian theatre.

During one visit, Lampo encounters Biton, a Syracusan whose son was tortured to death by the Athenians. Biton has beaten one prisoner to death and is pursuing another, a green-eyed man named Paches. Lampo trades a pouch of wine for Paches, claiming Gelon needs a green-eyed actor to play Jason in Medea. That night, at Dismas's tavern, Gelon reveals his grand ambition: They will become directors and stage a full production of Medea in the quarry, complete with chorus, masks, and costumes.

Preparations begin immediately. Lampo secures Paches as Jason, and the two discover Numa, an Athenian hiding in a quarry tunnel who once acted in rural theatres. Numa performs Medea's opening monologue with startling conviction and earns the lead role. A chorus of 15 Athenians is assembled. Meanwhile, the directors encounter a group of war orphans playing soldiers with bones scavenged from unburied Athenian dead. Their leader, Dares, whose father died in the war, and a tiny child named Strabo, whose brother was killed by the Athenians, help build a funeral pyre for the remains. Lampo collects Athenian armor from the site to sell for production funds.

Funding proves difficult until the directors meet Tuireann, a wealthy and enigmatic foreign collector from the "tin islands" far to the north, whose ship carries crates of war relics. Below deck, Tuireann asks whether they believe in the gods and offers to show them one: a large circular crate filled with murky water that glows and pulses when prodded. Lampo panics and flees, but Gelon stays and emerges pale and shaken, carrying pouches of gold. Tuireann has become their producer.

Flush with money, Lampo squanders much of it on luxuries, including a lightning-blue chiton, or tunic, and crocodile-skin boots, while supposed to be buying food for the Athenians. He arrives at the quarry with a single sack of barley instead of the wheat Gelon requested. Gelon says quietly, "They'll not eat tonight because of you." The incident drives Lampo toward something more purposeful: his growing love for Lyra, a slave from Sardis in Lydia who works at Dismas's tavern. Lyra is literate, her father a man of learning who could predict eclipses. At a secluded cove, she writes Lampo's name in the wet sand, the first time he has ever seen it written. A wave washes it away. Lampo promises to buy her freedom. Lyra says she cannot trust him but agrees that if he truly frees her, she will stay. Dismas names a price of 300 drachmae.

Lampo begins working market shifts, saving every coin. Gelon reveals he wants to stage not just Medea but also Euripides's newest play, Trojan Women, set among the women of Troy after the city's destruction. Casting brings conflict: A young Athenian named Linar delivers a devastating Cassandra audition, surpassing Paches. Lampo threatens to walk out unless Paches is given the role of Helen, and Gelon relents. The children join as production assistants, and Gelon recruits an old musician named Alcar to play the aulos, a double-reed pipe. During rehearsals, Biton returns and confronts them violently, accusing Gelon of feeding the enemy in front of orphaned children, but Dares intervenes and Biton retreats with a warning.

Alekto, the formidable proprietor of Syracuse's only theatre shop, delivers spectacular costumes and painted backdrops. On performance day, after agonizing minutes of waiting, hundreds of spectators stream down into the quarry. Medea opens shakily, but Numa's entrance commands total silence, and Paches proves commanding as Jason. Trojan Women follows immediately, the cast's emaciated bodies and chains suited to the roles of ruined Trojan women. Linar as Cassandra delivers a manic performance, scratching the quarry floor until his nails bleed. In Gelon's boldest choice, Strabo plays Astyanax, the infant son of the Trojan hero Hector, who in the myth is thrown from the city walls. A guard pushes Strabo from a boulder, improvising the line, "Would you like to fly over your city?" The child's scream silences the quarry. Syracusans and Athenians weep together.

Near the end, as Numa begins the final lament, Biton appears and caves in Numa's skull with a club. A group of men join the attack, killing nearly the entire cast, including Linar and Alcar. Gelon is beaten badly. Only the children's presence eventually prompts some audience members to intervene.

Lampo recovers in a quarry cave, tended by Paches, who survived by playing dead. He learns of a new decree: The Athenians' rations will be cut entirely, and the prisoners left to die. Lampo proposes rescuing Paches, but Gelon, broken in spirit, refuses. Lampo erupts, blaming Gelon for the deaths, and storms out. He goes to Tuireann, whose ship cannot take Athenians aboard in Syracuse but will be at Hyccara, a ruined town across the island, in two nights. Lampo secures Alekto's wagon and horses, finds a rain-loosened stake in the quarry fence, and tells Paches the plan.

On the night of the escape, Gelon is already in the wagon, having changed his mind without a word. They widen the gap in the fence and Lampo blows Alcar's aulos to signal Paches, but Paches has collapsed partway up the hill. Lampo sends an Athenian back with a rope to haul him out, fills the wagon with prisoners, and drives into the night. A border patrolman recognizes Gelon from the quarry play, pauses, and lets them pass.

After a grueling two-day crossing, they arrive at the charred ruins of Hyccara and find Tuireann's ship. The Athenians board. Tuireann offers Lampo a job sailing the world, but Lampo declines, asking instead for 300 drachmae to buy Lyra's freedom. Tuireann hands it over. Paches kisses Lampo on both cheeks in the Athenian manner of farewell, and the ship pulls away.

Lampo returns to Syracuse and goes directly to Dismas's, only to learn that Lyra has been sold to Tuireann for 700 drachmae. Lampo collapses on the floor.

The narrative shifts. An elderly Lampo sits at the quarry's edge and throws all 300 coins into the pit below. Speaking in retrospect, he reveals he never learned to read or write. Strabo, now grown, has been transcribing his story onto papyrus. Gelon is dead; he had established a school teaching Homer's Iliad to children. Syracuse is under Carthaginian siege. Strabo urges Lampo to flee, but he refuses. Eyes closed, he sees it all: the quarry, Gelon, the Athenians, the children, and Lyra, and the memory seems to him "a soft and delicate thing."

In a brief epilogue set in Athens, the aged Euripides hosts a farewell dinner on his last night before departing for Macedonia. A rain-soaked stranger appears: Paches, who kneels at the playwright's feet, presents an original scroll of the philosopher Heraclitus, and tells the story of the quarry theatre. Euripides weeps silently and spends his last night listening, "for his master was ever in love with misfortune and believed the world a wounded thing that can only be healed by story."