Word: agathon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...WRECKAGE OF AGATHON by John Gardner. 243 pages. Harper...
...seer's name is Agathon. He shares his cell with a family of rats that nibble his toes when he sleeps, and a gawky, earnest boy-disciple named Demodokos, who being only an apprentice seer is called Peeker. In alternated monologues, Seer and Peeker describe the cycles of personal passion and international politics that brought them to their stinking dungeon, lit at night by government buildings burned at the hands of revolting Helots, the Spartan slaves...
...Agathon was once a handsome and ambitious academic-political young man, an Archaic Period Kissinger to the John Mitchell of Lycurgus, the famous lawgiver who recast the constitution of Sparta in a fierce authoritarian mold. Now Agathon is a drunken old bum. In between, he has fought a battle disguised as a woman, seduced and married the daughter of an archon, helped the Ionian philosophers invent humanism, rationalism and Western civilization, betrayed his best friend to the Athenian FBI, and made love to the wives of all his friends. By teaching his greatest love, a Helot woman, to read...