Word: helots
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Perhaps some perspective will help. John Gardner's two previous novels set out on much the same course as The Sunlight Dialogues: In The Wreckage of Agathon, an old, muddled Athenian seer is imprisoned in Sparta for aiding the Helot rebellion. Using this one dominating character, set apart from the world, Gardner waxes and wanes between the philosophical and the lewd, providing an overview that is at once serious and hilarious. Again, in Grendel, the monster's ability to stand back and look at man from a unique perspective makes the novel both exciting and valuable reading. This remains true...
Agathon, once an adviser to Lykourgos, has now been thrown into prison, officially for complicity in the Helot rebellion but actually because he represents a different, more serious threat to Lykourgos's rule. A leering, over-weight, foul-minded old mystic, constantly eating onions, farting, and peeking in windows to watch elderly couples making love. Agathon scorns the Spartan ideal and gleefully embodies its antithesis. The novel deals with how he got this way and how he views himself, the people he knows, the universe he inhabits. Gardner adroitly uses the device of alternating two manuscripts: Agathon's disjointed writings...
...novel are Agathon's reminiscences about his past before he became a seer. He tells us of his marriage to Tuka, the beautiful daughter of an Athenian nobleman at whose home he was tutored, of his involvement with the gross but practical Solon, of his fascination with the Helot Iona, who later becomes a leader of the rebellion. Interesting enough, but all this smacks of soap opera, and at any rate the young Agathon seems pale in comparison to what he becomes...
...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 and write and think politically, he has set events in motion that end in a blaze of atrocity and civil...