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The Wreckage of Agathon
Laid to waste by drink, Agathon, a seer, is a shell of a man. He sits imprisoned with his apprentice, Peeker, for his presumed involvement in a rebellion against the Spartan tyrant Lykourgos. Confined to a cell, the men produce extraordinary writings that illustrate the stories of their lives and give witness to Agathon's deterioration and the growth of Peeker from a bashful young apprentice to a self-assured and passionate seer. Captivating and imaginative, The Wreckage of Agathon is a tribute to author John Gardner's passion for ancient storytelling and those universal themes that span the course of all human civilization.
279 pages, Mass Market Paperback
First published January 1, 1970
17 people are currently reading
318 people want to read
About the author
John Gardner
401 books462 followersJohn Champlin Gardner was a well-known and controversial American novelist and university professor, best known for his novel Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf myth.
Gardner was born in Batavia, New York. His father was a lay preacher and dairy farmer, and his mother taught English at a local school. Both parents were fond of Shakespeare and often recited literature together. As a child, Gardner attended public school and worked on his father's farm, where, in April of 1945, his younger brother Gilbert was killed in an accident with a cultipacker. Gardner, who was driving the tractor during the fatal accident, carried guilt for his brother's death throughout his life, suffering nightmares and flashbacks. The incident informed much of Gardner's fiction and criticism — most directly in the 1977 short story "Redemption," which included a fictionalized recounting of the accident.
From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gar...
Gardner was born in Batavia, New York. His father was a lay preacher and dairy farmer, and his mother taught English at a local school. Both parents were fond of Shakespeare and often recited literature together. As a child, Gardner attended public school and worked on his father's farm, where, in April of 1945, his younger brother Gilbert was killed in an accident with a cultipacker. Gardner, who was driving the tractor during the fatal accident, carried guilt for his brother's death throughout his life, suffering nightmares and flashbacks. The incident informed much of Gardner's fiction and criticism — most directly in the 1977 short story "Redemption," which included a fictionalized recounting of the accident.
From Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gar...
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
May 10, 2017
You know that subgenre of lit novels about suburban college professors swapping wives and drinking themselves to death? This book is that set in BCE Sparta during a slave revolt.
June 28, 2013
I have loved Gardner's Grendel since reading it in high school but never got around to reading anything else of his until this. This time the story is set in ancient Sparta, although the chronology is deliberately vague and we have characters from several different periods (Lyucurgus, circa 820-730 BCE, Solon, 638-533 BCE living as contemporaries). None of this really matters though as Gardner's point is not to relate history. Instead we get a vivid if anachronistic picture of life in ancient Sparta as backdrop to a intense, introspective study of several characters, none of whom are ever completely revealed, but all are more real for that very reason. alongside the character studies Gardner is satirizing the Spartan mindset, which is revealed to be uncomfortably similar to certain modern ideologies. Gardner is much more sympathetic to the Helots than to the Spartans, which is a good corrective given the misrepresentations of Sparta we see in modern culture -- from Frank Miller's demented hero-worshiping caricature in _300_ to Steven Pressfield's more realistic (but still moon-eyed) representation in _Gates of fire._
Also a fun read for the philosophical digressions -- Gardner paraphrases thinkers from Epicurus to Nietzsche as well as coming up what I'm guessing are his own original theories as the characters debate and discuss life and ethics.
Also a fun read for the philosophical digressions -- Gardner paraphrases thinkers from Epicurus to Nietzsche as well as coming up what I'm guessing are his own original theories as the characters debate and discuss life and ethics.
March 24, 2011
I found this book in a used bookstore having never heard of the author. I loved the journey and the humanity with which Gardner imbues all the characters with shades of gray.
February 8, 2008
Gotta love onions!
June 3, 2012
The setting is the police state Sparta, 400ish BC (I’m hazy on my Greek history and too lazy to look it up). The tale is told from two viewpoints, Agathon, the fat, smelly, cackling philospher-seer in exile from Athens, and his one remaining acolyte, a gangly young man called Peeker who both loathes and loves Agathon. The two of them are arrested towards the start of the book and spend the rest of it writing out their story on parchment provided by their Spartan jailers. There are two basic themes here, politics and family.
***
Politics: “Wreckage of Agathon” is a political book, and one with a surprisingly subtle touch, finally. The two political-ideological extremes are represented by Athens’ Solon and Sparta’s Lycurgous:
Lykurgos, Sparta: Agricultural, rigidly heirarchical, militaristic, xenophobic police state. Culture is virtually non-existence. Money is essentially outlawed (replaced by unwieldy iron brickbats). Everything depends on the Helots, essentially serfs, are exploited and sometimes murdered…but Helots are not slaves.
vs.
Solon, Athens: Free trade, culturally relevant, pluralistic, open, democratic, open to new ideas. Loves money, but everything depends on a slave-based economy.
Agathon is from Athens, sent by Solon to Sparta to be a kind of diplomat without portfolio/spy. As the years go by, Agathon winds up going native, hanging around with the helots. Lykurgos keeps him around as a combination political advisor/court fool, a role Agathon despises. Finally Agathon winds up on the streets, a travelling philosopher in rags, peeping in windows, farting windily, cackling, etc.
The Spartan ruler comes off rather one-note at first, a law and order guy of unbelievably rigid rectitude and heartlessness. And yet Gardner gradually fleshes him out as a plausible human being to the point that he becomes perhaps the best of the major characters. A monster for sure, but a plausible weirdly selfless one. Solon is an absolute delight – fat and ridiculous on the face of it, he is an unrelentingly shrewd man of affairs who employs flexibility and deceit where Lycurgos uses rigid law and transparency. Deceit is convincingly shown to be the better, more humane way to organize a society.
And yet paradoxically, one of the most astonishing moments comes towards the end of the book when Agathon has to admit that he loves Sparta, and that for all its cultural backwardness and militaristic bullying and police state control, it is in many ways better than Athens because Athens is cynical, over-refined, and only possible because of its vast number of slaves who make everything go and provide the free people with lots of leisure time to philosophize and ponder beauties. This is a distinction that applies to free and not-so-free peoples today, I think, and rarely do you see it presented so adroitly. This is probably the best thing about the book.
***
The other main thread running through the book is family, and how family can be destroyed by politics, among other things. This is the main conflict:
Agathon, wife Tukka and kids: Years before Agathon became a cackling old crazy on the streets of Sparta, he was an ambitious young Athenian technocrat-intellectual. Tukka is a kind sexual deity with a dark, violent, possibly insane streak. She was the rich girl who married beneath her. Agathon’s account of their courtship is charming and yet they were “meant for each other” in all the usual ways which gets laid on a bit thick. But as the years pass they don’t cleave as well as they once did and Agathon’s political and philosophic interests seem to provoke her crazy streak. There is a domestic violence scene at one point that kind of gave me the creeps after reading Barry Silesky’s bio. of Gardner – is it wife beating or just another form of passion? Here, I detected a little bit of autobiographical special pleading on the author’s part: Agathon, after slugging her gives her a kind of “I told you so, but you started it” that is, I suppose, right out of Wife Beating 101… Then there are the kids. They are good kids, the daughter turns out to be a dummy, the son a little too soft, but in a good, gentle way. Agathon lavishes them with bad dad sentimentality that is almost as bad as the wife-beating episode. But Agathon would be the first to tell you he was a failure as a father (although as with so many bad dads, there’s a tendency for the rhetoric of apology to substitute for action).
vs.
Ionia and husband Dorkis, and kids: Helots of the best sort, both turn from trusted servants of the Spartan state to revolutionaries. Dorkis the husband is a noble, naïve strappingly handsome cypher who gets tortured and executed – Gardner manages a crude sort of effectiveness in his rendering which makes his execution sort of moving, but to tell the truth Dorkis could play the hero in a bodice-ripper pretty easily. Ionia his wife is incredibly sexy and charming to the point that she kind of blurs in the telling. Later she grows ugly through her harshness and political savagery (she becomes a terrorist). She rescues the plague-ridden Agathon from a Spartan prison and he dies in her arms sort of. Ionia is a kind of Maude Gonne figure, the beauty made ugly because she entered the big wide world of action and politics. Well, I’d make a lousy feminist, but there is something deeply chauvinistic about this sort of thing, the fact male authors like their women nubile and smart and not too concerned about the same things the men are.
Some of the worst parts of the book detail the love-triangle (rectangle, actually) between these two couples. It is very post-swinging sixties via the sleazy seventies. Agathon’s autopsy of the ensuing catastrophe are among the book’s worst moments:
“The pain of jealousy was over, for the moment anyway, and now, clear-minded, she could see the jealousy and the attack on Iona as they were, and she was depressed. It was true that she had hurt Miletos, and though she wasn’t the cause of his grief, she was to blame. And it was true, she knew, that Iona had been fond of her, that they really might have been like sisters, whatever that meant, if it weren’t for Dorkis and me. It could have been very good for all of us. But Dorkis was a lover, not only a man with busy hands but a man who did in fact fall in love, though he did nothing about it – and so, alas, was I. So whenever we came together, the four of us, there was no escape from the heart-swapping game, tiresome and futile, doomed to frustration and anger because of our natures. She understood, now that her attack on Iona had ended it, that we’d had nothing from the start, only a grand potential…” (pp. 204-205)
A potential reader shouldn’t judge the whole book by a single passage, but there are swatches of this stuff and they definitely mar the whole. The adolescent miseries of Peeker (and his loving, complaining, shrewd widowed peasant mother) are far more compelling than the intellectual hot-pants set and their complicated parties full of political big ideas and ass-grabbing.
***
Gardner is sometimes at his best with minor characters. Peeker’s mother, a hard-working, hectoring apple-vendor is the book’s best parent, even when she chucks the occasional apple at her son. The Spartan jailer who never speaks a word until the end of the book is perhaps my favorite character of all, embodying as he does that which is best in duty-bound Sparta. His heart manifests itself despite his rigid code. The jailer’s probably a bit hokey, but sometimes Gardner’s characters work best when he isn’t devoting so much effort to them; the main efforts at character-building get to be too sweaty, an authorial workout where the reader can catch a whiff of the weight room heavy-lifting and sweat…
But old-fashioned character development is an old-fashioned tale-teller’s virtue, and Gardner was old-fashioned. His attacks on metafiction and postmodern literature in general were notorious in the ‘70s. But old-fashioned virtues come with old-fashioned vices. The storyteller can spin a good yarn, keep a plot interesting, advance a character’s dilemma and beguile the reader. But there is a tendency for characters to fall into “types” and for the plot to follow a beginning-middle-end trajectory that can be, without a great deal of care, trite. For instance, Agathon in his “seer” in his full-blown intellectual in disguise of a holy fool role is rendered in such a cartoonish manner that he finally actually becomes a cartoon.
Gardner also has a tendency to over-write. His is not the over-writing of the amateur or the talentless, so it is not as irritating to the reader and it is not easy to detect except by an overall feel. Too often in “Agathon” I felt this vague sense of verbal overkill which became cloying. It is possible that Gardner was working long enough ago that fashions have since changed (I don’t read enough novels to know this for sure). Or maybe my own preferences now tend towards a cooler approach. Also, Gardner’s vocabulary is vast but sometimes obtrusive. The word puissance (or puissant) shows up about five times in the second half of the book, which is where I first noticed it. “Puissance” is a fine word, although I’ve never much cared for it since its definition and its spelling/sound are so at odds with each other (it means “of great force or vigor” but it sounds as if it should mean something like “pusillanimity” – showing a lack of courage; or, to be crude about it, it sounds too much like “pussy”). “Puissance” becomes a tic after the first use.
I don’t feel I have been particularly fair (or coherent) about “The Wreckage of Agathon.” Twenty years ago this was one of my favorite books, but it has since dropped off my charts. I guess I was just a little bored with it. But I was impressed by Gardner’s subtle take on politics – he demonstrated how distinctions between repression and freedom can be more ambiguous than you might think.
Note on the Text: Typos galore! My copy of “Agathon” is a Ballantine Books trade paperback from 1970 and I found five or six typos, which means there are probably 25 of them, given my fast, sloppy reading habits. So much for blaming slovenliness on computers.
***
Politics: “Wreckage of Agathon” is a political book, and one with a surprisingly subtle touch, finally. The two political-ideological extremes are represented by Athens’ Solon and Sparta’s Lycurgous:
Lykurgos, Sparta: Agricultural, rigidly heirarchical, militaristic, xenophobic police state. Culture is virtually non-existence. Money is essentially outlawed (replaced by unwieldy iron brickbats). Everything depends on the Helots, essentially serfs, are exploited and sometimes murdered…but Helots are not slaves.
vs.
Solon, Athens: Free trade, culturally relevant, pluralistic, open, democratic, open to new ideas. Loves money, but everything depends on a slave-based economy.
Agathon is from Athens, sent by Solon to Sparta to be a kind of diplomat without portfolio/spy. As the years go by, Agathon winds up going native, hanging around with the helots. Lykurgos keeps him around as a combination political advisor/court fool, a role Agathon despises. Finally Agathon winds up on the streets, a travelling philosopher in rags, peeping in windows, farting windily, cackling, etc.
The Spartan ruler comes off rather one-note at first, a law and order guy of unbelievably rigid rectitude and heartlessness. And yet Gardner gradually fleshes him out as a plausible human being to the point that he becomes perhaps the best of the major characters. A monster for sure, but a plausible weirdly selfless one. Solon is an absolute delight – fat and ridiculous on the face of it, he is an unrelentingly shrewd man of affairs who employs flexibility and deceit where Lycurgos uses rigid law and transparency. Deceit is convincingly shown to be the better, more humane way to organize a society.
And yet paradoxically, one of the most astonishing moments comes towards the end of the book when Agathon has to admit that he loves Sparta, and that for all its cultural backwardness and militaristic bullying and police state control, it is in many ways better than Athens because Athens is cynical, over-refined, and only possible because of its vast number of slaves who make everything go and provide the free people with lots of leisure time to philosophize and ponder beauties. This is a distinction that applies to free and not-so-free peoples today, I think, and rarely do you see it presented so adroitly. This is probably the best thing about the book.
***
The other main thread running through the book is family, and how family can be destroyed by politics, among other things. This is the main conflict:
Agathon, wife Tukka and kids: Years before Agathon became a cackling old crazy on the streets of Sparta, he was an ambitious young Athenian technocrat-intellectual. Tukka is a kind sexual deity with a dark, violent, possibly insane streak. She was the rich girl who married beneath her. Agathon’s account of their courtship is charming and yet they were “meant for each other” in all the usual ways which gets laid on a bit thick. But as the years pass they don’t cleave as well as they once did and Agathon’s political and philosophic interests seem to provoke her crazy streak. There is a domestic violence scene at one point that kind of gave me the creeps after reading Barry Silesky’s bio. of Gardner – is it wife beating or just another form of passion? Here, I detected a little bit of autobiographical special pleading on the author’s part: Agathon, after slugging her gives her a kind of “I told you so, but you started it” that is, I suppose, right out of Wife Beating 101… Then there are the kids. They are good kids, the daughter turns out to be a dummy, the son a little too soft, but in a good, gentle way. Agathon lavishes them with bad dad sentimentality that is almost as bad as the wife-beating episode. But Agathon would be the first to tell you he was a failure as a father (although as with so many bad dads, there’s a tendency for the rhetoric of apology to substitute for action).
vs.
Ionia and husband Dorkis, and kids: Helots of the best sort, both turn from trusted servants of the Spartan state to revolutionaries. Dorkis the husband is a noble, naïve strappingly handsome cypher who gets tortured and executed – Gardner manages a crude sort of effectiveness in his rendering which makes his execution sort of moving, but to tell the truth Dorkis could play the hero in a bodice-ripper pretty easily. Ionia his wife is incredibly sexy and charming to the point that she kind of blurs in the telling. Later she grows ugly through her harshness and political savagery (she becomes a terrorist). She rescues the plague-ridden Agathon from a Spartan prison and he dies in her arms sort of. Ionia is a kind of Maude Gonne figure, the beauty made ugly because she entered the big wide world of action and politics. Well, I’d make a lousy feminist, but there is something deeply chauvinistic about this sort of thing, the fact male authors like their women nubile and smart and not too concerned about the same things the men are.
Some of the worst parts of the book detail the love-triangle (rectangle, actually) between these two couples. It is very post-swinging sixties via the sleazy seventies. Agathon’s autopsy of the ensuing catastrophe are among the book’s worst moments:
“The pain of jealousy was over, for the moment anyway, and now, clear-minded, she could see the jealousy and the attack on Iona as they were, and she was depressed. It was true that she had hurt Miletos, and though she wasn’t the cause of his grief, she was to blame. And it was true, she knew, that Iona had been fond of her, that they really might have been like sisters, whatever that meant, if it weren’t for Dorkis and me. It could have been very good for all of us. But Dorkis was a lover, not only a man with busy hands but a man who did in fact fall in love, though he did nothing about it – and so, alas, was I. So whenever we came together, the four of us, there was no escape from the heart-swapping game, tiresome and futile, doomed to frustration and anger because of our natures. She understood, now that her attack on Iona had ended it, that we’d had nothing from the start, only a grand potential…” (pp. 204-205)
A potential reader shouldn’t judge the whole book by a single passage, but there are swatches of this stuff and they definitely mar the whole. The adolescent miseries of Peeker (and his loving, complaining, shrewd widowed peasant mother) are far more compelling than the intellectual hot-pants set and their complicated parties full of political big ideas and ass-grabbing.
***
Gardner is sometimes at his best with minor characters. Peeker’s mother, a hard-working, hectoring apple-vendor is the book’s best parent, even when she chucks the occasional apple at her son. The Spartan jailer who never speaks a word until the end of the book is perhaps my favorite character of all, embodying as he does that which is best in duty-bound Sparta. His heart manifests itself despite his rigid code. The jailer’s probably a bit hokey, but sometimes Gardner’s characters work best when he isn’t devoting so much effort to them; the main efforts at character-building get to be too sweaty, an authorial workout where the reader can catch a whiff of the weight room heavy-lifting and sweat…
But old-fashioned character development is an old-fashioned tale-teller’s virtue, and Gardner was old-fashioned. His attacks on metafiction and postmodern literature in general were notorious in the ‘70s. But old-fashioned virtues come with old-fashioned vices. The storyteller can spin a good yarn, keep a plot interesting, advance a character’s dilemma and beguile the reader. But there is a tendency for characters to fall into “types” and for the plot to follow a beginning-middle-end trajectory that can be, without a great deal of care, trite. For instance, Agathon in his “seer” in his full-blown intellectual in disguise of a holy fool role is rendered in such a cartoonish manner that he finally actually becomes a cartoon.
Gardner also has a tendency to over-write. His is not the over-writing of the amateur or the talentless, so it is not as irritating to the reader and it is not easy to detect except by an overall feel. Too often in “Agathon” I felt this vague sense of verbal overkill which became cloying. It is possible that Gardner was working long enough ago that fashions have since changed (I don’t read enough novels to know this for sure). Or maybe my own preferences now tend towards a cooler approach. Also, Gardner’s vocabulary is vast but sometimes obtrusive. The word puissance (or puissant) shows up about five times in the second half of the book, which is where I first noticed it. “Puissance” is a fine word, although I’ve never much cared for it since its definition and its spelling/sound are so at odds with each other (it means “of great force or vigor” but it sounds as if it should mean something like “pusillanimity” – showing a lack of courage; or, to be crude about it, it sounds too much like “pussy”). “Puissance” becomes a tic after the first use.
I don’t feel I have been particularly fair (or coherent) about “The Wreckage of Agathon.” Twenty years ago this was one of my favorite books, but it has since dropped off my charts. I guess I was just a little bored with it. But I was impressed by Gardner’s subtle take on politics – he demonstrated how distinctions between repression and freedom can be more ambiguous than you might think.
Note on the Text: Typos galore! My copy of “Agathon” is a Ballantine Books trade paperback from 1970 and I found five or six typos, which means there are probably 25 of them, given my fast, sloppy reading habits. So much for blaming slovenliness on computers.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 10, 2018
I'm really really glad that I mysteriously came across this book online and immediately bought it. The character of Agathon that Gardner created is like a mirror to me. Utterly real and challenging the world to be honest and seeing exactly as it is. Awesomely philosophically and comically deep. Epic read!
September 14, 2021
The setting is a fictitious BC Greek and Spartan world in which a worn-down pseudo-Cynic philosopher is tossed into a dirty jail cell along with his young attendant.
The two take turns narrating via scrolls they write in prison, where they are stuck for most of the novel writing their autobiographies until Agathon, the elderly philosopher, takes ill from plague and is rescued during a revolt.
The novel gets mired for a while in dry, overly long passages about Agathon’s history as an Athenian intellectual who works for Solon and later for Lycurgus (who were not actually contemporaries). The couple swapping and arguments about politics heavy-handedly evoke late 1960s America.
Agathon is not a particularly reliable narrator and among the characters of the novel he is more loved than lovable. Among his contradictory attributes, he is a freeman and gadfly for radical freedom who also loves Sparta, in part because of Lycurgus as a foil; and who finds little truth or solace in systematic thinking, seeking it instead in games and mockery.
Still, we are stuck in a cell for a long time, and see very little of the young attendant, Demodokus, on his quest after being sent away, still grimy from his prison cell. It is easy to feel a bit cheated by this.
This does not display Gardner at his zenith but there are incidents of inspiration and wit, and some touching sketches of the thorny terrain when people say goodbye to someone unpleasant whom they also admire or love.
The two take turns narrating via scrolls they write in prison, where they are stuck for most of the novel writing their autobiographies until Agathon, the elderly philosopher, takes ill from plague and is rescued during a revolt.
The novel gets mired for a while in dry, overly long passages about Agathon’s history as an Athenian intellectual who works for Solon and later for Lycurgus (who were not actually contemporaries). The couple swapping and arguments about politics heavy-handedly evoke late 1960s America.
Agathon is not a particularly reliable narrator and among the characters of the novel he is more loved than lovable. Among his contradictory attributes, he is a freeman and gadfly for radical freedom who also loves Sparta, in part because of Lycurgus as a foil; and who finds little truth or solace in systematic thinking, seeking it instead in games and mockery.
Still, we are stuck in a cell for a long time, and see very little of the young attendant, Demodokus, on his quest after being sent away, still grimy from his prison cell. It is easy to feel a bit cheated by this.
This does not display Gardner at his zenith but there are incidents of inspiration and wit, and some touching sketches of the thorny terrain when people say goodbye to someone unpleasant whom they also admire or love.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
August 14, 2017
I wasn't able to finish The Wreckage of Agathon. I'm interested in the time period and the setting of Sparta under the rule of Lykourgos is very interesting to me, but the story in this novel is just not good. The characters, Agathon and Peeker, are neither relatable nor likable. The author makes use of too many modernism, which take me out of the historical setting. I got about half way and stopped reading.
If you're interested in historical fiction, I would not recommend this book.
If you're interested in historical fiction, I would not recommend this book.
April 22, 2020
Very funny at points and very philosophical at points. Similar to what Gardner does in Grendel, but I this case the setting is ancient Sparta, he illuminates silly human characters with a living brightness. Perhaps too many flashbacks for my liking, but a very humorous and warming work.
December 3, 2023
I’ve been wanting to read this since I saw an old paperback copy in the basement of the Ohio Bookstore in downtown Cincinnati. I didn’t buy it then, but have been on the lookout ever since. I can’t say it was worth the wait, but I’m glad I finally read it.
October 3, 2022
Grendel is still my favorite of John Gardner’s novels, but The Wreckage of Agathon had the same lyrical style that I loved. It had some laugh out loud funny moments but it was also very meaningful with an interesting story and great characters.
March 13, 2011
The Wreckage Of Agathon is historical fiction set for the most part in Sparta ~ 7th century BCE. Sparta has recently been invaded by the Dorians and the semi-historical tyrant and lawgiver Lykourgos is in the process of founding the admirable/horrible social institutions that characterized Spartan society: militarism, a brutal egalitarianism, lack of concern for money enforced by the abolishment of gold and silver currency, and oppression and exploitation of the native Achaians (Helots) whom the Dorians had conquered.
Agathon is a self-exiled Athenian, a former protege of Solon, then an advisor to Lykourgos, but who in the story's present (and late in Agathon's life) has finally become a bit of a madman, a seer who occasionally has supernatural insights into current/future events, but who for the most part now lives a life of eating onions, farting, mocking Lykourgos, and training his young acolyte Demodokos, whom he has named "Peeker", to become a seer himself. Agathon had at one time been fascinated by the Spartan social experiment but is now well over this infatuation and ridicules Lykourgos and his ideas at every opportunity.
The story alternates between Agathon and Demodokos as narrators; Demodokos is being driven mad by Agathon and his idiosyncrasies, but is still devoted to him. At the telling of the story the Helots are revolting; Agathon and Demodokos have been thrown into prison by Lykourgos due to justifiable suspicions that Agathon has been aiding the Helots; while in prison Agathon tells us of how he progressed from an intelligent young fellow with a beautiful and intelligent wife, two beloved children, and the friendship of the man credited with laying the foundations of classical Greek democracy...to become advisor to the beastly Lykourgos while trying to remain a friend to the Helots and eventually their revolt, and finally a cynical wreck, a court-jester-at-large and occasional seer. Despite his personal shortcomings, Agathon's instinctive fairness, honesty and wisdom keep him a sympathetic character as Demodokos provides us with the view from the outside, critical, entertaining, frustrated to distraction and almost to despair.
No more detail - read the book! The Wreckage Of Agathon, one of my favorites, examines political and philosophical themes, loyalty, and love in an unusual and entertaining way and I still find it very effective - I had originally read this book almost 40 years ago and upon re-reading it recently found to my delight that it is still as good as I had remembered. I recommend this book very highly.
Agathon is a self-exiled Athenian, a former protege of Solon, then an advisor to Lykourgos, but who in the story's present (and late in Agathon's life) has finally become a bit of a madman, a seer who occasionally has supernatural insights into current/future events, but who for the most part now lives a life of eating onions, farting, mocking Lykourgos, and training his young acolyte Demodokos, whom he has named "Peeker", to become a seer himself. Agathon had at one time been fascinated by the Spartan social experiment but is now well over this infatuation and ridicules Lykourgos and his ideas at every opportunity.
The story alternates between Agathon and Demodokos as narrators; Demodokos is being driven mad by Agathon and his idiosyncrasies, but is still devoted to him. At the telling of the story the Helots are revolting; Agathon and Demodokos have been thrown into prison by Lykourgos due to justifiable suspicions that Agathon has been aiding the Helots; while in prison Agathon tells us of how he progressed from an intelligent young fellow with a beautiful and intelligent wife, two beloved children, and the friendship of the man credited with laying the foundations of classical Greek democracy...to become advisor to the beastly Lykourgos while trying to remain a friend to the Helots and eventually their revolt, and finally a cynical wreck, a court-jester-at-large and occasional seer. Despite his personal shortcomings, Agathon's instinctive fairness, honesty and wisdom keep him a sympathetic character as Demodokos provides us with the view from the outside, critical, entertaining, frustrated to distraction and almost to despair.
No more detail - read the book! The Wreckage Of Agathon, one of my favorites, examines political and philosophical themes, loyalty, and love in an unusual and entertaining way and I still find it very effective - I had originally read this book almost 40 years ago and upon re-reading it recently found to my delight that it is still as good as I had remembered. I recommend this book very highly.
June 7, 2016
John Gardner's 1970 novel The Wreckage of Agathon marks my sixth book of the "36 Best novels for a Survey of Ancient Greek History" over at Historicalnovels.info as well as the first story set after the Bronze Age.
The novel takes place in Sparta during the reign of Lycurgus, who transformed the city state from an Athenian trade-based society into the warrior culture we connect Ancient Sparta to today. The novel focuses on a Seer, Agathon, who along with his apprentice, is imprisoned during the change of power and left to sit in a sort of limbo in prison while awaiting a trial for crimes that have never been made quite clear.
The novel takes the form of alternating narratives, by Agathon and his apprentice/cell mate Demokokos (who is called Peeker by Agathon and the Chapter headings). The two things I enjoyed most about the novel were the fact that the Spartans, as viewed by Agathon, are not evil, they are simply the new way and in his mind an all controlling way of any sort is evil, and the fact that the novel, taking place in roughly 700 BCE shows a man living at the end of his civilization, looking both backwards at what was and forwards at what might be.
Considering the almost fetishistic view of the Spartans as shown in the Frank Miller (and later Zack Snydor film adaption) story 300. It was kind of refreshing to read a story set at the dawn of that culture and viewing it as the death of something, rather than simply the beginning of one of the Ancient world's most formidable warriors.
The novel takes place in Sparta during the reign of Lycurgus, who transformed the city state from an Athenian trade-based society into the warrior culture we connect Ancient Sparta to today. The novel focuses on a Seer, Agathon, who along with his apprentice, is imprisoned during the change of power and left to sit in a sort of limbo in prison while awaiting a trial for crimes that have never been made quite clear.
The novel takes the form of alternating narratives, by Agathon and his apprentice/cell mate Demokokos (who is called Peeker by Agathon and the Chapter headings). The two things I enjoyed most about the novel were the fact that the Spartans, as viewed by Agathon, are not evil, they are simply the new way and in his mind an all controlling way of any sort is evil, and the fact that the novel, taking place in roughly 700 BCE shows a man living at the end of his civilization, looking both backwards at what was and forwards at what might be.
Considering the almost fetishistic view of the Spartans as shown in the Frank Miller (and later Zack Snydor film adaption) story 300. It was kind of refreshing to read a story set at the dawn of that culture and viewing it as the death of something, rather than simply the beginning of one of the Ancient world's most formidable warriors.
October 11, 2013
On the surface this is the story of a rather silly old man and his foolish follower who tackle the politics and military mindset of Sparta. The real story, though, is far more complicated and concerns the nature of love and loyalty. I can't say this is my favorite Gardner but it is a good book. I gave it three stars because I think most people would find it difficult to hang in with the story. It took me over a month to read it by picking it up and putting it back down.
April 1, 2011
Like Grendel, I read The Wreckage of Agathon (i.e. the Good) too early and didn't get a lot of it, not knowing too much at the time about Agathon's interlocutor, Lycourgos, legendary lawgiver of Sparta.
The book, as one might suppose, is about "the best laid plans" of men, both individually (Agathon) and socially (Sparta).
The book, as one might suppose, is about "the best laid plans" of men, both individually (Agathon) and socially (Sparta).
June 7, 2012
Interesting depiction of a seer/philosopher trying to be a part of the rough-and-tumble world of Spartan politics. Gardner shows many different responses to the tyrannical set of laws by Lycourgos. As with Grendel, Gardner's anachronisms are compelling--he makes the 7th-century BC a world with which we can identify.
February 19, 2011
After I finished this book, I realized that when I think philosophically, I inevitably conclude that killing myself is the only logical thing to do. This book only intensifies that. But I love this book! What to do...
October 9, 2012
Bought this on the strength of Grendel. Read it. Didn't understand it at the time. Only partially understand the back story now. I seriously recommend reading up on Solon and Agathon (real people from 7th Cent. Sparta) before jumping in.
December 6, 2012
Loved it! Gardner was a genius until sweet, cold Death took his hand. This is a historical I guess. Deals a lot with love/hate directed both inwardly and outwardly, on a personal and social scale. Lyrical, funny, dark and creative.
December 25, 2014
Set in ancient Sparta but with strong parallels to Gardner's take late 60's America, this novel has lots to say about our current militarized police state, too. Plus, there are lots of onion-fueled fart jokes!
February 18, 2012
For some reason, I wasn't able to finish this novel--occasionally, certain sections were very powerful, but the piece as a whole was sort missing something to me.
November 23, 2012
My least favorite of Gardner's novels. The philosophical tone is certainly intentional, but I struggled getting any traction with the narrative.
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May 13, 2019Not my favorite of his books but he writes so well in my opinion that he could write about the weather and i would be pulled right in.
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