As I said, we make a good team—but we generally make a team as equals. I don’t tend to go to her as a suppliant. I don’t tend to go to anyone as a suppliant, except Father when it’s absolutely unavoidable. It’s rare for me to need to. And with Athene, on this particular subject, it made me deeply uncomfortable.
Nevertheless I went to her library-home and stood in the beam of light until she realized it had widened to the whole desk and looked up.
“Joy to you, Far-Shooter,” she said when she saw me. “News?”
“A question,” I said, sitting down on the marble steps outside, so I wouldn’t have to either hover in the air or risk treading on a book.
“A question?” she asked, coming out to join me. She lowered herself to the step, and we sat side by side looking out over Greece spread out before us—the hills, the plains, the well-built cities, the islands floating on the wine-dark sea, the triremes plying between them. We couldn’t actually see the triremes from this distance unless we focused, but I assure you they were there. We can go wherever we want, whenever we want, but why would we stray far from the classical world, when the classical world is so splendid?
“There was a nymph—” I began.
Athene turned up her nose. “If this is all, I’m going back in to work.”
“No, please. This is something I don’t understand.”
She looked at me. “Please?” she said. “Well, go on.”
As I said, I don’t often come in supplication, but that doesn’t mean I don’t know the words. “Her name was Daphne. I pursued her. And just as I caught her and was about to mate with her, she turned into a tree.”
“She turned into a tree? Are you sure she wasn’t a dryad all along?”
“Perfectly sure. She was a nymph, a nereid if you want to be technical about it. Her father was a river. She prayed to Artemis, and Artemis turned her into a tree. I asked Artemis why, and she said it was because Daphne wanted it so desperately. Why did she want to become a tree to avoid me? How could she care that much? She hadn’t made a vow of virginity. Artemis told me to ask Hera and then said maybe you would know.”
Grey-eyed Athene looked at me keenly as I mentioned Hera. “I thought I didn’t know, but if she mentioned Hera then maybe I do. What’s at the core of what Hera cares about?”
“Father,” I said.
Athene snorted. “And?”
“Marriage, obviously,” I said. I hate those Socratic dialogues where everything gets drawn out at the pace of an excessively logical snail.
“I think the issue you may be missing with Daphne, with all of this, is to do with consensuality. She hadn’t vowed virginity, she might have chosen to give her virginity up one day. But she hadn’t made that choice.”
“I’d chosen her.”
“But she hadn’t chosen you in return. It wasn’t mutual. You decided to pursue her. You didn’t ask, and she certainly didn’t agree. It wasn’t consensual. And, as it happens, she didn’t want you. So she turned into a tree.” Athene shrugged.
“But it’s a game,” I said. I knew she wouldn’t understand. “The nymphs run away and we chase after.”
“It may be a game not everyone wants to play,” Athene suggested.
I stared out over the distant islands, rising like a pod of dolphins from the waves. I could name them all, and name their ports, but I chose for the moment to see them as nothing but blue on blue cloud shapes. “Volition,” I said, slowly, thinking it through.
“Exactly.”
“Equal significance?” I asked.
“Mm-hmm.”
“Interesting. I didn’t know that.”
“Well then, that’s what you learned from Daphne.” Athene started to get up.
“I’m thinking about becoming a mortal for a while,” I said, as the implications began to sink in.
She sat down again. “Really? You know it would make you very vulnerable.”
“I know. But there are things I could learn much more quickly by doing that. Interesting things. Things about equal significance and volition.”
“Have you thought about when?” she asked.
“Now. Oh, you mean when? When in time? No, I hadn’t really thought about that.” It was an exciting thought. “Some time with good art and plenty of sunshine, it would drive me crazy otherwise. Periclean Athens? Cicero’s Rome? Lorenzo di Medici’s Florence?”
Athene laughed. “You’re so predictable sometimes. You might as well have said ‘anywhere with pillars.’”
I laughed too, surprised. “Yes, that about covers it. Why, do you have a suggestion?”
“Yes. I have the perfect place. Honestly. Perfect.”
“Where?” I was suspicious.
“You don’t know it. It’s … new. It’s an experiment. But it has pillars, and it has art—well, it has very Apollonian art, all light and no darkness.”
“Puh-lease.” (That wasn’t supplication, it was sarcasm. The last time I used the word it was supplication, so I thought I’d better clarify. But this was sarcasm, with which I am more familiar.) “Look, if you’re about to suggest I go to some high-tech hellhole where they’ve never heard of me because it’ll be a ‘learning experience,’ forget it. That’s not what I want at all. I am Apollo. I am important.” I pouted. “Besides, if they think the gods are forgotten, why are they writing about us? Have you read those books? There’s nothing more clichéd. Nothing.”
“I haven’t read them and they sound awful, and the only thing I want to get from high-tech societies is their robots,” she said.
“Robots?” I asked, surprised.
“Would you rather have slaves?”
“Point,” I said. Athene and I have always felt deeply uneasy about slaves. Always. “So what do you want them for?”
Athene settled back on her elbows. “Well, some people are trying to set up Plato’s Republic.”
“No!” I stared down at her. She looked smug.
“They prayed to me. I’m helping.”
“Where are they doing it?”
“Kallisti.” She gestured towards where Thera was at the moment we were sitting in. “Thera before it erupted.”
“They’re doing it before the Republic was written?”
“I said I was helping.”
“Does Father know?”
“He knows everything. But I haven’t exactly drawn it to his attention. And of course, that side of Kallisti all fell into the sea when it erupted, so there won’t be anything to show long-term.” She grinned.
“Clever,” I acknowledged. “Also, doing Plato’s Republic on Atlantis is … recursive. In a way that’s very like you.”
She preened. “Like I said, it’s an experiment.”
“It’s supposed to be a thought experiment. Who are these people that are doing it?” I was intrigued.
“Well, one of them is Krito, you know, Sokrates’s friend. And another is Sokrates himself, whom Krito and I dragged out of Athens just before his execution. If Sokrates can’t make it work, who can? And then there are some later philosophers—Platonists, Plotinus and so on, and some from Rome, like Cicero and Boethius, and from the Renaissance, Ficino and Pico … and some from even later, actually.”