“So you thought Sokrates was like me?” Ficino asked, with a twinkle in his eye.
I helped myself to porridge. “Yes. His eyes are like yours.” I saw that it was true what Sokrates had said when he laughed. Ficino was pleased, and even flattered, at the comparison.
“He wants to teach you. Do you want that?”
I looked at him, inquiringly. “Do I have a choice?”
“Oh yes. This coming year you’re all going to be choosing, or chosen. As we have always told you, some of you are iron, some bronze, some silver, some gold. You have bronze and silver and gold mixed into you, but not much iron I think!”
“I want most of all to be my best self. I always thought the masters would decide how the metals were mixed in us and assign us to our places when the time came.” I fingered the silver pin I had won at the Hermeia three years before.
“We will,” Ficino said.
“Good.”
“You think it’s a good system?” he asked.
“Oh, yes.” I hesitated, then went on, because I did trust Ficino. “So much better to be chosen for what we’re fit to work on by those who know us than being limited to what our parents could have taught us.”
“You were dreaming before you woke here, you grew under the soil,” he reproved me, but his eyes twinkled. “When I saw your painting of the footrace I had thought you would settle among the bronze. And you are fierce in the palaestra, and you did well racing in armor at the Artemisia last year, so you certainly have plenty of the silver spirit. And you are so quick at mathematics that Axiothea and I felt you ought to be allowed to try astronomy. And now Sokrates has singled you out! So you may be destined for gold after all. Don’t frown. All the metals are equally valuable, and the city needs them all.”
I tried to stop frowning and swallowed my mouthful of porridge. It gave me time to change what I would have said immediately, which was that if all the metals were equally valuable, why were they always listed in the same order, with gold in best and final place? “If I am not made of gold then I think bronze is my metal,” I said. “My soul leaps to painting and sculpture and architecture more than to gymnastics and fighting.”
“And to the pursuit of excellence?”
“Of course,” I said. “How not?”
“Sometimes I envy you children your certainty,” Ficino said. “Well, in the hour before dinner go to Sokrates. He has a house on the street of Athene near the library. The house is called Thessaly. He may not be there. As you may know, he is given to wandering about the city, engaging in dialogues. If he is not there, seek him about the place. He has said he wants to choose his friends, and not spend all his time besieged by those who admire him; and we have agreed to respect that. It seems that you are one of the friends he has chosen.”
“Isn’t it exciting that he’s here?” I said. “Sokrates himself. I thought he was dead.”
“And I knew he was dead, and had been dead for two thousand years,” Ficino said. Ficino was known as the Translator, and it was Plato he had translated from Greek to Latin, in Florentia in the days when few people understood Greek but every educated person knew Latin. I had read all the Plato I had been allowed, which was only the Apology and the Symposium and the Lysis. I knew there were lots more dialogues. I hoped to be allowed to read them when I was old enough to study rhetoric. It was a badly kept secret that the Just City was described in a book of Plato’s called the Republic, which was not in the library. (I felt sure there was a copy on Maia’s shelf next to that Botticelli book that was printed in a language that was not Latin.) “It’s the most wonderful mystery of all that he’s here. Bless Athene!”
I got through the morning in a flurry of impatience. In the early afternoon I saw Pytheas in the palaestra and rushed up to him. “Do you know who’s here?”
“Who?” At fifteen he was better-looking than ever, and still totally unconscious of the effect it had on everyone. I was used to him, and even so I could occasionally be distracted from my thoughts by seeing his lips part as he said something especially interesting. I knew other people who were beautiful, but no other person moved me the way Pytheas did. The others were beautiful like themselves, but he was beautiful like a painting or a sculpture. That I was also secretly attracted to him only made this worse. The Symposium is extremely clear about the shame of lust, and I knew it was the attraction of soul for soul that I was supposed to feel. I was also most certainly drawn to his soul. Pytheas was the most unusual person I knew. In most ways he was the closest to true excellence of anyone I had ever met, but other spheres seemed completely closed to him. He was a paradox that continued to intrigue me.
“Sokrates!” I said. “I met him last night. He’s going to teach me!”
“I wonder why he came now,” Pytheas said, looking abstracted.
“Now? Not when all the other masters came?” I fell into a wrestling stance, and Pytheas automatically did likewise. We began to circle slowly.
“Yes. If he was going to be here, why wasn’t he here from the beginning when he could have the most effect?”
“I don’t know.” I feinted to the side, trying to think about it. “Perhaps he was doing something else—no, that’s silly. He could have done it and still arrived five years ago with all of us.”
“The masters were here before that.” He landed a blow on my arm and I raised my hand to mark it as we took up position again. “They must have been, I mean. They were here to build the city and decide what went into the libraries.”
“And rescue the art,” I said, plunging in suddenly to grapple. The only way to win against Pytheas these days was distract him and take him by surprise. I managed to bear him to the ground, and he tapped the sand.
“When are you seeing him? Can I come too?” We circled again. Pytheas was grinning, trying to get the sun in my eyes, one of his favorite tricks. I leaned the other way, bouncing on the balls of my feet.
“After this. What are you supposed to be doing? I can’t think he’d mind, considering what he was like.”
“I’m supposed to be in the library. I could come with you. What was he like?” Pytheas charged in and caught me at once in a grapple that I knew I could not break.
“He was fascinating,” I said. “Do come.”
“I’m not sure I should come without an invitation. Maybe you should ask him if I’d be welcome, and if I could come another day.” He was leaning his strength against me now, and even as I tried to hold myself back, I was acutely aware of how my breast was pressed up against his side.
“I think you should come today. You have to be ahead of where you’re supposed to be in the library, you always are, the same as I am. And I’d love to know what you make of him.” He pulled me off balance and I went down, meaning he won the bout.
“All right. I’ll meet you at the fountain after.” He ran off to look for another partner and I went to join the runners.
Kebes joined us at the fountain when it was time to leave. “Are you going to talk to Sokrates too?” he asked Pytheas, sounding dismayed.
“I thought I would,” Pytheas said, in a tone that invited Kebes to make something of it while they were still in the palaestra.
I put my kiton on and fastened it. “Come on, we’ve just got clean, we don’t want to get sand all over ourselves again. Besides, I don’t want to be late.”
The two of them blustered at each other as we walked along. I thought I detected something worse than usual in it. I started to dread what would happen when we found Sokrates and it became clear that Pytheas had been invited only by me.