“That’s right, Sokrates,” Kebes said. “Or it was the case until you came.”
“Then let us consider. I am not a child because I am seventy years old. But I was brought here without being consulted, like a child.”
“You have a house to yourself like a master,” I said. “We all live in houses with six other children.”
“That seems a minor point, but we will let it stand on the side of masters.”
“The thing that marks you as different from children and masters considered together is that you came to the city now,” Pytheas said. “All the rest of us have in common that we came here five years ago, at the time of the founding of the city. Why did you come now?”
“They tell me that I came now because before this you were too young to learn rhetoric, and I am an old man and they feared that if I had been here from the beginning I would die before you were old enough to learn. For that is to be my purpose here, you see, to teach rhetoric to you children: I, who was never a teacher but who liked to converse with my friends and seek out the nature of things.”
“They have their own imagination of who you are, but you are not that,” Kebes said.
“Now that’s true,” Sokrates said. “And perhaps what I shall teach is not what they expect me to teach.”
13
APOLLO
Who would have guessed that Sokrates would recognize me? True, we had always been on good terms. But I was in mortal flesh and fifteen years old. Nobody else had recognized me. Nobody else had even come close to guessing, not even people I knew well. It isn’t as if we go around manifesting physically all the time. People don’t expect to see the voice in their ear incarnate in front of them in the form of a youth, and so they don’t see it. Sokrates, of course, didn’t ever see what he expected to see, he saw what was there and examined it. He knew me instantly, as fast as Athene had, faster.
The difficulty wasn’t that I cared that Sokrates knew. Sokrates was one of those people whose integrity really could be relied on. No, it was that I didn’t want Simmea or that lout Kebes to know. I was also a little afraid of giving away too much to Sokrates. This was never a problem before I became a mortal. Saying precisely as much as I want, with as many multiple meanings as words can be made to bear, has always been one of my oracular specialties. Composing oracles like that can be as much fun as really complex forms of poetry. But since I became Pytheas things had all been more complicated. I sometimes blurted out things I shouldn’t, and there were these huge areas of human experience that I kept blundering into with both feet. Simmea really helped with this. She was always prepared to put her time into working things out with me, sometimes even before I messed things up. I really valued that.
Being a mortal was strange. It was sensually intense, and it had the intensity of everything evanescent—like spring blossoms or autumn leaves or early cherries. It was also hugely involving. Detachment was really difficult to achieve. Everything mattered immediately—every pain, every sensation, every emotion. There wasn’t time to think about things properly—no possibility of withdrawal for proper contemplation, then returning to the same instant with a calm and reasonable plan. Everything had to be done in time, immediately. Paradoxically, there was also too much time. I constantly had to wait through moments and hours and nights. I had to wait for spring to see blossom, wait for Simmea to be free to talk to me, wait for morning. Then when it came, everything would be hurtling forward in immediate necessity again, pierced through with emotion and immediacy and a speeding pulse. Time was inexorable and unstoppable. I had always known that, but it had taken me fifteen years as a mortal to understand what it meant.
I found my own charged emotional states interesting to contemplate. Some were exactly the same, others analogous, and still others entirely new. Then there was the vulnerability, which is quite different in practice from the way it seems in theory. I could never have reasoned my way to understanding how it felt to stand in the palaestra, hoping that Simmea would hit me instead of walking away from our friendship. Even at that instant, even as I was waiting and not knowing how it would go, I knew that I would be making poetry from those emotions for centuries.
I certainly was learning lots and lots about equal significance. It was easy to grant it to Simmea, who was smart and brave and cared passionately about art, even though she was flat-nosed and flat-chested and had buck teeth. It was much harder in practice to extend this out to everyone. It took me a long time to realise that I’d been extending equal significance as a favor on an individual basis and that it really applied to absolutely everyone—funny cowardly Klymene, bad-mannered Kebes, and pretty Laodike. Everyone had their own internal life and their own soul, and they were entitled to make their own choices. I had to keep reminding myself of that regularly, and really I should have had it cut into my hand. I did an exercise at the end of every day, if I could keep awake long enough, when I tried to imagine the inner significance of everyone who had spoken to me that day.
Before I get on to the conversation with Sokrates, I should say a word about Kebes. He was big, one of the biggest of the youths in the city. He had clearly lied about his age and was a year or two older than most of the rest of us. His growth spurt had come early, and he had shot up. He had a head like a bull—a big broad forehead that could easily have sprouted horns, and a habit of setting his jaw belligerently. If I’d named him he would have been Tauros. He had a grudge against the world, and he hated everything. He wasn’t stupid, far from it. He’d have been easier to understand if he had been. He just hated everything and everyone and devoted his time and energy and considerable talents to hating them. He did exactly as little as he could get away with, and spent far more effort calculating that than he would have spent on trying to excel. He had a way of making one master after another believe that they would be the one who would succeed in motivating him, that they were on the verge of success, while in fact he mocked each in turn behind their back. He hated everyone—everyone except Simmea, that is. Once, while helping Manlius, he contrived to break a statue of Aphrodite by moving the plinth where a worker was supposed to set it down. Both statue and plinth fell three stories onto marble and shattered beyond retrival. I would have thought it an accident, save that he boasted about it to Phoenix, who thought it was funny and repeated it to lots of people.
Left to myself I’d have avoided Kebes entirely. As it was, he persisted in being around Simmea, and so I had to deal with him. We had fought twice in the palaestra when neither Simmea nor any masters were around. These were not athletic contests in which victory was marked with points; they were vicious all-out fights in which we tried to hurt each other. I won both times. They were not really fair fights. Yes, he was two handspans taller and much heavier, and likely his body was a year or two older, but I had been wrestling since the art was invented. I knew tricks from centuries Kebes had never had the chance to visit, and when not bound by rules, I used them freely.
The second time, I had him on the floor with his head in a choke where I could easily have broken his neck. I thought about it. I would have had to pretend to be horrified at such an accident, and probably to purify myself before the gods. It wasn’t this that stopped me but that I didn’t want to deprive Simmea of anything she valued, even this. “Yield?” I whispered in his ear.
“Never,” he said, and in his tone I could see that if he had been on top he wouldn’t have had the same hesitation in killing me.