I looked at the painted colonnades, flowers, and well-kept lawns. “But didn’t he spend all day in the streets and Agora? One can do that for nothing.”
“True. Plato isn’t rich, though he has more than Sokrates had; but the school does accept endowments. Only from Academy men; he won’t be beholden to outsiders. Dion gave us the new library. But no one, ever, is accepted for what he owns—except here.” He tapped his brow. He had gray eyes, with an inner ring as dark as smoke. “Thank you for the pleasure of your conversation; I must go, or I shan’t get a good place for Plato’s lecture. This is his great one. He only gives it once every few years.”
“Well, we may meet again here. What is the lecture?”
“On the Nature of the One,” he said, as if surprised at my asking.
When he had gone, I loitered on in the shade of the plane trees. All the young men from the school had gone in; the palaestra gave out a different noise, louder but hollower. The gardens and lawns were empty. I walked nearer. A dolphin fountain murmured softly; the buildings, though newish, seemed to be at home like an old olive tree. There was an open door, with men’s backs filling it. It seemed to me that one more would scarcely be noticed, and if Plato charged no fee one could not be defrauding him. I might learn what had made Dion the man he was.
As I got closer, I could hear a voice I recognized. Great God, I thought, these amateurs. Why does he throw it all off the top of his mouth? A beautiful voice, half-wasted. The chest is there; he should be able to fill a theater; even now, if a good professional took him in hand … Nobody noticed me in the doorway. I could hear quite well; they could not have kept quieter for Theodoros in Antigone. Well, I listened for as long as it takes to sing an opening chorus, and for all I could make out of it, he might as well have been speaking Scythian.
I slipped away, stopping for a last look at the house. There were words carved over the portico, and filled in with gold. But when I went up, all they said was NO ENTRY WITHOUT MATHEMATICS.
The cobbler to his last, I thought. A wasted morning, except for those gray eyes. I went home to my exercises, and Hector’s Ransom, and took the air nearer home thereafter. It would have been different if the lad had ever shown himself in the gymnasium; but, clearly, he was all for the mind and the Nature of the One. It could only end in grief.
However, one fine autumn day some weeks later, friends called me to come walking, and we found ourselves there. As we crossed the park, one of them nudged me, saying, “Niko, you dog, you said you would go anywhere, but you took care to steer us here. Where do you find such beauties? Don’t pretend you don’t see him looking. It would serve you right if we didn’t go away.”
I got rid of them, before he saw what they were laughing at, and went to meet him. He greeted me, and said at once, “I know you now. I remembered as soon as you had gone last time. You are Nikeratos, the tragic actor.”
I said yes, feeling pleased, as who would not, that he should have remembered my face from those few moments at the theater when one takes one’s bow.
“I saw you,” he said, “as Alkestis, at the Piraeus. I’ve seen the play twice before, but the other two were sniveling and self-pitiful, compared with you. You made the whole transit of the Styx, lying there all alone with the mourners round you. I wept, but as one should, with the soul and not the belly.”
There was not a hair on his face; he could hardly be more than fifteen then; his poise and assurance startled me. I said, “Then it’s not all mathematics here?”
“Of course not. Why didn’t you join us, as I said?”
“My dear boy, though one doesn’t pay, one still has to eat. But we can meet again, I hope?”
“You could come and study when you’re not working.”
“‘No entry without mathematics.’ I’d be a white crow in the flock, you know. Will you sup with me this evening?”
“Is it because you are an actor? Plato is not conventional. He paused in thought. “I believe he would even take a woman, if he thought her fit.”
“You believe more than I can, then.”
“So everyone told me. Yet here I am.”
I opened my mouth to speak, and kept it open to gasp. Sure enough one could see under the man’s tunic, once one was looking, the shallow curve of breasts.
“I am Axiothea from Phlios. At the Academy, everyone knows. I don’t dress like this as a disguise.”
I could only stand blinking. If I had known from the first, no doubt I would have disapproved; as it was, I simply felt winded.
“I could see,” she said, “it was becoming unkind not to tell you. I hope you are not angry.” Her smile, and her frankness, won me over. I could not be cross, perceiving she was the same sort of woman as I was a man. “Friends are friends,” I said. “May I take a friend’s privilege and ask your age?”
“Nineteen. You thought me precocious.” We laughed, and I asked how she had begun all this. She said that when she was fifteen, she had won the girls’ race at Olympia. Plato had been there; she had seen him, and heard the Academy spoken of. “But,” she said, “I thought of it as one might of driving in the chariot race—splendid, but out of reach. I did the only thing I could—bought his books and read them. So I lived in my father’s house, a white crow in the flock, as you said just now, and suitors avoided me, which angered my father.” She had been through hard times; he had beaten her, and burned her books when he found them; those that were left, she had had to hide in the rocks and read by stealth. No one had spoken for her except her mother’s brother, a man who had studied at Phaedo’s school in Elis. But her mother was dead, so no one heeded him. Then suddenly her father died, and this man became her guardian. “Everyone, and I myself, was sure my father had disinherited me. But he had put it off, or changed his mind; and when this became known, suitors sprang up all round, like the Sown Warriors. My uncle, the best of men, not only understood my disgust but shared it. So we talked, and he granted me my wish. He would rather I’d gone to Phaedo; he said Plato was a man of dreams; but, he said, Plato was the likelier one to take me.”
She had cropped her hair and worn men’s clothes to go to him, because she wanted her mind tested for what it was worth in itself, not as something remarkable in a woman. “But,” she said, “having put them on I found they fitted my soul. You, I expect, will understand.”
“Yes,” I said. “The theater can give one that.”
“So I came before him, as it seemed, in my true likeness, which I expect was why he was deceived, if you can call it so; at all events he questioned me, and said I should be welcome. But by then I felt such respect for him, I would no more have bed to him than to a god, so I told him everything. Truly, Nikeratos, he is a great-souled man. He might well have been angry, and thought I had meant to make a fool of him. But he said I had proved his thesis, that women can be taught philosophy if they are given to it by nature, and that I was welcome more than ever. As for my clothes, he said one must be true to the mind before the body.”
“And he has really kept to it? He gives you equality with the rest?”
She made a gesture so fierce and eloquent that I noted it in my mind to use at work. “Equality! I hope I need never sink so low. That poppy syrup! Does the soldier ask to be equal with every other? No, to prove himself. The philosopher? No, to know himself. I had rather be least of Plato’s school, knowing the good and taking my own measure by it, than run back to Phlios, where I could command what praise I chose. Equality! No, indeed, Plato doesn’t so insult me. People whom such things concern you’ll find at the schools of rhetoric. They don’t come here.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “An artist ought to have known better.” We sat down on a bank under an olive tree. Once one got used to her, I found her easier to talk to even than easygoing Gyllis of Thebes. The one could have furnished a regiment from her lovers; the other had virgin written all over her, but she was used to men’s companionship, friendly without brazenness and self-respecting without defiance. It seemed Plato had known his business.