What folly to once believe we were the masters of our fate, when at the point of a sword we may so swiftly and permanently become the mastered. In this world, philosophy must go begging. No, not so, for even a beggar may choose his street corner. To be a man, once, and then to be magicked so effortlessly to be transformed into a clay pot, a footstool, a nothing. I was not brave. I was not a soldier. I tried neither to escape, nor to end my servitude by my own hand. This is my shame, and I carry it upon my back like the sacks of rock my stooped and broken brothers and sisters bear in the quarry. Why do I speak of such things? Because if you are reading this you must surely be among the owners, not the owned, so of what possible interest could anything I have to say be to you? Do you wish to learn of greatness? Then abide, for one need not possess greatness to stand close by it.
How my bondage came about was a study in cause and effect. My parents raised horses on our small country estate; I was riding before I could hurl an insult. (My mother claimed the first word out of my mouth was “stupid.”) I was also quite bright: I was reading Aesop by the time I was five, bored with him at six, and laughing with Aristophanes a year later. Beyond anything to do with hippology or reading, I had no use for the continual stream of young, hapless playmates with which my mother was continually pestering me. As a result, any friends I might have made quickly became discouraged, if not by my disdain then by my smell. In truth, I was an alarmingly disagreeable child.
My mother and father, being quite patient and forbearing parents, did their best, but even their gentle tenacity finally frayed and their restraint turned to resignation. By then, unfortunately, my acrimonious and antisocial behavior had all but calcified. And so, when I turned seventeen, they threw their hands toward Olympus and packed me off to the urbane, marbled wonder that was Athens. Perhaps my compassion would expand with my mind, they prayed. I do miss them, and shall forever wonder what fate they suffered.
In the city I found a new love, but became just as single-minded as I had been with my previous equine obsession. Its name, or rather his name, was Aristotle. I ate his words as if no other food could sustain me. Obsession being my only way of shutting out all that I saw that was wrong with the world, I soon had no interest in anything other than the continuation of my studies at the Lyceum. In my arrogance, I presumed to think that some day I might even teach there. Finding spare but adequate lodgings near the school, for two years my eyes would not be torn from the parchment of my texts, my ears would heed only the words of my teachers.
Oh, how the fierce devotions of youth are easily diverted!
When not in class, it was my occasional habit to go for long walks, not for exercise or with any destination in mind, but to digest what I had learned that week in school. On one of these peripatetic strolls, I found I had taken myself to the very steps of the library at Plato’s Academy. I ventured within and before my eyes had adjusted to the indoor light, I beheld a raven haired, blue-eyed girl pushing a trolley of unfiled scrolls. She turned and spoke to me, asking if I required assistance, and I was immediately undone. From that moment on, my walks become neither random nor infrequent.
But the Academy was Plato’s school. No matter. It became clear to me in a heartbeat that the focus of my studies was far too narrow. After all, to become a truly enlightened philosopher, one must have a generous and open mind, mustn’t one? Without so much as a letter home I rushed to matriculate where I might be nearest to her, trading philosophical heroes faster than the time it would take to barter for a handful of figs in the market. In the end, it made no difference — the same fate awaited both schools.
Like the Academy, my infatuation was doomed. To her credit, Phaedra only laughed at me behind my back. In retrospect, a little more overt derision on her part might have dampened my obdurate campaign to humiliate myself. I could not comprehend a universe which could allow a love as pure as mine to languish unanswered. How could I feel this deeply unless her heart stirred as well? I was achingly naive. Phaedra was my first encounter with the brittle, wintry truth that alas, love is often a skewed affair. I returned to my studies, vowing never to love again, unaware that I hadn’t yet loved at all. Eventually even I tired of my pitiful pining and determined to redirect that wasted energy back toward my studies. I was at the center of the philosophical universe, and there was much to learn and little time to waste. But by then it was too late.
Plato’s school lay northwest of the city walls in a park along the southern bank of the Kephisos. The Academy was an idyllic spot close by the gymnasium and formal gardens, and we students debated and discussed as much and as often wandering through leafy glades as we did in the halls of learning. But it had not always been so. Centuries before, to celebrate Cimon’s victory over the Persians, the vast spoils of that war were used to both fortify and beautify the city. Had not my forebears chosen to turn the dusty, neglected hills north of the city into a verdant paradise, Plato might have founded his school elsewhere. But no, to honor Athena, Cimon had planted there a grove of sacred olive trees, irrigated them with care and transformed the forlorn northern suburb into a bucolic haven. The goddess of wisdom blessed the grove and the trees grew thick and tall. A hundred years later, Plato arrived to find the place a perfect setting for contemplation and learning.
Alas, my thirst for knowledge withered when it came near the heat of the aspirations of a Roman by the name of Lucius Cornelius Sulla who, in ruthless and systematic fashion, laid siege to fair Athens. His engineers chanced upon the Academy’s ancient grove north of the city walls. What was once a sacrament to a goddess now became timber for machines of war intent on the destruction of the city that bore her name. If not for Sulla, I might even now be strolling, perhaps with the aid of a walking stick, or better still with a young, attentive maiden supporting each arm, through the gardens of the Lyceum, my students crowding behind, hanging on every word of my discourse. Afterwards, they would bring me honey, bread and wine, and we would devote each day to the simple yet sublime pleasure of seeking knowledge in all its forms. A pretty picture, that.
But this was a life imagined, never lived. For like one of our sacred trees usurped to make their siege engines, I was harvested and swept up to feed Rome’s insatiable appetite for the tens upon tens of thousands of men, women and children upon which that lumbering beast’s survival depended.
In those first days, I was bitter, despondent, terrified. I never knew what became of Phaedra. Did I hate Rome? Most certainly. Why had she come pounding at Greece’s door? What had we done to deserve invasion and annexation? It was only later that I discovered why it was that Sulla had crossed our borders, a tragic example of cause and effect. Was it not to avenge the death of tens of thousands of his own countrymen at the hands of the King of Pontus, with whom Athens was allied? Shall I then lay the blame for my bondage at the feet of Asia Minor’s treachery? Or were they, in turn, simply trying to expel an invader? If you ask Melyaket, he will tell you it was my own foolish lust for a library girl that put chains around my ankles. But he is a lover of pain, and likes the rap of my knuckles upon his Parthian pate as payment for his insolence. In the end, what does it matter? The gods set me down in the right place at the wrong time. Now, time has brought me here to this moment where right and wrong have become little more than words, drained of meaning. Over the years I have grown… philosophical.
Not long after I was captured I was given by Sulla as a gift of thanks to one of his generals, and it was he I served first in fear, then faithfully for thirty years. It was not the life I would have chosen, but who among us is fortunate enough to choose his own destiny and see it fulfilled as planned? Who, indeed, is fool enough to make such a plan?