Ficino raised his cup. “It’s my birthday. I’m ninety-nine years old. It seems the perfect time to set out on a voyage. To exploration!”
We all drank.
6
ARETE
I wasn’t in the Chamber for the debate, or in the Assembly for the vote, but I was in Thessaly for the family fight.
It was just after the midwinter celebrations. It had been a mild clear day with a promise of spring in the air. The Assembly had voted that the voyage of exploration would take place when spring came, and now the question was of who was to go. Father was going, there was no question of that. Klymene was going with the Florentia troop. Erinna was going, as one of the few people who properly understood how the Excellence worked. And Ficino was going, and so was I—I had won that battle without any need to fight. This was to be a voyage safe for old men and children, and Ficino and I were the exemplary old man and child. That I was only a child for three more months didn’t matter. I was going!
My brothers all wanted to go. Well, Plato-loving Alkibiades didn’t. He had written to us—he had sent a letter to Father with the envoy who went to Athenia. Father let me read it. In addition to saying all you’d expect about Mother, he said to trust that the head of Victory wasn’t in Athenia, and that he would let us know immediately if he heard anything. He sent love to all of us and said he had made the right choice and was happy.
Phaedrus and Neleus were at home in Thessaly on the evening when Kallikles came around with a jar of wine after dinner. “We need to talk,” he said.
I broke the resin seal and mixed the wine without being asked, using the big red-figure krater decorated with Apollo killing the dragon Pytho, and the cups that matched it. (Apollo on the krater didn’t look at all like Father, but I liked the coils of the snaky dragon.) I watered the wine half and half, as Plato recommends, and then gave a cup to everyone.
It was too cold to go into the garden now that the sun was down, which was inconvenient as it was the only space suitable for sitting and talking. There was a reason the houses were known as “sleeping houses.” We were supposed to do everything else elsewhere. Most of the year this worked out well enough, and even now it would have been all right if we could have gone to Florentia or another eating hall to have our conversation in public. As it was, we all sat on the beds. I passed around some dried figs and goat cheese and missed Mother, who would have made the boys help.
“I want to go with you on the voyage,” Kallikles said, once we were all settled. I sat down beside him on the bed.
“It isn’t up to me,” Father said. “The Chamber is deciding who goes. Apply to them.” Father was looking a little better now that the voyage had been agreed on.
“We all want to go,” Phaedrus said.
“You can’t all go,” Father said. “What if the ship went down?”
“What if it did?” Kallikles asked. “That’s part of the hazard of life.”
“All of you lost at once?” Father said. “No.”
“The city wants to send the best,” Phaedrus said. He grinned at me. He was constantly making jokes about my name—it was he who had first thought up the game of pursuing Arete. “And in addition to my little sister, the most excellent people they can find. We brothers are the certainly among the best of the Young Ones.”
Father took a deep draught of his wine. “Arete’s going,” he said. “No more.”
“The problem with that is that we’re heroes,” Kallikles said, spreading his hands. “You know we are. And this is a heroic mission, where we will have the chance to prove ourselves. It’s like the voyage of the Argonauts. We all ought to have that chance. The Chamber gives us the chance, on our own excellence. If they turn us down, then they do. But if you speak against us they will turn us down.”
Father shook his head. “Not all of you,” he began, but wrathful Neleus interrupted.
“I insist on going, even though I’m not a hero!” He looked furiously at Kallikles.
We all looked at him. And suddenly I saw us all looking at him. It was strange. They were all my brothers, and I knew them well, Neleus among them, but now I saw them all with new eyes. Neleus sat alone on his bed, and we were all looking at him, and we were all one thing, and he was another. We all looked like Father, and he did not. We all had Father’s calm blue eyes and chiseled features. We had all shades of skin color—or all the shades of the Middle Sea, as Maia put it: Kallikles’s chalk pale, Father’s olive, mine brown, and Phaedrus’s near-black. We had hair that curled wildly and hair that lay flat as silk. Kallikles was short and Phaedrus was tall and I was a girl. We were an assorted set, but we were all Father’s children, children of Apollo, of a god. We knew we were all heroes, and Neleus knew he was not. My father and my brothers looked coolly at Neleus, and I looked with them, ranged myself with them in that moment. I had to whether I wanted to or not. I was a hero. I could not make myself be like Neleus. I was human—we were all human. But we all had something else in addition, and Neleus did not, and we all knew it.
“It shouldn’t make any difference,” Neleus said, into that long silence. His voice wavered a little.
“It shouldn’t,” Phaedrus said, gently enough. “But you have to see that it does.”
“You’re not any better than I am,” Neleus blazed.
Phaedrus lifted an eyebrow. “You know I am. I’m faster and stronger. We’re exactly the same age but I haven’t been able to wrestle with you in the palaestra since we were six.”
“It’s not fair!”
“It may not be fair, but it’s the way it is,” Kallikles said. He reached out a hand toward Neleus across the space between the beds, but Neleus ignored it.
“It’s not your fault,” Phaedrus said.
“Being heroes doesn’t make you better people,” Father said. He sounded immensely weary. “It might even make you worse. Knowing about it might. Simmea was afraid of that.”
“What does it mean, exactly?” I asked.
“Arete, even you must see that this isn’t the time for a Socratic debate clarifying terms!” Kallikles said, turning on me angrily.
“I don’t see that at all,” I said, keeping my voice even as Mother would have. “I think this would be a splendid time to discuss it properly. We all know we’re heroes, except Neleus, sorry Neleus, but we don’t know what that means in real and practical terms. We don’t know what difference it can make.”
Kallikles looked at Father, but Father was staring down at the blankets and said nothing.
“I’m going on the voyage,” Neleus said, in a calm and decided tone. “I appreciate that you all despise me, but I am going. I have more right than anyone, and more need to prove myself than any of you. If the Chamber won’t accept me for the voyage I’ll stow away. I am her son. I am Simmea’s only son, and I am going to avenge her.”
I made a little sound when he said he was her only son, because why should gender matter so much? But then I stopped myself from protesting, because he needed to be special, and when it came down to it he wasn’t a hero and I was.
There was another long silence. Then Father spoke. “Being a god made me worse at being a human being. She saw that. And she saw that being heroes might be a problem for you. And she was afraid that you would be unkind to Neleus because he isn’t, and that he’d suffer from that.” She had been right to worry about that, because we had been and he had. Father went on without hesitating, still looking down at the bed and not at any of us. “She thought that people needed more training to bring up children than we had had, but she understood that we had to bring you up and take responsibility for you. Most of the people with the training left after we voted to have families, and the rest were rushed off their feet.”