“Why are you and Phaedrus suddenly interested in Italian poetry?” Ficino asked.
I gaped at him, entirely without an answer. If I’d known Petrarka had written in Italian as well as Latin, I could have said I was interested because of that, but I’d had no idea. “We were just wondering what it sounded like,” I said, feebly. “It’s beautiful. And that’s such an interesting thought. Did you see her?”
He smiled. “She’d been dead for almost two hundred years before I read the poem.”
“It’s hard to understand the time things take, chronology, that kind of thing. The vast expanses of history.”
We had walked through the streets so that we were now outside the marble pillars of the entrance to the colosseum. Ficino stopped. “It’s especially hard because we’re at the wrong end of it, and because you’ve met people from so many different times. Why shouldn’t I have seen Laura, when we both lived in Florentia in the Renaissance, as if it was all one big party?”
“She could be here, or Petrarka could at least,” I said.
“Too good a Christian, for all that he loved classical learning,” Ficino said. “And he didn’t know Greek, so he couldn’t have read Plato. Before I translated his work, Plato was only a legend in Italy.”
“It’s so hard to imagine,” I said. “Ages without Plato. How wonderful that you could bring him back.” I wondered if my language gift could be used in that way.
Ficino smiled, and gestured to the colosseum. “Shall we go in?”
Inside, the colosseum descended in banks of earthwork seats down to a raked sand oval. They clearly used it as a palaestra, as there were weights stacked up ready for use. It was empty, and Ficino and I walked down the steps that divided seating sections from each other. I walked out onto the sand and sang a couple of lines from one of Father’s praise songs. “Good acoustics,” I said. “I expect they use it as a theater too.” Looking up, I saw that it was built of earth and marble, not concrete the way the colosseum in Rome is described.
“Probably they use it for all kinds of things,” Ficino said. “There are grills on the gates there, look.”
We walked over to the gates. There was a strange smell there too, musky and acrid. “Animals,” I said. “Do you think they have animal fights in here?”
“The Romans did,” Ficino said. “And clearly they do.” He was peering in through the grill. “I can see what might be a trident. Maybe they have Roman gladiatorial combat too.”
“But they seem so nice,” I said. I had to step back because the smell was making me feel queasy.
“Well, the Romans did it, and most of these Marissans are from the mainland and would be used to watching violent kinds of entertainment.” Ficino wasn’t as disturbed as I was. “I wonder what Aristomache thinks of it.”
“I don’t like to think of them raking blood off the sand,” I said, looking at the sand, which seemed so clean and innocent. “I don’t like to think of the Romans doing it either.”
“The problem with only giving you art that shows good people doing good things is that it makes you uncompromising, and doesn’t give you useful examples,” Ficino said. “This isn’t a dark secret. It’s open to everyone.”
As if to demonstrate this, a group of ephebes came in and, after greeting us politely, started to race around the outside of the circuit, exactly as my friends and I would in the palaestra at home.
We walked back through the city. I realized this time that the houses near the agora were larger and better-built than the ones further away. The smaller ones didn’t have glass in their windows, just wooden shutters. I saw a woman in a courtyard bent over, turning a stone on another stone. “What’s she doing?” I asked.
Ficino looked. “Grinding wheat.”
“They don’t have Workers, or electricity,” I said.
“They don’t even have wind or water mills, which we used to grind wheat to flour in my time. They’re starting without our technological base.”
Just then another woman came out into the courtyard and started to berate the woman turning the stone. We moved away.
“They have social classes,” I said.
“Yes,” Ficino agreed.
“And money. And wealth and poverty.”
“They started with adults who knew those things,” Ficino said. “That must have made it difficult.”
“Are they pursuing excellence?” I asked.
Ficino looked at me approvingly. “That’s the question I’ve been asking myself. They haven’t said they are. They talk about rescuing people and spreading their civilization. But they haven’t mentioned excellence at all. And in the discussion just now, did you notice how much of what they said was about politics?”
“You kept asking about philosophy, and they always answered in terms of politics,” I said. It was clear, now that I thought about it.
Ficino nodded. “I can’t help thinking about Kebes, how stubborn he was. These cities are more than just Kebes, and they’re clearly very influenced by the culture of the people they rescued, as well as what the Goodness brought. Do you remember your project on how to tell how philosophical a city is?”
I remembered it very well. I nodded.
“How would you assess this one?” We stepped out of the way of a man leading a laden donkey.
“The people you were debating with seemed to understand rhetoric, and to want to debate. But they don’t have a library,” I said. “Of course, one of the things they want from us is books, and it must be very difficult without.”
“It may seem strange to you, but is possible to hand-copy books,” Ficino said. “We did it in my day. They’ve done it too. They have versions of the Bible, the holy book of Christianity, as best they can remember it. And they have versions of Plato, the ones Aristomache knows by heart. There are some books in the school. But you’re right that they don’t have a library, and that’s significant. There’s a school and a church and a colosseum.” Ficino gestured to a house we were passing, one of the ones with window glass. “They’re doing well on a material level, not compared to us, but compared to what we’ve seen in the islands.”
“But maybe not so much philosophically?”
“I keep reminding myself that it was justice Kebes cried out for.”
“It was?” I’d never heard that.
“At the Last Debate. I was trying to hold him back but he leaped up onto the rostrum and started yelling out. ‘These pagan gods are unjust.’”
We were almost back in the agora. “Athene had just acted very unjustly.”
“Yes. But the gadfly that had been Sokrates spurned Kebes and flew toward your parents, which has always seemed to me an indisputable sign. Still, Kebes started rallying people, and off they went.” He looked around him. “And here they are, and we’ll have to make the best of it.”
We spent two more days in Marissa. On the second of them there was a bull baiting in the colosseum. Neleus and Erinna went, but I volunteered for duty aboard to avoid it. Erinna said it was disgusting, and Neleus said it was kind of fun but he wouldn’t go again. Maia, who also hadn’t attended, said she was glad that at least they ate the bull afterward. Father just shook his head.