After that, I was in debt to every slave in the house. It took a conspiracy of the whole neighbourhood to keep me safe. Yes – slaves are never friends. Or perhaps I should say that desperate slaves are never friends. Happy, prosperous slaves in a good house have the time and safety to be friends – selfish, backbiting friends, but friends nonetheless. But they hate the masters in their own way. Someone might have blabbed, if anyone had made it worth their while, but those two men – slave or free – they were scum. No one came looking for them.
I began to live with fear. In fact, I began to think like a slave – really think like a slave. I began to be very careful about what I said. I began to swallow insults. Those two killings taught me another lesson – and I was lucky to get off so cheaply. A week in the temple, and a year of carrying water and emptying chamber pots and fetching yarn and running errands – and minding my words. And a twinge in my chest when the rain is coming, every time – those broken ribs are still with me, honey.
A month later I was back at my lessons. Diomedes caught me on the steps. 'Your nose looks bad,' he said. 'How could that have happened? '
I didn't even meet his eye. I consoled myself that I had killed his thugs. I told myself that I would have my revenge.
But I crawled like a slave and didn't meet his eyes.
And that hurt more than the beating. Heraclitus understood something of what had passed. He became more careful of his praise for me and at the same time more acerbic in his dealings with Diomedes. I kept my head down until one day, as we rose to leave the steps, I found his bronze-shot staff resting against my sternum.
'Stay,' he said. He nodded to Archi. 'You, too.'
When the other boys were gone, he looked around. 'What's going on?' he asked.
We were both silent, as young men ever are in the face of authority.
His staff pointed at my nose. 'Who did that?'
I shrugged.
Heraclitus nodded. 'Strife makes change, and change is the way of the logos,' he said. A statement I'd heard a hundred times, actually, except there and then, I think that I understood.
'Change is not always good,' I said, rubbing my nose.
'Change merely is,' the philosopher said. 'Why are you so good at geometry, boy?'
I bowed my head at his praise. 'My father was a bronze-smith,' I said. 'We use a compass, a straight edge and a scribe to lay out our work. I knew how to make a right-angled triangle before I came here.' I shrugged. 'Any potter or leather-worker could do as well, I expect.'
He shook his head. 'Somehow I doubt it. So – you know how to work bronze?'
I nodded. 'I'm no master,' I said. 'But I could make a cup.'
He shrugged. 'Hmm,' he said. 'I am more interested in the properties of fire than in having a cup made.'
I have to say that at some point I had learned that, far from being the penniless beggar he seemed, Heraclitus had been offered the tyranny of the city and his father and brother were lords. He was a very rich man.
He went on, 'Fire hardens and softens, isn't that true, bronze-smith? '
I nodded. 'Fire and water to anneal make bronze soft,' I said, 'but iron hard.'
He nodded. 'So with all strife and all change,' he said. 'Strife is the fire, the very heart of the logos. Some men are made free, and others are made slaves.'
'I am a slave,' I said bitterly.
Archi turned and looked at me. 'I never treat you as a slave,' he said.
What could I say? He treated me as an object every day, but I knew that he treated me better than other slaves and a hundred times better than men like Hippias treated their slaves.
But Heraclitus was looking out to sea, or into the heart of the logos, or nowhere. 'Most men are slaves,' he said. 'Slaves to fear, slaves to greed, slaves to the walls of their cities or the possession of a lover. Most men seek to ignore the truth, and the truth is that everything is in flux and there is no constant except change.' He looked at me. 'It is ironic, is it not, that you understand my words, and you are free inside your head, while standing here as a chattel, property of this other boy who cannot fathom what we are talking about?'
Archilogos frowned. 'I'm not as stupid as you claim,' he said hotly.
Heraclitus shrugged. 'What is the logos?' he asked, and Archi shook his head.
'Change?' he asked. He looked at me.
Heraclitus swatted him. 'Best be going home.'
I thought that I understood his message. 'You think that I should not give up hope,' I said.
Now the master looked mystified. 'What have I to do with hope?' he asked, but he had a twinkle in his eye. Another winter passed. I could calculate inside my head without using my fingers and I could draw a man with charcoal. I could put my spear into a target ten horse-lengths distant, no more than a finger's width from the instructor's cane pointing where he wanted to see the throw. And I was growing to be the swordsman I wanted to be. I was strong. After all, I was getting the exercise of a rich man, and for nothing. Every day I could lift a larger weight stone. I could raise it behind my head and over my chest, I could lift my body off the floor of the temple with my hands alone. I was tall, and taller every day, and my chest began to grow broad. I was strong.
Archi grew, too. He grew as quickly as I did, or perhaps faster. Suddenly he was as tall and as wide, and when we wrestled, we could hurt each other, and we no longer dared to use oak swords to fight, because we could break bones. Instead, we fought as the ephebes fought, a spear's length apart, as if dancing, so that each blow was parried without sword and shield ever coming together.
Archilogos loved competition and he never liked to lose, so he began to apply himself to his studies, and he could suddenly do the geometry I could do and he could solve sums in his head, too.
I hated being a slave but, all the same, it was a good time. Adolescents are good at these divisions, and indeed, Heraclitus was full of such pairs of strife-riven opposites. So – at Ephesus, I was a slave, but in many ways, I was freer than I ever was again. I was poor and had nothing but my coins in the jar in the garden – although they were beginning to pile up. And yet, in just the way Heraclitus described, I was rich beyond imagining, with a young, strong body and an agile mind and the company of others like me. What young man – or woman – wants more?
Yes. So it was. And so another year passed, and we worked and played. I thought less and less of Briseis, although every time I saw her – and that was seldom – my heart beat as if I was in a fight. Diomedes came to our house to woo her. Hipponax took care that I should be on errands when this happened, not because he knew – or would have tolerated – my hidden passion, but because he suspected who had sent the thugs.
Although I still pursued Penelope, I understood that she had chosen to put space between us. I had other lovers – girls who were easier, freer, and never as much fun.
And then came the events that broke the pot that held us, and smashed the futures we had imagined in our ignorance. Strife came, and with it, change.
9
It was spring. I remember that well, because the end of the world began with a day of roses and jasmine and sun and beauty.
I was seventeen by my reckoning, and when I walked through the agora, women watched me. Don't laugh, thugater. I was once one of those.
And men watched me as well. What cared I? If I had been free, men would have put my name on pots. Even as a slave, I was kalos kagathos. I was beautiful and smart and strong.
Oh, the arrogance of youth.
Archi and I were boxing in the garden, Euthalia watching us from her couch, and Hipponax lay next to her, stroking her as she watched us fight.
We'd been at it for enough time for the water-clock to run out and be refilled. We were covered in sweat and euphoric with the daimon of it. And then Briseis came.
She seldom entered the centre of the house. As an unmarried virgin, she kept very much to the women's quarters. But that was the week that Hipponax had put his seal to her wedding contract with Diomedes, and she
