I shrugged. 'He had it coming.'
Heraclitus sat and leaned on his staff. I can't remember another time that he sat with me. Finally he looked at me. 'I have so many things I want to say to you. You can all but see the logos – and yet you are so far from true understanding, aren't you? You understand me when I talk, and yet you can hurt a boy like that – for a child's reasons.'
I blinked tears. I had been blinking tears since he sat with me. Hah! I feel them in my eyes even now. No one else had cared, except Stephanos and Archi. He sat there, and listened.
'I did it because he broke his engagement with Briseis,' I said. 'He hurt her. I did the right thing!'
Heraclitus's eyes rested on me, and you could almost see the sparks as his gaze ground away at mine.
Finally, I hung my head. 'No, I did not.'
'No,' he said. 'Tell the truth, at least to yourself. I knew the truth as soon as I heard that the boy had been hurt. You hurt him. Cruelly. Is that who you are? A man who hurts for his own satisfaction?'
I couldn't meet his eyes. And I began to weep. I sat on the steps and told him the tale of Cleisthenes. He shuddered when I cut off the hand. But he smiled when I told him, through my own tears, of the funeral pyre.
'It is the pity of the world that we must come to wisdom through fire,' he said. 'Why can no man learn wisdom from another?'
I couldn't answer him. Perhaps no one can. After a while he went on, 'You have discovered one of the secrets of the world of men.'
'What's that?' I asked. Those boys – most of them knew me – were wondering why the teacher was sitting with me, and why I was pouring tears the way a mended pot leaks water.
'The secret is that men are easy to kill. That if you are brave and have a steady hand and a cold heart, you can have whatever you desire.' He looked away. 'This city is about to go to war with Persia, and then it will learn a lesson that I think you already know. War is the king and father of all, my son. Some men it makes lords, and others it makes slaves. Do you understand?'
'No,' I said.
'Ah!' he said, and laughed – at himself. 'The strife I preach – some men master it without knowing why, and use it for themselves, without a thought to consequence. War makes them lords and kings. But they are not good men. The killer lies in every man – closer to the surface in some than others, I think. I saw the killer in your eyes when first your master led you up the steps.' He nodded. 'If you would master the killer in you, you must accept that you are not truly free. You must submit to the mastery of the laws of men and gods.'
'Men fight wars!' I protested.
'And men return from them, confused as to what the laws of men and gods ask of them.' He looked at a raptor, climbing in the distance over the mountains. 'That bird can kill twenty times a day and never be the agent of evil – merely change. But men are not animals. What they mate and what they kill becomes who they are.' He looked at me. 'You are a warrior. You must find yourself a path that keeps you among men and not among animals. Avoid the confusion. Law is better than chaos.'
It doesn't sound like a helpful speech, although I think I can remember every word. And yes, that line about strife and war – he said it all the time, and it's in his book. Don't think I was the first to hear it, either. But it stuck.
Listen, all of you. There are men and women – you're old enough to know – who discover what their nether parts are for and go mad with it. It is the same with killing. Turns out that killing is easy. Inflicting pain is easy. Cleisthenes learned that. And when I gave him the other half of the lesson, he never got to benefit from it. Perhaps if he'd had a teacher like my teacher… For weeks the ships came up the river and dropped soldiers – Greeks – on our shores, and we gathered a mighty army. At least, we thought it was an army. Aristagoras promised us an easy fight. He said that the Persians had short spears and no shields and that their riches were there for us to take.
It is the dark comedy of men that every Ionian knew that he was full of shit. Many of them had faced Persians – or run from them – and they knew how good they were. And yet this disease, this mania, swept them as if the deadly archer had shot them with arrows of inflammation and disease – failure to fear the Persians.
There's a name for this disease in all the tragedies. We call it hubris, and all men and all women are subject to it.
So they debated and planned. No one drilled, though, and no one appointed a commander, although all but the Athenians took orders, or at least suggestions, from Aristagoras. He went to dinner at the house. I wasn't excluded, but I wasn't comfortable attending formal dinners. Oh, my manners were up to it – I had learned the manners of aristocrats. But to lie on a couch and be served by Kylix?
I went and ate in taverns by the water. Which proved to be a good choice, because I found Epaphroditos in one and Stephanos in another, and learned to play knucklebones like an islander. Stephanos's victory as a wrestler had promoted him off the oar bench and into the ranks of his lord's retinue, and now he was a hoplite. He and Epaphroditos and I had the games in common, and that was enough. And when we found Heraklides, we were four, which is a good number for men.
Four weeks of dicing in taverns and drinking cheap wine, exercising in the gymnasium – all the allied soldiers were welcome there, and no one knew me – and four weeks of sitting at Heraclitus's feet. Indeed, I took my friends to hear him speak. They were pleased but mystified, and all three agreed that he was a great man, but they never went with me again.
Heraklides spoke for the other two. He was in the agora, fingering a plain bronze camp knife. The vendor was a slave for the smith who made it. It was mediocre work.
'I'll pay you in obols what you ask in owls,' Heraklides said to the slave. I had just asked him to come with me a second time to hear Heraclitus. 'By the gods, man – three obols, then!'
He turned to me with a grin. 'Yon philosopher is a little above the likes of me, Doru. I could see he was a great man – it was a pleasure to hear him. But I scarcely understood a word he said.' He whirled back on the slave. 'Four obols – take it or leave it.'
Heraclitus sat with me every day after the other boys walked away, and we talked about laws – laws of men and laws of gods. You've heard it all from your tutors, I'm sure. Aye, I'll have his head if you haven't heard it, honey! That most laws are men's laws for men's reasons. In Sparta, every man takes a boy as a lover, and in Chios, it is death for a man to lie with a boy. These are the laws of men.
But the gods hate hypocrisy and hubris, as any history that is true will show. And murder – and incest. These are the laws of the gods. And there are laws we can only guess at – laws of hospitality, for example. They seem like god-given laws, but when we meet men who have different guest-laws, we have to wonder.
Bah – I talk too much. I should have been a philosopher, as the priest of Hephaestus said.
And then there was Briseis. I can't remember how long I had been in that house before I saw her again. I was in her father's room, with her father's permission – he was formal and polite to me, but a little cold – reading his scrolls. He had the words of Pythagoras and some of Heraclitus and Anaxagoras, too. And I was reading them. I was also helping him and Darkar do sums. I would have carried water to the well at this point, I was so bored and felt so under-used. Archi didn't want me when he went to the daily conference, and so I seemed to have no duties at all except to match him in the gymnasium, at the palaestra and on the track.
I was reading, as I say, when Briseis came in. She smiled at me – quite a happy smile – and took a scroll from my basket.
'Have you read Thales?' she asked. 'For all that he sounds like a soothsayer, he seems the wisest of the lot. Or perhaps he just hated women less.'
'Heraclitus doesn't hate women,' I answered hotly.
'Oh!' she said, and her eyes flashed. 'Wonderful! I'll ask him to accept me as a student straight away.'
I had to smile. I raised my hand the way a swordsman does at practice, when he acknowledges a hit. 'Well struck,' I said.
'I was happy at Sappho's school,' she said. 'I wish I could go back, but I'm too old.' Old at sixteen.
Her father glared at us. 'I'm working,' he growled.
'May we read in the garden?' Briseis asked sweetly, and he kissed her hand – absently – his eyes on his work.
We picked up the scroll baskets and walked into the garden together.
'Why don't you read to me?' she said. There was very little question to it.
And that was that. I read to her every day. We read Thales' book on nature – really just an accumulation of
