Adventure in Athens

by Caroline Lawrence

  About ten minutes in they were both smiling and nodding and taking lots of notes.

  After about two hours we had exhausted the subject of Socrates, Alcibiades and Kid Plato. Professor D’Angour was disappointed that we hadn’t met Aspasia, the quick-witted widow of Pericles whom Socrates had known in earlier days and might even have fallen in love with. But he was delighted to hear about how ancient Greek music sounded, since that was his particular field of research. Dr Charis made us describe the clothing they wore and the artefacts they used.

  Finally, after three hours of intensive questioning we convinced them that we really had gone back.

  Someone brought in Greek coffee and Orangina, along with a big platter of baklava.

  As he sipped his coffee, Professor D’Angour told us that although Socrates was considered ugly when he was older, he was probably not bad-looking as a younger man, when he was admired for his physique and courage on the battlefield.

  ‘Jolie-laid,’ he said. ‘It’s French for “ugly in a pretty way”. If they make a movie of my book, I’d like Adrian Grenier to play the part.’

  ‘Why not a Greek actor?’ asked Dr Charis, sucking baklava honey from her long-nailed fingers. ‘Omiros Poulakis has a snub nose, and the way he looks up at you from under his eyebrows would be perfect.’

  Crina put down her Orangina. ‘Rami Malek,’ she said. ‘He’d make a good Socrates.’

  ‘Somehow I can’t imagine Socrates singing “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen,’ I quipped. That got everyone laughing.

  Solomon Daisy had been quiet all this time, but suddenly his head was in his hands and his massive shoulders were shaking.

  We all stopped laughing and stared at him.

  Was he laughing or crying?

  ‘Mr Daisy?’ asked Mr Posh.

  He raised his face. It was wet and smiling.

  ‘That’s all I wanted to know,’ he said, looking at me and Dinu and Crina in turn. ‘That’s why I sent you back. To see if Socrates was really true. True in the deepest sense. You have satisfied my dearest wish.’ To Mr Posh he said, ‘I’ll make myself completely transparent and show you all my offshore accounts. You can lock me away if you like. I’ve learned my lesson.’

  Mr Posh raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘Very touching. But I think there are better places for you than prison. The Prime Minister would like to see you and your two technicians as soon as we return to the UK,’ he said. ‘I think we can come to a mutually agreeable arrangement.’

  55

  How They Died

  Later that afternoon as the day started to cool, Professor D’Angour and Dr Charis took Mr Posh and us three kids around the Agora, which is now just a bunch of ruins with trees and tortoises and butterflies.

  Crina whispered to me and Dinu, ‘Does Dr Charis remind you of anybody?’

  ‘The shoemaker’s daughter,’ said Dinu and I nodded.

  ‘Doctor Charis,’ I began.

  ‘Please call me Fotini.’

  ‘Are you from Athens?’

  ‘Yes, as far back as records go,’ she replied, ‘on my mother’s side. Why?’

  ‘You remind us of Simona, the daughter of Simon the Shoemaker,’ said Crina boldly.

  Dr Charis stopped in her tracks, removed her sunglasses and turned to look at us. ‘When I was young I had to wear an eyepatch to correct a lazy eye. And my great-great-grandfather claimed to have come from a long line of shoemakers.’

  We all stared at her and Mr Posh murmured, ‘Extraordinary.’

  After a moment we continued on through the knee-high grasses and wildflowers of the ruined Agora.

  Presently Professor D’Angour stopped at the remains of a building near the Tholos. ‘Any idea what this is?’ he said. He held up his hand to stop me speaking. ‘Not you, Alex. You’ve been to Athens several times. I want to know if Dinu or Crina can tell me.’

  Crina got it first. ‘It’s the house of Simon the Shoemaker!’

  ‘Brava!’ He stepped to one side and we all saw a stone block on the waist-high foundations behind him. It bore the inscription ‘OIKIA SIMONOS-HOUSE OF SIMON’ picked out in red paint.

  ‘And look!’ Dr Charis used the toe of her sandal to tap another stone half-hidden in the golden grass. It read ‘I AM THE BOUNDARY OF THE AGORA’ in both Greek and English.

  I shivered.

  And as we started up a path towards the Acropolis, I shivered again. I knew where we were heading.

  About a hundred paces on, we stopped by some ruins lying beside the trench of the Great Drain. It was very quiet here, with the late sun shining through the trees. A few birds twittered and a bee buzzed past my right ear.

  ‘See the foundations of this building?’ said Professor D’Angour. ‘It’s the State Prison where Alex and Dinu almost ended up. It’s probably also the place where Socrates spent the last month of his life before he bravely faced execution.’

  Mr Posh frowned. ‘I thought the Prison of Socrates was some caves near the Acropolis.’

  ‘Almost certainly not,’ said Dr Charis. ‘Archaeologists found little cups for measuring hemlock here and even a votive figurine of Socrates himself, as if it became a kind of shrine to his memory.’

  ‘He died with extreme calm and dignity, didn’t he?’ asked Mr Posh.

  ‘Yes,’ replied Professor D’Angour. ‘While his friends wept, he calmly drank the deadly potion. It makes you numb and cold from the feet up,’ he added.

  Dr Charis said, ‘We know this because Plato wrote a blow-by-blow account of Socrates’ last hours in a dialogue called Phaedo.’

  ‘Even though he tells us that he wasn’t actually present when Socrates died,’ added the professor.

  ‘But Plato was present at the trial of Socrates, and wrote about it in an account called The Apology.’

  ‘Which really means a defence, rather than an apology,’ added Crina.

  ‘Exactly.’ Dr Charis took off her sunglasses and looked at us. ‘It’s one of the few dialogues that’s not a dialogue, that is to say a question-and-answer session. Plato only reports what Socrates says, and for once Socrates plainly states his beliefs.’

  ‘What was the charge?’ I asked.

  ‘They accused him of corrupting the youth and introducing new gods,’ said Dr Charis. ‘And I do believe he was guilty.’

  We all stared at her.

  She put on her sunglasses again. ‘Not of corrupting the youth,’ she said. ‘But Socrates believed an extraordinary thing: he believed that ho theos – that is, God or “the god” – must be purely good and must want people to try to be good too. To be virtuous. To seek aretay.’

  ‘Aretay means “virtue” or “excellence”,’ I whispered to Crina.

  Mr Posh raised an eyebrow. ‘Are you claiming Socrates didn’t believe in the Greek gods?’

  ‘I am. I believe he sacrificed to them and paid them lip service,’ said Dr Charis, ‘but he thought they were cruel and capricious, which they are. So in a way he was introducing new gods. Or rather a new god. That is why Socrates is still revered by many Jews and Christians.’

  Crina frowned. ‘But he lived five hundred years before Christ.’

  ‘Yes, he did.’

  ‘Some historians think the charges were merely an excuse to arrest him,’ said the professor. ‘The Athenians really wanted to punish the maverick general Alcibiades, but by that time he was already dead. So they executed his teacher instead: Socrates.’

  Dinu looked at him. ‘Why did the Athenians want to kill Alcibiades?’

  ‘Many reasons,’ said Professor D’Angour. ‘Mainly because the Sicilian Expedition was a terrible disaster. As you know, it resulted in the deaths of more than twenty thousand Athenian soldiers. As a consequence Athens lost the war with Sparta and ultimately her empire.’

  ‘But I thought Alcibiades never went on the expedition,’ I said.

  ‘He didn’t. But it was originally his idea. And even before the expedition set out, the Athenians voted for him to be put to death on accoun
t of the incident of the herms and the profaning of the Mysteries. So he defected to Sparta–’

  ‘What?’ Dinu’s face went a shade paler.

  ‘In fairness, the council had voted for him to be put to death.’

  ‘But he fought for the Spartans against Athens?’

  ‘Yes,’ agreed the professor. ‘Even so, when he changed sides again and returned a few years later the Athenians gave him a hero’s welcome.’

  Dr Charis added, ‘We Athenians have a strange love-hate relationship with Alcibiades.’

  ‘Like in that famous poem by Catullus,’ suggested Mr Posh.

  ‘Odi et amo,’ I quoted the Latin. ‘I hate and I love …’

  ‘Yes.’ Professor D’Angour smiled.

  ‘How did Alcibiades die?’ Dinu asked in a barely audible voice.

  ‘Accounts vary,’ said the professor. ‘But historians agree that he’d fled to Phrygia, that is modern Turkey. He was hiding out in a house with his latest girlfriend, and Persian commandos tracked him down. They had been sent at the request of the Spartan king, who was in league with the local Persian governor. The soldiers set the house on fire to drive Alcibiades out.’

  ‘Oh!’ Crina covered her mouth with her hand.

  ‘Then what?’ Dinu’s face was pale.

  ‘He charged outside, naked except for a blanket wrapped around his left arm as a shield, and they shot him full of arrows. It was only five years later that they put his teacher Socrates to death.’

  After hearing that, we were all silent for a while.

  It was hot and peaceful there, with golden grasses around the foundations of the cell where Socrates had spent the last month of his life. Twig birds were twittering and a wood pigeon was cooing. We could hear faint music coming from one of the cafes. A couple of girls came by, in shorts and sunglasses, with their bare arms already turning pink. They looked around then turned and headed back, because the path ended there.

  I wanted to shout after them, ‘This is the spot where one of the most amazing men in the history of the world died!’

  Professor D’Angour, Dr Charis, Mr Posh and Dinu started back along the path, but Crina and I lingered at the ruins of the prison.

  ‘Do you think Socrates guessed we were from the future?’ she asked me.

  ‘No idea,’ I said. ‘In a way, I don’t think that would have mattered. He only wanted each of us to live our best life.’

  ‘And I intend to,’ she said.

  I glanced at her and smiled. ‘Me too.’

  At that moment a little white butterfly fluttered by.

  ‘Goodbye, Socrates,’ I whispered.

  And Crina added, ‘We’ll never forget you.’

  56

  Back to School

  When Dinu and I came into the cafeteria on the first day back at school after the summer holidays, the whole place fell silent again. But just for a moment: then chairs scraped and feet pounded as a bunch of kids rushed towards us. I saw a kind of hunger in their eyes, as if they hoped some of our popularity would rub off on them.

  It reminded me of the way the crowds had looked when Alcibiades drove past in his chariot. Or when Socrates did his pelican walk through the forum. I now knew those were the same people who had later urged the death penalty for both men. Hoi polloi. The masses.

  I braced myself for fake smiles and demands for selfies, but to my surprise the masses swarmed right on past.

  Dinu and I turned to see them mobbing a red-headed girl named Britney in our year.

  ‘What the chickens?’ Dinu muttered, reaching for a tray.

  I shrugged as I grabbed one too. ‘No idea.’

  Crina came up to us. She already had the cauliflower-and-broccoli cheese bake on her plate. Our two families had spent most of July in a five-star hotel near my aunt’s small apartment in Vouliagmeni, courtesy of Solomon Daisy and Mannasoft Games. Crina’s sun-lightened hair was almost blonde. She had kept it short and bought a new pair of glasses with gold rims that matched her Greek suntan.

  She also had a new pin on the lapel of her blazer: a tiny white enamel butterfly. I had bought it for her on the last day of our hols.

  ‘What’s going on there?’ I tipped my head towards the mass of admirers.

  Crina rolled her eyes. ‘Britney’s older brother was on Love Island. And now everyone wants to know more about him and the girl he hooked up with. I’m afraid you and Dinu are old news.’

  I got into the queue for food behind Dinu and said, ‘Looks like our fifteen minutes of fame are over, dude.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  Once the dinner ladies had given me and Dinu beef lasagne and garlic bread, we took our trays and looked for somewhere to sit.

  The Mean Girls’ table was full and they were too busy discussing Britney’s brother to notice us. I saw my former girlfriend Kiana sitting next to a Polish boy named Filip, star of the school’s top football team. Their heads were close together and she didn’t even see me go past.

  I felt a small pang, but consoled myself with the thought that we didn’t really have that much in common.

  Also, she’d only liked me because I was ‘popular’.

  Relieved to no longer be the object of everyone’s attention, Dinu and I headed for the back of the cafeteria, looking for a free table.

  We chose one by a window.

  ‘So are you and your gran going to use your millions to get a new flat?’ Dinu put down his tray and pulled out a chair.

  ‘Probably not.’ I sat across from him. ‘We donated half of it to a charity and Gran put the rest in a trust fund that can only be accessed when I go to university. She won’t even give me an allowance. She says I need to get an after-school job.’

  A girl sat down beside me. It was Crina.

  ‘What’s this?’ I raised an eyebrow in mock surprise. ‘A Year Eight girl sitting with Year Nine geeks?’

  ‘Why not? We don’t care what people think, do we?’ She reached across me for the shaker of Parmesan cheese. ‘So did Dinu tell you what he did with his millions?’

  ‘No!’ I looked at my best friend.

  Dinu had changed since we got back from Greece. He was starting to get spots and also some fuzz on his upper lip, so he wasn’t quite as pretty as he had been half a year ago.

  But there was something else different about him.

  Although he didn’t joke as much as he used to, he seemed happier somehow.

  He now had a kind of Zen calm.

  You might even call it eudaimonia.

  ‘So, Mr Moneybags,’ I asked him, ‘what did you do with your fortune? Give it away to charity?’

  Dinu gave a half-smile. ‘I bought a workshop for my father.’

  ‘You bought a workshop? What kind of workshop?’

  ‘Carpentry. When we lived in Romania, he used to make furniture as a hobby. But he never had much time for it. Last week we found a good workshop across the river in Chelsea. Our offer was accepted yesterday.’

  ‘Papa is a brilliant carpenter.’ Crina was tapping the bottom of the Parmesan, trying to get the cheese to loosen up. ‘He’s going to make bespoke furniture and our mother will do cushions and things. They’ll sell their stuff online, or people can come into the workshop. It’s really nice and bright with a big skylight.’

  ‘Did the workshop cost the whole ten mil?’ I asked Dinu.

  ‘Course not. We’re using the rest to buy a nice flat by the river.’

  Suddenly I wasn’t hungry any more.

  57

  Socrates Club

  Were my best friends about to move away, thanks to their newfound wealth?

  I put down my fork. ‘Where?’ I said, my appetite gone. ‘Where are you moving to?’

  ‘Probably right here in Wandsworth,’ said Crina, still tapping the Parmesan shaker. ‘We like this area.’

  ‘There’s a new riverside development not far from you,’ said Dinu. ‘It’s called Smuggler’s Wharf. It’s really nice.’

  I knew Smuggler’s Whar
f. It was only a five-minute walk from our flat. My appetite revived and I tucked into my lasagne. ‘That sounds like a good use of Daisy’s millions.’

  ‘It is,’ said Dinu. ‘It means my father will be around all the time. Oh, and I bought four season tickets to Fulham.’

  ‘Fulham? That’s my team!’ I narrowed my eyes at him. ‘I thought you and your dad supported Liverpool. Nobody changes allegiance. Ever.’

  ‘We still support Liverpool. But it’s too far to go often, and that doesn’t mean we can’t attend local matches too. Do you want to go with us next Saturday?’

  ‘Day-lon hotee,’ I replied with a grin. Of course.

  I tipped my head towards Crina and raised my eyebrows at Dinu.

  ‘Oh, I already asked her. She doesn’t want to come.’

  Crina had finally got the Parmesan dispenser to work and was shaking it over her cheese bake. ‘No football for me,’ she said briskly. ‘I have a protest march on Saturday.’ She changed the subject. ‘Did Dinu tell you that he’s also quite good at carpentry?’

  ‘Really?’ I raised my eyebrows.

  ‘Yeah,’ said Dinu, holding out his hand for the cheese. ‘I’m going to help in the workshop when I have time. I’ve already got a design for a chair.’

  ‘An ideal chair, I hope.’ Crina gave me a playful nudge with her elbow.

  I grinned. ‘I think Kid Plato was the one who came up with the concept of the Forms. When he was Old Plato,’ I added.

  ‘We could discuss the ideal chair at the new club.’ Crina handed Dinu the Parmesan.

  ‘Club? What club?’ Dinu shook cheese onto his pasta.

  ‘Our new Socrates club.’

  I turned to look at her. ‘But I thought you were going to join our Latin club?’

  ‘I am. Latin club on Tuesdays and Socrates club on Thursdays. Dr Stewart says we can use his classroom if we get at least six kids to sign up. And he can even get funding for textbooks if we do a little ancient Greek.’

  ‘It sounds cool,’ I said. ‘I’m in. You up for that, Dinu?’

  Dinu chewed thoughtfully. Then his eyes widened as a Year Eight girl named Hope sat down beside him.