The Golden Mean

by Annabel Lyon

  “Still hungry?” a voice said.

  “Always.” Carefully lidding the amphora.

  Eudoxus gestured for me to accompany him, and led me through his gate and into the road. “We’ll walk, yes? This way our voices won’t disturb your guardian, or Callippus.”

  “What’s he working on?”

  Eudoxus laughed. “He’s sleeping. He keeps bird’s hours. He’ll be up at sunrise tomorrow, piping his little song.”

  I told him I didn’t know what that meant.

  “Working, writing,” Eudoxus said. “We work a lot around here. What do you think of that?”

  It was a lovely road we were walking, lined with olive trees, fragrant with flowers from the public gardens we were passing. The school was on the city’s outskirts. Quiet, almost like country, but no country I knew: sweet and warm and comfortable, even at night. The South, then. Eudoxus (trim was the word I wanted for him: trim of beard and belly, trimly clothed, so trim and tidy and modest in his appetites, I noticed at supper, waving away meat and wine for a little fruit and water, that he probably could have trimmed a few years off his age without anyone guessing) put a brief hand on my shoulder, squeezed, and let go.

  “I was so sorry to hear about your father. Your guardian does him great honour, bringing you to us, and so promptly.”

  “I don’t think he knows what to do with me.” My voice was rusty; I’d barely spoken to anyone these past weeks. “He’s trying to find me a place to live.”

  “You might stay with Callippus and me,” Eudoxus said. “If you should choose to stay. If your guardian should make that choice. Several foreign students lodge with us.”

  I thanked him.

  “Whose decision is it, anyway? As a matter of interest?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “I’ll show you around, tomorrow.”

  I liked him for that, for not leaving a beat. “Will there be a lecture?”

  “In the morning.” Eudoxus himself would speak on a mathematical problem set by Plato before his departure for Sicily. “It should be well attended; you and your guardian will get a good sense of our students and of the atmosphere here.”

  I asked him if he remembered Illaeus.

  He laughed. “Very well. Excellent poet, horrible mathematician. I shall have his mess to undo, I suppose, in you.” When I told him that was an empty room rather than a messy one, he laughed again. “Come on.” He cut into some trees. “Want to see where you’d live?”

  We had circled back without my noticing. Set away from the main building, deep in the garden, was a smaller house with lights in the windows although it was late. We could hear low, young voices and laughter. Eudoxus tapped a knuckle lightly on the door, then pushed it open. Half a dozen young men sat around a low table, drinking and arguing about something on a piece of paper they passed from hand to hand.

  “New student,” Eudoxus said.

  I saw I would be the youngest. They greeted me, smiling, friendly. The one who’d answered the door led me deeper into the house to show me the dormitory with its rows of sleeping mats, all clean and comfortable enough, while Eudoxus stayed in the front room, grinning, to look over the piece of paper.

  “Do you want to stay here tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  The young man had a flop of hair like my brother and a lazy eye. I was prepared to like him. I was prepared to like all of them, why not, and their math problem too.

  The next morning, Proxenus and I hung back under the colonnade while the big courtyard filled with members of the Academy who had come to hear Eudoxus. I struggled to follow the talk, while Proxenus looked around, performing a more pragmatic calculation. Afterwards, at the meal, he told me he liked what he saw. Well dressed, serious men from good families. He had recognized some faces. Later he took Eudoxus aside for a little stroll. I knew they were talking about money. The school didn’t charge tuition, but my board would have to be covered. I knew I had plenty of money and land: an estate in Stageira from my father and another at Chalcis from my mother. Money would not be a problem.

  My housemate with the lazy eye drew me over to some other young men. “We’re going into town. Want to come?”

  I nodded. “I have to say goodbye to my family.”

  Proxenus had sent a messenger ahead to the house of our city relatives, so that the twins were already waiting in the street with the carts when we arrived. I kissed the baby, Nicanor, that Arimneste held out for me, and embraced Arimnestus.

  “Those yours?” my brother said of my housemates, who hung back a little, respecting our farewells.

  Eudoxus had told them of our parents’ sudden deaths, and told them too, I guessed, of my own numbness. At least, they hadn’t yet asked me why I didn’t talk. They probably looked freakish to my brother: indoor skin, no weapons, skinny arms hanging down. Freakish brains, like mine.

  “Friends,” I said.

  Arimnestus knew I didn’t know how to make friends. I could see he wanted to say something, some advice he was afraid to offer. Finally he brought our foreheads together in an affectionate butt and whispered, so Proxenus wouldn’t hear, “Relax. Drink a little more.”

  I nodded.

  Arimneste hugged me long but said only, “Take care.”

  Proxenus had never dismounted. I was sorry, in that moment, that he so disliked me, read me so wrong.

  “You come to us in Atarneus when you’re done here,” he said.

  “Write,” Arimneste called, holding the baby up to see me.

  The carts were already moving, sending up dust. I held my hand up, kept it in the air while they moved away. I wanted to die.

  “All right?” my housemate said.

  They knew a place where we could eat, a two-storey house on a busy street in a commercial district. Over bread and meat skewers at a long table someone produced the piece of paper from the night before, and they were off again. I wandered away from the table, deeper into the house, looking for somewhere polite to piss.

  “Through there,” a woman called from the kitchen. She waved a shooing hand at me. “Through, through.”

  I went through the door she meant, into a bedroom, and found the pot in a corner. When I turned around there was a girl sitting on the pallet on the floor.

  Outside, I took my place again on the bench. “All right?” my housemate said again.

  It was an hour’s walk from the door of the little garden house to the door to the girl’s room, a walk I made many times over the next few months. It never cost much; we hardly spoke. Back at the school there was a library where I spent most of the rest of my time. Occasionally there were public lectures in the mornings; occasionally a symposium in the evening. I could attend or not; my time was my own. I thought of Perdicaas and Euphraeus and their snotty dinners: the ritual measuring and watering of the wine, the blessing, the rehearsed disquisitions on set topics, the learned quips, haw, haw. One night I spoke too, some ideas I’d been putting together about the forms that everyone here talked so much about, the ineffable essences of things. I was not much keen on the ineffable, and said so, carefully. Surely things had to be rooted in the world to make any sense at all?

  “The boy smells of the lamp,” someone said, making them laugh. They were pleased, and curious too. So they’d been watching me after all, waiting.

  I would always smell of the lamp, I knew that. I lacked spontaneity; my wit was dry as mouse droppings, and as measly. I needed to put in the hours, yes, late hours over the lamp, exhausting myself. I had lied to Eudoxus. The inside of me was not empty, but viciously disordered. On the ship to Athens we’d been sitting below at a meal, my sister passing out plates of food, when a sudden swell sent everything sideways, she and the baby tumbling over, food swept to the floor, plates and cups shattering, everyone crying out. My mind was like that now, prone to such sudden upendings. Some days all I could do was wake and roll over and sleep some more. My housemates, by some instinct, left me alone. Some days I knew I would never have
to sleep again, and produced monuments of work that were pure luminous hammered gold genius. Less so, the next day. I learned never to show or speak of my ideas to anyone until I’d sat on them for weeks like a broody hen, checking and rechecking, making sure everything was strapped down tight and shipshape. Oh, good, steady, studious, boring me, who worked that girl over and over, used her hard, and came shouting when there was no one to hear.

  In my nineteenth winter, word came that Plato was returning early from Sicily.

  “What’s he like?” I asked Eudoxus at supper. I’d almost forgotten he was the reason I was here at all. I could more or less manage my life as it was, my Illaeus-life of sex and books and a fair amount of privacy, and I feared change.

  I had pitched my voice quietly but it made no difference: because I spoke little, people stopped to listen when I did, and because I was bright, people loved what ignorance I let show. It turned out I was the only student who hadn’t met him. He liked to approve admissions himself, and I was the last he’d considered before leaving for Sicily. Voices around the room competed to enlighten me. He was nobility, descended from the great Athenian statesman Solon on his mother’s side and the god Poseidon on his father’s. His family had been active in politics and he had been expected to go that route, but he was too fastidious, too moral, and occupied himself instead with political and pedagogical theories, theories he had tried to implement in Sicily. But the young king there was already well schooled in tyranny and debauchery, and wasn’t interested in the kind of beatific restraint Plato preached; so interpreted Eudoxus from the letter he read to us over our meal. Plato would be home in two weeks.

  “It’ll be all right,” he added, so only I could hear.

  WE WENT DOWN TO the port to meet his ship, the whole merry gang of us, led by Eudoxus, and Plato’s nephew, Speusippus. Everyone spoke too loudly and they might as well have worn flowers in their hair. I wandered some little distance away to watch the unloading. The sun struck coins in the water where I stared, dazzling my sight, and when I looked up the great man himself was on the quay being mobbed by my teachers and classmates. My name was called but I was already on my way over. I would not reveal sullenness.

  Speusippus introduced me, a hand on my shoulder, as though he knew me well and my accomplishments were his. Plato was slightly younger than my father would have been, and looked tired. He had close-cropped greying hair and lines around the mouth and eyes. Thin, not as tall as me, simple light clothes, hard chips of light in the eyes. I liked the look of him despite myself. I had expected someone soft and jolly, with seriousness represented by the cryptic.

  “I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you arrived,” he said, as though three years ago was last week. “I wanted to be. I was so sorry about your parents. I thought I could do good work in Sicily, influence many fates, and that it was the better choice. So it seemed at the time.”

  “The moral calculus, the choice to serve the greatest good for the greatest number,” Speusippus announced, as though interpreting an oracle.

  Around us the crowd murmured and nodded. Plato looked annoyed.

  “I would have waited longer,” I said. More murmuring and nodding; a good answer; only I meant it. Your parents, he had said, not your father. He and I shared a bubble: we were both stuck together back in that moment three years ago. I was only now arriving at his school, in his mind; my parents had only just died, in mine. Every morning as I woke they died all over again. Today my true studies would begin.

  “I want to spend time with you,” he said.

  We were moving away from the ship, swept along by the crowd eager to get him moving, to reinstate him at the school, like a city craving her king back in the palace, or a child his parents in the house.

  “Later. I’m too tired right now. I want to tell you a lot of things, and hear a lot from you also. I don’t like not knowing you. Eudoxus has written me—”

  I allowed Speusippus to slip between us then and the crowd to peel me away. Was that flirting? At a stall I bought apricots and hung back to eat them while the crowd I had come with disappeared in the distance, sheep guiding the dog. Musicians had already been hired, I knew, and a great supper was being prepared; no one would be working this afternoon. Had they heard him say he was tired?

  “You,” the girl said, surprised, when she saw me sitting alone at one of the long tables. Unusually, I had been told to wait. Her hair was loose and her face puffy. I followed her to the back room, where she rubbed hard at one eye with the side of her finger while I undressed. The bed was made.

  “Where do you sleep?” I asked.

  She pointed at the ceiling. Business quarters downstairs, living up.

  “Mornings. You sleep mornings.”

  She shrugged, nodded.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, no.” She dropped her dress and yawned, then laughed. “I’m sorry. I’m not very sexy today. I worked last night. Need a bath.”

  Could have been a slut’s patter—I’m so dirty—but she looked at me a moment too long. I wondered if this too was something I should offer to pay for, or if she was trying to tell me something else entirely: I don’t belong to you. Just to you.

  “How about we don’t talk,” I said.

  I got back late to the Academy. The sun was setting and the grounds were almost deserted. I could hear the music from the big house, glimpse the light and the movement of dancers through the windows. Laughter, clapping, smell of roast. At the guest house I washed quickly and changed my clothes. Teeth-marks in the soft places. A big meal would be perfect.

  In a niche by the front door I passed Speusippus in linen, reviewing some notes. We looked each other up and down and looked away. A roar went up when I walked through the inner door. They were drunk already, my classmates, and roared at every appearance: me, Callippus with a scroll under one arm, a slave with a tray of new delicacies. Plato sat with Eudoxus, but broke off his conversation to look up and smile every now and then at this or that student and mouth some pleasantry. So long, I read many times on his lips, and thank you. Something something something so long. He had not changed clothes, or his travelling clothes were his only clothes. I saw him notice me. He raised his hand for silence.

  “Nephew,” he called.

  Speusippus had entered immediately behind me, and made a show of putting his clammy hand on my head to move me aside. “Uncle. All here now.”

  Speusippus released me. I stepped back into the crowd, back and back, as he made his speech of welcome, until I found a slave against the wall with a tray I could pick clean. I finished in time to applaud with the others.

  “Water,” I told the slave with two pitchers on his tray. My hands still smelled of the girl, or I imagined they did. I plucked a large flower from an arrangement and shoved finger after finger down its white throat, reaming for scent. Plato was responding to Speusippus. He had taken the scroll from Callippus and unrolled it and held it up. It was a map of the world, fly-specked with black dots. Plato was explaining that each dot represented the birthplace of a member of the Academy. We all edged closer, looking for our dots. There was no Stageira-dot. The Pella-dot was probably supposed to be me.

  “I’m so proud of you all,” Plato was saying. “I’ve been away for so long. Too long, I know. I’m very tired, and can’t imagine travelling again anytime soon. You’re all stuck with me, is what I’m trying to say.” Laughter. “We have a lot of work to do, a lot of problems to solve. Difficult problems. But there is no problem without a solution. We are the world in miniature here, and together we will solve the problems of the world. Problems of geometry, problems of physics, problems of government, problems of justice and law. What we achieve here will be incorruptible down the ages.” Applause. “And I apologize for the rubbish they’re feeding you. I see standards in the kitchen have slipped unconscionably since I’ve been away. We’ll remedy that problem tomorrow.” Laughter and applause. A rebuke: the food was fine and fancy, the master a known ascetic. “Tomorrow,”
he repeated.

  I made my way over to him as the party resumed.

  “Did the new boy like my speech?” he asked.

  “All problems have solutions and the food will be worse tomorrow?”

  He laughed, and leaned forward to look into my cup. “He doesn’t drink?”

  He spoke like Illaeus. Illaeus spoke like him. “Not much.”

  “Why not?”

  Callippus was rolling the scroll, listening to something Eudoxus was saying in his ear. We were alone for a moment in the middle of the crowded room. “My master in Pella drank. It stopped him from getting his work done.”

  “Illaeus.”

  I nodded.

  “I remember his time here. A lovely boy. Lovely mind. A gift for languages, and for language. Loved poetry. He drank then, too, and liked to go into the city, alone, at night. It seemed harmless at the time.”

  I held his look.

  “His letter moved me,” Plato said. “Unexpected, first of all, because he left angry. I hadn’t heard from him in years. Then he says, I have a boy here. You must take this boy.”

  I smelled my fingers.

  “I had a master myself, years ago. Will you come with me, please? I’m having trouble hearing in this room.”

  He led me through a curtain. I felt my classmates watch us go. We sat in a room I had never entered, a cell with a bed, table, two chairs, and a shelf of books.

  “My master was a father to me,” he said. “I will be a father to you, if you’ll let me. You are already so many people to me. Illaeus, again, and my own younger self, and your own self too. Eudoxus tells me the others are frightened of you. He says you spend a lot of time alone.”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s not a bad thing. It doesn’t have to be.”

  “Why did Illaeus leave angry?”

  “He wanted me to love him the most. I failed him.”

  We sat listening to the party sounds from the big room.

  “Not all problems have solutions,” I said.

  We spoke for a while about that. I too wanted him to love me the most, already, and suspected the way to achieve that was to fight him. He had enough fawns in the other room. He said he believed in perfection; I said I believed in compromise. Perfection was an extreme, and I had a need to avoid extremes, perhaps because I was so subject to them.