As Zeno was a man as well as a guest Agariste entered the portico attended by two female slaves with the customary short hair and simple long tunics and bare arms and feet. But Agariste wore a peplos of saffron linen with a golden girdle intricately wrought, and she was so tall that she had no need of the high-heeled shoes worn by other rich Athenian ladies. Her shoulder pins glittered with jewels and there were many jeweled rings on her long, white and very slender hands and bracelets on her narrow arms. She had a noble figure if one too thin for the taste of many men, and her bosom swelled under the folds of the peplos in a delightful fashion and it was evident that she had no necessary recourse to the strophion to elevate it. Her hair was naturally fair and of a fine gilt sheen, and so abundant and so full of tendrils and waves that she wore no false wigs or supplements to increase its bounty. It was bound with golden ribbons. Zeno saw that it was from his mother that Pericles had inherited the strong refinement of facial structure, the milky complexion, the carved mouth and aquiline nose and the almost colorless blue of the large eyes. But Agariste was haughty and cold whereas her young son was grave and stately. It was evident that she possessed enormous esteem for her person and her intelligence, for her glance was august and her manner suggested that she found even her husband—the notable soldier of much fame, and the politician of no mean ability—not entirely her equal. As for Zeno, whom she had desired to see, and with whose writings she was familiar, she saw before her a small man of no distinguished appearance and with crudely cropped hair and a childlike figure, and she was disappointed and in some curious way offended. Seeing this Zeno thought: Had she expected an Achilles, or Apollo or at least a Hercules, out of a Homeric poem?
“Zeno of Elea, the Lady Agariste, the mistress of my house,” said Xanthippus, who admired, respected but heartily disliked his wife. He loved her in his way for her gifts of character and her beauty and her family history; however, he frequently discovered her tedious for she had no humor at all but only arrogance.
She bowed slightly and coldly to Zeno and he saw the grace of her long body under the carefully arranged folds of the peplos. Xanthippus did not invite her to be seated and she could not sit without her husband’s invitation. She glanced swiftly at an empty chair of ebony inlaid with pearl and when Xanthippus said nothing a slight flush ran over her transparent face and the pale eyes had, for a moment, the glitter of bare metal.
Studying her with a slight smile and in a little silence, Xanthippus finally said, “You wished to speak with Zeno of Elea, Lady, as you requested?” He leaned back in his chair, then negligently lifted a citron to his mouth and sucked at its juices.
Mortification heightened her color. She did not look at Zeno but addressed her husband: “Lord, you consider him an adequate tutor for our son?”
Zeno began to pity her. He said, “Lady Agariste, I find Pericles most exemplary, and I feel destiny in him. Therefore, I have consented to teach him.”
Agariste, her humiliation growing, yet heard Zeno’s voice and, more to her liking, his words. She turned her face to him though she kept her eyes averted. She had a voice as chill as snow and as colorful. She said, “Zeno of Elea, you repeat what I have heard in my dreams and have seen in my visions. I do not feel that you are exaggerating or flattering, but speak only the truth.”
“It is true, Lady,” said Zeno, and he began to feel annoyed that Xanthippus appeared to be absorbed in choosing a certain nut from a bowl of them, stirring them about noisily with a long lean finger as if looking for a favorite. So Zeno rose in a most courteous gesture to Agariste.
Xanthippus evidently found the nut he was seeking, and he cracked its thin shell between his strong white teeth and his eyes of that dark staring blue flickered with mirth.
“You are pleased, Agariste?” he asked, as if addressing a superior favorite among his slave women. He shifted seductively in his chair.
Agariste, whose flushed face had suddenly whitened both with wrath and shame, inclined her head and Zeno had to admire her composure and dignity for all she was a woman of no pleasant ways.
“Good. Then you may retire,” said her husband and waved his hand graciously.
He knew that she had intended to question Zeno sharply, and to impress on him the honor he had been offered, and that she had intended to cow him while she, too, studied his theories and his words. She had hoped to engage his mind and make him admire her attributes. Throwing up her noble head she turned and, accompanied by her maidens, left the presence of the men, her peplos as quiet as yellow stone. Xanthippus watched her leave and affected to study her figure and her movements as men study the gifts of the hetairai and are about to choose among them. Zeno did not find this risible.
Xanthippus saw this and he smiled. “The Lady Agariste is a female of many talents and not only beauty,” he said. He paused. “Her conversation is chiselled out of granite.”
Zeno could not help smiling. “I will return at dawn tomorrow to begin the instruction of my student,” he said, and took his leave.
He believed the oracles at Delphi to be fraudulent and ridiculous and the imposture of priests hungry for lavish offerings from the superstitious and the gullible. In an unguarded moment or two he had quickly investigated the hollow caves. Still, an oracle had predicted the defeat of Xerxes and his barbarians when the very thought had been preposterous and even priests had fled their temples. Another had predicted the future fame and glory of Greece, and Zeno, not often mystical, believed that implicitly.
Twelve years ago they had announced the birth of a great hero who would bring down the imperial lightning from Olympus and from the hands of Zeus upon this small city of only forty thousand souls, the majority of whom were slaves, and would write the name of Athens in immortal marble for the blinkless stare of the centuries.
CHAPTER 3
“It has been asked from the beginning,” said Zeno to his pupil, and with a courteous glance at Agariste who sat nearby, listening keenly and severely, “‘What is man?’ The first brute in the skins of animals asked that when he suddenly contemplated himself in quiet pools in the primeval forests. ‘Who am I?’ he asked. ‘I mate and live and breed and eat and defecate and die as do the animals which I hunt. Yet, I discern a difference. What is that difference which makes me a man?’ He was less moral than the beasts of the jungles and the plains and the mountains. (He knew he was weak before the power of their teeth and their claws and their strength, and he was less agile.) He discerned that the beasts had their own code of morality, discipline and behavior, which could not be violated except at the cost of death or destruction. “Was he less than the beasts after all? In all the capacities of their bestial nature they were superb, decisive, confident. He, himself, was not. We know that man possesses few instincts, and that he chooses by his own will, to a large extent, what he will think and what his future shall be. That is the crucial difference between man and the other beasts. The Choice. Does that ability make him an outlaw in the very natural world in which he was conceived, or does his disobedience to the law make him superior to them? He is not at peace with himself.
“We speak of the dominance of reason in men’s affairs. Reason has been analysed. It is based, they say, on the observation of a common reality, an admission of what reality is. But what is reality to me is possibly not reality to you, Pericles, or to other men. If we are to know what man is, we have to know what reality is.”
“On what, then, can we base our lives and sculpture our futures?” asked the young Pericles, who was now fifteen years old.
Zeno reflected. “It is necessary for objective laws, for we are a lawless and passionate and wicked and vindictive species. We have agreed that it is necessary for the survival of our tribe to have objective laws, though we are vehemently at war with law, both subjective and objective. We do not accept, as the beasts accept. Of what mysterious fruit have we eaten in that we are rebels even against ourselves, and challenge even the gods?”
He looked into the pale and thoughtful
eyes of his pupil, which told him nothing except that the young Pericles was thinking.
“No one has truly defined what is a man. The answer may be in the mind of God. It certainly is not in ours, no matter how emphatic the priest or the philosopher or the scientist.” Zeno smiled slightly, and ate a date.
“Young Anaxagoras has said that we are men because we have opposing thumbs. But so do various monkeys, and they have never raised a temple nor formulated a body of laws of their own. Others have said we are different because we think, that we are conscious of thinking, that we are conscious of ourselves. I have observed some dogs and notably the Egyptian cats. I am convinced they think, also.” He laughed.
“You are inconsistent, Zeno of Elea,” said Agariste, as she sat with her son and his tutor in the outside portico in the growing sunset. “You set paradoxes, and then smile at them as if with pleasure. You pose questions but never answer them. You hint of mysteries, propound them, then dismiss them as trivialities.”
Zeno glanced at her with pity. She sat like a princess in her lemonwood chair inlaid with ivory, with her female slave behind her waving a long palm-leaf fan; her hair was like wheat in the late sun. She advanced her intelligence, not with calmness and modesty or as even an equal, but with a kind of triumphant defiance and overweening pride. In this, thought Zeno, she does not confirm the theory that women are intelligent. He smiled at Agariste gently.
“Lady,” he said, and was somewhat vexed that the young Pericles was watching him with a spark of amusement in his eyes, “it is my intention to have my pupil ponder on my questions and paradoxes and seeming contradictions and inconsistencies, and formulate answers and theories of his own, which we will discuss.”
“I believe it is the duty of a teacher to present facts and the reasons for the facts,” said Agariste, with severity.
“Lady,” said Zeno, “there is a vast difference between philosophy and what we have universally agreed is the truth.”
“You do not agree that there is any absolute truth?”
Zeno hesitated. He studied the gardens about the house, the walls overflowing with color, and beyond them the silver ribs of the hills of Greece, thrusting out between the firs and the cypresses and olive groves that covered them like a mantle which quivered in the evening breeze. But the zenith yet was like blue fire.
“Absolute truth, Lady,” he said at last, “is not to be known by men, just as no man can reach any truth by himself alone. The absolute truth, like absolute reality, is the prerogative of God and none other.”
“You do not believe, then,” said Agariste, “that men are like gods, though Homer has hinted of it?”
“I do not quarrel with Homer,” replied Zeno, “for he was a poet and the majority of men are not poets. We are more akin to the beast of the field, and once we understand him we can begin the painful climb to our own mystery—from that mutual standing ground.”
Agariste tossed her head. Pericles said to his tutor, offering him a blue and white bowl, “Refresh yourself with an apple, Zeno.” Zeno looked at him sharply and saw a subtle gleam on the boy’s face, and he wanted to laugh but refrained out of respect for Agariste.
“You do not deny the reality and truth of Thermopylae?” said Agariste, with umbrage.
“I know we held the Persians there to some extent,” said Zeno. “But, as many in the east assert, perhaps all is illusion.” He bit into the apple Pericles had given him and sipped a little wine. He stood at the table, rather than sat, for though like many sages he preferred to sit Agariste irritated even his gentle and serene state of mind.
“Illusion!” cried Agariste, moving strongly in her chair so that her pale blue robe was agitated, and her breast rose up and down in disquiet. “That is not only a foolishness, Zeno of Elea, but treason!”
Zeno closed his eyes briefly. He heard a faint chuckle near his elbow and knew that it came from Pericles, who was leaning back on his student’s hard stool and enjoying himself at both his mother’s expense and his tutor’s.
“You do not even wear a dagger!” cried Agariste, exasperated by Zeno’s silence, which she interpreted as a deprecation of her intellect as a woman. “What is a man without the smallest weapon with which to defend himself?”
Zeno deplored this. Agariste was a woman of mind, but she could descend to trivialities and personal attacks on those who offered a thought which conflicted with hers.
He said, with mildness, “From whom, and what, Lady, should I defend myself? I am a humble philosopher and teacher.”
Then Pericles spoke. “Zeno, there are many who would attack you. You may believe yourself the most inoffensive of men, but a number of your ideas and words have aroused antagonism in the city.” He beckoned to a slave near the doors of the house, and when the man approached he said with a sudden authority which surprised Zeno, “Bring the illustrious Zeno of Elea one of the lord Xanthippus’ daggers at once.”
He then looked intently at Zeno and said with firmness, “It is my decree.”
The slave brought an Egyptian dagger of considerable value, set with turquoises and amethysts and deep red stones, some of them intricately carved. “This is very valuable, as well as beautiful,” said Zeno. “Will not the lord Xanthippus object to this gift when he returns?”
“He has the highest regard for you,” said Pericles. “He would deny you nothing.”
Zeno fastened the dagger to his worn silver belt. It felt awkward against his thigh. Pericles observed him with a mocking smile. “I trust you understand how to use a dagger, Zeno?”
Zeno became grave and his glowing face darkened. “I know how to use a sword also,” he said.
Pericles raised his pale golden eyebrows. “In war?”
“In defense,” said Zeno. He looked intently at Agariste, who was calculating the value of the dagger, and Pericles saw this. He turned with courtesy to his mother but also with imperiousness. “My mother,” he said, “may I request that Zeno and I be left alone for a discussion?”
Agariste rose at once and her slave with her, but her lovely face was crimson. She exclaimed, “Am I of so inferior an intelligence that I cannot understand this—Zeno?”
“We will speak as men.” Pericles turned from his mother, overtly expecting her obedience, and gave his attention to Zeno, who was embarrassed again for the poor woman. She left immediately, her head high, and again Zeno pitied her.
When Agariste had departed Zeno sat down, placed his sharp elbows on the table, and contemplated the cheese and wine and bread and honeycomb and fruit and olives before him. Zeno nibbled; he was not aware he was nibbling. His thoughts were far away.
The sun was setting to the west, a conflagration of scarlet and green, and the low roofs of Athens flared with it, and the white walls ran with red shadows. There were murmurous sounds in the air of men and animals, muted, and aromatic odors arose of stone and white and red earth, and the wild scent of jasmine. The palms began to rattle and open their fronds to the breeze. Somewhere there was a babble of high and rasping women’s voices, and their shrill meaningless laughter. Now the zenith of the heavens was brightening into gold. The sound of the little city below was a long and insistent rumbling, hardly to be heard. The flowers of the garden exhaled. Pericles waited, his thin white arms folded on the table. He watched as Zeno nibbled, and once or twice he contemplatively chewed a date. Occasionally he turned his intense regard to the port and saw the sea racing in silver and dim purple. The skull of the moon was rising in the sky, pale as death, and frail.
Zeno finally spoke, but he looked at the harbor and saw the white sails leaving as the tide went out. He said, “It is strange that the government and the priests do not recognize an obvious evil, but seek out to denounce evils which do not truly exist, and only offend their distorted sensibilities.”
“Yes?” said the young Pericles. “My father agrees with you. He believes governments are wicked by their nature, for who dominates other men will misuse his power, out of vanity and aggrandisement
.”
Zeno suddenly heard and looked piercingly at his pupil. “True,” he said.
“Who, then, should rule?”
Zeno smiled wryly. “Who, indeed? When men become fully human—which I doubt will ever occur—they will rule themselves.” He spit out an olive pit and gloomily drank a little wine. He said, “Animals have their rule of authority. The wisest and strongest control, in succession, the layers beneath them, which descend to the lowest level, and no one disputes. But there is growing in Athens the error of Demos—democracy—which is a retreat from rational government. All men are equal, say their philosophers. But, what is ‘equal? Equality under the law, or privileged ‘equality’ by furious demand of the inferior envious? You will find, Pericles, that politicians are the most cowardly of men. They seek votes.”
Pericles waited. A big white moth hovered over the table and caught the brilliant sunset light on its wings, and it was a little lightning.
Pericles was fascinated. How beautiful was nature in even its smallest manifestations! Pericles did not speak of his inmost dream to anyone, not even to Zeno.
Zeno lifted his eyes and studied his pupil. He thought over what he must convey to the youth. Many philosophers believed that man had an instinctive knowledge of private things, enhanced by the observation of domestic animals in their breeding, and that any hazards or errors or misunderstandings would be corrected by experience. These same philosophers—with some truth—said that it was not possible to give the young the value of the experiences of their elders, for youth scoffs at bitter knowledge, and wisdom and elderly sagacity, and prefers to make its own disasters and wreck its own life, as if none had lived before it. Alas, thought Zeno. The world is very old and is growing older and there will never be a “new” planet, but only repetition which will be hailed as novelty and progress, because the young ignore the ancient history of their inheritance.