Beautiful male and female slaves posed for the hetairai for their lessons in painting and sculpture and mosaics. The bodies were carefully chosen for their grace and youth. Though Thargelia instructed the teacher that he should emphasize the attributes of alluring sexual differences, and expose the male slaves to the utmost scrutiny of her virgins, and discourse on their attributes and endowments, Tmolus preferred that these matters be discussed in the frame of artistry. “There is no coyness or libidinous aspects to Art,” he would say. “That which is exquisite is above tittering and filthiness. The evil is not in the object but in the viewer. We bring to art all our falsities and degradation, but in themselves the objects are neither lewd nor meretricious. In short, what we view can be interpreted innocently and with admiration, or debauched. It is in ourselves.”
The majority of the maidens preferred to peek and giggle, which outraged Tmolus. “You are fools!” he would cry. “Did not the gods create man and woman? Did they find either licentious, in their bodies, or obscene? These things are in your own minds, and that is sad. But I have discerned that youth is innately gross and is born impure. That is the curse of mankind.”
Once Aspasia had said to him, “But does not the belief that certain things are evil and disgusting enhance their value in human minds?”
Tmolus considered this. Then he said, “Alas, it is true.”
But still he struggled with the young girls assigned to him. Art, he would tell them, is above good and evil. He knew that in this he defied the purse-lipped Ecclesia who found evil in everything, and even denounced naked athletes, and, of a certainty, beauty itself. “No doubt they would destroy bees, who fertilize the flowers, if they dared,” Tmolus complained bitterly.
Aspasia put this into her mind and pondered on it, and knew it was true. Like Tmolus she deplored the fact that sculptors painted the noble white majesty of marble statues. “Let there be innocence,” Tmolus endlessly repeated. “Why must mankind inflict its meanness and mediocrity on that which is natively simple and complete? If there is any evil at all it is in the complicated intricacy of the deformed human soul, which must daub and smear its offal on that which is pure.”
From Tmolus she learned more of true glory and reverence than she did from her teachers of theology.
She had known since childhood that she was not capable of creating great sculpture nor was she adept at painting, for all her efforts. Tmolus consoled her. “It is not necessary to create beauty to appreciate it, my child. For what do sculptors and painters labor? For the joy of those who view. We cannot all be artists. But is the viewer who loves and reverences less than he who also loves and creates and reverences? Do the gods demand that we be gods also? No. It is enough for us to rejoice in them and in those they have gifted.”
Aspasia would hold cool marble in her hands and often she became ecstatic over it. Her heart lifted when she touched mosaics and gazed on pictures. This reproduction of nature exalted her. Her taste was immaculate and sure. She, like her teacher, hated mediocrity. “Excellence,” said Tmolus, “is the utter goal of a true artist. It is not relevant that all who love excellence in art be artists themselves. It is enough to appreciate it. That appreciation is the accolade and the contentment of all artists. Without an understanding of excellence a man is an animal.”
He would add, “Alas, no artist ever attains, in his work, the perfection for which he strives. Perfection is beyond humanity, but that does not mean we should abandon it as a goal.”
To Aspasia, who desired to be excellent in all things, this was a consolation. So she cultivated her adoration of beauty and her understanding of it. She fervently hoped that some day she would be able to influence a powerful man to become a patron of the arts. It would not be possible to endure a man who would revel in her own loveliness and not be aware of its greater meaning. Sensuality was not enough. Physical beauty was transient. That which was graven in stone and was painted in luminous colors and written eloquently in books endured. Helen of Troy was dead, but the memory of her beauteousness remained to inspire poets and artists. Legend was eternal, and never grew old and ugly. That was why the gods continued to be magnificent, beyond human pollution.
Today, Tmolus had a new model for his maidens.
The young girl, nude and gleaming like amber, was of some twelve years, innocently unaware of her nakedness. Her long black hair touched breasts still budlike and she had little pubic hair. She looked with curiosity at the maidens who trooped in, but it was a childlike curiosity, vacant and only vaguely aware. She stood with one elbow leaning on a half pedestal of marble and moved restlessly. Her name was Cleo. Slender and delicate, she was being considered by Thargelia as a candidate for the hetairai, for she was quick of thought and beguiling, when it concerned herself. Thargelia had recently received her as a handmaiden, and she was reputed not only to be the child of a beautiful courtesan but of a man of some importance in Miletus.
Cleo looked more closely at the maidens who assembled at their stations for clay molding and painting and mosaics, considering them somewhat elderly. Then her eyes fixed themselves on Aspasia, who seemed to bring a lambent light into the room. Immediately, she was filled with childish adoration, as one is transfixed at the sight of a nymph. Drawn by the girl’s intent gaze, Aspasia looked intently at her and she was touched with admiration. She was like a statue of the young Eros, and resembled spring. As always, Aspasia felt sadness and frustration that she was unable to mold in an exceptional manner and that never could she recreate in perfection what she saw. One of the maidens was adept at painting, and Aspasia went to the girl’s easel and saw, again with a lurch of envy, that the maiden was already delineating Cleo’s head with swift strokes of a piece of charcoal and had even sketched in that perfect young body. Aspasia went to one of the other maidens who was patiently matching small stones for her mosaic. I do not have the patience, she thought. My mind leaps too much. However, she found a small blue stone for which the maiden was searching. When it fitted exactly she was almost overcome with gratification. My eye is good, she thought, though, alas, my hands will not obey me.
She looked at Cleo again. Sunlight touched the form of the child and seemed to glimmer through it, as through honey. Aspasia sighed. She understood now what Tmolus meant when he had said that no one could reproduce nature in her living radiance, no matter how he dreamt and worked and sighed, and why he was never satisfied with what he had created.
Tmolus, who loved Aspasia, saw her longing face and he thought: Why cannot she understand that one cannot be excellent in all things? But he understood that it is the nature of genius to desire nothing but perfection, so he did not rebuke Aspasia for her air of desperation when she attempted to mold in clay or chisel in marble, or when she dashed a brush to the floor when working at her easel. She despised herself in this room. Yet she could not have enough of being in it.
The next class was in rhetoric, in which Aspasia excelled. Here she could forget her humiliation in Tmolus’ room. Her voice, resonant and firm and exceedingly musical, moved her teacher to wonder and tears. It was a voice without the coyness of a woman’s. The other maidens would listen, enthralled, even if they barely understood the subject. Aspasia’s eyes would take on an unusual brilliance and her gestures had more than grace. When she quoted a passage from Homer the room seemed filled with the glory of the Gemini and Achilles and Apollo and Hercules and Odysseus. She has a Syren’s voice, the teacher would think. She will be able to lure men to good and evil. Helen of Troy must have possessed such, for beauty is not enough to enthrall men.
After this class came dancing and music and instructions on the lyre and flute. Here, too, Aspasia excelled, though she considered dancing of no particular importance. But music enchanted her. She could, even now, manipulate the musical instruments so that they appeared to have an extra dimension and depth, and struck the heart with emotion.
Her lessons in theology were no felicitous occasions. But she held her tongue, knowing the punishments in
flicted by the Ecclesia on anyone suspected of heresy or dissent against the prevailing religion. Her face would flash, however, and her eyes become scornful at some pious pedantry. The teacher would reduce the grandeur of the gods to mere mortality, he believing that degrading the inexplicable and the majesty to low human understanding and status and familiarity made them more comprehensible.
He made Olympus, the abode of the gods, a suburb of Athens, or even of Miletus.
Aspasia always felt embattled when she went to her class in politics and history, and her teacher detested her for her arguments and controversies. “Who writes history?” she had asked him once. “Mere mortals, who make their own interpretations, according to their whims and subjective opinions, of what has transpired. History is easily distorted. As for politics, it is an exercise in hysteria.” But the subjects engrossed her as well as angered her. It was said that if Helen of Troy’s nose had been longer or her eyes less luminous Troy would never have been burned, nor would her husband have desired her to the death, nor would Paris have abducted her. On such trivialities did the affairs of men founder! She found both politics and history endlessly amusing, for the light they shone on the vagaries of human nature. “They should be the province of comedians,” she once remarked, “but certainly should not be regarded as objective and immutable truth.” At one time she had even said that history was made by madmen, and wars were the ultimate madness, a remark that did not endear her to her teacher.
“Is not everything made by man and the result of man?” he had asked her, to which Aspasia said, “No. There are imponderables beyond the knowledge and the understanding of man.” The teacher complained she was a mere chit, and a woman, and so therefore of no importance, and her opinions of no consequence. The maidens, who did not love Aspasia for her beauty and superiority to them, would titter. At least Aspasia dispensed with the ennui of teaching with her arguments, and for that they were grateful.
The teacher, Aeneas, was a Greek. Therefore he expounded frequently on the defeat of the Persians at Thermopylae. “I am not superstitious,” he would say, “but I believe in the Fates. Athens, and all of Greece, was preserved by some mysterious intervention. It seemed impossible that Xerxes could be defeated by us, we contentious Greeks, who suspected and even hated each other and were constantly quarreling and envious—men from the sallow mountains, the hot cliffs and passes, the fishing villages, the small towns even smaller than Athens, which is itself small and insignificant. Outnumbered by at least a score or more to one—and the immediate invaders but the first wave of a sea of soldiers and sailors—the Greeks had met the foe on their sacred land and waters and had driven him ignominiously away. This little land, all burning silver dust and mountains, all furious green torrents and crags and small green valleys and brilliant purple seas and miserable villages and stony roads and powdery fields and ardent blue skies, had stubbornly refused to be conquered and held slave to the mighty Xerxes and preferred, in all truth, liberty or death.”
Aspasia admired the poetry of his words, but she had said, “Solon declared that all men should be free. But we have slaves. Is not a slave a man?”
The teacher had glared at her. “We believe a slave to be a thing, not a man. The gods ordained his fate. The gods ordained freedom for men. If a man is not born free, then he is not truly human.”
“There is something wrong with your syllogism,” Aspasia said.
“Enlighten me!” said the teacher with wrath.
“Solon was a great and wise man,” said Aspasia. “He desired to establish a republic, but Athens has declined into a democracy. Therein is a great tragedy in government. But no matter. When Solon declared that all men should be free, and free from inquisitive and interfering government, he did not divide mankind into those born free and those who were born slave. Again, he demanded that slavery be abolished, so he did not consider a slave a mere thing, but a man.”
The teacher had then ignored this chit, had drawn another breath and continued with his history lesson.
“Certainly the Spartans—whom I usually deplore for their austerity—were the most disciplined and were a community of soldiers and lived only for war, but they were nothing to the armies and navies of Xerxes. As for us Athenians,” and he smiled fondly, “we are volatile and pride ourselves on our wit and our energy and our love for beauty, and we practice roguery in the market place, and it is alleged we cannot be trusted by our fellow Greeks. But less can be said of the men of Thebes, whom everyone agrees are uncivilized.
“The towns and the villages were in panic, and sent as few as possible of fighting men to confront the enemy in various places, keeping most of their warriors at home to defend their wives and children and the gritty walls of their habitations, and their scabrous domestic animals. But the armies of Xerxes were as locusts, Arabs, Cabalians and Milyans, Tibareni, Colchians with carved wooden helmets, Medes with their thin dark faces and their reputation as valorous soldiers, Negroes in the skins of animals, Pisidians, Moschians, Saspires, Thracians—and rivers of horses and oxen and glittering war chariots. Ninety thousand archers and spearsmen alone, not to mention swordsmen with leather shields and Persians, themselves, who are famous for ferocity, and mercenary Cissians, Assyrians, Scythians in felt trousers and barbaric Caspians in high-heeled boots and varicolored clothing—all these poured onto the burning plains of Greece and the scintillating dust rolled over them in clouds that caught the igniting sun. They also engaged the Greeks in the incandescent waters.
“At Thermopylae the Persian forces confronted but seven thousand Greeks, poorly armed except with courage even in the face of their own cynicism and fear, and prepared to die to defend the pass. It was said that Xerxes, himself, pitied them and admired them.
“His spies had told him that that wretched and quarrelsome army of Spartans, Thebans and some Athenians was being led by Leonidas of Sparta, a fierce captain and a man of fiercer independence. I may note here, as an Athenian, that the Spartans are as mindless as a hill of ants, as well as great warriors—”
“It would follow,” Aspasia interrupted.
The teacher’s face swelled with angry blood. He raised his voice and went on: “How such a society, alien to us free Greeks, could have bred a man like Leonidas is a mystery, and was a mystery to Xerxes also. He was a surly man, but intelligent, unlike his fellow Spartans who are only cruel and valiant. However. The earth at Thermopylae rumbled like a drum and the thunder of the gods under the feet of Xerxes’ armored men of many nations, including his Company of the Immortals, his personal and finest troops. And the Greeks met them in the narrow pass and held them immobile until they were betrayed by one of their own, who had led the Persians behind the pass. Xerxes killed the heroic Spartans to a man and advanced on Athens and burned her to the ground.”
“A man is always betrayed by his own kindred and by those he loves the most,” said Aspasia.
“Hah!” cried the teacher, moved to fresh anger. “You, who are of such a great and venerable age, how do you know this?”
Aspasia answered with her exasperating demureness, “You have taught us history, Aeneas.”
“Hah,” he said, but in a milder voice. “We will continue. The Spartans and the barefoot Thebans, with a number of Athenians, men of no importance, defeated the irresistible Xerxes at Mycale, and, greatest of all, at Salamis and later at Platea. How was it possible? At the last they had, these brave men, only their naked hands and bleeding feet and teeth and nails, when their thin spears and iron swords and weak little ships had splintered and disintegrated. What great secret heart had moved them to fight thus, and made them larger than the average man, if only for a few hours? What had inspired envious little souls and quarrelsome little minds and had given them divinity and incredible courage?”
“They were fighting for their lives,” said Aspasia. “They had nothing to lose but their lives.”
“You deny heroism, and the ability of men to fight for something greater than themselves?” cried the
teacher, goaded beyond endurance.
“I do deny that men will fight for something greater than their own selves,” said Aspasia. “It is against human nature.”
“You do not believe in personal nobility?”
“I have not observed it.”
“You are a cynic, my child, and I pity you.”
“I am a student of mankind. A man fights to protect himself and his own cherished rights, and if he fights for anything else he is either a madman or a god.”
The teacher let a portentous silence fall while he regarded Aspasia with hooded eyes. “You equate madness with the gods?” he asked in an ominously soft voice, he who had often hinted he did not believe in the gods.
Aspasia saw the dangerous trap. “Madness, it is often said, is akin to divinity. You have told us that yourself, Aeneas. ‘The divine madness.’”
“I was referring to poetry, and to the divine madness of a man who will fight for something nobler than himself, and the divine madness of artists. War is an art, also, as we Greeks have always said, though you Ionians are slow to discern it.”
“We once allied ourselves with Sparta,” said Aspasia, “which, I agree, was a madness in itself.”
Today, to the maidens’ fatigue, Aeneas continued his quarrel with Aspasia over the difference between a republic and a democracy. He asserted they were the same, as he had asserted before. But Aspasia said, “Solon desired a free republic. But though the Greeks honor that desire they are only a democracy, and so dangerous. Unfortunately, though Solon conceived the permanent base for a republic he did not frame the establishment of such. So, the rule of Athens fell into the hands of the Tyrants, who introduced democracy. The Athenians are too volatile and too active in insignificant affairs and too full of laughter and change, and too excitable, to extend Solon’s dream of a republic.”
Aeneas said, “As you are so wise, my pupil, define the difference between a democracy, which is Athens, and a republic.”