The Golden Mean (19 page)

“My mother told me otherwise,” I say. The boys snicker.

“It’s true.” Hephaestion seems not even to have to raise his voice, though his chest heaves. He and Alexander have broken apart and are circling each other again; I guess he spoke only to taunt his opponent with his casualness. “He’s a Macedonian. A Stageirite.”

“He’s an Athenian,” another voice cries, and the hooting starts again. Oh, for the repressive presence of Leonidas.

“What’s in the jar, Stageirite?” Ptolemy asks from his corner.

“My father wiped Stageira off the map.” Alexander abruptly stands from the wary crouch in which he’s readying to meet Hephaestion’s tense embrace. “Like shit from his shoes.”

The pages part to let him through.

“What’s in the jar?” he asks.

I upend the jar into a large, shallow dish I’ve brought from home for this purpose. Pythias and I and the servants have lately eaten a stew from it. The tiny creatures scramble blackly over each other, half-scaling and then tumbling back down the shallow sides. I give the jar’s bottom a spank to disgorge the last of them and the chunks of earth I’ve provided as a temporary home.

“Ants,” Alexander says. His interest is no longer a boy’s interest in their dirtiness and squirming, but a man’s interest in the metaphor to come.

“Tell me about ants,” I say.

As Alexander speaks, I’m aware of Hephaestion, who is lingering in the colonnade, towelling the golden sweat off himself and laughing with two older pages who likewise have hung back from the lesson. Extraordinary behaviour, since lovely Hephaestion does not noticeably have a mind of his own. When he sees me looking at him, something in his face falters. He’s a sweet boy, essentially, and it goes against his nature to be malicious or manipulative, as he’s attempting to be now. I wonder what the quarrel was.

“Indeed,” I say to Alexander, who has concluded his little peroration on the inferiority, the absolute inconsequence, of ants, and is looking calmer. If it rouses him to use his body, it settles him to use his mind. “Yet they are like men, also, if we care to see it.”

Man and young men and boys stare into the bowl, into the writhing mass there.

“You have a way, Athenian,” Alexander says in his dreamiest voice, “of beginning all your teachings by putting me wrong.”

“Ants were the easiest to collect for my purpose. I could equally have brought you wasps. Or cranes. Willingly would I have brought you a flock of cranes, had I the traps.”

Alexander says nothing, waiting.

I explain that these animals share with men a need to live communally, with a single purpose or goal common to them all: they build dwellings, share food, and work to perpetuate their kind.

“We live in an anthill?” Alexander says. “Or some shit-splashed crane’s nest? Athens must have been grand.”

“But the difference, the difference is that man distinguishes good from bad, just from unjust. No other animal does that. That is the basis of a state just as it is the basis of a household.”

“Laws.” Ptolemy looks interested.

“Athens has the grandest of laws, too, doesn’t it?” Alexander persists. “The most just? I think it must have the very best of everything. How you must long for it.”

“Indeed, at times, when my students are tiresome. It is the ideal state.”

The sound of twenty pages who have momentarily forgotten how to exhale.

“Macedon is the ideal state,” Alexander says.

“Macedon is an empire, not a state. In the ideal state, every citizen participates in the life of the polis, in the judiciary, in the promotion of the good and the just. Different states have different constitutions, of course, governing the amount and kind of power each citizen may possess. I might speak to you of Sparta, of Thebes, of their different constitutions. I might speak to you of polity, where the middle class holds the balance of power. Although each individual may not be utterly good, or utterly fit to lead, the ability of the collective of individuals always exceeds the sum of its parts. Think of a communal dinner, so much more enjoyable than a dinner provided at one individual’s expense. I might in this regard speak of Athens.”

“We are at war with Athens.” Ptolemy comes closer. “You might rather speak of Macedon.”

“I might, equally, speak to you of monarchy.” I skate over the interruption and the warning it implies, of thin ice below. “Where one family exceeds all others in excellence, is it not right that that family should govern?”

“Is that a question?” Alexander says.

“What are the goals of the state? I propose two: self-sufficiency and liberty.”

Ptolemy, at my elbow now, leans over and upends the bowl of ants. The boys cry out in shivery pleasure as the ants spill over their hands and feet and clothes and onto the floor.

“Liberty.” Ptolemy shrugs, brushing dirt from his hands. “Chaos.”

“You said best of seven,” Hephaestion calls suddenly, with the precisely ridiculous timing of a very bad but determined actor. “We’re only at three and two. Caught your breath or do you need more time?”

Their collision, the sound of it, reminds me that men, too, are meat. The cheers of the boys drown out the sounds of the fight, and I quickly recover my bowl before it gets broken. They have no respect for me today; there will be no further lesson. As I prepare to withdraw, I meet Ptolemy’s look.

“Pretty place, was it, Stageira?” Ptolemy asks, not unkindly.

I thank him for his interest.

“In fact, I know it was pretty.” The boys scream and roil about us and Alexander and Hephaestion abandon wrestling for fists, messier and more true. “I was there when they—”

“Yes. I wondered.”

“Only you should be more careful.” Ptolemy glances at the pages, then meets my eyes again with his straight, cool, frank look, sympathetic, though with no purchase for friendship in it. “No one wants to hear about the glories of Athens right now. We are at war.”

“Am I to fear boys, then?”

“Boys,” Ptolemy says. “Boys, their fathers.”

“What do you hear from the army?” Philip is on campaign again. Thermopylae was supposed to hold him back, as it had so many invaders in the past, but the Athenians and the Thebans between them forgot to reinforce the back roads, and Philip simply took the long way round. He has recently taken the city of Elateia, two or three days’ march from Attica and Athens.

“Diplomatic overtures to Thebes,” Ptolemy says. “Join us against Athens, or at least stay neutral and let us pass through your territory without trouble. Though I hear Demosthenes himself is in Thebes, waiting to deliver the Athenian pitch.”

“You hear a lot.”

“I do.”

“I’m surprised you’re not with them.”

“Antipater asked me to stay here.”

We watch the fight.

“He’s feeling much better,” Ptolemy says.

I thank him for the information.

At home I’m met by Tycho, who tells me Pythias has given birth to a daughter. I find her asleep in clean sheets with her hair dressed, and the baby already bathed and swaddled, sleeping in a basket beside her. Athea is in the kitchen kneading bread, thank you, as though this were the day’s real work that she’s had to interrupt to deliver a baby.

“Easy,” she says before I can speak. “Long time but no problems. Always first is long time. Next is easier. My lady—”

She struggles for the words. I wonder when Pythias became her lady instead of my wife, when that affection set in.

“Resting?” I suggest.

She raps a knuckle on a cooking pot. “Iron.” Satisfied, she turns back to her doughs.

“Thank you.”

“Next time easier.” She doesn’t bother to look over her shoulder at me. “Maybe I even let you watch.”

A week after the birth, I carry the baby around the altar Pythias has lit, purifying her. We’ve hung wool from the doors to show the world it’s a girl, and prepared a feast, overseen by Athea, to celebrate her life so far. Athea is fiercely possessive of the creature, to the point where I’ve seen her take the baby from Pythias’s arms and make Pythias cry, but I don’t intervene. After ten days we prepare another feast, inviting some friends this time, for the name-day. Callisthenes brings rattles for my daughter and pretty painted vases for Pythias, as is the tradition, while Athea watches us all blackly, muttering to herself, her face softening only when she looks at the baby.

Little Pythias has a boxer’s crease across the bridge of her nose and looks at me with a gaze the slaves say is preternaturally calm and steady, and foretells great wisdom. Other auguries: a white bee in the rosemary, a flight of swallows across the moon at dusk, unseasonable warmth and a sweet-smelling breeze at midnight, a pepper of sparks from a kitchen fire that had supposedly been extinguished. The household collects these happenings and trades them like rare coins. These and other wondrous events continue for weeks, reaching a fever pitch when we all are at our most sleep-deprived. I understand that every household with a new baby goes as foolish fond, and I collect more quietly, and keep to myself, my own talismans: the spider’s thread of milk from wife’s breast to daughter’s lip when they draw apart after a feeding; the abrupt drop of the baby’s brows when something amuses her; the way, at times of greatest distress, she buries her entire face in her mother’s breast, as though seeking oblivion there. Liberty and self-sufficiency: the house is like a ship, Pythias and I and the servants like mariners, united by the determination to protect our tiny, mewling freight. Tycho lines a handcart with pillows and clean woollens and clatters the baby up and down the courtyard while the servants clap their hands in time and cry, bump, bump! for her greater amusement. She smiles pacifically, with an infant’s mild aristocracy. Everything, everyone, it all belongs to her. When she mouths her first bites of honey pap, the slaves meet my eye, smile, and congratulate me. I realize they don’t often look me in the eye.

Pythias I had worried for, not knowing if she would rise to motherhood or be sunk by it; her cold elegance and alien distance didn’t bode well. But her breasts went plump with milk, and she sat on the floor, even in her linens, to fuss and coo at the baby. She weeps with exhaustion, from time to time, and both she and the baby fret when anyone—from myself to Tycho—leaves the house for too long. Liberty we have none, but there is self-sufficiency in our pleasure in the child and each other. Everyone, myself included, seems to touch more, as though the urge to touch the baby, to finger the downy depth of her scalp or the delectable fat toes, has transferred to one another. I myself, though she’s only a girl, undertake to supervise her education, which must begin, I tell anyone who will listen, as early as possible. In the ideal state, the education of children will be the highest business of government.

“Oh, the ideal state,” Pythias says. “I suppose she will need to know how to read, in the ideal state?” For she has caught me reciting the alpha-beta-gamma to the baby, who watches me wide-eyed from her bassinet of woven reeds, working her fists open and closed.

“I work with the materials I’m given.”

“I suppose, in your ideal state, she will be a citizen?”

I explain why that is ridiculous. The hierarchy of the state mimics that of the household, where men lead and women and slaves obey, as nature has fitted them to do.

T
HEBES VOTED TO GO WITH
A
THENS
, initiating a rare winter campaign. Philip, in an unusual tactical error, didn’t rush south to take the pass, but hung back thinking he might still politic a resolution. The Athenians raced north to seize the pass and for some months the opposing armies are locked in position, making small feints at each other with no real engagement. When spring comes, Philip falls back on the oldest trick in the book: he allows a false letter to fall into Athenian hands suggesting he’s giving up and going home. He even backs his army up a little, only to turn in the night and ram the pass, where the Athenians have let their defences down. Philip takes the pass and the city, and the stalemate is ended.

Pythias has been distracted lately, frowning, and asks me to write a brief life of Hermias for a keepsake, which I do one morning in the courtyard while my fat daughter sits on the sun-warmed stones, babbling and staring at her fingers. I haven’t permitted her to be swaddled, believing it inhibits the development of the muscles. And here she is, a healthy baby, pink and blooming; Hermias’s own blood, perhaps, babbling prettily in the sun. I think the old fox would have been moved despite himself.

“It’s lovely,” Pythias says.

“I was thinking of our Little Pythias as I wrote it.”

She thanks me again, then frowns and puts a hand to her side. A moment later I’m calling for the slaves, supporting her in my arms. She has to be carried to her bed, where she lies in great pain for several days.

“What is?” Athea asks me. She’s stopped me in the hall outside our bedroom. Asks; demands, truly. She doesn’t look happy.

“I don’t know.”

“I look. Is no baby again.”

“She is not pregnant, no.”

“I’m tell you,” she says, annoyed. “Is sickness.”

“She is a little warm. Apart from the pain in the belly, there is some paleness, a bit of sweating. Cool cloths, I think, and a light diet. Clear liquids. We will wait a few days and watch how it progresses.” I have begun a case study, as my father would have; my first since boyhood. I’m not happy, either.

“I tell women,” Athea says.

I’m not sure I understand; I wonder if it is the chasm between our languages, if something is getting lost there.
“You
are her woman,” I say, slowly, loudly. “I am instructing you in her care. You are skilled in these things, more than the others; you will follow my instructions and report to me if there is any change.”

“No,” Athea says. “I tell women. I no do with sick.”

For a moment I have no words. Then: “What are you talking about?”

“I no do with sick.” She crosses her arms across her breast for emphasis, a bit of business that makes me think briefly of Carolus.

I could hit her, whip her, maim her, slit her thick throat for impudence. Could.

“I tell women for you,” she says. “Cool cloth, light food. I tell.”