Amber and Clay
Page 17
and that something is what makes a bee a bee.
That’s what I’m after.
What is virtue? What is excellence? What is ἀρετή?”
They went on like that for a while.
They talked about courage and wisdom and justice
and a bucketful of things
that have nothing to do with me.
I wasn’t paying attention.
There’s a lot to see at the White Dog:
wrestlers struggling in the sand pits,
a man throwing the javelin.
There were three flute players,
playing different tunes.
Across the courtyard
there were paintings on the wall. Herakles, I think:
grappling with a lion,
mobbed by swans.
I strained to see.
Men left off watching the athletes —
Sokrates could always draw a crowd —
and came to listen. At one point — I don’t know why —
Sokrates asked Menon what a shape was.
Menon said shapes were triangles and squares and circles —
but Sokrates asked again, “What’s the same about all of them?”
I pricked up my ears,
because I know about shapes —
not that I recall anyone teaching me.
I know what a circle is,
and a square,
so it seemed like a simple question,
but I couldn’t answer it.
Menon couldn’t either. He’d thought this old man
was going to be easy to trick,
but now that they were face-to-face,
he couldn’t say what a shape was. He said:
“You tell me, Sokrates.”
And Sokrates said, “If I tell you what a shape is,
will you tell me about excellence?”
“I will.”
“In that case, I must do my best. It’s in a good cause.”
By then, I was paying attention. Sokrates said
a shape was the outside, or the limit,
of something solid. Which I guess it is.
Then Menon wanted to know what color was —
not just blue or green or black
but what color was. He wasn’t going to keep his promise about ἀρετή
until Sokrates told him.
Sokrates said: “Anyone talking to you, even blindfolded,
would know you were good-looking!
You lay down the law as a spoiled boy does.
You’ll be a tyrant
as long as your good looks last.
Now, I can never resist good looks,
so I’ll give in
and let you have your answer.”
Menon was pleased. He tossed back his curls,
shrugging and showing off
at the same time. He hadn’t noticed
that Sokrates had called him spoiled
and tyrant.
Sokrates was fool enough to dance naked
on the hillside of the Akropolis,
but he knew what Menon was.
There was sun in the courtyard,
but we were under the portico
and it was cold. I stood with my head down,
braced against the chill.
I got to wondering if I knew what ἀρετή was.
It came to me that, if I could draw a horse
that really looked like a horse,
I’d call that ἀρετή. I started thinking about horses.
If you ask me, just by being a horse,
a horse is excellent. But some
are better than others —
the swift horses,
the ones with horse sense,
and the ones that are beautiful —
Menon was telling Sokrates that excellence
was the ability to get things —
gold and silver, and good health and honors —
and Sokrates asked,
“Do you call it excellence if those things are acquired unjustly?”
“Certainly not.”
Then Sokrates said Menon was making a fool of him.
They’d agreed that justice was part of excellence,
but getting things could be done with justice
or without justice,
so getting things couldn’t be the same thing as excellence.
“Let’s go back to the beginning. Answer my question:
What is ἀρετή?”
Menon complained that Sokrates was confusing him.
Sokrates was like a wizard
putting a spell on him,
numbing him
like a stingray,
making him forget
everything he knew.
Then Sokrates started quoting poetry
and saying that learning was like remembering.
I stopped listening when he started with the poetry.
My toes were numb —
I was rubbing one set of toes against another
trying to warm them —
Then Menon said: “Come here.”
And he meant me. Everyone was looking at me.
The old men, and Anytus
and Menon, and the wrestlers,
who’d stopped wrestling.
Sokrates asked Menon: “He is Greek and speaks our language?”
Menon said yes, I was,
which surprised me,
because he always made such a point
of me being a Thracian barbarian.
But then, my father —
Menon’s father, or his uncle —
was Greek. It’s the male that creates life,
not the female,
so —
I was Greek.
I’d never thought of that before.
“Listen carefully, and see whether he learns from me,”
said Sokrates,
“or whether he’s just being reminded.”
He led me from the portico into the sunlight, by the sand pits.
The others followed. He smoothed out the sand
picked up a stick
and drew a square.
I was in a panic.
Sokrates was doing some kind of show with me,
and I was going to look stupid
in front of everyone. I felt like a snared rabbit.
A rabbit doesn’t know about the knife
or the cooking pot,
but once it’s caught,
it knows that what happens next
isn’t going to be good.
“Now, boy, you know that a square is a thing like this?”
“Yes.”
“It has all four sides equal?”
“Yes.”
He drew a cross in the square.
“And the lines that go through the middle are also equal?”
“Yes.”
He asked me how many of the little squares there were,
and he pointed with the stick, giving me time.
I started to feel better. My mother taught me numbers,
and I thought, maybe he was going to stick to easy things,
like two and two making four. I glanced up.
There wasn’t any malice in his face.
“Now, could you draw a square double the size of this,
with all sides equal?”
“Yes.”
“If the first square has four small squares inside it,
how many will the second square have?”
“Eight.”
“How long will each side be?”
“They’ll be twice as long, Sokrates. Obviously.”
I used his name.
It’s polite for a slave to speak the master’s name.
He handed me the stick. Here’s the thing that scares me,
that makes me laugh:
I almost drew a horse. It was just for a moment
when my hand closed around the stick,
b
ut I wanted to draw a horse. I felt a horse gallop down
from my thoughts
to my arm
to my fingers
to the stick.
Instead, I drew the square:
I saw I’d got it wrong.
If you make the lines twice as long,
you get something that’s four times bigger, not two.
And I didn’t have eight little squares. I had sixteen.
I was ashamed. I mumbled:
“It’s not right.”
I don’t know if Sokrates heard me,
but he asked me to try again.
He asked how I could get a square that was twice as big,
not four times. Already I had a new idea —
I said yes, I thought I could.
He answered, “Right! Always answer what you think.”
I started over;
this time I made the lines only one and a half times as long —
but it still wasn’t right. I could see it.
I wanted eight small squares, but I had nine.
Sokrates asked me again: how could I make a square
twice as big as the first one?
I stared at the marks in the dirt.
“It’s no use, Sokrates. I honestly don’t know.”
That’s when I expected everyone to laugh,
but they didn’t. I lifted my eyes, just a minute,
and saw Sokrates beaming at me
as if I’d said something astonishing
and good. It was as if he were proud of me.
I couldn’t remember anyone
ever
looking at me that way. He said to Menon,
“Look how far he’s come on the path of remembering!
At the beginning, he didn’t know how to draw the square,
— and he still doesn’t. But he thought he knew,
and he answered boldly, as he should have;
he felt no confusion.
Now he feels confusion!”
Menon said, “That’s true.”
“But isn’t he better off? We’ve helped him!
Before he thought he knew the answer,
but he was wrong.
Now he knows he doesn’t know, and he’s eager to find out!
Now he will seek the truth in our company.
Let’s give him another try. I won’t tell him the answer.
If you catch me instructing him, stop me.
I will only ask him questions.”
He showed me the square again,
and this time he divided it
corner to corner.
They were halves, but they were triangles.
He told me those slanty lines were called diagonals.
He was asking me questions,
and I was answering them,
but the fact is, once I saw them
— those diagonals —
the whole answer came in a rush.
I could imagine
having four triangles
and moving them around —
They’d spin like the fourths of a chariot wheel
— a wheel isn’t square —
but at the hub of a wheel,
where the four spokes meet . . . ?
there are triangles, four triangles —
If I took half that square
and made it somersault
back
to back
to back
to back
I’d have a square twice as big.
Four halves make two!
I reached for the stick.
Sokrates gave it to me right away.
I drew another square, made of triangles,
and counted the triangles,
poking each one with a stick.
I rubbed out the extra markings with my foot.
I looked up. Several of the men were nodding,
and one burly fellow —
his name was Aristokles —
raised his eyebrows
as if to say Well done!
Sokrates was grinning. “Is it your personal opinion
that the square on the diagonal
is double the size of the original square?”
I couldn’t keep from grinning back.
“Yes.”
Sokrates spoke to Menon. “What do you think?
Only a few minutes ago, he didn’t know!”
Menon said, “True.”
“Has anyone taught him geometry?
You would know. He was brought up in your household.”
“No one ever taught him anything.”
It flashed through my head:
I was taught to pick up turds.
“All the same, those opinions were inside him.
Because I questioned him, he was able to remember.
He found the answer by himself.
He must have formed his ideas before this life,
when he was not in human shape.
He remembered like someone remembering a dream.”
I stood there with the stick in my hand,
my mind whirling
swift as a chariot wheel
in the course of a race.
Like the discus
leaving the hand of the thrower
my mind spun free —
I raised my eyes to the sky
and saw an omen: a hawk
scything the blue,
a blessing from Apollo.
I almost interrupted. I almost shouted,
I remembered the chariot wheel!
— then for a moment I wondered
if that was cheating: remembering one thing
that reminds you of another.
But then I thought,
my memory gave me the chariot wheel
at just the right time.
Any way you worked it out,
I wasn’t stupid. And if learning was remembering,
I could remember more things
just by thinking.
I wouldn’t need anyone to teach me,
and I wouldn’t have to be stupid all my life.
Then Sokrates was saying
that since nobody taught me geometry
(because that’s what it’s called,
those problems with squares and lines: geometry)
I must have understood it in my soul
before I was born.
Before I was even human.
He said, “If the truth is always in our soul
the soul must be immortal. One must take courage
and try to discover —
that is, to remember —
what one doesn’t happen to know.
One thing I’m ready to fight for —
that we shall be better, braver, and more active men
if we try to find out what we don’t know.”
I was on fire, thinking about my soul.
I hadn’t known I had one,
because of being a slave. But Sokrates seemed to think I did:
a wise part of me
from before I was born.
I was as good as other men, slave or not,
because of my soul.
By now, Menon was bored with the question: What is ἀρετή?
He wanted to skip ahead
and talk about how virtue could be taught.
Sokrates wouldn’t let him. He still wanted to know what it was.
They asked Anytus
and Anytus answered sullenly.
I thought he didn’t like Sokrates —
later I learned I was right.
Sokrates said if there ever were a man
who had ἀρετή himself,
and could teach it to others,
he would be like a living man among ghosts.
That’s not the end of the story.
When we left the gymnasion, I followed Menon.
Athens is crowded
and foot traffic is slow.
There was a na
rrow passage —
a cluster of men, talking;
we were caught behind them.
I overheard:
“For once, the slave came off better than his master.
He was honest about what he didn’t know.”
“Menon’s not the first to make a fool of himself
in front of Sokrates. And he won’t be the last.”
I stood behind Menon
and watched his neck turn red.
I heard one man scoff: “Thessaly,”
as if Thessaly were a pigsty. The others laughed.
I understood: we were foreigners in Athens.
And Menon had come with his hand out, asking for troops.
He was overconfident,
and they didn’t like him.
When I led Menon home from the banquet that night,
there was no moon, and the streets were a maze;
Menon was reeling, unsteady on his feet.
We came to a blind alley —
I’d counted the streets, but I made a mistake.
Menon asked me what I meant
by leading him all over town
like a bull in a labyrinth. Did I take him for a fool?
I said no and he seized my arm
— I thought he’d jerk it out of the socket —
He slapped my face
and broke my nose. Again.
I screamed. I heard a door open —
and then shut: Only a drunkard, beating his slave,
nothing to worry about.
He hurled me to the ground and kicked me.
I tried to get up. I know I fought back,
but at the end
I curled up in a ball
and gave Menon what he wanted;
I begged him to stop.
He said he’d sell me
the very next day.
We were enemies, Menon and me.
He’d finally caught on.
The next morning, he took me to the slave market
and sold me for ninety-three drachmas.
I pleaded with him. It wasn’t parting from him that I minded;
it was my whole world.
Thessaly, Georgios,
the horses. For the last time
I twisted my face
to look like Lykos.
I shamed myself
trying to find the man
who once loved his brother.
But he never looked back. Not once.
2. THE SLAVE MARKET
No day was ever so long.
I was thirsty. My face felt puffy,
and three of my teeth were loose.
If anyone had offered me food
— nobody did —
I couldn’t have kept it down.
For sale in the Agora:
spices, weapons, wool,
cuttlefish and pastries,
tools and wine and ribbons and toys