Glory and the Lightning (36 page)

“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.

Zeno looked at the gardens below and about him and saw the peacocks and the ducks on their pond, and roving domestic dogs and cats, and the shrilling birds. The sunset splashed him with ruddy light and Pericles, still waiting, thought that Zeno had the most noble appearance of any man he had ever known.

Zeno said, as if meditating to himself, “You have asked me if I am afraid of weapons. And I replied that once I carried a sword, but discarded it. I killed two men with my sword.”

Pericles was amazed. He said, “But you refuse to be present when I take my fencing lessons!”

“True. It is my own remembrance. Many men deserve to be executed but it is a horror to the executioner. I cannot forget the men I killed—though they eminently deserved to die.”

“We have a conscience,” said Pericles, and made a mouth of derision which was also half-humorous.

“So do animals,” said Zeno.

He looked again at the domestic animals. He said, “You have observed the mating instincts of these?”

Pericles said, “Yes.”

“Then you know it is the way we human beings mate also.”

Pericles was faintly amused. “Yes, that I know. Our bodies are as much animal as are the bodies of the beasts.”

Zeno nodded. “It is when we depart from the profound instincts of our nature that we become less than the beasts.”

Pericles frowned. “Elucidate,” he said.

Zeno said, “There is a philosophy which is recent in our history, though it is ancient in practice. But we Greeks like to give a white cloak of morality to our sins, though older civilizations are more cynical and pragmatic. We Greeks say that our wives and our concubines do not entirely satisfy us, and that men cannot feel true love for a woman, who is lesser and inferior and has no mind or soul of any consequence. Therefore, we must seek out ideal love and perfection of understanding among our own sex, for exultant exchange of ideas. Do not men live by ideas and poetry and communication?”

Zeno continued. “If love between men, of the same sex, were confined to argument and ideas and conversation and the excitement of the exchange of theories, none would have objection.”

Pericles was silent.

Zeno said, after a pause, “But when men substitute other men in the physical capacity of a woman, then they enter into a twilight world not only of perversion of nature, but in the perversion of their own minds and souls.”

Pericles’ light blue eyes widened innocently, and he said, “Is that possible?”

Zeno fixed his own eyes upon the youth and thought, “Ah, that feigned innocence!” He said to Pericles, “Let us be men. Let me say this: The love between a man and a woman, if really love, is a great mystery and a great glory. It exalts, it edifies, it elevates, it makes them one flesh, almost immune to outward calamity, steadfast, the deepest intimacy any human being can know, beyond friendship, beyond the mere breeding of children.”

Pericles said, “You have not married,” and there was pale blue lightning of amusement between his lashes.

“I have loved,” said Zeno. “I have loved many women, but have found none whom I wished to marry. Women, by nature, as the sages have said, are of the earth and the concerns of the earth, including their own wombs, but that does not make them inferior, for who can live without the earth?”