Amber and Clay by Laura Schlitz (easy books to read TXT) 📗

the wisest man on earth.

Menon itched to meet him.

So Anytus took Menon to the gymnasion. It was called the White Dog,

not the best place in town. Foreigners and half-breeds,

metics, human mongrels

were allowed to work out there.

And there he was,

my dancing man, that grizzly old satyr;

it turned out he was Sokrates.

I didn’t stare;

A slave is supposed to keep his head down.

A glance was enough. It was the same man.

Once they’d been introduced, Menon began to ask questions.

His eyes gleamed: a cat who’d spotted a mouse.

He was courteous. Even bashful.

He asked Sokrates if excellence could be taught.

The word he used was ἀρετή,

which means goodness

or excellence. If something’s good

at being the thing it’s meant to be,

or doing the thing it was made to do,

that’s ἀρετή.

Menon spoke modestly,

a young man consulting a sage.

It was a trap. He meant to trick Sokrates

into saying something stupid.

Which he did. Or so I thought. Because right away

Sokrates said he didn’t know.

He didn’t know if ἀρετή could be taught.

Not only that, he wasn’t sure what it was.

Not only that, he didn’t know anyone who did.

Menon started to tell him. He said ἀρετή

was lots of things: a man ruling a city,

helping his friends and harming his enemies;

a woman obeying her husband.

Sokrates exclaimed, “I’m in luck!”

and you could see

he was set to have himself a good time.

“I asked for one kind of excellence,

and you give me a whole swarm.

But if I asked you, What is a bee?

and you answered me,

There’s this kind of bee, and that kind of bee . . .

I’d have to say, You haven’t told me what a bee is.

All bees have something in common,

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