Da Vinci's Bicycle - Guy Davenport (e novels to read TXT) 📗

We see a tall soldier from the guard summoned to the custator’s frilly lecticula. The old boy swings out. He needs to piss and it is his whim to piss against the soldier, who stands at attention while he is being pissed upon. There is natural philosophy in us all. I hope he did not take it as an honor, knowing all the while that he did.

I SKIDDLE DOWN into grass fading to hay, grass bearding out into awns, worts, burrs, and docks, down among hoppers and midges sawing the air, tumblebugs, ants, and silvery crawlers. I find a ball of grass, a nest, and there lies a mama mouse with three implausibly small and exact baby mice at her teats, pumping with their paws. Her belly, throat, and whiskers are white, otherwise she is as brown as an acorn except for her eyes, which are like wet black apple seeds. She is patient and alert. Her tail lies across her young like the pin of a fibula.

O Lady Mouse, I breathe, your well wisher here who has come to visit, the round of nothing before you in this fine grass, was the emperor of Rome.

Whereupon the Consiliarii were suddenly with me, one with a red moth for an eye, a sycamore seed for another, mulberry leaves for hair. Clustered bees were his beard, a lion’s bones, still joined, his body, a lizard his sex. His fellow was a leopard through which you could see, like water.

— Mus mater haec, Moth Eye said. Here in this place a temple used to stand. The ground is still sacred.

Whose temple? I watched the mouse no bigger than a thumb and her brood snuggled so neatly between her forelegs and hindlegs, eager little fellows.

— Diktynna, Leopard answered, the Lady. Cut stone is not to her liking, and she abides these long houses with their thin rock trees out of the courtesy of the undying until old Kelp Beard knocks them down, at which we have heard her laugh, her and her girls, her and her bears.

Am I now her kin? Does my divinity put me into her family?

— O no, Moth Eye was quick to say, too quick, for I am easily confused. The gods, he went on, are powers like wind and snow, mercy and light. You, an emperor, when you find something to care for, will be given the necessary power to care for it. That will be the extent of your godhood. There is a king from the north who rides with wrens and spells them on their eggs, an earl of the Angles who roosts with gannets, a queen of the Belgii who has lived for a hundred years with spotted toads in the great wood that grows between the Rhenus and the Mosa.

THEY MOUNT the crosses where we can see them if we lift our eyes from our pickaxes, carrion crows crowded along the arms.

Distance, distance. I can lie at night in the stink of piss and smegma and regain the window in which I sat at Poplicola’s house on the Via Nola, English geese gabbling among the poultry for a pastoral note, the cool house warmed by our yellow Roman light that filled the windows like a kindness, a din of traffic beyond just enough garden walls to make a pleasant patter, like rain, or the womenfolk in the atrium.

I remember my young head turned by the idea of worth, and my book, an Antisthenes or Hekaton, with the life of Cleanthes of Assos in it, Zeno’s successor in the Stoa.

A man worthy of carrying on for Zeno! Zeno, who had died at a full old age by simply ceasing to eat. He was in pain toward the end. Quit nagging, he cried out to death, can’t you see that I’m coming of my own accord?

Cleanthes, my book told, was a boxer who had heard of philosophy and came to Athens with but four small coins in his mouth. Zeno accepted him as a pupil. He made his living as a water drawer and miller, selling water for gardens by night and crushing meal at kitchen doors.

O the strangeness of Athens three hundred years ago! So hale was Cleanthes that he was brought before the Areopagitas and asked how he made his living, for he seemed to do nothing but walk up and down the Stoa with Zeno and his barefoot flock, talking about time and necessity, evil and the moon. When witnesses testified that he was their water carrier and their meal grinder, the archons voted him an income of ten minas, which, on the advice of Zeno, he refused.

I began to fall in with the stoics then and there, behind the followers of the followers of Cleanthes.

The mockers twitted him for toting buckets of water. This, they brayed, is philosophy? I know the oily slide of their eyes upward, the ringed hand hanging limp from the wrist, the urine and garlic rictus of ape’s teeth and the lizard tongues playing with the money in their mouths.

Do I, Cleanthiskos carissimus would reply with the true Zenonian gall, only hustle buckets? You’ve missed me chopping weeds? Watering lettuce, basil, melons? O, but I slave at philosophy, dear citizens!

One day he showed around a handful of coins. See, he said, I could support a second Cleanthes were I two of myself. Life in the streets of Athens was a kind of myth.

That old Etruscan olive elf and her hoot owl must have had occasions when she wondered why the Greeks built her a city. Homely old Minarva! Ignea rima micans, with a farmer’s rude understanding of that rima, thundery old maiden aunt with her bundles of lightning, an owl witch that these Greeks in their paganry have tried to make into a lady.

He was a slow learner, Cleanthes, and never quite understood the physics of Zeno. Yet he studied harder than any of Zeno’s students. The wags called him Herakles, meaning that