“For me?” she said, awed and amazed. “He died for me?”

“To protect you,” I clarified. “He didn’t have a weapon or anything he could use as one. He probably didn’t know how to use one anyway. I never saw him in the palaestra. He wasn’t in the troop, he was too old. He just put himself in between you and the blade.”

Arete started crying. “He said he died defending arete, and I thought he meant excellence, but he meant me.”

“He meant both,” Kallikles said.

I put my arm around her, just as Simmea always did when people cried. “Would you have done that for him?” I asked.

“Yes,” Arete said through her tears, with no hesitation. “I’d have tried to do something more effective to stop the attacker, but if that’s all there was to do, of course I would.” She paused. “I couldn’t have answered that as clearly before the battle in the colosseum. I wouldn’t have known. Now I know.”

“And for me?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” she said, just as fast, and then stopped, and pulled away from me as she realized what I meant. “Do you think that’s what she was doing? Mother? But she knew you’re a god.” She stared at me.

“So do you,” I pointed out.

“It’s a strong instinct, to protect,” she said, thoughtfully. “I know you’re a god, but I’d have put myself between you and a blade.”

“You flew down from where you were perfectly safe with Auge and her hammer,” I said.

“Leaped,” she corrected. “And it wasn’t just you. They were heading for the judges.”

“Ficino, and Erinna,” I said.

“And Neleus,” she added.

“A very strong instinct,” I repeated, thinking about that. “A human instinct. One I don’t possess at all.”

“But it’s exactly what you were doing,” Arete said, surprised. “You were about to kill yourself for Mother, when she killed herself to stop you. If that’s what she did.”

“It isn’t the same,” I said, irritated. “I wouldn’t have died. Well, yes, I would, but I wouldn’t have lost my life by doing it, only this temporary mortal life. I’d still have been here, and remembered everything.”

“She had time to think,” Kallikles said. “The battle was over. She had an arrow in her lung, yes, but it wasn’t the middle of a fight and going on split-second instinct.”

“It hadn’t been over for long,” I said. “And she was wounded, and I surprised her, drawing my knife, and maybe she just went with instinct, protecting me, getting between me and danger. Like Ficino. Like you. Like I did when I didn’t kill Kebes in the street the first day.”

“What a very human thing to do,” Arete said. “Poor Mother. Betrayed by instinct.”

“But we’ll never know,” Kallikles said, shaking his head. “It might have been that. She might have done that. Or she might have had some reason, the way you’ve been thinking. She wasn’t afraid of death, not the way so many people are. Ficino wasn’t either. They both knew they have souls that go on. She knew from you, and Ficino from Athene. And Mother knew how important you are. She’d been helping you be incarnate for years. She might have thought it would be good for your soul to understand human grief and sacrifice and…”

“And how to skin an enemy alive?” I finished, sarcastically. “All the useful things I have learned since she died.”

“She lived while she was alive, and she wasn’t afraid of death,” Arete said.

“She told you not to be an idiot. That means she was thinking,” Kallikles said.

“She could have just instinctively been telling me not to be an idiot,” I said glumly. “I am an idiot all too often.”

As I said that, I wished Sokrates could have been there. He’d have said “Apollo! What hyperbole!” and we’d all have laughed, even Kebes. Now I was the only one who could remember those dialogues in the garden. I couldn’t be missing Kebes, it wasn’t possible. I’d always hated him. Simmea never had, though, even after what he had done to her, even after she had made her definite choice of me and the City, she still spoke of him as a friend. She was a true philosopher. And now I had killed Kebes in the most revolting way, and he hadn’t told me anything, and the only good it had done had been to his soul, and perhaps to the Lucians who might lose their taste for public torture without the chief torturer. He might be better in his new life, and the world might be better without him. But I had thought vengeance would make me feel better, or anyway not worse.

Ficino had said it would be bad for my soul to kill Kebes, and I’d dismissed the thought because I’d killed people and taken vengeance before. But maybe it had been. Had it made me worse, instead of better? I kept trying to be less unjust, but did I ever really improve? All my deeds will become art. Now that this was done, I wondered how later ages would see it: the god of music against a man with a syrinx, and then such a slow unpleasant death.

I thought again of Ficino, putting his body between Arete and the blade. And Simmea had done the same for me. I was anguished all over again. There was no question that she’d have sacrificed her life for me if it were necessary. It’s just difficult to envision a scenario in which it would be necessary. But she would also give her life for my excellence. That’s the first thing she ever did for me: when she was teaching me to swim, she risked her life to increase my excellence. I could see how she would believe that enduring all this would increase my knowledge and my understanding of mortal life, and therefore my excellence. And that’s agape, that’s what Plato wrote about and Simmea believed, the love that wants to increase the excellence of the beloved. But I also wanted to increase her excellence. She hadn’t come to the end of herself. And she knew I needed her. Needing her and not having her was such a hard thing to have to learn.

How could she have deliberately left me alone to go through all this? But caring as she did about my excellence, how could she have let me go back to being a god without learning something so important? I put one foot down into the cold clear water of the sea, then drew it back up, making a wet black footprint on the hot gray rock. It was distinct for a moment, then immediately began to fade and dry. Soon there would be no sign that it had ever been there.

I had always protected myself against mortal death. When time is a place you can enter at will, it’s easy to do that, to save some moments so the ones we love are never wholly lost. Even with Hyakinthos there are moments left I can visit and savor. I can see him smile again, and if I choose I can spend decades of my own personal time illuminated by that smile, working, planning, contemplating, knowing there will come a next instant, another breath, when I am ready to take it. There are whole days I did not spend with him that I hoard against my future loneliness. That has always been my strategy, and it has always protected me. Simmea knew that, we’d talked about it after we lost Sokrates. She loved me. But that never made her go easy on me. And that was one of the best things about her.

She wouldn’t have killed herself just to have me endure mortal grief. But she drew out the arrow rather than have me go back to being a god without learning about it. I couldn’t understand it until I saw Ficino, old and unarmed, unhesitatingly put himself between Arete and a sword. He died of the blow. Simmea did the same for my own personal arete. Of course she did. What else would she have been willing to die for?

That was a very good question. I sat up with a jerk. Kallikles and Arete turned to me in surprise “I’ve been an idiot,” I announced. They exchanged glances. “What did she put her body in the way of?”

“You?” Kallikles hazarded.

“What I mean is, what did Simmea care most about?” I asked, Socratically.

“Philosophy, and the City, and art, and you,” Arete answered promptly.

“All of us,” I corrected. “She cared about our whole family, not just me.”