He nodded, getting up again. “It was a really stupid thing to say. Do you think there’s any point apologising?”

“Not yet. She’s too upset. I’ll tell her I beat you up, that might make her feel a bit better.”

“You hit me harder than the boar,” he said.

“I still don’t know if you understand!”

“That everyone is of equal significance and that the differences between individuals are more important than the differences between broad classes? Oh yes, I’m coming to understand that really well.”

I glared at him.

“What? You’re still going to be my friend, aren’t you? I need you to help me understand these things properly.”

“Yes, I’m still your friend. But I don’t know how I’m going to explain to people about what you said.”

He spread his hands. “I do know there’s a difference between being soft and being a woman. I do see that there are men like doves too. And I don’t see anything wrong with them, as long as there are enough falcons to protect them, and there are.” He hesitated. “I do see that you are a falcon, not a dove, even if you’d rather be making art than making war. I would myself. Peace is better than war. There’s too much glorification of war and not enough glorification of peace, and especially not enough glorification of the importance of the doves. I value Klymene, even if she’ll never believe it now.”

“The masters say we are all equally valuable,” I said.

“But they don’t act as if it’s true.” Pytheas frowned. “The worst thing about that hunt is that there was nobody there who really knew how to do it, nobody who had done it before. Atticus and Axiothea are scholars, not warriors. The city is heavy with scholars, unsurprisingly. Testing us for courage isn’t a bad idea, but that was a stupid way to do it. Boars are really dangerous. People could have been killed or crippled if I hadn’t known what to do.”

“Write a poem glorifying peace,” I suggested.

“And you paint a picture doing it, and you’ll soon see how easy it is.”

Ikaros was walking towards us, no doubt to find out what we were doing standing still for so long. “Come on, let’s wrestle properly,” I said.

At the festival I came second in swimming and third for running long distance in armour. As I had taught swimming to Kornelia, who had won, I regarded this too as a victory. I could have eaten from the boar Pytheas had killed, but I declined in favour of bread and honey.

9

MAIA

A month or so after the art collections began, Ficino and Ikaros blandly presented to the Art Committee a lost bronze of Michaelangelo, a David, but very unlike his most famous David. They told us unblinkingly that it was Theseus with the head of Kerkyon. I nodded and made a note of it. “Excellent,” Atticus said. “One of the best artists of your time.”

“Of any time,” Ficino said, smiling.

I asked Ikaros if I could speak to him a little later. He agreed at once. After dinner, that day a kind of nut porridge, we went for a walk.

The island was beautiful, even then when the city was still a building site. We walked off to the west and sat under a pine tree overlooking the sea to watch the sunset. “You’re a monk,” I began. I was speaking in Latin as we usually did together.

Ikaros jumped. “I am not! I was just wearing the habit. I’ve taken no vows of celibacy, don’t worry.”

It was my turn to jump. “Did you think this was a sexual assignation?” I asked. I was simultaneously horrified and delighted. Ikaros was a handsome man, only about ten years older than me, and I had believed everyone who told me that nobody would ever want a bluestocking. Yet at the same time I felt diminished, as if it meant he wasn’t taking me seriously.

“Such things have happened,” he said, smiling. “Even here. Plato does not describe how the first generation of teachers are supposed to regulate their lives.”

“He does talk about how children are to be born,” I said, as sternly as I could. “And really, sneaking off to the woods is against everything he says.”

He took my hand and ran one finger around my palm, making my breath catch. “But if it were a proper festival of the Republic, and you and I had drawn each other by lot?”

“That would be entirely different,” I said, pulling my hand away in as dignified a way as I possibly could. Entirely different and far too exciting, I thought. “Come on Ikaros, we’re friends.”

“And what does Plato say about friendship?”

“He says not to get Eros mixed up with it,” I said crisply, though far from unmoved. I was very aware that the kiton left far more of me uncovered than the clothes of my own period. I had never really noticed that before, because nobody had been looking at me the way Ikaros was looking at me. I stared straight ahead. The sun was setting into the sea and turning both sea and sky as crimson as my cheeks felt.

“If you didn’t want that, then why did you want to drag me off alone?”

“I wanted to ask you about the David.”

“Theseus,” he corrected me at once.

“Exactly. That’s why I wanted to ask you alone.”

“Well, what? It’s a good Theseus, it meets the needs, it’s beautiful and we’ve rescued it. Atticus didn’t blink.”

“But why not say it’s David? Why do we have to keep Christ out? What’s the necessity? The reason I mentioned that I thought you were a monk was because I thought you were a Dominican, but still you prayed to Athene.”

“I was having a bad moment when I prayed to be here. The church refused to hear my arguments and then I was imprisoned in France.”

“You prayed to Athene when you were imprisoned by the Inquisition?”

“With very good results,” he said, smiling and spreading his hands.

“Yes, fine, but my point is that many people have reconciled Plato with Christ. Ficino did.” Only a sliver of the sun was left, but the sea and sky still blazed. Why would he have been wearing a monk’s habit if he were not a monk? Did they have fancy dress parties in the Renaissance? Could I possibly ask?

“I myself did,” he said, proudly. “I reconciled Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Platonism and Zoroastrianism. I learned Arabic and Hebrew. I was so proud of myself. But don’t you see, we were doing it starting from a belief that Christianity was true. If instead it’s the Greek Gods who are true, if we have immortal souls that go down into Hades and on to Lethe and new life, then what price salvation? They can mix from the other side, we could say that Plato was really talking about God. But from this side, well, we can’t say that when Jesus said he’d be in his father’s house that he was really talking about Zeus, now can we?”

“I do see that,” I said. “But it’s not as if it does any harm, even if it’s not true. It’s a lovely story, about good people. It’s not … contaminated. I don’t see why we have to exclude it so entirely that we have to say the David is Theseus.”

Ikaros lay back, propped on his elbow. “Christianity is harmful to the Republic because it offers a different and incorrect truth. We want them to discover the Truth, the real Truth that a philosopher can glimpse. That’s important. We don’t want to clutter it up with irrelevancies. Christianity would just get in their way. So no Madonnas and no crucifixions.”

“But David is all right as long as we say it’s Theseus?”

“Why not? What harm could that do? I’d bring a Madonna and say it’s Isis, but Ficino thinks that’s going too far.”

“I wish I could see the Madonnas again. Botticelli’s Madonnas, that is. I only saw them once. I was going to buy an engraving, but I spent all my money on books. Still, we have the new ones.”

“We do. Athene in the Judgement of Paris looks a little like you.” He moved closer and put his arm around me. “The real trouble with Christianity is that the morality can do so much harm.”