1.41

The Son of Rome

I realized very quickly that my time as Gaius’ shadow had spoiled me. My conception of what a mentor – or a patron – was, had been heavily skewed by years on campaign. In the legions, every lesson was eminently applicable to the task at hand. The skills taught were concrete, readily contextualized, and though they weren’t all easily learned, the reason I needed to know them was always clear.

As I invoked gravitas as viciously as I could while trying to complete a single push-up, only one of many such tasks laid out for the day, I wondered how I could have possibly forgotten Aristotle‘s teaching methods.

More importantly, why had I thought his master’s master would not be even more Greek about things?

“Pathetic,” Socrates declared, not the first time and certainly not the last. “You can’t even do a push-up in this state. How are you going to lead an army with a weak body like that?” I grit my teeth and strained against the weight of command, pressing down with it as hard as I could at the same time.

“How?” How could I push up while my soul pushed with everything it had down?

“With your arms, boy.”

“I beg the master,” I forced myself to say, diverting valuable breath to form the words. “Help this lowly sophist ask the proper question.”

The old man did his own push-ups beside me, pressing effortlessly through the weight of the captain’s virtue. I’d been all too happy to oblige him when he demanded that I invoke Gravitas on him, but I might as well not have done anything at all for the impact it had. Instead, the cumulative weight of its upkeep had pressed me down, down, until it had gotten to the point where I couldn’t complete a single push-up no matter how hard I struggled.

“You’re asking me how you can match your body against a manifestation of your soul, is that fair to say?”

Sweat dripped from my face. My arms trembled. “It is.”

“And what is the relation of the soul to the body?”

I didn’t have the strength for sophistry. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.” Up he rose, and down he fell, smoothly and in rhythm. “You’re familiar with my student’s theories on the nature of the soul, yes?”

“Three parts. Reason, spirit, and hunger.”

“Do you know what inspired that theory, which you cultivators take as simple truth?”

I bit the inside of my cheek as I started to fall, from halfway down to a third, and then to a quarter. Slowly, with such effort that I couldn’t speak at all for a moment, I stopped my descent. But no matter how hard I pushed, I couldn’t make back what I had lost.

“You,” I said, less because I was confident in the answer and more because a single word was all I could manage. But I was lucky, this once, and his grunt confirmed it.

“I confided in him one day the nature of my principle,” Socrates explained. “The ideal that I choose to live by, each and every day. Since I was old enough to think, I have had a daemon in my head.”

I stared at him out of the corner of my eye.

“It tells me when a thing is bad, and says nothing when a thing is good,” he said. “And so whenever I’m considering a course of action and I hear the daemon speak, I don’t do that thing.”

“That’s your principle?” I asked faintly. He rolled his eyes.

“Disappointed? Profundity and simplicity aren’t mutually exclusive, boy. This world would be a far brighter place if every man listened to the voice that told him when something wasn’t worth being done.”

“At any rate, my student took a lesson from that that I had not intended to teach, peppering me with questions and eventually, years later, developing his model of the human psyche. Or, as cultivators so adore calling it, the tripartite soul.”

Socrates raised one hand off the floor so that he could tick off three fingers, continuing to do one armed push-ups through the captain’s virtue. The sight alone made me furious enough to raise myself back to the halfway point, though stars drifted across my vision as I did.

“Logistikon, thumoeidas, epithumetikon,” he recited, words that I wouldn’t have understood even a few days ago that now rang clear as common Latin in my head. Reason, spirit, hunger. “Drawing from my own story, he created a model of the soul that existed in three parts. When pressed to explain it, he called upon the allegory of the Charioteer. Have you heard it?”

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“I have not.”

“Have you not heard, or have you forgotten?” Socrates demanded.

“I haven’t.” He smacked me over the back of the head, driving me back down so that my nose hovered just above the marble floor. I snarled.

“I’m not your friend, boy, and your father isn’t paying me to humor you. Watch your mouth. And tell me why the worthless student of my worthless student didn’t bother to tell you what he learned at your age?”

I focused on breathing, on a simple cadence, centering myself in memories of long afternoons drilling in the miserable heat of a Mediterranean sun. Doing push-ups and other bodyweight drills with the Fifth, suffering together. Suffering as one. I forced myself to rise and made it just barely past the halfway point.

“Aristotle told me that if I only had time to learn a few things, they might as well be useful.”

Socrates laughed.