Iain Pears - The Dream of Scipio

They were his delight, and when he turned from such pleasures they stayed, carefully wrapped in cloth, in his chest. It is shameful to admit, but his love of his shoes was so great he did not once feel in the slightest bit guilty about his wickedness. On the other hand, he knew that one day restitution would have to be made. So it was that when he found The Dream of Scipio he handed the copy he made over to Ceccani rather than keeping it for himself. The gift, he considered, more than paid for the delight he had felt for his shoes. From there, it made its way to the papal library after the cardinal’s death, and lay, waiting, for the young French scholar to come in one morning in 1925, sit down, and read.

MANLIUS HAD first met Sophia in Marseille, after the death of her father, the philosopher Anaxius from whom he had taken instruction. He had gone there to attend the schools in a city that was still functioning, although the ever more intermittent water supplies, the inability of the authorities to prevent crime, and incursions of brigands into the outlying suburbs caused much grumbling among the populace. The schools were among the best in Gaul; for a better education, an earnest student would have to travel very far indeed: to Antioch, or Alexandria. A generation ago young men did this; now no longer. Even going to Marseille produced expressions of astonishment and incomprehension amongst his family.

It was not a happy experience. The schools received little subsidy from the city anymore; that was reserved for the administration or was swallowed up by the greedy maw of the church. The teachers were old and tired, discouraged by the dwindling numbers of students and the constant abuse of those who denounced them as pagans. One day, as Manlius sat and listened with two others to the old man discoursing on the poetry of Horace in a hall capable of taking near a hundred, there was a dull cracking, rumbling sound that echoed through the room. Anaxius took no notice, but droned on in a monotone that completely contradicted the points he was making about rhythm and rhetoric.

Then, in a cloud of dust and plaster, a portion of the roof collapsed onto the podium. Manlius, then seventeen, thought it hugely amusing, the punishment of the gods for having bored him so completely, until he realized the seriousness of the event. Anaxius collapsed under the pile of plaster and heavy concrete, more than a century old and now weakened beyond salvation. The cracks had been all too obvious before; no one had paid any attention to the way they had been growing for weeks.

He was dead; a fragment of concrete as long as Manlius’s arm had pierced his body like an arrow, driving into the top of his shoulder with such force it penetrated deep down into his body. He expired with scarcely a groan as Manlius stood above him, wondering what to do.

And when he turned around, his two colleagues had left. They had packed up their books and walked out. One, Manlius learned later, threatened legal action to cover the costs of a course paid for but never completed; he threatened to sue the daughter for the funds. Manlius arranged a small demonstration that she had powerful friends, not to be trifled with. While the student was still nursing the bruises administered by Manlius’s servants, he completed the lesson by visiting the sickbed and hurling twenty times the amount claimed, in gold, onto the floor all around him. It was a gesture from which he gained far too much satisfaction.

So it was Manlius who found a janitor, arranged for the body to be removed from the wreckage and taken to be cleaned and prepared. It was he also who went to inform the household of the tragedy, and discovered that the old Greek philosopher had lived alone with his daughter, Sophia, who was, perhaps, about twenty-five at that time, and still unmarried.

He was impressed, first of all by her reaction: no tears or sorrow, no manifestations of undignified grief; she listened and thanked him, asked where the body was, then offered him a cold drink, for it was a searingly hot day. Her self-control, her nobility was striking in a period much given to lamentation and ostentation in emotion.

“He will be happy now,” was her only comment.

Later, after the funeral rites had been conducted by Sophia herself, a pagan rite ending with a cremation, he asked her about the remark. She considered, and then told him something of her philosophy, weaving an explanation that captivated him and left him slightly in awe of her. It was his first instruction in Platonic thought, pure and unadulterated by Christian admixture. The way she talked, what she said, hypnotized him and fascinated him. He once remarked that had her father spoken of such things, he would have had a throng every day, beating at his door for the honor of hearing him.

“Ah no,” she said. “My father was a much greater philosopher than I could ever be; and when we came here from Alexandria he had high hopes of teaching such things; but few wished to hear, and many were afraid of what he had to say. So he fell silent, and taught the mechanics of giving speeches empty of meaning. You have been too polite to say what we both knew too well, that he had no skill at this at all; his words reflected the dullness of his heart. But Manlius, if you had only heard him talk of true philosophy! His voice was music, his thought the purest beauty. All gone now, and all silent forever.”

“Not while you are alive, my lady,” he replied. “And you are wrong that no one wishes to hear. I know myself of half a dozen people who would fall at your feet and worship you, if they were only allowed to listen.”

Over the next few weeks he proved it, gathering together those whom he considered trustworthy and bringing them to her. All aristocrats, all young, all ready to be captivated. For the next two years, they met twice a week at Manlius’s house in Marseille, for he was by far the richest of them, and heard of marvelous things. When he was finally summoned away, to accompany his father to Rome in the entourage of the new emperor Majorian, others had joined the group, and for the next twenty years Sophia was able to live out a penurious existence in the manner he had created for her. It was unusual, of course, but there were enough precedents in the past to go by. Was not Hypatia the greatest philosopher of Alexandria, and a true martyr to the old values of learning? She was torn to pieces by a mob of incensed Christians not because she was a woman, but because her learning was so profound, her skills at dialectic so extensive that she reduced all who queried her to embarrassed silence. They could not argue with her, so they murdered her. And Sophia’s father had been one of her last pupils, and when she died had fled to Marseille, a city less under the sway of religion, for fear that the same punishment would be meted out to him.

For Sophia, Manlius’s efforts were a mixed blessing, as not all he summoned to her feet were moved solely by the love of philosophy. Many dressed ostentatiously, gave dinner parties modeled on the banquets of old, sneered at the vulgarity of Christians, the coarseness of the rabble unable to appreciate the delicacies of true thought. They stood around in the street, loudly talking of the nature of the divine. Her philosophy, so jealously protected and cradled within her, became their youthful defiance, spitting in the face of the world. She even had to reprimand them on occasion.

“I do not wish to become like Socrates or Hypatia. I do not wish to be accused of corrupting the morals of youth and be murdered because of my pupils’ behavior. I do not wish my teaching to be nothing more than a costly garment, to distinguish you from others. More decorum and modesty, if you please. There is no virtue that I know of in giving offense. And today, as a punishment, we will talk of the beauties of Christianity.”