Creation (13 page)

“I try. But Greece does not interest him. He keeps talking about India, and about those countries to the east of the east.”

“India is a world away from Persia.” Histiaeus mixed water with the wine that Lais had poured him. “But Athens is just across the sea from Miletus.”

Democedes nodded. “And Italy is just across the sea from Greece. As everyone knows, I was sent to Croton to prepare the way for the Great King. But he never came—and I came home.” This was nonsense. But Democedes could hardly admit that he had actually fled the service of the Great King. Officially, his defection was always described as a highly secret diplomatic mission for the second room of the chancellery.

“The Great King has no ambitions in the west.” Democedes coughed at length into a piece of cloth. I have seldom known a good physician who was not himself constantly ill.

“Except for Samos,” said Histiaeus. Briefly the frown disappeared as he raised his eyebrows. “
That
was a Greek island to the west.”

“A difficult man, Polycrates.” Democedes studied the cloth for signs of blood. I looked, too. Everyone did. But there was no blood—a mild disappointment for all but Democedes. “I got on with him. Of course, most people, found him—”

“Treacherous, vain, foolish,” said Lais. “I always forget you were at the court of Samos, too.” Democedes smiled. He had three bottom teeth set in pale gums, and no top teeth. Before he ate he would insert a piece of wood so carved that it clove to the roof of his mouth. He was then able to chew, rather slowly, all but the toughest meat or hardest bread. Now that I am old, I think quite a lot about teeth—and what their absence means. “Yes, yes. I remember you as a child with your father. From Thrace, wasn’t he? Yes, of course. The rich Megacreon. Silver mines. Yes, yes.”

“I met my husband at Polycrates’ court,” said Lais, looking sad. “That was the only good thing I remember from those days. I hated Samos. Polycrates, too. He was nothing but a pirate. He actually told my father that when he gave back to his friends the cargoes that he’d stolen, they were more pleased than if he had never taken them in the first place.”

“He was a pirate,” Democedes agreed. “But he was also a most splendid figure. I can remember when the court at Samos was even more dazzling than that of Pisistratus. Remember Anacreon? The poet? Before your time, I suppose. He lived in darkest Thrace before he came to Samos.”

“Anacreon lived,” said Lais, most firmly, “in Abdera.
Greek
Abdera.”

The two men laughed. Democedes bowed to Lais. “He lived in light-filled Thrace until he came to Samos. Then he moved on to Athens. He was a favorite of poor Hipparchus. That was a sad story, wasn’t it? Anyway, you must credit Polycrates with one thing: he always looked to the west. He was a true sea lord.”

“Yes,” said Histiaeus, again raising his eyebrows, “a sea lord who wanted to be lord of
all
the isles.”

Democedes turned to the former tyrant. “Perhaps you should speak to the Great King of islands. After all, Darius was happy to acquire Samos. He was even happier to gain possession of the Samian fleet. Well, once you have at your disposal a splendid fleet—” Democedes stopped, looked at Histiaeus.

“When I was still at Miletus”—Histiaeus spoke almost dreamily—“I could very easily have conquered Naxos.”

Democedes nodded. “A beautiful island. Fertile soil. Vigorous people.”

The two men exchanged looks.

Thus the Greek wars began.

As a child, listening to adults, I did not recognize the significance of this cryptic exchange. Years later I realized how, almost idly, these two meddling Greeks began what proved to be a successful conspiracy to embroil the Great King in the affairs of Greece.

But this is hindsight At the time I was more interested when Democedes spoke of the wonder-worker Pythagoras. “I knew him in Samos,” said the old physician. “He was still a jeweler then—like his father, who was private jeweler to Polycrates until they fell out. Sooner or later, you always fell out with Polycrates. Anyway, Pythagoras was—is—I saw him again when I was at Croton—an unusual man. With curious notions. He believes in the transmigration of souls ...”

Although Persian children are not supposed to ask questions of adults, I was always given a certain license. “What,” I asked, “is the transmigration of souls?”

“How like his grandfather!” exclaimed Lais, at this perfectly unremarkable question. Lais was forever alluding to my alleged resemblance to Zoroaster.

“It means that at death one’s soul goes into another body,” said Democedes. “No one knows where this idea comes from ...”

“From Thrace,” said Histiaeus. “Every crazy witch notion starts in Thrace.”

“I,” said Lais firmly, “am Thracian.”

“Then, Lady, you know exactly what I mean.” Histiaeus nearly smiled.

“I know that we are the land closest to heaven and to hell,” said Lais, in her special witch voice. “So Orpheus sang when he went below the earth.”

We let this pass. Democedes continued, “I don’t know how the idea came to Pythagoras. I do know that he spent a year or two in the temples of Egypt. He might have picked up the notion there. I don’t know. I do know that Egyptian rituals are most impressive if you are susceptible. Luckily, I’m not. He was. I also seem to remember that Polycrates had given him a letter to his friend the pharaoh. That was old Amasis. So Pythagoras must have been shown all sorts of secret rituals that people don’t usually see or hear. But then Cambyses attacked Egypt and Amasis died and poor Pythagoras was taken captive, and even though he kept insisting that he was a friend of the tyrant Polycrates, the Persians sold him to a jeweler in Babylon. Luckily, the jeweler was indulgent. He let Pythagoras study with Magians—”

“Not a good thing,” said Lais firmly.

“Wise men take whatever they can find, even in the most unlikely places.” Democedes had a practical turn of mind. “Anyway, Pythagoras was a different man when he finally bought his freedom from the jeweler and came back to Samos. For one thing, he stayed with me, and not at court. He told me that he had learned to read and write Egyptian hieroglyphs. He had also learned Persian. He had new theories about the nature and the ordering of what he called the universe.”

Yes, it was Pythagoras who first coined the word that is now used a thousand times a day here at Athens by sophists who have no idea just what subtleties the word’s inventor had in mind.

As I understand Pythagoras—and who does in his complex entirety?—he thought that the single unit was the basis of all things. From the single unit derives number. From numbers, points. From points, lines of connection. From lines, planes and, hence, solids. From solids, the four elements—fire, water, earth, air. These elements commingle and form the universe, which is constantly alive and shifting—a sphere containing at its center a smaller sphere, the earth.

Pythagoras believed that of all solids the sphere is the most beautiful and that of all plane figures the most holy is the circle—since all points connect and there is no beginning or end. Personally, I could never follow his mathematical theorems. Democritus says that
he
understands them. I am very pleased that you do.

Democedes also described how Polycrates quarreled with Pythagoras, and sent his bowmen to arrest the wise man. “Fortunately, I was able to persuade Polycrates’ chief engineer to hide him in that tunnel they were building next to the city. Then, one dark night, we got Pythagoras aboard a ship for Italy. I gave him a letter to my old friend, now my father-in-law, Milo of Croton ...”

“The destroyer of Sybaris.” Histiaeus’s scowl had returned. This Milo was a true destroyer. After he defeated the Sybarite armies, he diverted the course of a river in such a way that the entire city vanished beneath the water.

“What can I say?” Democedes was polite. “I have known Milo since he was a boy. In fact, I’m old enough to be his grandfather. When he won his first wrestling match at the Olympic games ...”

Democritus thinks that the destruction of Sybaris took place several years later. I don’t. But then, I must note that when I reconstruct a conversation of sixty years ago, I am bound to mix together various meetings.

Over a period of years I heard a good deal about Pythagoras from Democedes. This means that what I report is always accurate in the sense that I repeat exactly what I was told. Chronology is something else again. I do not keep annals. All I know for certain is that during my first summer at Ecbatana I heard the name Pythagoras. Of even greater importance, on that same day I listened to Histiaeus and Democedes discuss the sea lord Polycrates. Because of certain glances exchanged and silences charged with meaning, I later came to realize that it was at this meeting that the two men joined forces in order to embroil Darius in the Greek world. It was their policy to tempt the Great King with the one title that he lacked, sea lord. They also did their best to persuade him to support the tyrant Hippias—through war, if necessary. Naturally, eventually, war was necessary thanks, largely, to the idle conniving of two Greeks at Ecbatana on a summer day.

“Your wife tells me that Pythagoras has built himself a school in Croton.” Lais quite liked Democedes’ wife, since she posed no threat. “People come from all over the world to study with him.”

“It’s not a school in the proper sense. It’s more ... Well, he and a number of other holy men have a house where they live in accordance with what Pythagoras calls the proper life.”

“They don’t eat beans.” Histiaeus allowed himself a laugh. To this day, the surest way to make an Athenian audience laugh is to mention Pythagoras’ injunction against eating beans. The Athenians think this taboo wondrously funny, particularly when the Athenian comic actor’s accompaniment to a bean joke is a series of loud farts.

“He believes that beans contain the souls of men. After all, they do resemble human foetuses.” Democedes was always the man of science, and there was no notion about creation that he did not at least consider seriously. “Pythagoras also refuses to eat flesh for fear that he might, inadvertently, be eating an ancestor or a friend whose soul happens to have passed into that particular animal.”

“How long,” I asked, “does Pythagoras think that souls keep passing from creature to creature?”

The two Greeks looked at me with real curiosity. I had asked a crucial question. For an instant I was no longer a child but the heir to Zoroaster.

“I don’t know, Cyrus Spitama.” Democedes said my name with due reverence.

“To the end of time of the long dominion? Or before?” I was genuinely fascinated by what was, for me, a dazzling new conception of death and rebirth and ... what? “Certainly, nothing can be born
after
the end of infinite time.”

“I cannot speak in terms of Zoroaster’s view ... I mean, of his
truth
.”
Democedes was not about to question the religion of the Great King. “I can only say that, according to Pythagoras, it should be the aim of each man’s life to free the spark of deity that resides in him so that it can rejoin the entire universe, which he sees as a kind of shifting, living aether ... a perfect and harmonious whole.”

“ ‘I am a child of earth and of starry heaven,’ ” announced Lais. I listened impatiently while she sang a very long and very mysterious song about creation, as viewed by the witches of Thrace.

When she had finished, Democedes resumed. “To break out of the constant cycle of death and rebirth is the aim of Pythagoras’ teaching. He thinks that this can be done by self-denial, by ritual, by purification through diet, by the study of music, mathematics. Whether true or not as a doctrine, thanks to him and his school, Croton now controls most of southern Italy.”

“That’s not the reason,” said Histiaeus. “You’d better thank your father-in-law, Milo. He is a great soldier.” For a Greek, Histiaeus was remarkably uninterested in philosophy—the word that Pythagoras invented to describe a true love of wisdom.

It was also Pythagoras, with the aid of Democedes—or so Democedes told me—who established that the human brain is the center of all our thinking. I have not seen the proofs of this theory, nor would I understand them if I did. But I believe this to be true. I used to argue the matter with the Cathayans, who think that the stomach is the mind’s center, since the stomach is more sentient than any other part of the body due to its windy gurgling. Democritus tells me that I have said this before. You must bear with me. Besides, repetition is the secret of the learning process.

“I attribute the success of Croton to the virtue of its inhabitants.” Democedes coughed into his cloth. “They believe that their teacher is a god, and I think that perhaps he is.”

“Does
he
think that he is?” Histiaeus was to the point.

Democedes shook his head. “I think that Pythagoras believes that all things are interrelated, that we all partake of the one cosmos, that each of us shares in the entire divinity. But we cannot re-join the whole until we have got free of the flesh, which is our tomb.”

“Why?” asked Lais.

“To transcend the pain of this world, the sense of incompleteness ...”

“Orpheus went down into hell,” said Lais, as if she were making a relevant response; perhaps she was. I have never known very much about the cult of Orpheus. A Thracian, he went down into hell to reclaim his dead wife. He came back, but she did not—the dead tend not to. Later he was torn to pieces—for impiety, I should think.

The cult of Orpheus has always been popular in the back country, particularly in witch-haunted Thrace. Lately the cult has started to spread throughout the Greek world. From what little I know of Orphism, I should think that it is nothing more than a coarse variation on the beautiful and truly ancient legend of the hero Gilgamesh. He also went down into hell in order to bring back his dead lover Enkidu. No, Democritus, Gilgamesh was not a Greek but he was very much a hero, and like most heroes he wanted too much. There was nothing that he could not defeat save nothing itself, death. The hero wanted to live forever. But not even the glorious Gilgamesh could reverse the natural order. When he accepted this ultimate truth, he was at peace ... and died.