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city; particularly, for a metic—the local word for foreigner—who happens to be the mistress of a man hated by the old aristocracy and their numerous hangers-on. She also surrounds herself with brilliant men who do not believe in the gods.
    Currently, a mad soothsayer is threatening to charge Aspasia with impiety. If he does, she could be in real danger. But according to Democritus, she laughs at the mention of the soothsayer’s name. Pours the wine. Instructs the musicians. Listens to the talkers. Attends to Pericles; and to their new son.
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    AT THE BEGINNING THERE WAS FIRE. All creation seemed to be aflame. We had drunk the sacred haoma and the world looked to be as ethereal and as luminous as the fire itself that blazed upon the altar.
    This was in Bactra. I was seven years old. I stood next to my grandfather Zoroaster. In one hand I held the ritual bundle of sticks and watched ...
     
    Just as I was beginning to see again that terrible day, there was a banging at the door. Since the servant is never in the house, Democritus unlatched the door and admitted the sophist Archelaus and one of his pupils, a young mason.
    “He’s been arrested!” Archelaus has the loudest voice of any Greek that I’ve ever met, which means the loudest voice in the world.
    “Anaxagoras,” said the young mason. “He’s been arrested for impiety.”
    “And for medism!” thundered Archelaus. “You must do something.”
    “But”—I was mild—“since I am the Mede at Athens, I don’t think anything that I might say is apt to impress the assembly. Quite the contrary.”
    But Archelaus thinks otherwise. He wants me to go before the authorities and say that since the treaty of peace, the Great King has no designs on the Greek world. More to the point, since there is now, demonstrably, a perfect peace between Persia and Athens, Anaxagoras cannot be guilty of medism. I found this argument moderately ingenious, like Archelaus himself.
    “Unfortunately,” I said, “it is a condition of the treaty that the terms not be discussed in public.”
    “Pericles can discuss it.” The sound reverberated in the courtyard.
    “He can,” I said. “But he won’t. The matter is too delicate. Besides, even if the treaty were discussable, the Athenians are still capable of finding Anaxagoras guilty of medism, or of anything else that strikes their fancy.”
    “Quite true,” said the pupil. The young mason is called Socrates. Uncommonly ugly, according to Democritus, he is uncommonly intelligent. Last summer, as a favor to Democritus, I hired him to repair the front wall of the house. He made such a botch of it that we now have a dozen new chinks through which the icy wind can whistle. As a result, I have been obliged to abandon the front room entirely. Socrates has offered to re-do the wall but I fear that if he so much as touches the house with his trowel, the whole mud edifice will fall down about our ears. As an artisan, he is most disconcerting. In the midst of plastering a wall he is apt, suddenly, to freeze and stare straight ahead for minutes at a time, listening to some sort of private spirit. When I asked Socrates what sort of things the spirit told him, he simply laughed and said, “My daimon likes to ask me questions.”
    This struck me as a highly unsatisfactory sort of spirit. But, I dare say, the lively Socrates is as highly unsatisfactory a sophist as he is a mason.
    Archelaus agreed with me that since the conservatives don’t dare to attack Pericles personally, they must satisfy themselves with an indictment of his friend Anaxagoras. But I disagreed with Archelaus when he said that I should tell the assembly that the charge of medism is false.
    “Why should they listen to me?” I asked. “Besides, the main charge is bound to be impiety—of which he’s guilty. As are you, Archelaus. As am I, in the eyes of the mob and those who’ve accused him. Who did bring the charge?”
    “Lysicles, the sheep dealer.” The name broke