The Philosopher Kings Read Online Free PDF Page B

I had only been given the part that morning, and I was full of the glory of it. I was thrilled to be given a part this year, especially such a good part. I wanted to know all my lines before the first rehearsal and be the best Briseis possible.
    I took the book out into the garden. We had a statue of Hermes that Sokrates had carved himself. I raised my hands in greeting to it as I always did. Then I lay down in the dappled shade of the tree, chin on my hands and book open on the ground. I started to work through my lines by brute force memorization, trying to concentrate on the words and not the meanings, and certainly not letting myself be distracted by the thought of what I’d be wearing and how I’d manage my hair, which had to be loosened in mourning disarray for the end of the play. I read each line and then shut my eyes and repeated the words to myself. I was so glad I looked like Father and not like Mother, or I’d never have been chosen for the part of a beautiful woman, even though of course I’d be wearing a mask. I wondered what the mask would look like. “Son of Thetis,” I repeated to myself. I opened my eyes to read the next line and saw Father before me, looking absolutely devastated.
    I am not using that word lightly. Father’s face looked like a city that had been sacked and the fields sown with salt. He has a highly expressive face, the kind of face you see on statues of gods and heroes. Now you could have used it as a study for Niobe or grieving Orpheus. It wasn’t just that he had been weeping. He wept quite easily; I’d often seen him with tears in his eyes at something especially moving. Mother used to tease him about it a little sometimes—she’d say she could tell him a story about a child finding a lost goat and he’d tear up. But now his face was ravaged. I’d never seen anything like it. I sat up at once, closing the book. “What’s wrong?” I asked.
    â€œSimmea,” he managed to say before he broke down again, and so I knew.
    â€œMother? Dead? How?” Having thought of Orpheus, my imagination went immediately to Euridike and the snake in the grass.
    Father sat down beside me and put his arm around me in the most awkward, tentative way imaginable, as if he didn’t know how hard to squeeze, or was afraid of breaking me. “Art raid,” he said.
    I wanted to cry, I wanted to fling myself on his chest and be held and comforted, but the openness of his grief made mine close up somehow. I felt it as a gulf inside myself, but I didn’t cry. An art raid. She had been killed by human greed and folly. And she had despised the art raids. “Instead of raiding each other for art, we should be making more,” she had said.
    â€œI couldn’t save her, she wouldn’t let me,” he choked out.
    â€œShe wouldn’t let you?” I echoed. “Why not?”
    â€œCan you think of any reason? I can’t,” he said.
    I sat there in the awkward circle of his arm and tried to think. “ Could you have saved her?”
    â€œEasily, if I’d had my powers. And I could have had them before she was dead. I’d have been back in a moment.”
    I shook my head. “She must have had a good reason.” I was only just starting to take it in that she was dead, that she wouldn’t be coming in soon to teach the calculus class, that I’d never be able to tell her I’d be Briseis. On that thought I started to cry sudden hot tears. I hadn’t really understood even then. I hadn’t started to think about the long term. I hadn’t even got any further than that afternoon.
    Mother and I had fought about all kinds of things, mostly when she thought I wasn’t working hard enough, or when I forgot to do things. She could be impossibly sanctimonious and stiff-necked. She never let me get away with sliding along as my friends sometimes did; she wanted me trying my hardest every