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By Root 1816 0

akin to “thinker-teacher”—a philosopher, if you will. The tlamatini, who “himself was writing and wisdom,” was expected to write and maintain the codices and live in a way that set a moral example. “He puts a mirror before others,” the Mexica said. In what may have been the first large-scale compulsory education program in history, every male citizen of the Triple Alliance, no matter what his social class, had to attend one sort of school or another until the age of sixteen. Many tlamatinime (the plural form of the word) taught at the elite academies that trained the next generation of priests, teachers, and high administrators.

Like Greek philosophy, the teachings of the tlamatinime were only tenuously connected to the official dogma of Tlacaelel. (To be sure, Plato does have Socrates subtly “correct” Homer, because the gods supposedly couldn’t have behaved in the immoral way described by the poet. But by and large the Greek pantheon on Mount Olympus plays no role in either Plato or Aristotle.) But the tlamatinime shared the religion’s sense of the evanescence of existence. “Truly do we live on Earth?” asked a poem or song attributed to Nezahualcóyotl (1402–72), a founding figure in Mesoamerican thought and the tlatoani of Texcoco, one of the other two members of the Triple Alliance. His lyric, among the most famous in the Nahuatl canon, answers its own question:

Not forever on earth; only a little while here.

Be it jade, it shatters.

Be it gold, it breaks.

Be it a quetzal feather, it tears apart.

Not forever on earth; only a little while here.

In another verse assigned to Nezahualcóyotl this theme emerged even more baldly:

Like a painting, we will be erased.

Like a flower, we will dry up here on earth.

Like plumed vestments of the precious bird,

That precious bird with the agile neck,

We will come to an end.

Contemplating mortality, thinkers in many cultures have drawn solace from the prospect of life after death. This consolation was denied to the Mexica, who were agonizingly uncertain about what happened to the soul. “Do flowers go to the region of the dead?” Nezahualcóyotl asked. “In the Beyond, are we still dead or do we live?” Many if not most tlamatinime saw existence as Nabokov feared: “a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.”

In Nahuatl rhetoric, things were frequently represented by the unusual device of naming two of their elements—a kind of doubled Homeric epithet. Instead of directly mentioning his body, a poet might refer to “my hand, my foot” (noma nocxi), which the savvy listener would know was a synecdoche, in the same way that readers of English know that writers who mention “the crown” are actually talking about the entire monarch, and not just the headgear. Similarly, the poet’s speech would be “his word, his breath” (itlatol ihiyo). A double-barreled term for “truth” is neltilitztli tzintliztli, which means something like “fundamental truth, true basic principle.” In Nahuatl, the words almost shimmer with connotation: what was true was well grounded, stable and immutable, enduring above all.

Because we human beings are transitory, our lives as ephemeral as dreams, the tlamatinime suggested that immutable truth is by its nature beyond human experience. On the ever-changing earth, wrote León-Portilla, the Mexican historian, “nothing is ‘true’ in the Nahuatl sense of the word.” Time and again, the tlamatinime wrestled with this dilemma. How can beings of the moment grasp the perduring? It would be like asking a stone to understand mortality.

According to León-Portilla, one exit from this philosophical blind alley was seen by the fifteenth-century poet Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin, who described it metaphorically, as poets will, by invoking the coyolli bird, known for its bell-like song:

He goes his way singing, offering flowers.

And his words rain down

Like jade and quetzal plumes.

Is this what pleases the Giver of Life?

Is that the only truth on earth?

Ayocuan’s remarks cannot be fully understood out of the Nahuatl context,