The Golden Mean - Annabel Lyon [68]
“Ahem,” I say, more loudly this time. “Shall we begin?”
“Greek,” a voice says, all insolence, and the insult is taken up in a chorus of hoots and jeers: “Greek! Greek!”
“My mother told me otherwise,” I say. The boys snicker.
“It’s true.” Hephaestion seems not even to have to raise his voice, though his chest heaves. He and Alexander have broken apart and are circling each other again; I guess he spoke only to taunt his opponent with his casualness. “He’s a Macedonian. A Stageirite.”
“He’s an Athenian,” another voice cries, and the hooting starts again. Oh, for the repressive presence of Leonidas.
“What’s in the jar, Stageirite?” Ptolemy asks from his corner.
“My father wiped Stageira off the map.” Alexander abruptly stands from the wary crouch in which he’s readying to meet Hephaestion’s tense embrace. “Like shit from his shoes.”
The pages part to let him through.
“What’s in the jar?” he asks.
I upend the jar into a large, shallow dish I’ve brought from home for this purpose. Pythias and I and the servants have lately eaten a stew from it. The tiny creatures scramble blackly over each other, half-scaling and then tumbling back down the shallow sides. I give the jar’s bottom a spank to disgorge the last of them and the chunks of earth I’ve provided as a temporary home.
“Ants,” Alexander says. His interest is no longer a boy’s interest in their dirtiness and squirming, but a man’s interest in the metaphor to come.
“Tell me about ants,” I say.
As Alexander speaks, I’m aware of Hephaestion, who is lingering in the colonnade, towelling the golden sweat off himself and laughing with two older pages who likewise have hung back from the lesson. Extraordinary behaviour, since lovely Hephaestion does not noticeably have a mind of his own. When he sees me looking at him, something in his face falters. He’s a sweet boy, essentially, and it goes against his nature to be malicious or manipulative, as he’s attempting to be now. I wonder what the quarrel was.
“Indeed,” I say to Alexander, who has concluded his little peroration on the inferiority, the absolute inconsequence, of ants, and is looking calmer. If it rouses him to use his body, it settles him to use his mind. “Yet they are like men, also, if we care to see it.”
Man and young men and boys stare into the bowl, into the writhing mass there.
“You have a way, Athenian,” Alexander says in his dreamiest voice, “of beginning all your teachings by putting me wrong.”
“Ants were the easiest to collect for my purpose. I could equally have brought you wasps. Or cranes. Willingly would I have brought you a flock of cranes, had I the traps.”
Alexander says nothing, waiting.
I explain that these animals share with men a need to live communally, with a single purpose or goal common to them all: they build dwellings, share food, and work to perpetuate their kind.
“We live in an anthill?” Alexander says. “Or some shit-splashed crane’s nest? Athens must have been grand.”
“But the difference, the difference is that man distinguishes good from bad, just from unjust. No other animal does that. That is the basis of a state just as it is the basis of a household.”
“Laws.” Ptolemy looks interested.
“Athens has the grandest of laws, too, doesn’t it?” Alexander persists. “The most just? I think it must have the very best of everything. How you must long for it.”
“Indeed, at times, when my students are tiresome. It is the ideal state.”
The sound of twenty pages who have momentarily forgotten how to exhale.
“Macedon is the ideal state,” Alexander says.
“Macedon is an empire, not a state. In the ideal state, every citizen participates in the