Chapter 1.41

Chapter 1.41

The Son of Rome

I realized very quickly that my time as Gaius’ shadow had spoiled me. My conception of what a mentor - or a patron - was, had been heavily skewed by years on campaign. In the legions, every lesson was eminently applicable to the task at hand. The skills taught were concrete, readily contextualized, and though they weren’t all easily learned, the reason I needed to know them was always clear.

As I invoked gravitas as viciously as I could while trying to complete a single push-up, only one of many such tasks laid out for the day, I wondered how I could have possibly forgotten Aristotle‘s teaching methods.

More importantly, why had I thought his master’s master would not be even more Greek about things?

“Pathetic,” Socrates declared, not the first time and certainly not the last. “You can’t even do a push-up in this state. How are you going to lead an army with a weak body like that?” I grit my teeth and strained against the weight of command, pressing down with it as hard as I could at the same time.

“How?” How could I push up while my soul pushed with everything it had down?The initial posting of this chapter occurred via Ñøv€l-B!n.

“With your arms, boy.”

“I beg the master,” I forced myself to say, diverting valuable breath to form the words. “Help this lowly sophist ask the proper question.”

The old man did his own push-ups beside me, pressing effortlessly through the weight of the captain’s virtue. I’d been all too happy to oblige him when he demanded that I invoke Gravitas on him, but I might as well not have done anything at all for the impact it had. Instead, the cumulative weight of its upkeep had pressed me down, down, until it had gotten to the point where I couldn’t complete a single push-up no matter how hard I struggled.

“You’re asking me how you can match your body against a manifestation of your soul, is that fair to say?”

Sweat dripped from my face. My arms trembled. “It is.”

“And what is the relation of the soul to the body?”

I didn’t have the strength for sophistry. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.” Up he rose, and down he fell, smoothly and in rhythm. “You’re familiar with my student’s theories on the nature of the soul, yes?”

“Three parts. Reason, spirit, and hunger.”

“Do you know what inspired that theory, which you cultivators take as simple truth?”

I bit the inside of my cheek as I started to fall, from halfway down to a third, and then to a quarter. Slowly, with such effort that I couldn’t speak at all for a moment, I stopped my descent. But no matter how hard I pushed, I couldn’t make back what I had lost.

“You,” I said, less because I was confident in the answer and more because a single word was all I could manage. But I was lucky, this once, and his grunt confirmed it.

“I confided in him one day the nature of my principle,” Socrates explained. “The ideal that I choose to live by, each and every day. Since I was old enough to think, I have had a daemon in my head.”

I stared at him out of the corner of my eye.

“It tells me when a thing is bad, and says nothing when a thing is good,” he said. “And so whenever I’m considering a course of action and I hear the daemon speak, I don’t do that thing.”

“That’s your principle?” I asked faintly. He rolled his eyes.

“The heart,” I said, thinking of burning eyes and heroic spirits. “That, or the blood.”

“And what leads you to believe that?”

“When a hero is impassioned, the heart flames in their eyes flare or flicker to match their mood. But more than that, anyone can feel the pressure of grief or joy in their chest. It’s... painfully physical.”

“Reason?”

“The head,” I said after a long moment.

“Why?”

“When I try to make sense of why Greeks are the way they are, it hurts.”

Socrates slapped me again. This time I managed to hold my place.

“Well enough. And what is virtue?”

“Performative excellence.” On this, Griffon and I had always been in agreement.

“Excellence of the soul, or excellence of the body?”

I frowned.

“All too often, cultivators consider virtue to be an expression of the soul and the soul alone,” Socrates said, progressing from simple one-handed push-ups to more advanced two finger variants. “Intuitively, it’s easy to understand why. Virtue is something many men never truly grasp. It is depth and it is complexity, which we naturally attribute to the nebulous realms of the soul. But what did we just discuss?”

“The elements of the tripartite soul can be physical as well as abstract,” I mused, beginning to see. “The hunger, the spirit, and the reason can be attributed to the body as much as they can to the soul. So why should virtue be any different?”

“Unity in all things is best,” Socrates said. “Unity of the body and the soul most of all. If a man is living his life the proper way, the virtue of his body and the virtue of his soul will be in perfect synchronicity with one another.”

It struck me like a lightning bolt, and in the same moment my arms gave out beneath me.

“Split foundations,” I gasped, panting for breath.

I couldn’t do a push up while laboring under the captain’s virtue because my foundations were split. I couldn’t rise against the weight of my soul because my body was not its equal. Out of sync.

“You begin to see,” he said approvingly, rising to his feet and slapping the dust from his palms. “In our efforts to understand cultivation, as we strive to understand all things, we create terms and stratifications. Citizen, Philosopher, Hero, and Tyrant. Principle, passion, and purpose. And of course, virtue. Each of these concepts is connected, unified in the same way that the body and the soul are, and their tripartite components within. It all begins with virtue. And it all ends with virtue just the same.”

“Fates and Muses forbid it be simple,” I said between ragged breaths. Socrates chuckled.

“The world would be a boring place if every man could understand it by the time he was twenty. Come, let’s do some sit ups.”

I wondered how Griffon was faring.