Free The Orpheus Descent by Tom Harper

aloud.
    ‘Children keep us young,’ Archytas said. ‘Sometimes they see things more clearly than grown-ups.’
    He tickled the baby’s cheek as a slave woman bundled it away. I handed him the scroll. ‘I found this in my bedroom. I think it belongs in your library.’
    Archytas checked the title. ‘I wondered where it had gone.’
    ‘It fell behind the bed.’ I paused. ‘Did Agathon have that room before me?’
    ‘Yes.’
    Again, Agathon’s name was like sand on a fire. All the light went out of him and the warmth cooled. This time, I decided to poke around to see what I could stir up.
    ‘Tell me about Agathon. Is he well?’
    ‘The last time I saw him.’
    ‘You said he left in a hurry.’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Why did he go?’
    ‘He didn’t tell me.’
    The bitterness in his answer practically invited the next question. ‘Had you argued?’
    He picked up the duck and examined the underside, tightening one of the wheels. ‘Is Agathon a close friend of yours?’
    ‘The best friend I have.’
    I could see him wondering how to interpret that. If I’m honest, I’m not sure myself. On one level, it’s entirely true that Agathon is my dearest friend, the one I love best. When I talk to him, it can feel as if my soul is on my lips. But it’s also true that he can be wilful, evasive, cruel, and often gives the impression he wouldn’t notice if you came or went. Like asking you to cross the sea to meet him, and then leaving before you get there.
    ‘I know Agathon’s sometimes difficult,’ I offered, trying to make an opening. ‘He gets impatient.’
    Archytas nodded slowly.
    ‘Was he bored of waiting?’
    ‘He thought I could teach him something I wouldn’t tell him.’
    I didn’t understand. Agathon had come to Taras to meet me off the boat, not to study.
    So why isn’t he here?
    I looked at the armour on the wall. It was nicely made, but not impractical. Light pooled in the hollows where dents had been hammered out, and the cuts scored into the leather greaves were too deep to have come from drills and sparring.
    ‘Was Agathon interested in warfare?’ Unlikely: he’s the most peaceful man I know. ‘Politics?’
    ‘Philosophy.’
    He laughed at my obvious surprise. ‘Not all philosophers are shoeless loiterers haranguing strangers.’
    I remembered the way the men in the agora had deferred to him – even the older ones. ‘I didn’t realise you were a philosopher. I thought you were somebody …’
    ‘Important?’
    ‘Respectable.’
    ‘I’m the captain of the city’s defences, if you count that as important.’ He smiled. ‘In Italy, philosophy isn’t incompatible with other occupations. You can even be respectable.’
    That was a whole different conversation I would love to have had. But not now.
    ‘What did Agathon want from you?’
    ‘He’d become fascinated by Pythagoras.’
    I stared at my host. In every pore of his being, he couldn’t have looked more different from Eurytus. ‘Are you a Pythagorean?’
    ‘I’m a mathematician.’
    ‘Like Eurytus?’
    ‘We both believe that the key to the world is numbers. But he thinks that the numbers themselves are what matters. He looks at the particulars and thinks he can make rules from them, some sort of meaning. I’m doing the opposite.’
    He put his thumbs and index fingers together, making a crude triangle. ‘You might see this as a triangle, but it isn’t really. My fingers aren’t straight, the angles aren’t exact. If you tried to generalise about triangles from this, you’d get gibberish. But there’s another way. When I think about a triangle, I’m not thinking about this one or that one. They’re just images of a prototype which isn’t defined physically, but logically. Not
a
triangle, but
the
triangle
itself
. Pythagoras’ genius was discovering that the world has an underlying order, a system which – and this is the really miraculous bit – we can understand through reason.’
    ‘I can see it works for