Free The Dream of Scipio by Iain Pears Page A

event. Anaxius collapsed under the pile of plaster and heavy concrete, more than a century old and now weakened beyond salvation. The cracks had been all too obvious before; no one had paid any attention to the way they had been growing for weeks.
    He was dead; a fragment of concrete as long as Manlius’s arm had pierced his body like an arrow, driving into the top of his shoulder with such force it penetrated deep down into his body. He expired with scarcely a groan as Manlius stood above him, wondering what to do.
    And when he turned around, his two colleagues had left. They had packed up their books and walked out. One, Manlius learned later, threatened legal action to cover the costs of a course paid for but never completed; he threatened to sue the daughter for the funds. Manlius arranged a small demonstration that she had powerful friends, not to be trifled with. While the student was still nursing the bruises administered by Manlius’s servants, he completed the lesson by visiting the sickbed and hurling twenty times the amount claimed, in gold, onto the floor all around him. It was a gesture from which he gained far too much satisfaction.
    So it was Manlius who found a janitor, arranged for the body to be removed from the wreckage and taken to be cleaned and prepared. It was he also who went to inform the household of the tragedy, and discovered that the old Greek philosopher had lived alone with his daughter, Sophia, who was, perhaps, about twenty-five at that time, and still unmarried.
    He was impressed, first of all by her reaction: no tears or sorrow, no manifestations of undignified grief; she listened and thanked him, asked where the body was, then offered him a cold drink, for it was a searingly hot day. Her self-control, her nobility was striking in a period much given to lamentation and ostentation in emotion.
    “He will be happy now,” was her only comment.
    Later, after the funeral rites had been conducted by Sophia herself, a pagan rite ending with a cremation, he asked her about the remark. She considered, and then told him something of her philosophy, weaving an explanation that captivated him and left him slightly in awe of her. It was his first instruction in Platonic thought, pure and unadulterated by Christian admixture. The way she talked, what she said, hypnotized him and fascinated him. He once remarked that had her father spoken of such things, he would have had a throng every day, beating at his door for the honor of hearing him.
    “Ah no,” she said. “My father was a much greater philosopher than I could ever be; and when we came here from Alexandria he had high hopes of teaching such things; but few wished to hear, and many were afraid of what he had to say. So he fell silent, and taught the mechanics of giving speeches empty of meaning. You have been too polite to say what we both knew too well, that he had no skill at this at all; his words reflected the dullness of his heart. But Manlius, if you had only heard him talk of true philosophy! His voice was music, his thought the purest beauty. All gone now, and all silent forever.”
    “Not while you are alive, my lady,” he replied. “And you are wrong that no one wishes to hear. I know myself of half a dozen people who would fall at your feet and worship you, if they were only allowed to listen.”
    Over the next few weeks he proved it, gathering together those whom he considered trustworthy and bringing them to her. All aristocrats, all young, all ready to be captivated. For the next two years, they met twice a week at Manlius’s house in Marseille, for he was by far the richest of them, and heard of marvelous things. When he was finally summoned away, to accompany his father to Rome in the entourage of the new emperor Majorian, others had joined the group, and for the next twenty years Sophia was able to live out a penurious existence in the manner he had created for her. It was unusual, of course, but there were enough