Free Glory and the Lightning by Taylor Caldwell

inflicted by the Ecclesia on anyone suspected of heresy or dissent against the prevailing religion. Her face would flash, however, and her eyes become scornful at some pious pedantry. The teacher would reduce the grandeur of the gods to mere mortality, he believing that degrading the inexplicable and the majesty to low human understanding and status and familiarity made them more comprehensible.
    He made Olympus, the abode of the gods, a suburb of Athens, or even of Miletus.
    Aspasia always felt embattled when she went to her class in politics and history, and her teacher detested her for her arguments and controversies. “Who writes history?” she had asked him once. “Mere mortals, who make their own interpretations, according to their whims and subjective opinions, of what has transpired. History is easily distorted. As for politics, it is an exercise in hysteria.” But the subjects engrossed her as well as angered her. It was said that if Helen of Troy’s nose had been longer or her eyes less luminous Troy would never have been burned, nor would her husband have desired her to the death, nor would Paris have abducted her. On such trivialities did the affairs of men founder! She found both politics and history endlessly amusing, for the light they shone on the vagaries of human nature. “They should be the province of comedians,” she once remarked, “but certainly should not be regarded as objective and immutable truth.” At one time she had even said that history was made by madmen, and wars were the ultimate madness, a remark that did not endear her to her teacher.
    “Is not everything made by man and the result of man?” he had asked her, to which Aspasia said, “No. There are imponderables beyond the knowledge and the understanding of man.” The teacher complained she was a mere chit, and a woman, and so therefore of no importance, and her opinions of no consequence. The maidens, who did not love Aspasia for her beauty and superiority to them, would titter. At least Aspasia dispensed with the ennui of teaching with her arguments, and for that they were grateful.
    The teacher, Aeneas, was a Greek. Therefore he expounded frequently on the defeat of the Persians at Thermopylae. “I am not superstitious,” he would say, “but I believe in the Fates. Athens, and all of Greece, was preserved by some mysterious intervention. It seemed impossible that Xerxes could be defeated by us, we contentious Greeks, who suspected and even hated each other and were constantly quarreling and envious—men from the sallow mountains, the hot cliffs and passes, the fishing villages, the small towns even smaller than Athens, which is itself small and insignificant. Outnumbered by at least a score or more to one—and the immediate invaders but the first wave of a sea of soldiers and sailors—the Greeks had met the foe on their sacred land and waters and had driven him ignominiously away. This little land, all burning silver dust and mountains, all furious green torrents and crags and small green valleys and brilliant purple seas and miserable villages and stony roads and powdery fields and ardent blue skies, had stubbornly refused to be conquered and held slave to the mighty Xerxes and preferred, in all truth, liberty or death.”
    Aspasia admired the poetry of his words, but she had said, “Solon declared that all men should be free. But we have slaves. Is not a slave a man?”
    The teacher had glared at her. “We believe a slave to be a thing, not a man. The gods ordained his fate. The gods ordained freedom for men. If a man is not born free, then he is not truly human.”
    “There is something wrong with your syllogism,” Aspasia said.
    “Enlighten me!” said the teacher with wrath.
    “Solon was a great and wise man,” said Aspasia. “He desired to establish a republic, but Athens has declined into a democracy. Therein is a great tragedy in government. But no matter. When Solon declared that all men should be free,