For the first time in his life, Ian could see that the things he most wanted would always be out of reach. He belonged elsewhere? All this striving with Greek cases and plurals and tense stems was a false direction? Ian said he sometimes thought about a career in the Foreign Service. The civil service was a fine idea, said the professor.

2.

The significance of the Ziegler notebook changed as Asquith grew older. At first it was an embarrassing object, a reminder of failure—at the same time, it was a sly thing he couldn’t throw away. He thought about sending the notebook to the British Library, or perhaps the Pontian Society of Britain, where it might have value as a remnant of Hellenic Smyrna. Instead he held on to the journal, and read a little further in the field of bucolic scholarship, and found himself admiring the odd lyrics that Ziegler had found. The professor at Edinburgh, that pompous old prick, was wrong; the Smyrna writings were bloody good.

Came the day that Asquith began to write in the notebook itself. He needed to prove a point about his classical learning. From the notebook, he tore out the pages in which Ziegler announced the visit to Smyrna had been a failure, then Asquith began to write on the empty pages. He wrote a play, a comedy called The Twins (Δίδυμος). Ziegler’s Greek script was angular and inconsistent with the character of his drizzly Latin and German handwriting. Ziegler’s plain Greek script might have been written by anyone, Asquith told himself as he copied the great scholar’s hand. He had 187 blank pages to work with; he wrote with a Swiss dip pen. If anyone asked to see the notebook, he could hand it over as proof of the source.

Asquith wrote the play in English first. Then came the Greek, written straight into Ziegler’s notebook; he would claim the original copy had been destroyed in the Great Fire of Smyrna. All this siphoning became a daily routine. He came to his desk at the same time each evening. When he looked at the stars he had the feeling he was looking into the past. There were dictionaries, there was the notebook, and his books of poetry and drama spread like a phalanx across the desk. All these objects came together to allow him to finally make something good. He had the sense of being inside a device of his own invention, a machine with esoteric contours and secret compartments; he switched the device on and off and it did not break. The contraption produced a piece of writing set in iambic trimeter. The result was nothing like him, and more like art. And whenever Asquith got stuck he pinched a few words from the genuine Bion of Smyrna, thinking that most writers steal, a little, from their earlier work.