That is precisely what happened this evening. The book fell open at the life of Alcibiades. I allowed myself to be seduced by the flow of those Attic cadences; within moments, I was entering the Olympic Games, marveling at that flower of Athenian manhood as he drove his chariot magnificently, with the grace and determination he had always shown on the battlefield, or when curbing his fellow citizens or his own sensual urges. Oh, to be alive then, sir! But then the slave-boy came in to light the gas, and that was enough to put all the archaeology of my imagination to flight. Athens was relegated to history, while my gaze fell from the clouds, or, rather, came to rest upon my white duck trousers, my alpaca jacket, and my cordovan leather shoes. And then I thought to myself:

“What would that illustrious Athenian make of modern-day dress?”

I have been a spiritualist for some months now, because, convinced that all systems are pure nothingness, I decided to adopt the most enjoyable one. The time will come when it is not only enjoyable, but also useful for solving historical problems: it is far quicker to summon the spirits of the dead than to expend one’s own critical energies to no good end, because no rationale or theory can better explain the intention of an act than the author of the act himself. Such was my goal this evening. Wondering what Alcibiades might have thought was a sheer waste of time, with no benefit beyond the pleasure of admiring my own cleverness. I therefore decided to summon up the Athenian, and asked him to appear in my house forthwith, without delay.

And here begins the extraordinary part of the adventure. Alcibiades lost no time in answering my call; two minutes later, he was there, in my parlor, standing by the wall, but he was not the intangible shadow I had expected to summon using our schoolboy methods; it was the real Alcibiades, flesh and blood, the man himself, authentically Greek, dressed like the ancients, and full of that blend of courtesy and audacity with which he used to harangue the great assemblies of Athens, and occasionally its fools. You, sir, who know so much about history, cannot ignore the fact that there were, indeed, some fools in Athens. Yes, even Athens had fools, a precedent that perhaps gives us something of an excuse. I swear I could not believe it; no matter what my senses told me, I could not believe that it was not a ghost standing there before me, but Alcibiades himself, restored to life. I still nurtured the hope that it was nothing more than the effects of indigestion, a simple excess of gastric fluids, magnified through the lens of Plutarch. And so I rubbed my eyes, stared, and . . .

“What do you want from me?” he asked.