I enter into such minutiae only so as to omit nothing that might give you a more precise understanding of the extraordinary events I am describing. I have already mentioned that Alcibiades was listening to me avidly; I should also add that he was clever and shrewd, very quick on the uptake. He was also somewhat sarcastic, or at least that’s how he came across at one or two points in our conversation. But, in general, he showed himself to be simple, attentive, polite, sensitive, and dignified. And quite the dandy, too, as dandyish as in ancient times; he was always glancing sideways at the mirror, just as women and others do in our own century, admiring his buskins, adjusting his cloak, and striking sculptural poses.

“Go on,” he would say to me, whenever I paused.

But I couldn’t. Having entered into the realm of the inextricable and the marvelous, I believed that anything was possible, and just as he had come to meet me in this world, I couldn’t see why I couldn’t go and join him in eternity. I froze at this idea. For a man who has just had his dinner and is waiting for the Cassino to open, death would be a joke in the very worst possible taste.

“If only I could get away . . .” I thought to myself. Then I had an idea: I told him I was going to a ball.

“A ball? What’s a ball?”

I explained.

“Ah! You’re going to dance the Pyrrhic dance!”

“No,” I replied. “The Pyrrhic dance has been and gone. My dear Alcibiades, every century changes its dances just as it changes its ideas. We no longer dance as we did a century ago; probably the twentieth century won’t dance as we do now. The Pyrrhic dance is long gone, like Plutarch’s men and Hesiod’s gods.”

“Even the gods?”

I explained that paganism had come to an end, that the august academies of the last century had still given it shelter, but with little real soul or conviction, and that even Arcadian drunkenness—Evoe! Father Bassareus! Evoe!, etc.—the honest pastime of certain peace-loving district judges, had been eradicated. From time to time, I added, some writer of poetry or prose alluded to the remnants of the pagan theogony, but only for show or amusement, while science had reduced the whole of Olympus to the merely symbolic. Dead, all dead.

“Even Zeus?”

“Even Zeus.”

“Dionysus? Aphrodite?”

“All dead.”