One day when I was in the middle of building a new colossus, I mentioned to Maia that Aristomache could not see my work, because her eyesight had deteriorated to the point where she could not see anything big or far away. This made her sad, and it made me sad too, that I could not share my art with her. She had never seen any of it, because I had made none before she left with Kebes, and by the time she came back her eyesight had failed. She could read and see things close up, but she said that the distance was only a colored blur.

“You should make something especially for her,” Maia said. “Something very small, but still characteristically part of your work.”

“That’s a wonderful idea,” I said.

I incised an intaglio into a piece of porphyry the size of Maia’s thumbnail. An intaglio is like an inside-out carving, you can press it into wax or plaster to make a raised impression.

The picture I made for Aristomache was of her, Pytheas, Simmea, Kebes, and Sokrates, examining an inscription I had carved around the eaves of the Mulberry sleeping house. Although the faces were barely the size of a grain of barley, I have lenses and carving tools fine enough to give them individuality and expressions. So I showed Pytheas’s quizzical face, Aristomache with her mouth open in consternation, along with the way Sokrates liked to stand with his legs apart and his head tilted back, the way Kebes copied this, and the swell of Simmea’s belly, since she had been pregnant with Neleus at that time.

Much of my work in those early years was historical and autobiographical. It was several years after that before I began to work on my series of Platonic responses, doing philosophy in the form of sculpture, or sculpture in the form of philosophy. Maia and Pytheas especially loved that work, but Aristomache was dead before I began it.

I went to Marissa myself to deliver my little intaglio. Aristomache was truly old by then. She could see it plainly, and it delighted her. We talked about Sokrates, and about the good intentions of the Masters in setting up the Republic, and about education. I had been in Marissa before, helping to make it fit for Plato, supervising young Workers who were not yet self-aware. Aristomache was not well enough that day to walk with me to the train, and later that year I was sent word that she was dead.