“What is a god?” Ikaros threw back instantly. They both sat up and leaned forward eagerly. Sokrates looked like, well, a philosopher. Ikaros was, frankly, gorgeous, more gorgeous than even Jathery pretending to be Hermes, because he was more mature. But there was no question he was a philosopher too, with that avidity in his face, twin to Sokrates’s own.

“None of my old definitions will work, unless we allow that you and Porphyry and Athene are some other kind of being, and that there are unchanging unseeking perfect gods that are different,” Sokrates said.

“The One,” Ikaros said. “And I used the word angels in the New Concordance, for those other kinds of being. But perfection is a dynamic attribute.”

“How can it be? The nature of perfection—”

“Perfect things can become more perfect, endlessly.”

“Excellence, yes, but perfection implies completeness.”

Porphyry and I looked past them and smiled at each other. There was something satisfying to the soul in the way they so immediately became utterly absorbed in the argument. Sokrates caught the smile as Ikaros began to explain the nature of dynamic perfection, which was exactly the kind of abstraction Ikarians and Psycheans love. “Wait,” he said. “We’re arguing with each other when we have an expert here.”

“I’m not an expert,” Porphyry said, throwing up his hands.

“But you admit you are a god?”

“Yes…” Porphyry admitted, tentatively.

“Then you must know what a god is,” Sokrates said, with a brisk nod. “Please enlighten us.”

Porphyry shook his head ruefully. “Do you know what a human is because you are one? Or how souls work because you have one? There are many kinds of god, and I don’t know everything about it. It makes a huge difference who your parents were, and I’m not sure how. Gods are born with a heroic soul. Some have one or two parents who are divine, others do not.”

“What’s the difference between a heroic soul and any other kind of soul?” Sokrates asked.

“I don’t know, and Father—that is, Apollo—doesn’t know either. But there is a difference. We don’t know whether other souls evolve into heroic souls or whether they start off different. Apollo says there are always more heroic souls waiting to be born than suitable lives for them. He says all children of gods have a heroic soul.”

Alkippe, I thought, at once. I’d been so focused on getting Hermes, or rather Jathery, to go back and ensure she existed, that I hadn’t thought about her heroic soul. But certainly she showed that level of excellence.

“But that doesn’t necessarily make them gods,” Porphyry went on. “Look at my brother Alkibiades. He said he wanted to be an ordinary philosopher king like everyone else, and that’s what he is. He has a heroic soul, but he doesn’t want to be a god.”

“Is he excellent?” Ikaros asked.