“I never said it wasn’t. Plato’s doing his thing there where he assumes there’s only one good.” He was bent over sweeping up the wood chips, and he hesitated, looking at me where I was stacking the logs, which would make useful material for so many things. “We have our perfect selves, if you like to call them that, the essential self, but that self can have several affinities, several forms that are all real and perfect in their own ways, for their own things. It’s a matter of personality. As a god, I have a human form, a dolphin form, a mouse form, a wolf form, a solar form … they’re all me, all part of what I am. It’s not falling away from being myself to choose which one to be at any time, no more than to choose whether to sing or not on a given occasion, whether to smile or frown. Though of course, Plato would see emotions as falling away from perfection too.”

“And what about Hephaistos?” I had a special interest in Hephaistos, because some accounts said he made Workers to help in his forge, and I felt he might therefore be our patron.

“Hephaistos?” Pytheas bent to his sweeping again.

“Being lame,” I elucidated.

“It happened before I was born, so he’s been lame for as long as I can remember. But I think that disability became part of his imagination of himself, after his fall to Lemnos. It became one of his attributes, in his own soul, an essential part of who he was.”

“And if he changed to another form, would that be the same?”

“A lion with a thorn in its paw? Yes. But he seldom does change. He seldom leaves his forge. He’s always busy making things.”

“Like the shield for Achilles,” I said. We’d recently read that part of the Iliad in the current rhapsode.

“Yes.”

“And can you take on other human forms?”

Pytheas laughed and straightened up, putting a hand to his back and wincing a little. “Yes. Briefly. And for exactly the purpose Plato says we never have: to deceive. If I want somebody to do something I can show up as myself and command and hope they obey, or I can send a dream, or give an oracle; but sometimes it’s much more effective to show up looking like somebody they trust and make a suggestion.” He brought the pile of chips over towards me as I went back to bring more branches to the stack.

“What about if you wanted to become a bull?” I asked.