People talk all the time about pursuing excellence, and when I was younger my brothers made a game of this where they chased me. My mother was a philosopher and my father is an extremely philosophical god, and so of course they named me Arete, which means excellence. Maia, who comes from the nineteenth century, says that in her day it used to be translated as virtue, and Ficino worries that this is his fault for translating it into Latin as virtus. Maia and Ficino are my teachers. Ficino comes from Renaissance Florence, where it was considered the duty of everyone to write an autobiography, and since Renaissance Florence is almost as popular here as Socratic Athens, many people do. I, as you can see, am no exception.

I’m starting this all wrong, with my thoughts all over the place. Ficino would say it lacks discipline, and make me write a plan and then write it again to the plan, but I’m not going to. This isn’t for Ficino, it isn’t for anyone but myself and you, dear nonexistent Posterity, and I intend to set down my thoughts as they come to me. My brothers chased me and called it pursuing excellence, but I also pursue excellence, and Father told me that it can only ever be pursued, never caught—though my brothers caught me often enough, and turned me upside-down when they did.

I call them brothers, but they’re all half-brothers, really. Kallikles is the oldest. He’s Father’s son by Klymene, conceived at the first Festival of Hera. Father and Klymene don’t like each other much. But Klymene doesn’t have any other children, and she and Kallikles have this odd relationship where they’re not quite mother and son, but they’re not quite not either. Maia says I should think of her like an aunt, and I suppose I do, insofar as I know what aunts are. We don’t have any proper ones yet. When my brothers start to have children I’ll be an aunt, and my little nieces and nephews will be overwhelmed by how many uncles they have.