Ficino had said it would be bad for my soul to kill Kebes, and I’d dismissed the thought because I’d killed people and taken vengeance before. But maybe it had been. Had it made me worse, instead of better? I kept trying to be less unjust, but did I ever really improve? All my deeds will become art. Now that this was done, I wondered how later ages would see it: the god of music against a man with a syrinx, and then such a slow unpleasant death.

I thought again of Ficino, putting his body between Arete and the blade. And Simmea had done the same for me. I was anguished all over again. There was no question that she’d have sacrificed her life for me if it were necessary. It’s just difficult to envision a scenario in which it would be necessary. But she would also give her life for my excellence. That’s the first thing she ever did for me: when she was teaching me to swim, she risked her life to increase my excellence. I could see how she would believe that enduring all this would increase my knowledge and my understanding of mortal life, and therefore my excellence. And that’s agape, that’s what Plato wrote about and Simmea believed, the love that wants to increase the excellence of the beloved. But I also wanted to increase her excellence. She hadn’t come to the end of herself. And she knew I needed her. Needing her and not having her was such a hard thing to have to learn.

How could she have deliberately left me alone to go through all this? But caring as she did about my excellence, how could she have let me go back to being a god without learning something so important? I put one foot down into the cold clear water of the sea, then drew it back up, making a wet black footprint on the hot gray rock. It was distinct for a moment, then immediately began to fade and dry. Soon there would be no sign that it had ever been there.