There was a roar of acclamation, and I had a lump in my throat. She was so sincere, and asking for nothing but instead offering to make and give. And her visible horror at the thought of the art raids helped us realize how barbaric they were. They’d been going on so long we’d almost become used to them.

Then Crocus raised one of his great arms. Neither of the Workers spoke often in Chamber. I called on him. He wrote his statement on a tablet, and Manlius read it aloud. “I will also offer free art equivalently, and extra work, whatever is needed, to stop the fighting.”

There was another great cheer. More people began to offer the same. Then there were a few other speeches. Some citizens of the original city said how attached they were to the particular art in their own eating halls, and Aeschines and Sixty-one talked about how frescoes and mosaics couldn’t be moved without damaging them. But nobody wanted to continue the art raids. When I called for a vote it was almost unanimous.

30. Arete

30

ARETE

When I came back from the missions I plunged straight into my adulthood tests, along with Boas and Archimedes, who were the other two people born in my birth month. When my brothers had become ephebes they had done it amid hordes of other Young Ones born in the same month, but for me there were only the three of us. Boas and Archimedes had been waiting more or less patiently for my return so that we could all do it together. They could have petitioned the Archons to go ahead without me, and I could have done it alone, but they had waited. Neither of them were philosophically inclined. Boas wanted to be a metal worker, perhaps a sculptor, and Archimedes loved growing things and was already working out at the farms for far more than the required time. We had very little in common but we got along well.

We all acquitted ourselves well in the palaestra, especially Archimedes, who was already getting broad shoulders. “They’ll make you a silver,” I said when scraping him off after the wrestling.

He shook his head and grinned. “They know where I belong.”

Then the conference began. Alkibiades, with his friend Diogenes, came to town with the Athenian delegation, and Porphyry came with the Amazons, so Thessaly was full to bursting point. I had no time to spend with them because I was being tested on the laws, and on rhetoric, and history, and music, and mathematics. It was an experience intended to be grueling, and it was. It was meant as a rite of passage. For Boas and Archimedes it unquestionably was. If I hadn’t been on the voyage I would no doubt have felt it that way too. As it was, I felt grown up already, as if this were just a necessary marker.