Maia laughed, and I jumped, because I hadn’t heard her come up and she was right next to me on my other side. “You need philosophy and rhetoric and history and mathematics,” she said, as if I wasn’t already ahead of her in mathematics.

“But we don’t have any books,” I said. I had my notebooks, though I had left behind the two I had filled already.

“We have sufficient books,” Ficino said. Trust them to bring books, I thought. “But for now, how about calculating the angle the ship’s bow makes?”

I calculated angles in my head for hours, until we had rounded the point of Amorgos and were tacking our way up the other side to where we hoped to meet the shore party. Ficino and Maia then began to make me work on rhetoric, aloud. “Plato says young people shouldn’t learn rhetoric, it makes them contradict their elders before they have wisdom,” I pointed out.

“You wouldn’t be studying it yet in Athenia,” Maia said. “But we think fifteen is old enough to begin.”

“I learn more the older I get,” Ficino said. “I’m glad I began so young.” His eyes were on the gentle curve of the shore we were slipping past. “I don’t sleep much these days. Growing older I need it less, perhaps as I need the time more to learn things and get the most out of every day. Learn what you can while you can. Learn, Arete.”

There are times when I wish my parents had given me a different name. Pursuing excellence and learning excellence are puns I am thoroughly sick of. Now we were on the ship there was even more opportunity for such jokes, of course. But Ficino was entirely serious.

Amorgos is a long thin island, and it took hours sailing back east around it before we found the shore party. They had built a fire by a stream as arranged, and the Hesperides masthead lookout spotted their smoke and called out. The shore party signaled that they had seen nobody, so we anchored again to take on fresh water. “We’re going to spend the night here,” Maecenas told Ficino as he went by. “You can go ashore if you want to.”

Everybody seemed to want to, just for the excitement of walking on a different island. There were crowds around the ship’s boat. I could see we wouldn’t be ashore soon.

“Where will we go next?” Maia asked Maecenas.

“Tomorrow we’ll make for Ios.”

“Will there be people there?” I asked.

Maecenas shrugged. “Homer doesn’t mention any, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any. And Kebes may be there. It’s the next likeliest place, after here.” He moved on, trying to calm the people waiting to go ashore.

“When did the islands come to be inhabited?” I asked.