“Besides, I didn’t know anything about them. They didn’t pray to me,” he said, still staring out over Delos, toward the mountain in the center of the little island where he had been born long before. “Those people in the Kyklades. I didn’t know they were there. There weren’t any statues of me, did you notice?”

“But this is so close,” I said, gesturing at Delos, the first and oldest center of the worship of Apollo in the world.

“How often do you think they leave their petty islands?” Father asked, shaking his head. “Probably they haven’t ever been any further out to sea than they need to catch fish. I’ll do what I can to help them, now. I’ll argue in Chamber in favor of Kallikles’s idea of sending out missions to them. You’re absolutely right that it’s what Simmea would have wanted to do.”

“And it won’t change anything?”

“It might get the Naxians to build that pleasant temple I remember on the little island,” he said. “But it won’t change the future. There’s only one world. We’re in prehistory here. We hardly know the names of kings. Nobody knows for sure what happened on any given day, or when people learned about sanitation or philosophy, or even metal smelting. This isn’t the generation before the Trojan War, it’s more like four or five generations before. And even Troy—ask Ficino exactly where it was. He doesn’t know. They forgot where it was until it was rediscovered late in the nineteenth century.”

“Really?” I was astonished. “How could they lose Troy?”

“There’s a lot of history. When it isn’t recorded, things drop out. There are entire civilizations that are forgotten. Troy’s lucky. It had Homer.”

“Why do you suddenly seem so sure about when we are? I thought you didn’t know either?”

“I didn’t until now. But look at Delos,” he said, gesturing. “I pay attention to Delos. It’s mine. I know when things were built here. This is early Minoan. I should have guessed Athene wouldn’t have put us immediately before the eruption.”

I looked at the island. “I really want to go ashore,” I said. “It’s so beautiful. I want to explore it. I feel connected to it, even from up here, as if it’s calling to me.”

“You’re my daughter. The island knows you.” He sighed. “It knows me too. But I probably shouldn’t go ashore, just in case. People don’t usually recognize me, incarnate. They’re not expecting to see me. But Sokrates did. And priests of mine, on Delos—they probably are expecting me at any moment. And if the island knew me—no. It’s a little unkind to the priests, being so close and not letting them see me, but better not to risk it.”