Plato repeated the strange metal’s still-unfamiliar name to himself. It stuck in his mind; the more he thought about it, the deeper seemed the mystery.
After a long moment’s thought the philosopher rolled up the parchment and tied it with a leather string. He gave a deep sigh.
“Perhaps we could bring these scrolls back to our lodgings for tonight,” Gladius whispered from behind him. “. . . Master?”
Plato looked up for the first time. “Yes,” he said softly, as though waking from a dream. “A good idea. Gladius, send word to the legate’s villa.”
He stood. “Venerable sir, I would impose upon your favor and borrow these Atlantean documents. I will be staying several days at the legate’s villa, and I promise they will be guarded most carefully.”
The ancient priest muttered something too quietly for Plato to hear and bowed his head low.
Rising and gathering up the scrolls, the philosopher walked out through the curtain into the courtyard without so much as a glance behind. The midday light stabbed at his eyes so painfully he felt as though he were emerging from a cave.
Plato wobbled into the shade of the tamarisk like a man intoxicated. His mind was filled only with thoughts of meeting the Atlanteans who were said to be still living in villages along the western coast of Mauretania, that land facing the Isles of Hesperides. He had heard of these villages from both Phoenician and Tyrrheanian sailors. The hints of the priest he had visited the year before in Fayum returned to him now, burning like a torch within his breast.
He had first heard the word Atlantis from his grandfather Critias. Critias had told him, in that way the elderly have of over-explaining themselves, that he had learned about Atlantis when he was still young from Solon himself—one of the legendary Seven Sages.
Critias’s description of Atlantis had taken on an incredible weight within the young Plato, sinking deep inside him. He had thought, even as a youth, that one day he must see the lost city with his own eyes and hold its artifacts in his own hands. The young Plato had been no prodigy. He had been more interested in learning how to sail a boat and experiencing the products and customs of other lands than in his formal academic studies. One day, he had decided, he must venture to the Sea of Marmara, beyond the Straits of Hellespont and to the Argo Sea beyond that, then past the Pillars of Heracles to the end of the world where the great ocean falls like a waterfall.
And the stories of the great kingdom of Atlantis that once existed far across the western sea—the realm that had sunk to the ocean floor in the space of a single day—were enough to stir excitement in his soul.
It was at the age of twenty-eight, when his name was becoming known in the larger cities such as Athens, Mycenae, and Terinth, that Plato first set foot in the town of Sais. There he learned that the stories that Solon the Wise had told were common knowledge. It was then that the name Atlantis had quite suddenly taken on a new degree of verisimilitude. He wrote of his excitement at that time to his friend Tethys of Terinth. Then, three years later, the philosopher-adventurer once again made his way to Sais. This was when he first heard the rumor that a venerable priest of that town possessed a trove of parchments in which much about Atlantis was written. Unfortunately, his official research duties interfered, and he was obliged to return to Athens empty-handed.
But his interest in Atlantis only increased.
Some who came after Plato interpreted his yearning for Atlantis as a facet of his quest for the ideal state, but this couldn’t have been further from the truth. The thing that drove him westward was his passion, undiminished since youth, for adventure in unknown lands.
After the sentencing of his teacher, Socrates, Plato had gone to Megara, homeland of his elder Eukleides, and there he had first learned of other peoples—barbarians—living within the Greek world. Humanity, went the common opinion of the day, was a distinction reserved only for the Greek; to educate a barbarian was to welcome him into the fold of civilization. Yet many barbarians proved intractable, unwilling to participate in the glory that was the polis —the Greek city-state. Persia threatened from the east and Carthage from the west. At times, Plato felt as though the non-Greek world would overrun the world he knew. To a citizen of Greece such as himself, the downfall of Greece meant the collapse of the polis, and there was only one way to save his society from fading away altogether—to realize a strong and resilient “ideal state.” Yet, rather suddenly after their inception, Plato’s political dreams turned down the path of pessimism.
The age called for empire. It was already being said among a certain segment of the cognoscenti that the uniform rule of a single archon over all Hellas was preferable to the chaotic polis society of independent city-states.
In later years, Plato visited Archytas, who was serving as director of a Pythagorean school in southern Italy. Then he went to visit Dionysos the First in Sicilia, where he first made the acquaintance of Dionysos’s brother-in-law, Dion. He made no small number of friends there and returned later, at Dion’s request, during the reign of Dionysos the Second. There he was subjected to a scathing counterargument to his theory of the ideal state from actual politicians. A shadow passed over these thoughts in his mind. During this time, he also traveled to many other lands: Crete, Carthage, Algeria, and even as far as Judea and the Sinai Peninsula. It would be difficult to sum up all he saw in those travels, but it is clear that his solitary drive toward the unknown kept him far better company than the rapidly fading patina of his ideal state. For Plato, all roads led toward Atlantis.
That night, Isus, the legate of Sais, held a great banquet for the famous scholar of Athens. Isus’s villa was a magnificent affair constructed of slick polished rock, white with deep brown speckles, that faced the central courtyard in town. It was decorated all about with lit sconces, and even the two hundred or so slaves who bustled about the grounds seemed an insufficient number to carry all of the wine jars up from the cellars.
Plato found himself holding a silver goblet filled with retsina as he peered at the fires that burned atop the elegantly carved pillars. Long blue flames wavered from three saucers of oil on each capital. Meanwhile, a warrior in the middle of the courtyard moved through his forms in a demonstration of skill. He was a large man with a brown beard—a foreigner from the East by his appearance—and the two swords he swung around him danced like waterwheel shadows. As the man moved, the long scar that ran from his shoulder down his back seemed to stretch and contract upon his skin like a living thing.
“Master Plato?”
Isus leaned across the table. His light blue eyes peered at Plato’s face. A good man, by his bearing and demeanor, the philosopher thought. Plato took a sip of wine while his free hand went to a nearby saucer, plucking out an olive drenched in sheep’s milk.
“I’ll need Gladius and four others,” he said quietly. “And donkeys.”
The journey Plato was about to undertake would make any other he had experienced seem like an afternoon stroll by comparison. His sister’s child Speusippus would look after the Akademia in his absence. He would have to skip the fall seminar this year, but he could always make up for it with a special session the following spring.
Plato’s face tilted upward as he sank into his thoughts. For a long moment his expression was as vacant as that of a fever victim, until a slave poured fresh wine into the goblet in his hand and its weight brought him back to his senses.
“Master Plato, I have a request—a small request,” Isus began, his voice hesitant and quiet, as though he had been waiting for this moment for some time.