The high road south wound its way through the rocky Vale of Tempe, between Ossa and craggy Mount Olympos, its lofty peak already gleaming with snow.
“The abode of the gods,” said Aristotle to me as we rode through the brisk autumn morning. Brittle dead leaves strewed the trail; our horses snorted steam in the early chill.
“Only in legend,” I replied.
He looked up at me, his brow furrowed. “You don’t believe in the gods?”
I must have made a bitter little smile. “I believe in them, but they don’t live up there in the cold. They take better care of themselves than that.”
Aristotle shook his head. “Remarkable. For a man who has no memory, Orion, you seem very certain of your knowledge about the gods’ residence.”
“We could climb the mountain,” I said, “and see for ourselves if the gods are living up there.”
He laughed. “See for ourselves! Very good, Orion. Very good. The essence of truth is knowledge gained by examination. I’ll make a philosopher of you yet!”
“The essence of truth,” I muttered.
“Truth is often difficult to determine, Orion. Sokrates gave his life seeking for it. My own teacher, Plato, tried to determine exactly what truth is, and he died brokenhearted.”
I wondered silently what the essence of truth might be. Were my dreams truer than my waking reality? Were my hazy recollections of other lives true memories or merely desperate fantasies of my mind?
He misinterpreted my silence. “Yes, I differ from Plato’s teachings. He believed that ideas are the essence of truth: pure ideas, with no physical substance whatsoever. I cannot accept that. To me, the only way to discover truth is by examining the world about us with our five senses.”
“You say that Plato died of a broken heart?”
The gnomish old man’s face grew somber. “Dionysios invited Plato to his city of Syracuse, in distant Sicily. There Plato instructed him on how to be a philosopher-king, a great leader among men. It isn’t every day that a philosopher has a king for his student.”
“What happened?”
“Dionysios listened very carefully to Plato’s ideas about the ideal republic. And he used those ideas to make himself absolute tyrant of Syracuse. His son was even worse. He threw Plato out of Syracuse, sent him packing home to Athens.”
“So much for the philosopher-king,” I said.
Aristotle gave me a troubled look, then fell silent.
Our little band was growing larger every day with Aristotle’s constantly-growing collections. We had to buy more mules and wagons and more men to tend them. The pack train would be twice the size of our original group by the time we reached Athens. There was already snow on the lower mountaintops, and the trees were turning gauntly bare. I urged our band southward through the narrow pass of Thermopylai, where Leonidas and his Spartans had stood against the invading Persians of Xerxes more than a century and a half earlier.
Alexandros insisted that we stop and do homage to the brave Spartans, who died to the last man rather than surrender to the Persians.
So there on the narrow rocky shelf between the grim mountains and the heaving sea, near the hot springs for which the pass was named, we paid honor to ancient heroes while the winds keening down from the north warned of impending winter. Alexandros spoke of the Persians with contempt, ending with, “Never will our people be free until the Persian Empire is shattered completely.”
Aristotle nodded agreement. The men were impressed with his words. I was more impressed with the smell of snow in the graying sky. We moved on.
“One thing that Alexandros did not mention,” said Aristotle from the back of the gentle chestnut mare he rode, “was that the Macedonians allowed Xerxes and his army to travel through their territory without raising a finger against them. They even sold the Persians grain and horses and timber for their ships, as a matter of fact.”
He spoke with a forgiving smile, and in a low voice so that no one could hear but me. Even so, he added, “But that was a long time ago, of course. Things have changed.”