The Mask of Apollo by Mary Renault

profile, too serious for his age. Meeting him one day in the path, I took the chance to ask if Dion was a guest there.
    “Not now.” He had a low pleasing voice, without the roughness of his years. “You’ve missed him by a month or two. He left with Plato, for Delphi, and went on home to Syracuse. Have you come to see him?”
    I passed this off, and to cover it asked some questions about the school. The boy had seemed shy, but this unlocked his tongue. “It’s not a school at all, in the sense you mean. We meet to work, and think, and discuss, and experiment; and the younger learn from the elder. From Plato, everyone learns; but anyone can disagree, if he can make it good. Join us! It will change your life. It did mine.”
    Plainly, he took me for a man of leisure. Before one has become known, one can hang one’s mask up and go anywhere, free as air; nobody knows one’s face. Even now I sometimes miss it
    I said, “I don’t suppose I could raise the fee. How much a year?” If he was not too high-born and rich, I was hoping to see more of him.
    “Why, nothing. I’ve never paid one drachma. As Plato says, Sokrates never charged; he said he liked to choose whom he conversed with.”
    I looked at the painted colonnades, flowers, and well-kept lawns. “But didn’t he spend all day in the streets and Agora? One can do that for nothing.”
    “True. Plato isn’t rich, though he has more than Sokrates had; but the school does accept endowments. Only from Academy men; he won’t be beholden to outsiders. Dion gave us the new library. But no one, ever, is accepted for what he owns—except here .” He tapped his brow. He had gray eyes, with an inner ring as dark as smoke. “Thank you for the pleasure of your conversation; I must go, or I shan’t get a good place for Plato’s lecture. This is his great one. He only gives it once every few years.”
    “Well, we may meet again here. What is the lecture?”
    “On the Nature of the One,” he said, as if surprised at my asking.
    When he had gone, I loitered on in the shade of the plane trees. All the young men from the school had gone in; the palaestra gave out a different noise, louder but hollower. The gardens and lawns were empty. I walked nearer. A dolphin fountain murmured softly; the buildings, though newish, seemed to be at home like an old olive tree. There was an open door, with men’s backs filling it. It seemed to me that one more would scarcely be noticed, and if Plato charged no fee one could not be defrauding him. I might learn what had made Dion the man he was.
    As I got closer, I could hear a voice I recognized. Great God, I thought, these amateurs. Why does he throw it all off the top of his mouth? A beautiful voice, half-wasted. The chest is there; he should be able to fill a theater; even now, if a good professional took him in hand … Nobody noticed me in the doorway. I could hear quite well; they could not have kept quieter for Theodoros in Antigone. Well, I listened for as long as it takes to sing an opening chorus, and for all I could make out of it, he might as well have been speaking Scythian.
    I slipped away, stopping for a last look at the house. There were words carved over the portico, and filled in with gold. But when I went up, all they said was NO ENTRY WITHOUT MATHEMATICS.
    The cobbler to his last, I thought. A wasted morning, except for those gray eyes. I went home to my exercises, and Hector’s Ransom , and took the air nearer home thereafter. It would have been different if the lad had ever shown himself in the gymnasium; but, clearly, he was all for the mind and the Nature of the One. It could only end in grief.
    However, one fine autumn day some weeks later, friends called me to come walking, and we found ourselves there. As we crossed the park, one of them nudged me, saying, “Niko, you dog, you said you would go anywhere, but you took care to steer us here. Where do you find such beauties? Don’t pretend you don’t see him