The unforgiving

A pale beam of moonlight was languidly creeping across the piss-soaked straw on the cell floor. Sopater regarded that waning light with eyes tearing up as if at the sight of a dear old friend. His dry lips formed the ghost of a smile. Gathering up his long tunic about him he walked to the other end of his tiny prison where a single barred window allowed him his final melancholy view of the world above the palace dungeons. He peered through the iron bars trying to glimpse the perfect circle of the Moon. His master, Iamblichus, had taught him to measure its circumference and they had spent many a fragrant evening in the gardens of Alexandria discussing the mystery of that grotesque visage imprinted on its silver-gray surface. He had read the writings of the ancients who recorded a time when there was no Moon orbiting the Earth. He tried to imagine what that primordial, moonless world would be like with its nights full of terror and the dark sanctuaries of primitive man rank with superstition and fear.

That night he could not find the Moon. It was hidden by a dark silhouette etched against the glaring heavens: the towering statue of the emperor Constantine, erected on a crimson pillar at the center of the forum. Sopater examined the Apollonian outline of the statue depicting the emperor in full naked glory in the midst of Constantinople, crowned with the twelve rays of the sun, in the likeness of the god Apollo. Such vanity, Sopater thought, was to be expected from a rough soldier-emperor.

There had been a time when he could call Constantine a friend. When he sailed away from the ancient opulence of Alexandria to settle in the newly-founded court at Constantinople, he had hoped he could serve as an adviser to the emperor. In his heart, Sopater had nourished the secret hope that Constantine could be turned from his crude ways of soldiering and transform into a philosopher-monarch; if only he had the right counselors and tutors by his side: he would then usher the crumbling Roman Empire into an age of light, governed by the laws of Master Plato’s Republic. After all, the soul of all men was predisposed to virtue and goodness; or so Sopater thought.

But the court of an emperor was hardly the Academy, as he soon found out. Orators speaking in Constantine’s presence rarely meant what they said. They cared more to kindle the fires of passion and superstition than for the cool waters of reason, which temper the heart and mind of man. Lactantius and the other hierophants of that new Nazarene sect, Christianity, filled the emperor’s ears with whispered tales of Yeshua, so-called Christus, the incarnated son of the Jewish god Jehovah. They seemed anxious to gain Constantine’s favor in order to restore the wealth and prestige of their temples and assemblies, which had been taken away by the emperor’s own patron, Diocletian. Lactantius’ counsels were not born of reason but rather by a fervent faith which placed belief and obedience to God above everything else. Contantine seemed to favor that notion. It was simple enough for him to understand. After all, he had grown to manhood away from his gentle father’s court in the West, in the oriental despotism of Diocletian’s palace at Nicomedia.

Sopater could never understand how religion could cloud a man’s reason. He had always been puzzled by the covert hostility the Christian advisers of the court displayed towards him. Did they not both believe in one God? He in the Divine Creator, as taught by Socrates, and they in their Christus, maker of all things. Sure enough, Sopater would offer sacrifice to the gods of Olympus but so did the Christians pay tribute to their saints and martyrs in similar ceremonies. What difference so great separated them? After all, Sopater mused, theological creeds were not valid arguments in a discussion: one could either accept or reject them as they were but, in truth, they did not contribute anything to the deduction of rational conclusions – and therefore to philosophy, the search for wisdom.

Sopater was not a young man. He no longer possessed the vigor to tolerate living in the midst of ignorance. At forty years of age, he would catch himself longing for the learned company assembled in the matinees of the School of Alexandria, far away from the bustling streets of that new city, Constantinople, ringing with the clamor of hammering and chiseling and building – and the acrid smell of lime clinging to every street.
He never gave up on Constantine though. He knew all too well how the burdens of administration and the temptations of youth could impede him from embracing a philosopher’s life. Constantine was a harsh but fair man; or at least tried to be. When a great controversy arose within the Christian Church between the followers of the presbyter Arius and the Orthodox party clinging fiercely to the Nicene Creed, the emperor sent a letter to the bishops, advising them to “be more like the Greek philosophers”. He thought it a shameful thing that Christians should fight amongst themselves and not seek unison through mutual compromise instead. Sopater was pleased with his imperial friend. In that instance, he knew he could still hope for a philosopher-monarch on the throne of the empire.

But Sopater’s hopes were not to last long. Turbulent times arose, as they always do when a new power forges its grip on the world. Constantine, moved by malicious rumors circulating the court, had his son Crispus executed on suspicion of treason – a rash action he quickly regretted.

Sopater was there when Constantine in tears clasped the lifeless, bloody body of his son and wailed to the heavens. The clotted blood of his innocent son stained his hands and smeared his golden imperial ring. From that moment on, the emperor was never the same: his mood turned foul and he would emerge from his bedchamber with black circles under his eyes, having barely slept at all. Sanguine nightmares haunted his  brief moments of repose and howling guilt consumed his soul. He would not drink any red wine, having formed a sudden aversion towards it. Even the crimson of his imperial robes seemed to cause him great distress as if it were a blood-dyed reminder of his crime he was forced to wear in public.

One night Constantine came to Sopater’s chamber. The emperor’s face was haggard, glistening with feverish sweat in the light of the lamp he carried. His complexion was of a sickly shade of ochre.

He asked Sopater about the Sacred Mysteries of Eleusis, where it was said that one would enter the underworld and reconcile himself with the truths of life and death to emerge again into the world, pure and absolved as a newborn baby.

“Surely there” Constantine said in a trembling voice “they will grant me absolution for what I have done!”
Sopater shook his head sadly and put a consoling hand on Constantine’s shoulder. No man who had stained his hands with the blood of an innocent, who had been tainted by murder, could ever be initiated into the Sacred Mysteries.

Constantine became desperate. He pressed Sopater to present him with a philosophical argument which would console reason with his crime.

Again, Sopater shook his head sadly.

“For that, dear friend,” he said “you need a sophist – not a philosopher!”

Constantine roared in agony and anger and smashed down a tripod of incense. He stormed out of the chamber, his purple mantle flowing behind him like a trail of bad blood.

The following morning the court was ablaze with rumors of the emperor’s imminent conversion to Christianity. Constantine had visited Lactantitus during the night as well, desperately seeking consolation. The priest, with the wry smile of a benevolent father, divulged to the emperor the secret of the Mystery of Baptism: once someone was baptized a Christian, all his sins were washed away – even the most abhorrent ones. God forgave all who came into his fold.

Relations between the philosopher and the emperor grew more distant and cold as the days went by. The Christian bishops of the court reveled in their triumph. They had achieved to mend Constantine’s broken conscience where the Pagans and their reason had failed. It was only a matter of time before the first ruler of mighty Rome knelt before God and accepted the rite of baptism.

Sopater realized that there was nothing more left for him in Constantinople. The emperor had proven himself too weak to control his passions. He cared naught for the bridle of reason in his life. He sank into the superstition of magical rites guaranteeing absolution and an eternal life of bliss after death. To Sopater’s mind, he was sadly no better than one of those vulgar cat-worshiping Egyptian barbarians.

Disappointed in his failure to tutor Constantine and turn him into a philosopher-king worthy of bringing Plato’s Republic to life, the aging philosopher began making preparations to return to his hometown of Apamea. He was overseeing his servants as they packaged his precious collection of books when two armor-clad soldiers of the palace guard came for him. Their iron-sod sandals echoed on the marble floor as they dragged him away before the shocked eyes of the idle courtiers. More than a few sniggered, their pious eyes flashing with murderous glee.

Sopater was charged with sorcery, heresy and treason. A few days earlier a fleet laden with grain, bound for Constantinople, had been delayed by an unexpected lack of wind causing a brief distress in the ever-growing populace of the city who was all too familiar with the prospect of famine to dread it. Allegedly, Sopater was the culprit of that malicious act, having detained the winds by the exercise of magical arts.

No matter how strongly the philosopher protested in court, despite his meticulous explanation of how the way the winds blew around the globe of the Earth and his citations of Apollodorus’ and Aristotle’s meteorological observations, his sentence had been already decided. The emperor was not even present at that mockery of a trial to defend his once trusted friend and advisor.

Sopater was to be beheaded outside the city walls on the following morning – and until the moment of his execution he was to be locked in the sunless pits of the palace dungeons.

Following its heavenly course, the Moon slowly emerged from behind the massive statue of Constantine. Sopater smiled. He could tell from its position that dawn was not very far away – two hours and thirty minutes at most, he mused, running the calculations absently in his head. He wished he could be as unafraid as Socrates was in the face of death. He wished his friends were with him that moment, to talk of circles and celestial bodies and the immortality of the soul. But he was all alone and cold. A chilling thought passed through his mind: what if the world killed off all of its philosophers or suffocated them with the soft pillow of that encroaching new faith? What place would such a future world be?

He quickly banished the idea from his thoughts and reprimanded himself for entertaining such a silly notion. No tyrant’s or executioner’s sword could ever harm a free spirit. It could only free it from the prison of its body.

Sopater knew that, come the morn, he would be conversing with Homer, Socrates, Aristotle, Plato and his beloved master Iamblichus in the spending mansions of the Moon. The soldiers who would come to take him away, in truth, would be speeding him along on his journey to the stars…

And that was a comforting thought amidst the smell of piss and shit and mold of his cell.