Celestial Matters by Richard Garfinkle Page A

Perhaps drama and comedy are used in your secret research, but I have never needed them.”
    “History is needed in my work.”
    He lowered an eyebrow, twisting his lined face into a frown. All eyes fixed on him. Watching scholars debate has been the favorite sport of students ever since Sokrates faced off against the Sophists.
    “History. What can history tell you?”
    I offered a prayer of thanks to Kleio for guiding me and felt her breath on my back filling me with divine strength. “Tell me, Pisistratos, would you ever impregnate fertile earth with fire?”
    He glared at me, adding wrinkles of annoyance to the map of his face. “Of course not; it would explode.”
    “How do you know that?”
    He snorted majestically, a sacred bull ready for sacrifice. “Every educated person knows that.”
    I leaned forward and pointed toward his emaciated stomach. “But how do you know it?”
    He waved airily toward the north edge of the orchard. “Because, one hundred and fifty years ago the hero Kofites blew himself to pieces trying to do exactly that.”
    I bowed my head as if acknowledging his mastery. The moonlight shimmered down through the silver cage, casting a checkered pattern on his sneering face.
    “Then you use history to avoid past mistakes,” I said quietly.
    “But—”
    I cut him off. The knowledge I had gathered through years spent in the neglected archives of the Akademe poured out of my lips, overwhelming him with an epic tale of the labor thousands of scholars had performed in the last nine centuries of painful research to determine the myriad facts every educated person knew.
    “Everyone in the world knows something of the past,” I said. “Family history, the history of their particular fields of science. Some, like the best Spartans, know military history. But the Akademe does not want its students to know its own history. Why?”
    The audience looked eagerly at Pisistratos. They wanted an answer to my question. But he didn’t know it, so their heads turned back to face me. And Pisistratos walked in stiff-necked stubbornness back to his seat.
    I paused to gather my thoughts and drink again the wine of Kleio’s inspiration. Then I began to speak.
    “The Akademe,” I said, “is not primarily a place of knowledge, but of war.”
    Silence.
    “The supposedly equal partnership between Athens and Sparta that has ruled the Delian League since its founding is dominated by Spartan thinking.”
    A questioning rustle.
    “To prove this, I will lay out three examples from the history of science; I will start with the most recent and progress backward to the time of Aristotle and Alexander.”
    The wind stilled and even the scarabs and squirrels quieted at the mention of those heroes.
    “The first event I will discuss happened only forty years ago.”
    The eyes of the assembled students brightened. They knew what I would speak about: the first voyage to the moon.
    At that time the classical school of Ouranology said such a journey would be impossible because there was a Sphere of Fire between Earth and Selene and there was no air beyond that sphere, only unbreathable ether. But the modern school denied the existence of the Sphere of Fire and claimed that air extended all through the universe out to the Sphere of Fixed Stars.
    I told my audience how the modern school was proved right when Kroisos and Miltiades crashed the first celestial ship, Selene’s Chariot, on the moon, and returned in triumph, flying on a piece of celestial matter they had carved out of the moon itself. The wonders of the spheres became available for study, and the science of Ouranology flourished because of their efforts. The students would have cheered, but that would have been contrary to Akademe etiquette.
    “But,” I said, “It was not for the sake of Ouranology that those two great men risked their lives. They went to Selene because Sparta wanted flying weapons, platforms to seize the skies from the domination of the Middle