Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

The Young Griffon

It was said that there were as many paths to heaven as there were stars in the night sky. That platitude was one that countless cast-off sons and daughters of Helen clung to every day, assuring themselves of its absolution as soon as they awoke and seeking its cold comfort in the fleeting moments before Hypnos delivered them to rest. The sentiment was appealing, there was no arguing that.

Cultivation favored the bold, and it was the nature of bold men to chafe at the bonds of those that came before. It was only justice that a cultivator should walk his own path to the peak of the divine mountain. It was only virtue that he take for himself what none who came before could provide him.

Yet, the reality of things was that there was a difference between defiance for the pursuit of greater things, and defiance for the sake of defiance. The truth of the matter was that the young generation had a choice - take for themselves what their ancestors had spent their lives scraping through the dirt to achieve, and build upon that foundation a grander monument than any who’d come before could ever hope to match. Or, in spite, discard it, and spend their life scraping through the dirt just as their forefathers had.

It was a fine line to walk, and so alacrity of the spirit was required for any successful soul. Too complacent and you risked becoming a filial son, beholden to your betters and doomed to never outpace them. Too spiteful and you tempted the Fates, ignoring even the best aspects of your ancestry simply because you resent the association.

We loved the solitary rising star, but that didn’t change the fact that we cultivated within a framework based off of the best of our older generations. We refined our reason, our spirit, and our hunger, as distinct and meaningful portions of our bodies and souls, because a wise man of our older generation had spent his life scraping through the dirt for that insight. We sought virtue and lived in accordance to higher ideals, we slayed monsters and liberated our fellow men, and we did much and more because we wanted to measure ourselves against the greatest of the champions that had lit the walls of our nursery caves with the light of their passionate souls.

I’d walked the line between defiance and spite since I was a boy. No one sprang from the womb a master of all things, not even me, and so I took what deserved to be taken from the older generation when they offered it to me. From the charting of stars to the production of art and song, all the way to glorious pankration, I had learned early and often that irreverence was a competent man’s luxury.

Only a fool wasted an opportunity to refine himself. And regardless of what the wise men of the world might think, I was no fool.

“It’s still too crude,” my senior brother in Raging Heaven reproached me, dispelling the rushing wave of my rhetoric without much effort. Chilon clicked his tongue, circling around me in the sun-bathed sands of the stadium pit. “You’re prioritizing speed over substance. You can’t win an argument by speaking over your opponent - not in any way that matters.”

Following our first encounter in the Olympic Stadium over a week ago, Chilon had offered up his experience with rhetoric in exchange for my humble guidance in the art of violence. How could I say no?

“Ho?” I raised an eyebrow, stretching my arms languidly while he circled around me. I was pleasantly tired, but my senses were as sharp as they’d ever been. “An argument of this nature is decided by the last man standing, is it not?”

I leveraged a plain truth, took from its simple strength and cast it out - battering the senior Philosopher with it like a storm’s wave battered a stranded ship.

[Better an ugly flower in full bloom than a withered rose bud.]

The storyteller’s lips twisted in distaste and I felt through my sophic sense the stirring of his own rhetoric as he readied a response. I pivoted on my heel and lunged, scattering his focus and tackling him bodily to the pit sand. His breath exploded out of him, and despite being my senior in age as well as refinement, his immediate attempt to slip my grapple was just shy of pitiful.

“If you can’t manifest your claim, what does it matter if it’s closer to the truth?” I demanded, rearing back and punching him squarely in his jaw. He grunted and thrashed like a beached fish, for all the good it did him. “If I can make my statement and prevent you from ever making yours, how can I be anything but the victor?”

Chilon opened his mouth to respond, and I slapped him across the face with a dozen pankration hands each from a different angle in a cascading sequence.

“If I silence your rhetoric before it can challenge mine, I win by default. Is that not so?”

“No-” he managed to get out, before I slapped him silent again.

“No? Here I am, speaking every word I care to say while your rhetoric lives and dies trapped inside your throat. What does that make me if not the victor?”

[A Tyrant] he intoned in the voice of his soul, and the force of it struck me across the face like a wild haymaker. I spun backward, rolling to my feet and working my jaw while Chilon did the same across from me. My senior initiate scowled at me in exasperation, prodding a loosened tooth with his tongue.

“Suppression is a crutch,” he explained to me, advancing forward. I strafed to the right, maintaining distance between us while I listened. “You’re faster than me, and you’re stronger - in a fight, you can keep my mouth shut if you really want to. But at that point, it can’t be said that we’re exchanging discourse. A conversation is a mutual endeavor, and suppressing the other party is as far from that spirit as one can get.”

“And that’s an issue,” I surmised, “because eventually I won’t be able to suppress my opponent.”

“With how you act?” Chilon snorted. “I’d be surprised if you could go a year of your life without drawing a stronger cultivator’s ire. Especially in this city.”

Well, he wasn’t wrong.

“It is possible to be stronger than someone and also be right,” he explained. “Just because you can overpower an opposing sophist’s argument doesn’t mean you should. Debate a weaker man in good faith and win, and the result will be the same as if you’d beaten him down and choked him with his own unspoken rhetoric.”

“Is that not a point in favor of my approach?” I asked him curiously. “The result is the same, but the time wasted in debate is less.”

I ducked as he abruptly pivoted and swung a sloppy kick at my head. His speed was respectable for a man that spent far more time studying than training his body, but his form was still atrocious and full of tells. I lashed out and slapped the side of the knee that was carrying his weight, buckling it and nearly sending him back down to the sand.

Grimacing, he regained his balance and carried on.

“Your approach saves time at the expense of your own growth,” he said, kicking sand at my face to mask a roll towards my blindspot. I rolled my eyes and kicked sand right back in his face and he rolled past. His next words were forced out between sputtering coughs: “Debate a hundred weaker men and win a hundred honest times, and you’ll have the weight of each of those experiences behind you when you finally come across someone you can’t suppress with strength alone. Beat down a hundred men before they can speak their minds because you’d prefer not to waste the time, and you’ll be as worthless as a Citizen when it comes time to debate a man that’s stronger than you.”

“And what if there isn’t a stronger man?” I pressed with intent while he squinted in search of an opening. “What if I alone am the strongest man I’ll ever meet?”

“Arrogance,” was all he said before closing the gap again.

Where he delivered verbal instruction, I instructed my senior with physicality alone. He gave the exchange everything he had, though he was utterly out of breath and far from my equal in martial pursuits. I corrected the most egregious of his missteps with carefully placed pankration hands - slapping, poking, and prodding at the sensitive junctures of joints and tendons that were bearing too much or too little of his weight.

He swung at me with a right hook that was far more shoulder than it was hip, and I slapped it aside before demonstrating the proper form. I saw him realize his mistake a moment before I slammed the right hook into his kidney and folded him over my fist.

“There is always a bigger fish,” he wheezed. I hummed, conceding the point.

“For now.”

Pivoting, I gripped the back of the tunic he’d insisted on wearing even here for some bizarre reason, and heaved him up over my head before smashing him back down on the sand.

“Do it right ninety-nine times when it doesn’t matter, in preparation for the hundredth time when it does,” I summed it up while he struggled to rise. “That’s obvious enough. But you still haven’t explained to me why it’s wrong to favor speed over ‘substance’. If I’m against a stronger man, speed and succinct rhetoric will allow me to make my point before he can suppress me.”

I’d put to practice that theory against the Gadfly twice now, once leveraging the formative memory of my first time meeting the bisected corpse of the fallen sun god, and the second time assaulting him with the mad remembrance of the Orphic faith’s initiation rites. Both times, the speed and incomprehensible severity of my rhetoric had bought me a free moment to strike where every other attempt had flowed past him like water off a duck’s back. How could that be the wrong approach, when it was the only one that had shown the slightest bit of success?

“Speed will give you an opening to speak,” Chilon allowed, jabbing twice with a left and once with a right before attempting another hook, this time focusing on the strength supplied by his core. He exhaled sharply, putting his pneuma into it, and I caught it in three overlaid hands of pankration intent with a satisfied smirk. “However! You’re focusing on the wrong aspect of this.”

“Go on,” I encouraged him, matching his rising knee with my own and winking when he snarled a pained curse at the crack of bone-against-bone.

“Manifesting rhetoric is still an effort for you!” His voice rose in response to exhilaration and pain, and his pneuma rose to match it. “You have to think about it, and the more complex a statement, the longer it takes you to put vital breath to it! True?”

“True!”

We struck one another in rapid succession, each blow landed another point proven with martial strength alone. The storyteller struck me across the cheek and staggered sideways when I slammed a kick into his side. I struck him twice in the gut and then once in the throat when he lowered his arms to guard, and was pleasantly surprised when he struck back even while gagging. I danced back out of his reach, panting happily.

Hacking and staggering across the sand towards me, Chilon brought his lesson home.

“You can make a shallow point in a split second or a thoughtful statement in five! The way you’re approaching a debate right now, you’d rather make five of those shallow points than a single well-reasoned remark.”

“Because a split second is all any man has when defying higher power!” I fired back, leaning right to avoid his uppercut and slamming my forehead into his nose. The philosopher staggered back, clutching his nose while it poured blood onto the sand.

“Which is why I’m telling you your mentality is wrong.” Jaw clenching, he rushed in and tackled me to the sands. And so he sealed his fate. “You’re approaching this- urk!”

Twisting gracefully and bringing my leg up and around his neck, I locked my other leg ankle-over-ankle and pulled his face down into my stomach. He thrashed and struggled against the choke hold, but it was in vain. There was no escape for him now.

“You’re approaching this from the wrong direction,” he ground out, his face turning redder by the moment. “You don’t have to discard long-form sentiment in favor of speed. Instead of looking for arguments that you can fit into a single breath, refine your delivery.”

I tilted my head, looking down on him in rapt interest. “How?”

“Have you read the Broad’s Republic?” Chilon said with a purple face. I blinked.

“I have.”

“Do you…” The philosopher’s eyes rolled up into the back of his head. I loosened up my choke hold just enough for him to heave in a breath. “Do you remember the Gadfly’s analogy of the ship?”

“Of course.”

“Recite it to me,” Chilon demanded in a faint voice, his limbs hanging limp in the sand. “Like a philosopher.”

Frowning, I gathered up my influence and did so.

Within the framework of the Republic, the Gadfly had presented an analogy of a ship that suffered without a captain as an example against the rule of all - the democracy of an unfit mob. His argument had gone something like this:

[These men don’t understand that a true captain must pay attention to the seasons of the year, the sky, the stars, the winds, and all that pertains to his craft, if he’s really to be the ruler of a ship. And they don’t believe that there is any craft that would enable him to determine how he should steer the ship, whether the others want him to or not, or any possibility of mastering this alleged craft or of practicing it at the same time as the craft of navigation. Don’t you think that the true captain will be called a real stargazer, a babbler, and a good-for-nothing by those who sail in ships governed in that way?]

The true thrust of the argument, that a democracy was only as good as its worst man and that the specialized men most suited to the task of leading were the ones least likely to have the role thrust upon them, was typical of the Broad Philosopher King. I felt the sentiment flow out of me over the course of precious seconds, a tidal wave of rhetoric. With no opposing argument to match it against, it dissipated in the air around us, but the weight of it was impressive on its own.

It was a shame that it was such a mouthful. I’d never get through even half of it against a half-decent opponent, let alone the man that had first delivered it-

[Democracy is a hammer in every hand, and all the world a nail.]

My eyes widened as I traced with my sophic sense that self-same wave, just as I had felt it before, crashing into the empty air. Formed in a bare fraction of the time, but nearly every bit as potent.

“I see.”

I released Chilon from the choke hold and let him roll away gasping. I stared up at the cloudless skies of oncoming spring.

A long-form argument condensed down to a single thread of rhetoric, with the proper consideration and delivery, could be almost as potent as the original. Perhaps, with the proper delivery, it could even be more.

Succinct, yet elaborate.

“Simple,” I mused. “Yet profound.”

Panting like a dog and leaking blood from his broken nose, Chilon weakly raised a hand and pointed it at me in a mentor’s satisfied affirmation.