Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

The Son of Rome

I realized very quickly that my time as Gaius’ shadow had spoiled me. My conception of what a mentor - or a patron - was, had been heavily skewed by years on campaign. In the legions, every lesson was eminently applicable to the task at hand. The skills taught were concrete, readily contextualized, and though they weren’t all easily learned, the reason I needed to know them was always clear.

As I invoked gravitas as viciously as I could while trying to complete a single push-up, only one of many such tasks laid out for the day, I wondered how I could have possibly forgotten Aristotle‘s teaching methods.

More importantly, why had I thought his master’s master would not be even more Greek about things?

“Pathetic,” Socrates declared, not the first time and certainly not the last. “You can’t even do a push-up in this state. How are you going to lead an army with a weak body like that?” I grit my teeth and strained against the weight of command, pressing down with it as hard as I could at the same time.

“How?” How could I push up while my soul pushed with everything it had down?

“With your arms, boy.”

“I beg the master,” I forced myself to say, diverting valuable breath to form the words. “Help this lowly sophist ask the proper question.”

The old man did his own push-ups beside me, pressing effortlessly through the weight of the captain’s virtue. I’d been all too happy to oblige him when he demanded that I invoke Gravitas on him, but I might as well not have done anything at all for the impact it had. Instead, the cumulative weight of its upkeep had pressed me down, down, until it had gotten to the point where I couldn’t complete a single push-up no matter how hard I struggled.

“You’re asking me how you can match your body against a manifestation of your soul, is that fair to say?”

Sweat dripped from my face. My arms trembled. “It is.”

“And what is the relation of the soul to the body?”

I didn’t have the strength for sophistry. “I don’t know.”

“I’ll be the judge of that.” Up he rose, and down he fell, smoothly and in rhythm. “You’re familiar with my student’s theories on the nature of the soul, yes?”

“Three parts. Reason, spirit, and hunger.”

“Do you know what inspired that theory, which you cultivators take as simple truth?”

I bit the inside of my cheek as I started to fall, from halfway down to a third, and then to a quarter. Slowly, with such effort that I couldn’t speak at all for a moment, I stopped my descent. But no matter how hard I pushed, I couldn’t make back what I had lost.

“You,” I said, less because I was confident in the answer and more because a single word was all I could manage. But I was lucky, this once, and his grunt confirmed it.

“I confided in him one day the nature of my principle,” Socrates explained. “The ideal that I choose to live by, each and every day. Since I was old enough to think, I have had a daemon in my head.”

I stared at him out of the corner of my eye.

“It tells me when a thing is bad, and says nothing when a thing is good,” he said. “And so whenever I’m considering a course of action and I hear the daemon speak, I don’t do that thing.”

“That’s your principle?” I asked faintly. He rolled his eyes.

“Disappointed? Profundity and simplicity aren’t mutually exclusive, boy. This world would be a far brighter place if every man listened to the voice that told him when something wasn’t worth being done.”

“At any rate, my student took a lesson from that that I had not intended to teach, peppering me with questions and eventually, years later, developing his model of the human psyche. Or, as cultivators so adore calling it, the tripartite soul.”

Socrates raised one hand off the floor so that he could tick off three fingers, continuing to do one armed push-ups through the captain’s virtue. The sight alone made me furious enough to raise myself back to the halfway point, though stars drifted across my vision as I did.

“Logistikon, thumoeidas, epithumetikon,” he recited, words that I wouldn’t have understood even a few days ago that now rang clear as common Latin in my head. Reason, spirit, hunger. “Drawing from my own story, he created a model of the soul that existed in three parts. When pressed to explain it, he called upon the allegory of the Charioteer. Have you heard it?”

“I have not.”

“Have you not heard, or have you forgotten?” Socrates demanded.

“I haven’t.” He smacked me over the back of the head, driving me back down so that my nose hovered just above the marble floor. I snarled.

“I’m not your friend, boy, and your father isn’t paying me to humor you. Watch your mouth. And tell me why the worthless student of my worthless student didn’t bother to tell you what he learned at your age?”

I focused on breathing, on a simple cadence, centering myself in memories of long afternoons drilling in the miserable heat of a Mediterranean sun. Doing push-ups and other bodyweight drills with the Fifth, suffering together. Suffering as one. I forced myself to rise and made it just barely past the halfway point.

“Aristotle told me that if I only had time to learn a few things, they might as well be useful.”

Socrates laughed.

“Arrogant brat. After all these years they’re still at each other’s throats. I suppose I have no reason to be surprised - I know where they got it from. Allow me to fill this particular gap for you, then.

“My student explained the tripartite soul in terms of a charioteer. A man in a chariot is pulled by two horses, one ornery and blacker than night, the other snow white and passionate. The charioteer represents reason, or in this case the self. The black horse represents the hunger, man’s covetous desires. The white horse represents our spirit, the positive impulses of our hearts.

“The charioteer holds the reins of both horses, and manages them both as they clash with one another. Reason guides the soul, masters both desire and passion, and maintains the course. This is how a man aligns himself with the divine. Ascension is a circuit, and we are all racing along the track, doing our best not to stray. The daemon that I described to him is the charioteer, the negative impulses it warns me away from are the black horse, and the positive impulses it stays quiet on are the white horse.

“And what does that have to do with the body?” I asked. He nodded in approval.

“Consider the components described. It’s easy to imagine the three elements of the soul in an abstract sense. But if you were to describe them physically, how would you do it?”

I frowned. When I asked Gaius a question, so long as it was a question worth answering, he would answer it without fanfare. With Socrates, if I was lucky, I would receive another question.

“The hunger is the easiest comparison,” I finally said.

“Of course.” Socrates waved for me to continue.

“Hunger for prestige or power, those are abstract things. Spiritual hunger. But the body hungers for food, for water, and for… carnal things. The hunger comes from the stomach.”

“And what of the spirit?”

It felt like it went against the purpose of the question, but I immediately drew from recent experiences within the Half-Step City.

“The heart,” I said, thinking of burning eyes and heroic spirits. “That, or the blood.”

“And what leads you to believe that?”

“When a hero is impassioned, the heart flames in their eyes flare or flicker to match their mood. But more than that, anyone can feel the pressure of grief or joy in their chest. It’s… painfully physical.”

“Reason?”

“The head,” I said after a long moment.

“Why?”

“When I try to make sense of why Greeks are the way they are, it hurts.”

Socrates slapped me again. This time I managed to hold my place.

“Well enough. And what is virtue?”

“Performative excellence.” On this, Griffon and I had always been in agreement.

“Excellence of the soul, or excellence of the body?”

I frowned.

“All too often, cultivators consider virtue to be an expression of the soul and the soul alone,” Socrates said, progressing from simple one-handed push-ups to more advanced two finger variants. “Intuitively, it’s easy to understand why. Virtue is something many men never truly grasp. It is depth and it is complexity, which we naturally attribute to the nebulous realms of the soul. But what did we just discuss?”

“The elements of the tripartite soul can be physical as well as abstract,” I mused, beginning to see. “The hunger, the spirit, and the reason can be attributed to the body as much as they can to the soul. So why should virtue be any different?”

“Unity in all things is best,” Socrates said. “Unity of the body and the soul most of all. If a man is living his life the proper way, the virtue of his body and the virtue of his soul will be in perfect synchronicity with one another.”

It struck me like a lightning bolt, and in the same moment my arms gave out beneath me.

“Split foundations,” I gasped, panting for breath.

I couldn’t do a push up while laboring under the captain’s virtue because my foundations were split. I couldn’t rise against the weight of my soul because my body was not its equal. Out of sync.

“You begin to see,” he said approvingly, rising to his feet and slapping the dust from his palms. “In our efforts to understand cultivation, as we strive to understand all things, we create terms and stratifications. Citizen, Philosopher, Hero, and Tyrant. Principle, passion, and purpose. And of course, virtue. Each of these concepts is connected, unified in the same way that the body and the soul are, and their tripartite components within. It all begins with virtue. And it all ends with virtue just the same.”

“Fates and Muses forbid it be simple,” I said between ragged breaths. Socrates chuckled.

“The world would be a boring place if every man could understand it by the time he was twenty. Come, let’s do some sit ups.”

I wondered how Griffon was faring.