Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia

The Son of Rome

“You were right to seek out Aristotle first.”

I watched death lance towards my heart, a spear with a dull wooden tip that was better suited for a stage play than combat. And yet the rules of nature clung to its tip, and I perceived its simple truth through the lense of my Sophic sense.

A man dies from a spear through the heart.

I knew, like I knew that the skies above were blue on a cloudless day, that his spear of dull oak would skewer me as sure as any bronze or iron. That it would kill me where Gaius’ campaigns and howling wolves had failed.

As if I’d allow such a thing.

Dull wood can’t pierce bronze plate, I declared in the voice of my soul, and the rhetoric clinging to the practice weapon dispersed just as Socrates drove it into my chest. The haft cracked in his hands, the head of the spear crumpling against my breastplate.

“The foundation of a man is built over the course of years, and to tear that foundation apart after it’s settled takes twice the effort. Far easier to find a mentor that knows that foundation, who has built upon it before - either in his own lifetime, or through his students.”

Socrates pressed me with his broken spear, parrying the one I had stolen from the temple of the father with infuriating ease. Oracles heckled and cheered all around us, reaching out to shove at my mentor or pull at me when we passed too close to their tripods. I grit my teeth as he wound another rule of nature around his broken spearhead and fractured shaft, mending them both in the blink of an eye.

“Any man can teach fundamentals, assuming he’s familiar with them himself,” the Gadfly continued, without a hitch in his voice. “But you're past that. You’ve established your virtue, your foundations have been set, and now you're faced with a choice.”

Dull wood can pierce bronze plates at times, Socrates declared, and in the span of an instant, faster than the blink of an eye, he assaulted me with the truth of his own experience.

In that brief instant, Socrates’ pneuma, his rhetoric, clashed with mine and showed me a memory.

Broken men in the earth, screaming horses and calls to retreat. Beneath me, a son of Helen, a brother set against me by war. He reached desperately for the short blade on his belt. I raised the shaft of my broken spear and drove it through the crack in his breastplate.

I inhaled sharply and dodged right, watching the practice spear lurch through the space where my heart had just been. I knew that if I had still been standing there, it would have broken through my breastplate just the same as it had in his memory. Exhaling, I twisted at the hips and swung the shaft of my spear as hard as I could at his knees. He hopped over it obligingly, and I tackled him out of the air.

“That’s it!” the Oracle of the Alabaster Isles cheered. “Take it to the ground!”

“Between his legs, boy!” heckled the Oracle of the Broken Tide. “It’s a small target, but it’ll make him sing!”

“You're a troubled case,” Socrates continued, as we grappled. “Aristotle left you half-finished and the legions filled in the rest. Why is it, you think, that we call a cultivator’s formative years their foundation? What purpose does it serve to evoke such an image? The barbarians of the world call it by countless other names- what does a Roman call it?”

Foundation establishment. The Greeks used it to describe the refinement of a Citizen, a cultivator in the first realm. Once a cultivator ascended to the realm of Philosophers, no matter how long it took them, their foundations were considered established. In Rome, in the legions, we’d known a similar concept. A point of no return where a man became what it was that he’d be for the rest of his days. The first blow struck.

And then in his actions, Gaius had given us a name for it.

“Crossing the Rubicon,” I said, and the mystery of the Babel shard translated it to another word as it hit the air. A concept Aristotle had taught me in a distant memory. The first philosophy. Metaphysika.

I snarled as Socrates pinned my legs with his own and shoved his palm up under my chin. Leveraging all my strength to the right, I rolled us.

“And why call it that?” he asked. “What does it represent?”

Sea water struck us before I could answer, a wave appearing from nowhere, and as I coughed and spat I heard the crone of the Broken Tide cackle. Socrates growled in annoyance and ripped the sandal off my foot before I could stop him, twisting and heaving it with all his might. Dona’s laughter turned to an indignant shriek, and stone shattered.

“Advance and consign yourself to never-ending ascension,” I coughed out. Exploiting the crone’s distraction for everything I could, I slammed my forehead into Socrates’ nose and wrenched my arm up under his knee, prying it out of its lock. “When Gaius crossed the Rubicon in defiance of the senate, he condemned himself to eternity. An endless expansion of Rome as he saw it.”

I will step down when the enemies of Rome are dead and gone.

Since the birth of the republic, Dictator had stood unchallenged as the highest realm a cultivator could touch. For Gaius, it hadn’t been enough. And so he’d pressed on further and found what lay beyond.

Dictator Perpetuo.

“Then, to establish your foundations is to take the first step towards building something greater, endless in its expanse,” Socrates said, hammering my right side until I was forced to let go and defend it. “Is that fair to say?”

“Yes,” I growled, wedging my forearm under his chin when he tried to bring it down, pressing with everything I had against him.

“And what does the other half of you call it? What does the Greek in you say?”

“Metaphysics,” I answered, straining, but Socrates was too strong. He tossed me off and we rose with our spears in hand again. “The study of abstractions. The contemplation of things that can’t be directly observed.”

“The first principle,” Socrates concluded, and threw his spear at me like it was a toy javelin.

A dozen whispering truths propelled it through the air faster than any spear had a right to move. They clung sharply to its tip, his rhetoric imbuing it with piercing truths. It was too fast for me to dodge, too fast for me to unravel every portion of the rhetoric surrounding it, and far too fast for me to even think of countering them.

What else could I do but meet it head on?

The captain leads from the front.

I lunged forward and met his spear with mine, tip to tip. The wooden spear exploded with a whistling boom, pelting the late kyrios’ courtyard with shards of splintered wood. The Oracles shielded themselves with their myriad mysteries, some clapping and others whistling in appreciation. I scowled and twirled the celestial spear once before slamming its butt against the mosaic floor.

“What you call rhetoric is a blade with more than one edge,” Socrates said, rolling his left shoulder and pacing around the room. I watched him warily, but for the moment it seemed our spar was over. “Tell me, how many forms have you noticed today?”

“Three.”

He rolled his hand at the wrist, urging me on.

“Invoking the rules of nature,” I said, contemplating the eerie bite of a spear that should have had no chance against a sturdy bronze breastplate. “By emphasizing one aspect of your weapon, one strength, you can bypass its weaknesses.” That one had been hammered into me countless times over the last few days, every iteration of the lesson more punishing than the last. “But it can be countered. Inconsistencies can be pointed out to disrupt it.”

“It applies to more than just weapons, boy. But yes. The second?”

I backed up one step too far. Slim hands wound around my neck and through my hair, pulling my back against the warm stone of a holy tripod. Long, thick legs wrapped around my chest, pinning me in place.

“My, my, look what I caught,” the Oracle of the Alabaster Isles whispered in my ear. “My own barbarian prince.”

“Chara!” Selene cried, outraged.

I tilted my head back, glaring up at the holy woman. “I’m no prince.”

“No, I suppose you’re not,” she mused, her nails dragging down my scalp just gently enough not to break skin. “You’re all that remains, aren’t you? That makes you king.”

“That makes me nothing,” I told her quietly. “It makes me no one.” I leveraged the captain’s virtue against the eerie depths of her influence. She leaned back just a hair, her eyes dancing.

“Focus,” Socrates said, suddenly beside us, and Chara sputtered as he planted an open palm against her face and shoved her off her own holy tripod. He continued on, pacing around the room. I stepped away from the indignant oracle, over to the scarlet side of the octagonal room where Selene was watching me with concern.

“Are you alright, Solus?” she asked once I was close enough.

“Fine.” I set my elbow on the edge of her tripod and leaned most of my weight against it. It had been a long morning.

“Sometime today,” Socrates called. I shook my head.

“The second aspect of rhetoric,” I recalled. “Persuasion through lived experience. Even if a man’s knowledge of a thing tells him something, you can persuade him otherwise with your own recollections.”

The blunt shaft of a spear could not possibly punch through a bronze breastplate like papyrus, I knew that. But Socrates had lived his own life, he had served as I had served - for longer, likely - and he had lived through one of those uncommon circumstances in which such a thing could happen. He had done it himself and he’d shown me the work. That was a powerful thing to argue against, though I could have, if I’d had the time to do so in the middle of our bout.

But I hadn’t had the time. And that had been the point.

“You just realized something,” Socrates observed, though he wasn’t looking at me. “Share it with us.”

“Your rhetoric was flawed,” I said, frowning. “The shaft of your spear was enough to punch through that breastplate only because a stronger weapon had already cracked it sometime prior. You were striking a weak point, not an intact piece like mine.”

“It was a warhorse that did it, actually,” he corrected me idly. “The beast trampled him underfoot - nearly caved his chest in whole. But yes, you raise a fair point. So why did you dodge? Why didn’t you counter me, as you had just before that?”

“I didn’t have time,” I said, searching for the words. “When you were invoking just one truth at a time, telling me rather than showing me, it was like a thrust I could parry. But that… that was an ambush. I had to recognize it before I could counter it. I had to understand what you were trying to convey, find a flaw in your reasoning, all that before I could even attempt to counter it. I didn’t have time.”

“Good,” he said, nodding. “Rhetoric is about more than truth alone. Every man’s truth is a slightly different shade, you’ll find that out soon enough. A false argument presented in bad faith can be more powerful than the truth as you know it, so long as it is convincing. Not a righteous approach, but one you’ll have to contend with.”

“Third,” I murmured. In a prior lesson, Socrates had listed several words with heavy meaning, joined concepts of note. Among them were Purpose, Passion, and, “Principle.”

The captain leads from the front.

Socrates ceased his pacing, eyeing me from across the courtyard. The Oracles lounging off to his right and off to his left, belonging to the Howling Wind Cult and the Blind Maiden Cult respectively, each leaned forward with interest.

“Explain.”

“We are men of principle,” I said, reciting the words like a prayer, as Griffon had in the temple of the father. “Each of us holds dear to our hearts an ideal, a state of being that we aspire to every day of our lives. Something that we cannot achieve as citizens alone.”

Socrates crossed his arms, the muscles in his forearms flexing as he considered me. “We call it the first principle because it’s the first valuable thought a man has in his life,” he finally said.

I considered that, considered the words. The ideal. The Roman commander, leading the charge against the screaming hordes.

Yes. That sounded right.

“There’s power in striving towards something greater than yourself,” I continued, sounding out the words as much as speaking them. But they felt right. They thrummed through the channels that the Reign-Holder’s marrow had burnt through me, empowering me. Allowing me to stand up straight, where I had been forced to lean on Selene’s dais moments before. “And there’s power in getting closer.”

“And if you live counter to that ideal?” Socrates challenged me. “If you return to the earth the principle that you cast off your silk bonds of mortality for?”

Every oracle answered as one. A sorrowful epitaph.

“Deviation.”