Carthaginian Empire – Episode 4: Anaxagoras
By: David Bowman
ISBN: 978-1-877546-81-5
All rights reserved
Copyright © Jul. 2008, David Bowman
Cover Art Copyright © Jul 2009, Brightling Spur
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Dedication
History is written by the winners; for if treason succeeds none dare call it treason? I find the concepts this reveals to be fascinating. I can bore the teeth off anyone at twenty paces at parties if you get me going. Hopefully I won’t bore you here. My thanks to the team at Bluewood Publishing for giving me the opportunity to put my theories into practice. My thanks as ever to the people who encouraged me to write as a means of escaping the sometimes dreadful realities of life. I truly hope you enjoy reading these stories as much as I did writing them.
Carthaginian Empire – Episode 4: Anaxagoras
Anaxagoras turned a final time to gaze back on the dusty gate of the city that had betrayed him. Simply clad in the rough undyed cotton and the coarse rope sandals of the penitent he looked thoroughly unremarkable. This remarkable man carried his ideas in his head, not his riches on his back, and those ideas were anything but unremarkable.
“Exile me would you!” he half shouted back at the dimly seen group of men inside the gate who had ensured that the sentence of the assembly had been carried out.
“Exile me, indeed. I will be their doom, their very doom.” This last was said under his breath as he knew they would be under orders to stone him for any curse within earshot of the city. He turned and trudged north from his home city for the first thirty four years of his life, the spiritual home of everything cultured in his world, Athens.
He thought back to the previous spring when he had been expounding his theory on how the difference in size between the sun and the moon could be used to predict the difference in distance from Athens that they both were. At that moment a squad of soldiers had burst in and arrested him and his rapt students.
Used to being rough handled at times due to his controversial science he bore their behaviour with relative calm. Not so for three of his students who had importuned their wealthy fathers and in exchange for pardons had turned on their tutor and made the state’s case against him.
“Damn their eyes. The snivelling cowards will not be taught again by me or anyone like me!” thereby missing the point completely of what the young men’s fathers were accomplishing. They didn’t want people like Anaxagoras teaching potentially blasphemous ideas to their sons.
It was a good five days walk to Lamia where he had been offered sanctuary as long as he didn’t teach. As far as Anaxagoras was concerned this was not a desired destiny; but for now at least he had little choice. He set off through the heat of a stifling Aegean day.
An hour before dusk he reached a small roadside inn and with no other alternative than a hard roadside rocky field he stayed for the night. The food was filling if not appetising, the pallet was not too badly infested and the bed warmer was at least clean if she wasn’t that pretty. The following morning he set off again. The next two days were repeats of the first. Apart from at the overnight stops he saw few people and even fewer travellers. The fourth day, he was following the road along the winding low cliff tops above a small fishing village when he spotted a bulky man perched on a low wall, quite obviously waiting for the traveller. Anaxagoras approached warily, the man was obviously not Greek, but if the man offered violence he didn’t rate his own chances very highly.
“Hail, Anaxagoras! Well met. I have been waiting for you all morning.”
“And who are you to be waiting for me? And how do you know who I am?” The questions fairly tumbled out of him in his nervousness.