The Lost Labyrinth

FIFTEEN
I

The ancient path took Knox and Franklin in a slow spiral up and around the natural pyramid of the sacred hill, the toppled ruins on either side covered in tall grasses ablaze with wild flowers, dandelions, buttercups and brilliant red poppies; while on the summit above them a dilapidated clock tower told the wrong time, and a Greek flag fluttered limply. 'Petitier wasn't like the rest of us,' said Franklin. 'For one thing, he was much older, and his academic career was far more advanced. He'd been teaching in Paris, as I recall, though his time there ended badly. A friend of his wangled him a job here with the French School. They had their own accommodation, of course, but he fell out with someone there and so moved in with us. That was fine, as far as we were concerned. Another wallet to share the bills, fresh blood for our late-night debates. You know what student life is like.'

'Yes.'

'Though I don't know how he managed, if I'm honest. It was fine for the rest of us; we were all writing theses and things, so we could get away with the drunken all-nighters. But he had a day job. Not that it was particularly taxing, from what I could gather. Administrative stuff, mostly. Answering letters, that kind of thing. A waste of his mind, in truth, for he was brilliant in his own way. Take my Doric Invasion, for example. I'd soaked up the conventional wisdom without questioning a word. I'd taken it for granted that it must make sense, because so many people said it did, and they all had strings of letters after their names. But Petitier didn't think that way. He took it almost for granted that any established account had to be wrong. He kept asking me questions that he knew full-well had no adequate answers, and each time I stumbled over the gaps, he'd make fun of me, and my confidence would drain a little more, and I'd go to bed brooding. And one night as I lay there, I had what I can only describe as an epiphany, a sudden illumination of something utterly obvious yet previously unthinkable. There had been no Doric Invasion, no Aryan tribes sweeping down from the north. The whole thing was a fabrication, a work of political propaganda created not from the evidence, but in spite of it.'

'Isn't that a little strong?'

'Look at me, Mr Knox. Do I look European to you?'

'As it happens, yes.'

Franklin laughed. 'Well, I don't feel it. I never have. America was different. I felt at home there, ordinary. My father was black; my mother was Greek. So what? Mixed race families were nothing in Washington DC. But then my mother's mother fell sick and we came here to look after her. It was supposed to be for just a few weeks, but she proved a fighter. Six months passed. A year. My father hated it. Blacks were a real rarity here back then. He was a highly intelligent man, but he couldn't find work, certainly not as a teacher. And my mother refused to leave, not with her mother dying, so finally my father packed his bags and fled back to DC. I hated him for that. I used to burn with anger, though I was skilled at suppressing it. But now I realise it can't have been easy for him.' He waved a hand, to indicate the stresses that all families faced. 'It was hard enough even for me, with a Greek mother and speaking the language reasonably fluently, because my mother had always spoken it with me at home. My fellow pupils mocked me for being different, as children will. I was never an athlete or a fighter, so I had to get my own back in the only way I could: exams.' They passed several massive blocks of marble column lying by the side of the path, and the battered bust of a Roman emperor; probably Hadrian, to judge from his beard. 'I was the most conventional of students until Petitier arrived. I studied diligently and behaved myself. I tried so hard to fit in. But despite that-or perhaps because of it-I had a terrible anger burning inside me; resentment at being thought inferior just because of the colour of my skin. I think Petitier must have sensed it. He teased me with radical ideas. He suggested that Hannibal might have been black, for example. Cleopatra, too. Even Socrates. Think of it: that great icon of philosophy and wisdom, a black man.'

'I hadn't heard that,' said Knox politely.

'For a very good reason,' smiled Franklin. 'It's not true. Or, more accurately, there's precious little evidence to support it. But it spoke to a greater truth, one for which there's all the evidence you could want.' He paused to admire a pair of lovebirds swooping and frolicking in the spring sunshine. 'We Westerners think ourselves special, don't we, Mister Knox? We have this image of ourselves as born and nurtured in the cradle of Classical Greece, heirs to its great traditions: democracy, science, philosophy, medicine, mathematics, technology, architecture, universities. Everything that's best in western culture, we credit to the miraculous flowering of genius right here two and a half millennia ago. But Petitier made me look again at this image. He made me see that all these undeniably great things, all these wonderful discoveries and inventions…You see, they weren't actually Greek at all. No. They were African.'