1A hundred and forty years after the harbour burned, Rome had no rival left on earth. One man ruled it all, and he was called the emperor. Some emperors were good and some were mad, and the people had no say in which they got.
2In those days the emperor was Domitian. He was a clever, lonely, frightened man, and a frightened man with all the power in the world is a terrible thing. He saw plots in every face. He paid men to listen at dinner tables. A careless word over the wine could bring soldiers to your door before the lamps were out.
3There was in Rome a young man named Quintus, nineteen years old, the son of a senator. He had a fine house, a fine name, and a road laid out before him as straight as any Roman road: the law courts, then an office, then a higher office, then a province to govern.
4Three times a week Quintus went to a rented room near the cattle market, up a stair that smelled of cabbage, to hear a lame man talk.
5The lame man had been born a slave in a hill town of Phrygia. Even his name was not a name. It was Epictetus, and it meant only Bought. He had been carried to Rome as a boy and owned by a rich official of the palace, a man who had himself once been a slave, and who was not kind.
6One of his legs was crooked, and he walked with a stick. Some said a master had done it to him. Some said it was a sickness of the joints. When his students asked, he would begin to talk about something else, and they learned not to ask.
7While he was still a slave, his owner had let him go to hear a great teacher in the city. The slave sat at the back and listened with his whole life. Later he was freed. He did not go into trade or seek a patron, as freedmen did. He rented a room and began to teach what he had learned and what he had found out for himself.
8He taught no secrets. He asked questions, as Socrates had asked them in Athens long before. He would take a young man who had come in angry about an insult, or sick with fear before a trial, and he would ask him plain things until the young man saw what it was he was truly afraid of, and whether it was a thing that could be taken from him at all.
9He was not gentle. He once told Quintus, before the whole room, that he had the best tutors in Rome and the mind of a spoiled pony. Quintus went home furious and came back the next day.
10For Quintus had noticed something. Everyone he knew was afraid. His father, a senator, was afraid every hour, of the emperor, of his rivals, of losing his estates. The richest men in Rome flinched at a knock. And this lame freedman, who owned a mat, a bench, a cooking pot and an iron lamp, was not afraid of anything. Quintus wanted to know how that was done. He wanted it more than he wanted a province.
11In his twentieth year the fear in the city grew worse. A senator wrote a book in praise of a dead man the emperor had hated. The writer was put to death. Then another writer, for another book. The books themselves were carried into the public square and burned by the hangman, as if a thought could be executed.
12And then the emperor made a decree. Every philosopher was to leave Rome and the whole of Italy. They taught men that there was something higher than the emperor's will.
13Quintus heard it in the street and ran to the room over the cattle market. The teacher was rolling up his mat.
14There was a visitor there before him. Quintus knew the man. He was a friend of his father's, smooth and well-dressed, with an easy smile. Everyone knew what he did for a living, though no one said it aloud. He carried names to the palace.
15"It need not come to this," the smooth man was saying. "The emperor has nothing against you yourself. A harmless cripple. You could stay. You could keep your school, and no one would trouble you." He looked at his nails. "There are young men who come here. From great houses. Young men talk. They say things about the emperor that they would not say at home. You must have heard a good deal in this room. The palace would only like to know which of them said what."
16Quintus stood in the door and felt the floor go from under him. He had said things. They all had. He had said that the emperor was a sick wolf, in this very room, a month ago, to make the others laugh.
17The teacher finished tying the mat. He did not look at Quintus. "You have come a long way up a bad stair," he said to the visitor, "to offer me the city of Rome. I am sorry for your trouble. I was only renting it."
18"You will lose everything," said the smooth man.
19"I will lose a room that smells of cabbage." He picked up the iron lamp, turned it over, and shook the old oil out of it onto the floor. "What I teach here goes where I go. What these boys said here was said to me, and I have a poor memory for it. There is the stair. Mind the fourth step. It is rotten."
20The man went. He was not smiling any more. He stopped beside Quintus on the landing, and looked him full in the face, so that Quintus would know he had been seen there.
21"Master," said Quintus, when the steps had died away. "He will go to my father."
22"I expect so."
23"You could have given him a name. One name. Someone else's. You could have stayed."
24The teacher looked at him then. "And what would I have taught, after that, in the room I had bought with it? Carry the cooking pot. It is heavier than it looks."
25That night Quintus's father shut the door of his study and spoke to his son in a voice that shook. He had been warned. The family was watched. Quintus would never go near that man again. He would write a letter denouncing the philosophers, to be read aloud in the right places. He would be seen at the emperor's games. If he did these things, the road was still open: the courts, the offices, the province. If he did not, he was no son of that house, and not one coin of it would follow him.
26Quintus lay awake until morning. He thought of everything he had. Then he asked himself, as the lame man had taught him, which of those things he truly had. The house was his father's. The name could be struck from the rolls by a word from the palace. The road could be closed tomorrow by a rumour. The only thing in that fine house that no one could take out of it was the thing he had learned up the cabbage stair. And that was the one thing his father was asking him to give up.
27He left before light, with a cloak, a little money, and a wax tablet. He caught up with the teacher on the southern road, a small figure limping along behind a hired mule. The teacher did not seem surprised.
28"Your father?" he said.
29"I have no father. He said so."
30"He was frightened. Do not hold a man to what he says with a knife at his back. Write to him from the coast." And that was all that was said about it.
31They walked to the heel of Italy. It took twenty days at a lame man's pace. They took ship over the narrow sea to Greece, to a new town called Nicopolis, the City of Victory. It was a windy, raw place, full of sailors.
32There the teacher rented another room and set down his mat, his bench, his pot and his lamp, and began again as if nothing had happened. At first he had three students. They ate beans. Quintus, who had never in his life carried water, carried water.
33In the first winter a thief came in the night.
34The teacher kept the iron lamp burning in a corner. It was the one good thing he owned, heavy and well made. Quintus, asleep on the floor, woke to a noise. He saw a shape at the window and then the corner was dark. By the time he got to the door, there was only the sound of feet in the lane.
35He came back in a rage. He would find the man. He would go to the magistrates. He paced and swore, and the teacher sat on the bench in the dark and let him.
36"It was the only thing you had worth stealing!" Quintus shouted. "Does it mean nothing to you?"
37"It gave a good light," said the teacher. "I shall miss it this evening. Sit down. You are going to wake the fish-seller."
38In the morning he limped to the market and came back with a lamp of baked clay, the kind that costs less than a loaf. He filled it and lit it and set it in the same corner. He left the window as it was.
39That night Quintus sat looking at the flame for a long time. It was the same light. It fell on the same wall. He could find no difference in it at all. He thought of the thief, crouched somewhere over a good iron lamp, listening for footsteps. He thought of the emperor, who owned every lamp in the world, lying awake in a palace with polished walls. It was said he had them polished so that he could see who came behind him. And he looked at the lame man, asleep on a mat.
40In the spring a letter came from Rome. Quintus's father was dead. He had not been killed. His heart had stopped, as the hearts of frightened men do. And the emperor, finding some fault in the will, had taken the house, and the estates, and everything in them.
41Quintus read it standing in the lane. So the road was gone. If he had done all that his father asked, he would be standing in Rome this morning with nothing, and with that letter of denouncing to his name besides.
42He wept for his father, whom he had loved, and to whom he had written twice from the coast with no reply. He did not rage, and he was surprised to find he did not. He had already walked this road in his mind many times, on the teacher's orders. Each evening he had sat a little while and thought: this may be taken, and this, and this. He had walked the dark road before night. When night came, his feet knew the way.
43"What do I do now?" he asked.
44"What did you do yesterday?" said the teacher.
45"Carried water. Studied."
46"Is the well still there?"
47So he carried water. Three years after the decree, the emperor Domitian was stabbed to death in his own bedroom, by his own servants, with his wife's knowledge. The polished walls did not save him.
48The philosophers were free to go home. Many did. The lame man stayed in Nicopolis. "They will find me here as easily," he said, and they did. In time the room was too small, and then the house. Young men came from Athens and from Rome, and great officials crossing to the east would stop their ships to hear him for a day. He told them the same things he had told the spoiled ponies over the cattle market.
49Quintus stayed, and in time he taught the beginners. He once worked it out, and saw that of the young men who had laughed with him in that room in Rome, and who had kept to the straight road, half were dead by the emperor's order or their own hand before they were thirty.
50The teacher lived to be very old. He never married, and he never owned more than he could carry. But near the end he did a thing that surprised the town.
51A man he knew, a poor man, had a child he could not feed. In those days such a child was set out on the hillside, and that was the end of it, and the law said nothing. The old man heard of it. He went out on his stick and came back with the child in the fold of his cloak. He had lived alone for seventy years. Now he took a woman into the house to nurse it, and he sat up at night when it cried, and he was seen in the market, lame and white-bearded, buying a rattle.
52"You have always said a man should not hang his peace on things that can be taken," said Quintus. He was not young himself by then. "This can be taken. Children die."
53"They do," said the old man. He was watching the child try to catch the flame of the clay lamp. He moved the lamp back a little. "I did not say I would hang my peace on her. I said I would feed her. She had no roads at all on that hillside. Now she has some. I can tell those two things apart, I hope, at my age."
54He wrote nothing down, any more than Socrates had. But among his students in those last years was a young man from Bithynia who wrote fast. He sat at the back with a tablet and took down what the old man said, the questions and the scoldings and all, as near as he could get it in the old man's own rough words. The notes were copied, and went from hand to hand.
55So the words of a man whose name meant Bought went up the cabbage stairs of every city in the empire. One copy came, in time, into a tent on a frozen river, to a reader you would not expect. You shall hear of that.
56When the old man had gone through the Last Door, a rich man came to Nicopolis and bought the clay lamp. He paid three thousand silver pieces for it. He carried it home and set it on his table, and lit it, and waited to become wise.
57It gave the same light as any other lamp. The rich man had bought the clay, and the thing he wanted had never been in the clay.