Sofia and the end of Europe

By Raluca David

-5

I awoke at the beginning of history, or certainly the time when Herodotus began to write about istoría.

I awoke in this city of heat, where creatures do not hide from cold, where the body’s comfort allows the mind to wander. I learnt, for learning is the greatest virtue of these cloth-over-the-shoulder creatures here. I learnt that the town square stone is where lizards lie, where humans of knowledge orate, where men gather for ekklesia, their meetingplace, to enact demokratia. They don’t invite women, which saddens me, for I am female. My name is Σοφία, Sofía.

People wanted to see wisdom, to believe in wisdom. They made me. I am Wisdom.  

-4

There is a new orator in town, Aristotélēs, famed these days. He is a man of many coils: brown and white curls cover his head, a bouncy curtain frames his forehead, and coils hang off his chin like plentiful grapes. When he walks about Athína, people stand aside to listen. The height of his glory, dóxa, is still in the future, although he will have his share of undoing one day.

I stand perched under the colonnade, only my little zygodactylous feet out in the sun. I am already a century old; they told me I shall grow with each learnt man, yet I am still so small.

I hear Aristotélēs flagging about this new concept of taxinómisi:

‘All forms of life and matter in categories.’

Zóo, psári, poulí. Useful if you are drawing a family tree of life, call it evolution. But that idea will germinate, under rain and sun, for twenty more centuries.

I worry about Aristotélēs’s ideas. What happens if you classify humans? It seems like a concern for the future, yet I have felt it in my female body already. I, Sofía.

Aristotélēs says humans ought to be measured by thoughts. Walking with a book on his hip, he speaks of what makes a good bĭ́os. That confuses me. A good life is an optimum amount of light, not so much that it upsets the forest. Warm and clean feathers. I suppose he’d classify me as Owl.

1

To believe in only one truth is not what the ancients taught me five centuries ago, when I was born. Oratory is not a monopoly. I blink rarely, and my wide eyes do not rest. I turn my head in all directions in this forest. To doubt is to serve humanity.

2

Mortals over the Adriatic are now a bigger deal than us, Greeks. Behold, they are crafting an Empire again, playing Aléxandros the Great, only they have their eyes set on Evrópi, not Persía. I appreciate that they build bridges and cities, in a stone manner that will last forever. Like Aléxandros built Alexandrias. I imagine myself perched over their aqueducts millennia from now. But why did Aléxandros, and why do Romans, need war to build cities?  

4

They’ve done away with our Gods now.

First, we lent them to the Romans, even allowed name changes. Zeús became Iuppiter, it had to sound Latin for their people to believe it; Hera became Juno; Afrodíti became Venus, all mira nomina. The first praemonitium was when they replaced Dionýsios with Bacchus. Haven’t we long known that pleasure is not only found in alcohol? Ask an owl: she derives pure pleasure from immergere the tips of her wings in sunshine, from stepping across heated stone, and, yes, devouring the odd glossy camo lizard.

I was devastatum when they called my own god Minerva. Boooring. Athiná had an allure. Athiná meant wisdom ruled the city.

Now they’re calling the whole thing off. Only keeping Zeús, eliminating all competition. Humanity is yet to discover that Godly Pantheons function like economic markets; the key is fair competition. In the Godly realm, it’s called dialogue, oratory. Remember?

The final blow is when they change Zeús’ name to Lord. Then society, κοινωνία = community, becomes all about Lords and Landlords. It forgets demokratia. 

5

The Emperors of Rome have lost their sight. The balóni become overstretched; too much plenty, no further goals to unite behind. I flew all the way to Rome to warn them, departed Athína for the first time in my entire millennium. Mind you, it was not an easy time to leave. Temples of my Gods had just closed for good by order of the Byzantine Roman Empire. They even shut down the Olympic games. My duty was now to the whole of humanity.

I was too late. Under my wing flaps, I saw black smoke enveloping Rome. Some Visigoths had gotten there before me and were sacking Romans, beheading statues, ending the fat Empire.

What a lamentabilis 1st millennium birthday for me.

6

It’s become a tenebris locus, this place. I fly between settlements at night and rest on walls during days, from Rome to Paris, a new town the Franks have built on the elbow of a great river.

I even make it all the way to the famous Londinium. I remember when the Roman Empire was still magnificus, they named this place Augusta and built a mega wall around it. Now it’s fallen into disrepair. I perch over the port, desuetudo.

I try to orate, as my makers taught me. In Londinium, there is nobody to listen, and in Paris, they are all busy city-dwellers. I keep chirping on about the town square, where it all started, but they only listen to their Lord, or to their Priests who claim to speak the word of Lord. All lost in translation.

I stop looking. Eyes closed and count to ten. It will all pass in, what, ten centuries or so? Spero.

12

I wake up from half a millennium of sleeping flat on my tummy like a baby owl. I wake to the sounds of hoots. I shake the frozen slumber off my feathers, frazzled, and fly out of this mad silva, over distraught cities, bloodied crops, burning castles. Only then do I return to the owls who are screeching and barking. What does this all mean? Is it the end of the world?

Crusades, they tell me. Been going on for two hundred years. Wars about whose Optimus Maximum is the fortissimus. Attempts to recover the Holy Land. I sigh. Our Holy place was the Acropolis in Athína, or if you insist, the Pantheon in Rome. Long before they imported this new religion. Now they’re fighting other monotheists, calling them barbarians as if it wasn’t us Greeks who invented that word, bárbaros, babblers.  Funny to think we used bárbaros to refer to the Romans first.

Inquisition, the owls continue, and I am in dyspistía. Condemning heretics? What will they have these people do? Don’t be alius, don’t try to be nos. Cancel their births.

It is the first time I ask myself if it’s time to go. When is Wisdom allowed to call it quits?  

13

Just when you think it’s over, something nice happens. Humans of Brittania scribere this Magna Carta Libertatum, the Great Charter of Freedoms. It happens in the middle of a field, Runnymede, and I get to watch from the silva. It reminds me of home. Sure, a much wetter, diminished demokratia than us Greeks had. But it’s a start, and I’m allowed a bit of hope, am I not?

14

Slap in the visage. Black Death. Half of my continent dies.

My name is Wisdom, I’m to tell them it’s not punishment from Lord Zeús Iuppiter Optimus Maximus, it’s not to be blamed on alieni, foreigners poisoning wells. I’m to tell them it’s bacteria. Go quarantine.

But I’m only an owl. A female owl. Who would listen to me?

16

My praesumptio: when they wake up from the katastrofí, they’ll wake from two millennia of backwardness. The signs are poor, until somewhere in Florence, a few specimens shed away the God amnesia, and proclamatum man the measure of all things. Rinascita. I’m excited.

Next thing you know, it’s trending all over Europe under a French name, Renaissance. You can’t imagine what’s happening here: Dante, da Vinci, Michelangelo. They rebrand what was there from the start: us, the Greeks. But no matter, no matter. Ego sum bonae spei.

17

This century begins in style, in Londinium, with King James’ Bible. You know I’m not a fan of Lord Optimus Maximus, but providing folks with a God-book in their own lingua will force the door open for demokratia.

The only true Maximus of this century is Shakespeare. He’s bringing Classics back. His theatre alloweth people to seeth. I was there, alighted on the wooden railings, at which hour those gents staged Macbeth at the Globe. Mine own feathers were quite damp, and I was shivering. I hopped from one foot to the other, I told you I told you I told you.

18

I find myself most ardently enamored with the singular delights of this century and hold a deep affection for the esteemed Miss Jane Austen herself. What further remarks can be proffered? At last, a voice of eloquence doth emerge in representation of the fairer sex. I have been in anticipation of this moment for twenty-three centuries. Now I found myself most firmly persuaded that a substantial transformation was soon to grace the course of human existence. Postremo!

19

Finally, they’ve done away with the one-God, Lord Zeús Iuppiter Optimus Maximus. A human exemplar called Nietzsche nuntiatum, and became an Übermensch for it, although he wrote the Opus Magnum in a manner less intelligible than my old friends the Greeks.

It had it coming, the one-God. But I do wish Nietzsche hadn’t replaced God with some bleak depression. Instead, we could have crowned Dionýsios in Zeús’ place and that would have been just fine. Might have assisted all concerning what ensued in the coming centuries.

In retrospect, 19th might look like the best one. Ah, that the most profound strife of humankind would be between the bards of the celestial expanse, the minstrels of the woodland, and the learned men and women of science.

They have finally let women in. Twenty-four centuries of half of humankind blindfolded. But Ada Lovelace stripped away her veil. Her father, Lord Byron, of the poetic lineage, had been dispatched to my homelands to restore his faculties. The young lady was propelled forthwith to the camp of reason. Mathimatiká, filosofía, the universe of her intellect was unleashed upon the machine. She beheld the poetry of what the machine could achieve: endless cognition.   

20

I am tired, my wings have lost half of their feathers. The orators of Athína would have never opened my oculos had they known what I would discern. One shoots a prince in Serbia, and next thing you know, there are millions in trenches. One breath of air, one dance of swing. Then it starts again: blitz, fenced wire, gas, contorted dances. Millions boarded up on trains to nowhere.

Hadn’t they promised knowledge in pure form, rays coming off the minimus globule of stuff, the atom, stuphein, the fabric of everything? Instead, the sky became a mushroom larger than anything I had ever perceived, manufactured by humankind. And the 20th was only halfway through.

21

End of historia, they said. End of the West. As if we had never seen a millennium pass into darkness, for the next one to start. An Empire into darkness, for the next to incipio.

At the turn of the millennium, I did a fly-trip over Evrópi, now there were no more iron curtains cutting across. Shortly afterwards, two orphans, in the angry stage of grief, flew planes into the twin towers of Manhattan. What a calamity. I was flapping around somebody’s living room, blinking angrily at the rectangle of blue light, the central hearth of 21st century life.

The TV attempted to orate at me its fast wisdom. I didn’t listen. I perched on its overheated top. I wondered if, finally, they no longer required my oculos contemplating over their somnum.

A quarter of this century has now passed. And with everything that is happening, how angry the humans are, how much my beloved demokratia crumbles again before my very eyes the way it did in the Dark Ages, and how confused the birds are in the heating air, it might very well be end of historia, at least for my Evrópi and the so-called ‘West’.

People want to see intelligence to believe in intelligence. Instead of caring for us birds and our bird-eye view on their world, they manufacture cameras, drones, AI.

What will I do? I guess I shall find myself an island in the Cyclades, a half-standing temple of Athiná, bathe my fatigued wings under its shade, and call it retirement. Or perhaps I shall finally leave my Evrópi and go to talk about demokratia elsewhere. 

It’s been a bonum bĭ́os, Sofía femella.