Dennis knew the real secret.
The discovery of the Derveni Papyrus in 1962 had triggered a wave of expeditions through the most ancient necropoli, better funded and better equipped than in decades, fueled by the renewed belief that there were still treasures to be found. One such group thought to go to Pantalica, to the ancient necropolis so old that it pre-dated the ancient Greek colony at Syracuse on Sicily by five hundred years. In 1969, they found there an even older scroll, and transported it also to Thessaloniki where it could be analyzed in entire secrecy behind the veil of scholarly hubbub over the Derveni Papyrus.
What would be called the Pantalica Papyrus was even more secretly translated, and Dennis’s father was among the translators. Dennis was attending Thessaloniki, working on postgraduate studies in History and Archaeology, specializing in Ancient History.
The age of the Pantalica papyrus, the fact that it was prose, and the specific references to Apeiron, pointed immediately to Anaximander, the pre-Socratic philosopher, as its author. Kernels of it echoed, anticipated, and explained Anaximander’s beliefs so well that it could not easily be dismissed. And there was a reference to the author’s Thracian bride obtained in Appollonia. Had Anaximander not led the Milesian colony to Appollonia, to Thrace, to the shores of the Black Sea?
Anaximander was the philosopher who was well known to have posited in the 6th century BC that the earth was one of many worlds created from Apeiron, and that its entire surface had once been covered in water, with plants and animals birthed from mud and water. He claimed that men were not present at this early stage, but that mankind had descended from fish. From fish! Over two thousand years before Darwin. He asserted that there had to have been an embryonic transitional stage — with egg-born generations of men mouth-brooded by fish — before mankind could come out into the open air and lose our scales. A hero of rational thought. The first scientist and evolutionist.
When Dennis first read the Pantalica papyrus, among his father’s papers, he thought it must be a hoax or allegory. It was on par with suddenly finding a lost love letter between Pythagoras and Medusa, or, rather between Pythagoras and a mythical talking triangle eager to reveal its geometric secrets. Absurd.
Anaximander was supposed to be the first scientist. The man who first drew a map of the world. The man who first conceived of a mechanical model of the entire universe. Anaximander was a hero of deductive reason, of the triumph of the rational over the supernatural.
Or so they had thought.
From the papyrus, Dennis could see that the Thracian wife must have infected Anaximander with her Orphism. It was she, in the text, who offered the dedications to Apeiron and black-winged Night, and who played the wild flute that heralded the Boundless Chaos that is Apeiron.
It was she who had introduced Anaximander, and now Dennis, to Circe.
The author of the scroll wrote, and this certainly was no secret, that Circe was the daughter of Helios, sky-spawn, and one of the daughters of Oceanus, depth-spawn. Likewise, the author proclaimed that Circe commanded the gift of uplift and decay, of evolution and devolution. She could regress men to pigs and wolves and half-fish. She made of them living sculptures proclaiming what men had been and what they now were, both naturally (half-fish) and allegorically (pigs). She was not ashamed of her star-spawn heritage. Why should anyone else be? Let it be writ upon their faces and bodies.
When one of her creations was criticized and rejected — poor Glaucus whom she had regressed to fin and scaly tail from the waist down, she was incensed like an artist who had received an unfavorable review. What blinded this nymph Priscilla that she recoiled in horror from handsome half-fished Glaucus?
The next time Priscilla descended into her pool to bathe, Circe poisoned the water with primordial Apeironian ooze, collected from the deepest abyss where Oceanus slept dreaming and oozing from his tentacled orifices.
The nymph’s lower body changed beneath the water line, regressing and transforming. She became Scylla, a monster.
Circe had planned to laugh at Scylla’s suffering. She hated the slight against Glaucus, against her own flesh-craftsmanship.
Only, there was something enticing about Scylla as she tried to run from herself, from the twelve tentacles, from the six hairy mouths where she had only had one woman’s hairy mouth, and each attached to her waist by a sinuous neck so that it could twist and turn to gnash its teeth at her, and bark like a dog, hairy as a wolf.
“A fine story, wife,” Anaximander responded, the translation recorded, when she had concluded her description. “A tale for the fireside, and echoing Homer.”
“It is no story,” she challenged, this woman from Thrace who has no name at this point in the papyrus.
“Then what does it mean?” he asked, assuming it was some kind of allegory, a myth-garmented truth.
“It does not mean. It is. It was. It will be again.”
“I’m sure the person that taught you the story framed it that way.”
“You would challenge Circe’s own account?” she asked, fierce-tongued.
Anaximander was in no mood to argue this further. She was so young. So foolish. Perhaps he had been foolish to marry a woman in her teens when he was almost fifty-five, a very old man. “If Circe told me herself, I’d consider it, but I’d believe it when I saw Scylla wriggling and writhing in all her glory.”
“Few enough men have wished for that.”
“If such a creature existed, I would want to see her. It would be fascinating. She would be a kind of chthonic missing link. Remarkable.”
Something changed in his wife’s expression. She looked quite pleased. “We could sail to Syracuse, and then travel north to the place where she waits.”
Anaximander’s wife had a large gold-ornamented chest, which she had brought with her to his house at the time of their marriage. She always kept it locked. She kept it in a room in their villa which she also kept locked. Sometimes she sequestered herself behind that door, and he could hear flute music and drum through the open window, as he read in the courtyard below. He assumed it contained her Thracian instruments.
Now, she insisted that they take it with them to Syracuse. But first, while he arranged things and their sea passage, she let him know that she would be gone for several days, visiting her family.
Anaximander was glad to not be invited. He had never met her family, and expected they were quite decadently Thracian since she had been so reluctant to introduce him to them.
But, it struck him that her departure would be a chance to investigate the locked chest in the locked room. It had bothered him particularly in the first few months of their marriage, but he had not thought about it for over a year, gradually settling into their routines. This mention of her need to take it to Syracuse had re-ignited his curiosity.
He purchased locks that were similar enough to substitute, so that he could hide this act of invasion, and entered the forbidden room.
Surely this was simply a cautionary tale, Dennis told himself. It was a warning to not be taken in by the Orphic cult, to leave closed those doors which are not meant to be opened. That Anaximander had chosen to tell it in such biographical terms was intriguing and probably of interest to some literary scholar, but did not necessarily detract from his other scientific thinking nor cast aspersion on the source of his more radical ideas.