Ancient Greek was the first secret he kept deliberately and without guilt.
He had known Ancient Greek since before he'd known how to sit up. It had been in Jason Park's memory — three years of serious study, two semesters of classical Greek at Georgia State, the additional self-directed work he'd done for the mythology paper that had become something of an obsession. He read it fluently. He could parse Homeric epic and Attic prose with equal ease. He had opinions about the Ionic dialect that he had once aired at length to a professor who had not expected that level of investment from a junior.
None of this was information he could deploy at age eight in a New Orleans public school.
He had found a set of beginner Greek textbooks at the university library — old ones, spiral-bound, the kind used in introductory classical language courses — and checked them out with the explanation that he had found them interesting and wanted to try. His mother had looked at him with the particular expression she kept for moments when he did something that confirmed what she already knew about him, and said, 'There are better resources at Tulane. Want me to bring some?'
'Yes please,' he said.
She brought home intermediate resources. She did not say anything about the fact that he was nine and she was bringing him intermediate Ancient Greek materials. She simply put them on his desk. He thought: she has known for years. She is simply being patient with the shape of the knowing, letting it come out at its own pace.
He studied with the performance of someone learning for the first time. He made the errors of a beginner. He asked his mother questions he already knew the answers to, and she answered them with the genuine engagement of someone who found the language interesting in her own right. They had conversations, that year, about Greek etymology in plant names — botanical Greek was her professional territory — and he let those conversations teach him things he had not specifically known, because there was always more to learn and genuine learning was different from recalled learning and both were valuable.
In private, at night, he read the Iliad.
This was different from reading a translation. He had read the Iliad twice in translation — once in high school and once for the mythology class — and both times he had had the experience of reading a great story through a window. In the original Greek he had the experience of standing in the room. The language was not trying to be modern. It was not trying to be accessible. It simply was what it was — archaic and rhythmic and massive — and the specific weight of Achilles' rage in the original Greek was nothing like the weight of it translated.
He read it and thought about Luke Castellan, who had a legitimate case to make about divine parents who made promises and failed them. He read Achilles — sulking in his tent while people died because of his wounded honor — and thought: I understand this. I understand the logic of it. The tragedy is not that Achilles was wrong to be angry. The tragedy is that anger became the only thing he was.
He thought: Luke is not Achilles. Luke has more options than Achilles had. He could be shown that.
He thought: but Achilles had a mother who loved him. Luke did not, really. Not in the present tense.
He put the Iliad down and looked at the ceiling and thought about the difference between knowing a story and understanding the people in it. He had been treating what he knew about Luke as a plot point rather than a person. He needed to stop doing that before he met him.
[ SKILL IMPROVED — ANCIENT GREEK ]
Ancient Greek: Rank B → B+
(Concealed from display; held at Rank D
for performance purposes)
Internal skill level and performed skill level
are now tracked separately.
Note: The Codex recommends honesty where possible.
Note: The Codex also recognizes that some
situations require calibration.
Mythology depth: Increased.
— Homeric epic: comprehensive
— Hesiodic tradition: strong
— Attic tragedy: growing
+2 INT (knowledge integration)
New INT: 20
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
✦ ✦ ✦
He also, that year, began the careful work of separating what he knew from the Percy Jackson series from what was actually true about Greek mythology.
The books were excellent. He was not dismissing them. But they had been written for children, which meant they had simplified, and some simplifications had become, in his head, facts that needed revisiting. He made a list:
The Mist was real and worked roughly as described. The divine scent was real and worked roughly as described. Monster perception was approximately correct. The politics of Olympus were real but significantly more complex than five books could contain.
The gods: here was where the gap widened. The Percy Jackson Olympians were vivid and memorable and somewhat domesticated — made comprehensible to a contemporary audience, given modern equivalents of their ancient functions, given enough human psychology to be sympathetic characters. The actual Olympians, as Kael understood them from mythology, were older than that. Stranger. Less containable. They had been worshipped for a reason that went beyond their narrative personalities; there was something in them that the books had captured the flavor of without fully rendering.
He thought: when I meet Ares, he will be worse than described. When I meet Aphrodite, she will be more disorienting than described. When I meet Hades, he will be more just. When I meet Poseidon, he will be vaster.
He thought: I should approach every god I encounter with the understanding that the version of them in my head is a useful approximation, not a complete picture. And that approximations, however good, have edges where they fail.
He wrote this down in a notebook he kept in code — a cipher he had designed himself, mixing Greek and English and Korean (one of Jason's three languages) in a pattern that would take a dedicated cryptologist time to unravel. He did not think anyone would bother. He was nine. He wanted to be careful anyway.
The notebook's first entry read: 'Things I know that might be wrong — Olympians edition.' The list was already three pages long.