"Dear brother Quintus," Cicero began, "the fellows I was so strongly advised to cultivate here in Syracuse turned out to be of no account-the unsavory details can wait until we meet again. Nonetheless, my holiday here has not been entirely unproductive. You will be interested to learn that I have rediscovered the lost tomb of one of our boyhood heroes, Archimedes. The locals were entirely ignorant of its location; indeed, denied its very existence. Yesterday afternoon, however, I set out with Tiro for the old necropolis outside the Achradina Gate, and there, sure enough, peeking out above a tangle of brambles and vines, I spied the telltale ornaments of a sphere and cylinder atop a column. You must recall that bit of doggerel we learned from our old math tutor:

A cylinder and ball atop a column tall mark the final stage of the Syracusan sage.

"Having spotted the tomb, I gave a cry of 'Eureka!' and ordered a group of workers with scythes to clear the thicket all around. Now the tomb of Archimedes can be seen and approached freely, and has been restored to its rightful status as a shrine to all educated men."

Cicero did not mention the cube and cone, I noticed. They had been removed along with the thicket, lest someone else meet Agathinus's fate.

Cicero cleared his throat and resumed dictating. "Ironic, brother Quintus, is it not, and sadly indicative of the degraded cultural stan-dards of these modern Syracusans, that it took a Roman from Arpinum to rediscover for them the tomb of the keenest intellect who ever lived among them?"

Ironic indeed, I thought.

DEATH BY EROS

"The Neapolitans are different from us Romans," I remarked to Eco as we strolled across the central forum of Neapolis. "A man can almost feel that he's left Italy altogether and been magically trans-ported to a seaport in Greece. Greek colonists founded the city hundreds of years ago, taking advantage of the extraordinary bay, which they called the Krater, or Cup. The locals still have Greek names, eat Greek food, follow Greek customs. Many of them don't even speak Latin."

Eco pointed to his lips and made a self-deprecating gesture to say, Neither do I! At fifteen, he tended to make a joke of everything, in-cluding his muteness.

"Ah, but you can hear Latin," I said, flicking a finger against one of his ears just hard enough to sting, "and sometimes even understand it."

We had arrived in Neapolis on our way back to Rome, after doing a bit of business for Cicero down in Sicily. Rather than stay at an inn, I was hoping to find accommodations with a wealthy Greek trader named Sosistrides. "The fellow owes me a favor," Cicero had told me. "Look him up and mention my name, and I'm sure he'll put you up for the night."

With a few directions from the locals (who were polite enough not to laugh at my Greek) we found the trader's house. The columns and lintels and decorative details of the facade were stained in vari-ous shades of pale red, blue, and yellow that seemed to glow under the warm sunlight. Incongruous amid the play of colors was a black wreath on the door.

"What do you think, Eco? Can we ask a friend of a friend, a total stranger really, to put us up when the household is in mourning? It seems presumptuous."

Eco nodded thoughtfully, then gestured to the wreath and ex-pressed curiosity with a flourish of his wrist. I nodded. "I see your point. If it's Sosistrides who's died, or a member of the family, Cicero would want us to deliver his condolences, wouldn't he? And we must learn the details, so that we can inform him in a letter. I think we must at least rouse the doorkeeper, to see what's happened."

I walked to the door and politely knocked with the side of my foot. There was no answer. I knocked again and waited. I was about to rap on the door with my knuckles, rudely or not, when it swung open.

The man who stared back at us was dressed in mourning black. He was not a slave; I glanced at his hand and saw a citizen's iron ring. His graying hair was disheveled and his face distressed. His eyes were red from weeping.

"What do you want?" he said, in a voice more wary than unkind.

"Forgive me, citizen. My name is Gordianus. This is my son, Eco. Eco hears but is mute, so I shall speak for him. We're travelers, on our way home to Rome. I'm a friend of Marcus Tullius Cicero. It was he who-"

"Cicero? Ah, yes, the Roman administrator down in Sicily, the one who can actually read and write, for a change." The man wrinkled his brow. "Has he sent a message, or…?"

"Nothing urgent; Cicero asked me only to remind you of his friendship. You are, I take it, the master of the house, Sosistrides?"

"Yes. And you? I'm sorry, did you already introduce yourself? My mind wanders…" He looked over his shoulder. Beyond him, in the vestibule, I glimpsed a funeral bier strewn with freshly cut flowers and laurel leaves.

"My name is Gordianus. And this is my son-"

"Gordianus, did you say?"

"Yes."

"Cicero mentioned you once. Something about a murder trial up in Rome. You helped him. They call you the Finder."

"Yes."

He looked at me intently for a long moment. "Come in, Finder. I want you to see him."

The bier in the vestibule was propped up and tilted at an angle so that its occupant could be clearly seen. The corpse was that of a youth probably not much older than Eco. His arms were crossed over his chest and he was clothed in a long white gown, so that only his face and hands were exposed. His hair was boyishly long and as yel-low as a field of millet in summer, crowned with a laurel wreath of the sort awarded to athletic champions. The flesh of his delicately molded features was waxy and pale, but even in death his beauty was remarkable.

"His eyes were blue," said Sosistrides in a low voice. "They're closed now, you can't see them, but they were blue, like his dear, dead mother's; he got his looks from her. The purest blue you ever saw, like the color of the Cup on a clear day. When we pulled him from the pool, they were all bloodshot…"

"This is your son, Sosistrides?"

He stifled a sob. "My only son, Cleon."

"A terrible loss."

He nodded, unable to speak. Eco shifted nervously from foot to foot, studying the dead boy with furtive glances, almost shyly.

"They call you Finder," Sosistrides finally said, in a hoarse voice. "Help me find the monster who killed my son."

I looked at the dead youth and felt a deep empathy for So-sistrides's suffering, and not merely because I myself had a son of similar age. (Eco may be adopted, but I love him as my own flesh.) I was stirred also by the loss of such beauty. Why does the death of a beautiful stranger affect us more deeply than the loss of someone plain? Why should it be so, that if a vase of exquisite workmanship but little practical value should break, we feel the loss more sharply than if we break an ugly vessel we use every day? The gods made men to love beauty above all else, perhaps because they themselves are beautiful, and wish for us to love them, even when they do us harm.

"How did he die, Sosistrides?"

"It was at the gymnasium, yesterday. There was a citywide con-test among the boys-discus-throwing, wrestling, racing. I couldn't attend. I was away in Pompeii on business all day…" Sosistrides again fought back tears. He reached out and touched the wreath on his son's brow. "Cleon took the laurel crown. He was a splendid athlete. He always won at everything, but they say he outdid himself yesterday. If only I had been there to see it! Afterwards, while the other boys retired to the baths inside, Cleon took a swim in the long pool, alone. There was no one else in the courtyard. No one saw it happen…"

"The boy drowned, Sosistrides?" It seemed unlikely, if the boy had been as good at swimming as he was at everything else.