Virtuous Sons: A Greco Roman Xianxia
Chapter Chapter [2.17] The Broad Strokes

Sol,

The Raven From Rome

The Broad strokes of it were thus:

The Civic Realm was a period of relatively carefree cultivation—the formative years in which a cultivator was punished the least for dabbling in contradictory concepts, and rewarded the most for broadening their horizons. To advance beyond that first realm, up to the first step of the Realm of Philosophers, was to set your soul in stone. That was why the Greeks called it Foundation Establishment. What that truly meant—what those limitations implied—was something no two sophists could agree upon.

The common consensus was simply that the experience of refinement changed after the Civic Realm. In Broad terms, it was the point where one began cultivating with principle, with passion, and with purpose.

Principle, passion, and purpose. That was one of many rules of three that characterized the classical model of Greek cultivation. Another was the Broad’s insistence that ‘true’ cultivation could be divided into just three primary realms—Sophic, Heroic, and Tyrannic—, as was his assertion that each realm could itself be divided primarily into thirds.

The early stage of a given realm encompassed the first three steps. The middling stage encompassed the fourth, fifth, and sixth steps, while the late stage covered the seventh, eighth, and ninth steps—but notably not the tenth. In the Broad’s view, to stand at the tenth step was to be the captain of your realm, half a step from a higher plane of existence.

Yet, why separate the steps at all? Supposedly, for the same reason the realms themselves were separated: qualitative changes. Supposedly, these changes were too significant for the Broad to ignore, but not significant enough to warrant a realm all their own.

To advance from the second step of the Sophic Realm to the third was to enjoy an increase to your pneuma, a doubling and redoubling of your vital essence that would enhance every other aspect of your cultivation in turn—but not by an astounding amount in the grand scheme of things. Taking that step from second to third also meant internalizing a third principle, a key construct that would shape the rest of your life.

But both of those things could be said of every other step through the Sophic Realm.

To advance from three to four was to step away from the largest crowd of lowly sophists and don the mantle of a maverick. Mid-stage Philosophers were pioneers of metaphysics, no longer bound by the conventional wisdom of their chosen specialties. The Broad asserted that to properly advance through the mid-stage of the Sophic Realm, a sophist had to innovate upon the common thought—or at least break out of the mold they’d established as their foundation.

It was an odd contradiction on the surface, one that reminded me of the memory of my master that I’d seen through Stavros Aetos’ eyes.

At times, in order to move forward, a man had to go back first.

The late-stage of the Sophic Realm was the bleeding edge of enlightened innovation. To advance from the sixth step of the Sophic Realm to the seventh was to upend the status quo wherever you went.

The Platonic ideal of a late-stage philosopher’s progression was that of a ship the size of ten triremes, with radical truths manning every oar, cutting sharply through the waves of human thought and leaving a wide, rippling wake behind them.

To become a captain of the Sophic Realm, advancing from nine to ten, was to step out onto the same stage that the Broad himself occupied. It meant standing shoulder-to-shoulder with men like Aristotle and Socrates. In theory, anyway. In practice, few lived long enough at this level to approach the Gadfly at all, let alone regard him as an equal.

To stand at the peak of the Sophic Realm was to be half a step from glory. It was easy to envision what that meant in relation to the next step—the Heroic Realm was within reach, the heart’s blood was ready to burn. But what did it mean for the men that lingered there, at the peak of plain mortality?

Life as a Captain of the Sophic Realm was defined by a personal struggle against natural law, and the chafing of its chains.

There was a pressure that every sophist felt, a weight that pressed down the harder they pressed out at the boundaries of natural philosophy. There was a particular madness that afflicted all the greatest minds at the peak of the Sophic Realm—a madness that even Hippocrates couldn’t cure inside himself, a mania that put down roots and grew, taking more and more for itself the longer that a cultivator lingered at that tenth step.

This was the reason why the greatest minds in the Free Mediterranean were often so… strained. How could they not be, when they had struggled against the suppression of natural law the longest? When they had gone where no mortal man had gone before, had reached the pinnacle, and had still refused to break the chains that bound them.

Because in the end, that was the unique audacity of men like the Broad, the Gadfly, and my mentor. They could have been Heroes, any one of them. But they’d refused, because casting off the chains of mortality and letting the heart’s blood burn meant spitting in the face of natural law and disregarding it entirely.

For men like my mentor, that was a failure. Rhetorical creatures that the great philosophers were, they saw ascension to the Heroic Realm as the concession of a point.

Men like that needed to peel back the curtain of majesty and wonder that hung between the second and third realms—between the mortal and the divine—because in their minds, there was nothing that a god could do that a man could not do in kind. There was only the informed and the uninformed. The ignorant and the enlightened.

For men like them, every impossible innovation was one more stone chipped away from the face of the divine mountain. Every argument won against the earth mother herself, every great leap forward in mankind’s understanding of the metaphysika, was another tug upon that heavenly curtain. Pulling it back inch by inch, until the fateful day came that even the mortals in the cheap seats would have a clear view of the stage.

It was this arrogance that killed most captains of the Sophic Realm. Not the failed attempts to ascend to glory, but the refusal to even try. It was common knowledge that it was a hero’s nature to burn, and a tyrant’s nature to starve. Lesser known yet every bit as devastating was the curse of all Philosophers. The curse of wonder. The ever-burning, ever-gnawing need to push the boundaries of human understanding.

It was their curiosity that killed them in the end.

The question then became, what was the purpose of a principle for cultivators such as the Broad, the Gadfly, and the Man Who Knew Everything?

For men that had existed long enough to know themselves, and know they would never reach for the glory of the third realm, what need was there for a load-bearing pillar? Why bother building one at all, let alone ten? Why risk deviation by imposing restrictions that weren’t needed?

As it turned out, there were a few reasons that the Broad found compelling.

A principle was a powerful thing, and not just in the obvious ways that I’d experienced for myself when invoking my first and third pillars. It was here that Selene's understanding of the Broad’s teachings faltered, but I could hardly hold it against her. From the sounds of it, even the Broad himself had not been entirely certain of the phenomena he was trying to describe. Maybe if he’d had more time to study it before the Coast cast him down, and his Academy along with him, this portion of the lesson would have been more robust.

As it was, he had spoken of a phenomenon—a gathering of great thoughts, a natural mechanism like that of moths drawn to open flames, or ships guided home by the steady light of constellations. By internalizing an ideal, in the same way that a mortal apprentice might declare themselves for a trade, the Broad believed a pillar could draw good fortune in its chosen field towards the scholar that had established it. He spoke of the eureka, those moments of quasi-divine enlightenment that struck the great thinkers as hard as any Hero or Tyrant’s tribulation lightning.

He spoke of this phenomenon as a combination of factors, united and multiplied by the principle. A combination of personal mastery, the mind’s restless wandering, and the endless scholar’s grind. In a way, it reminded me of Aristotle’s model of the metaphysical. There was a connection there between his theory and the Broad’s that would have maddened my mentor if he knew I’d drawn it.

Magnitude, motion, and time — three factors that Aristotle firmly believed Philosophers were meant to master. Three elements of natural law that, in the Broad’s theory, could be bound by principle and catalyzed to create that holy breakthrough, the heavenly eureka that every sophist coveted.

There was more. When it came to the Broad, it seemed that was always the case.

The rule of three was a recursive constant in the Broad’s theoretical framework of enlightened cultivation — the magnum opus that he had dubbed his Theory of Man. Three realms, three partitions of the soul, three dimensions to the waking world.

And, of course, a Philosopher’s three voices.

These were the core conceits of the Sophic Realm that the Free Mediterranean knew best. The voice of our principles, the voice of our lived experiences, and the voice of our influence. Though, to hear the Broad tell it, these were only the shadows on the wall cast by a more ancient struggle, one that took place within every sophist’s soul. The impossible question that a wise man carried with him everywhere he went, a paradox of purpose that lurked within the deep subconscious waiting to be dug up and unraveled.

So, then. What did this Theory of Man look like, played out in the real world?

According to Selene, while the Broad’s approach was all but universally accepted as the framework for refinement in the Free Mediterranean, it was not quite enough on its own. Or at least that’s what the cults claimed. Each of the Greater Mystery Cults had their own frameworks, their own guidelines, which they claimed were the product of their own profound, foundational mysteries. The kyrioi of these institutions would have sooner vomited a river of blood and killed themselves before any one of them admitted to the truth of the matter. That being that each of their personalized paths to providence were, underneath the mystique, nothing but an unnecessary series of add-ons to the Broad’s simplified — and wasn’t that a Greek joke — Theory of Man.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

They had their differences, that much was true, but most were cosmetic in the grand scheme of things. As such, they could be largely disregarded, and I intended to do just that.

Outside of the Greater Mystery Cults, an independent sophist’s refinement might look like this:

First, establish your foundation and set down your first pillar — your Philosopher’s Reason. While the first principle isn’t necessarily more important than any of the other nine to come, it is the first real choice you’ll make as a cultivator. It’s a narrowing of scope.

There is more to the Sophic Realm than pillars of principle, of course, in the same way that there is more to the Heroic realm than a burning heart flame. No matter what stage or realm a man resides in, the Broad believes that it is a tragedy for him to not know the joy of his body’s full potential. You are a cultivator, and before that, you are a man — and a man exists both body and soul. So while you are refining your mind, you also take time to refine your body.

The tempering of a cultivator’s physique is a constant process, but the Broad suspected that it had its own qualitative stages. This side of refinement is one where a Greater Mystery Cult truly shines. Their martial scriptures are the envy of every rogue cultivator in the Free Mediterranean, and most beyond it, too.

Without such connections, you can only do your best, exercising your body to its mortal limits. Without the good fortune of a mystiko’s resources, or the inheritance of a benevolent old monster, you will almost certainly turn to the tempering method that the Broad passed down to all of his students in Greek cultivation.

It is called The Book of Broad Shoulders, and while it is a grueling, unremarkable, bare-bones technique — one of the few that does not reward the consumption of natural treasures, and does not function at all in the later stages without a partner — it is undoubtedly a monstrous martial scripture when pushed to the limits of its potential.

He is called the Broad for a reason, after all.

So while you deepen your understanding of the fields within your chosen scope, you temper your body as well. In the earliest stages, you master the solitary meditations — the calisthenics and flexibility formations that make a man the master of his body, and not the other way around. You refine the physical facet of willpower, through long fasting and aggressive modifications to the baseline meditations. Again I am reminded of my own mentor, and the connections that he refuses to draw between himself and the Broad. Magnitude, motion, and time are tools that every student of The Book of Broad Shoulders turns upon themselves in its early stages.

Add weight upon your back while pressing up. Adjust the position of your hands — closer together, farther apart, or entirely offset — to change the range of motion. Adjust the time spent at the lowest point of the exercise, where the struggle is greatest.

Without the active use of pneuma to trivialize all but the most extreme movements, you can spend the entirety of the early and mid stages of the Sophic Realm cultivating the Broad’s martial scripture on your own, before you’re finally forced to move on to the joint tempering of the late stages. But for the you that exists here and now, at the first step of the Sophic Realm, that is little more than a distant distraction. For now, you have mass to move.

You study diligently, familiarizing yourself with the work of greater minds that came before you, you temper your body, and you nourish all three portions of your soul. You refine your reason by stripping away each of the little contradictions and hypocrisies that you indulged in as a Citizen. You refine your spirit by venturing out and providing guidance to those less fortunate in matters of refinement. And of course, you refine your hunger by burning both ends of the candle and pursuing innovation like a starving hound.

You do all of these things in the closest thing to equal proportion that an imperfect man can manage, and soon enough you advance to the second stage. Your advancement comes with a new principle — or, as the Broad advises, you decide upon your second pillar, and the realms above make room for your advancement.

The choosing is the key. Selene emphasizes this more than once as the acts go by. The synergy within the soul is paramount, and it is the lack of that synergy that doomed each of the cultivators that Selene saved.

The Broad urged his students to apply the rule of three to this process of choosing as well. Three chances to reconsider. Three upon three upon three times as many months spent considering as months spent internalizing—and one more month upon the pile of nine, just for good measure. And then, most interestingly to both me and Griffon, three different portions of the soul for your principle to address. Three questions that must all be answered in the affirmative before a cultivator can proceed:

Does this nourish the mind? Will it nourish the heart, and the hunger?

Put another way, does this suit the needs of the philosopher? Will it suit the needs of the Hero? The Tyrant?

Is this column built to last?

If every answer is yes, after all of that, you may move forward and internalize your second pillar. This one will be your Philosopher’s Passion.

If the first, the Philosopher’s Reason, is a narrowing of scope, this is the prospecting phase. You have spent your time in the first stage of the Sophic Realm gathering as much knowledge as you can about your chosen field and the existing contributions to it. Now, in the second stage, you begin to weigh the worth of those contributions against one another.

It is an unfortunate truth that every man with a thought in his head believes himself to be the second coming of Socrates. Your second pillar is a statement of your values—the passion that you hold in your heart for the narrowed scope of your sophistry. It is at this stage that you truly begin to form your own opinions of the world and its natural laws, and it is here that you first begin to clash with the opinions of your so-called betters.

Your second pillar is the culmination of those passionate certainties—the lens through which you view the world—and that is why it is so very important to internalize the one that fits you best.

If you do this, and if you are diligent with the tempering of your body and the nourishment of your reason, your passion, and your hunger, then the time will come sooner or later that you ascend to the third step of the Sophic Realm.

The third pillar requires every bit as much careful preparation in its choosing as the first and second—perhaps even more so—because the third pillar is the culmination of your efforts in the early stage of the Sophic realm.

If the first principle is a narrowing of scope, and the second principle is a prospecting of the great minds that have done work within that scope, then the third principle is the plumbing of your chosen depths.

In the first stage, you familiarized yourself with all the noteworthy teachings in your chosen field. In the second stage, you chose for yourself the resources that you felt captured the truth of things best. Now, in the third stage, you devour your chosen sources—following the diamond vein all the way down to the bedrock of your field.

Your third principle is thus the assertion of your purpose as a scholar. It is the path that you cannot help but walk—the unfinished road that you will follow to its inevitable end, drawn along by the curse of your burgeoning curiosity. The third step of the Sophic realm is where you gorge your starving mind, and you prepare yourself for the cold water plunge that follows when you inevitably run out of material to consume.

The third step leads to the fourth. Eventually.

Moving from three to four is considered the first bottleneck of the Sophic Realm, and for good reason. It takes time to properly absorb all of the conventional wisdom of any field—especially in a place as rife with scholars as the Free Mediterranean. Even just reading the material is often the work of months or years in closed-doors cultivation, depending on the particular scope of your first principle. And that is only what is required to reach the peak of the third step.

Breaking past the boundary that separates three from four means blazing a trail—or at the very least, taking that first step off the edge of the well-paved road. Depending on the path you've chosen, that plunge might be the difference between a city’s marble street and the dirt road at its limits… or it might be a thousand-foot plummet off a cliff and into the sea.

Either way, taking that step over the edge is a declaration of your intent, a promise of the trails you will blaze, and the rules of nature that you will drag from the shadows of divinity out into the light. From this point forward, you are resolved. And assuming you’ve built the beginnings of a Broad body as well, you are ready.

What comes next is the breaking of boundaries.

I frown pensively, watching the curtains close on the ninth act.

Selene had laid out the steps that followed these first three, and I had listened—could repeat them verbatim if questioned. But there was no connection.

Rather than understanding more as I neared the end of the lecture, I felt like I understood less than when I’d entered.

Try as I might, I couldn’t find a way to step into the sandals of that hypothetical student of the Broad. To stand where he stood on those first three steps, to hold up my pillars instead of his, and to make sense of that process—I couldn’t do it.

It didn’t fit. I didn’t fit. And I knew Griffon felt the same.

Still, it wasn’t over yet.

Griffon and I applauded once more as the curtain rose and Selene bowed modestly. She was older now, in the early stages of her adolescence—still graceful, as a cultivator of her standing couldn’t help but be—yet clearly not finished growing.

Straightening up, she addressed us with finality. If there was any mischief to her in that moment, it was only a glimmer—an ember in the flames behind her eyes, gone as quickly as it appeared.

“Thus concludes the Study of Selene, and the myriad thefts that she committed on her path to principle,” she announced. Both Griffon and I straightened up.

“That’s it?” I asked. The restraint that Aristotle had beaten into me early and often held my tongue from saying more. Thankfully, I had a fellow student to be presumptuous in my place.

“We were promised ten acts,” Griffon protested. “Ten pillars—that’s what I paid the price of my admission for. It’s written on my ticket!”

“And where is your ticket, then?” Selene pointedly asked, raising an eyebrow.

Without looking, Griffon stabbed his hand through a streamer of psychedelic mist and pulled from it a scarlet ticket painted with a much younger girl’s childish script. As he thrust it toward the stage, I saw that the words had also been written on the back of it.

The Saint of Scarlet Hearts

A Ten Act Triumph — Ten Labors of Love

And in the corner, scrawled almost shyly:

This seat reserved for my future junior brother.

There was a long moment of silence as Griffon held his ticket out expectantly, and the actress on stage stared back at it with calm indifference.

Her poker face was admirable, but even here in the sanctum of her soul, she couldn’t hide the rosy flush creeping up her neck.

The ninth intermission ended abruptly, the curtains rushing in to cover the stage. One of them snapped like a hound at the brandished ticket as it passed by, trying to snatch it, but Griffon pulled it back and slipped it behind his ear, all too satisfied with himself.

“When did you find the time to draw that up?”

Griffon chuckled, sliding down into the saltwater pool so that his elbows were propped up on the stone lip.

“I didn’t.”

When the curtains rose on the tenth act, there was no resurgence of light. In fact, there was no light at all. The scarlet glow of the clouds flickered and went out like a snuffed candle. The eerie luminescence of the vapors bled away. Even Selene’s scarlet heart flames vanished.

There was a long, heavy silence—no sound at all came from the stage, no narration of any kind. It wasn’t until my eyes fully adjusted to the pitch dark that I saw the shadows begin to move.

“I warned you, girl.”

The tenth act dawned in darkness.