Plato’s Sister

Plato’s sister is perhaps 16 when she gives birth to her son. Then again, perhaps as old as 23. It is a math problem: If her mother gave birth to four children before being widowed at age 27, and her brother died between the ages of 80 and 75, and her son was 60 at the time of her brother’s passing, how old was she? The closest estimate of her birth is “before 427 BC.”

Look her up. She has no dedicated entry. Only her son; only her husband; only her brother; her brother; her brother; her mammoth brother; her mother as mother and wife, and niece and wife to uncle, as falsely attributed author. Of course it is false. She is silent. Such is the purview of Athenian women. We voiceless citizens. We monstrous Other.

Would you believe she read her brother’s poetry? Dithyrambs, initially—wild, choral hymns—then lyric written for the lyre’s accompaniment, and tragedies, a tetralogy to end in laughter. Would you believe she saved them all from the fire? When her brother turned to philosophy, she turned to the embers, sifted singed scraps for letters. Perhaps she taught herself to read in the ashes. That is her rightful place, after all: in the hearth. There belong women of wealth. Barred from the public, from men of another blood—a vahz, sold young, ornamental and swollen with seeds.

So yes, let’s say she reads. No, let’s not consign her to philosophy like the many men of her family. Sing not of the Republic! She tires of it. A sister can be crowded far into the shadow of her brother, but to relish the recounting of his sunlight is beyond her. Has she not burned enough with her bed in the fire? Let us give her a love for history or music—perhaps politics, but only if we wish her greater grief. She is a descendent, you know, of Solon—O Sage of Seven, O fabled first champion of the masses, the overturner of Draconian law. Tiiiimber. He missed a spot.

But I digress.

How else might we imagine her? As an author? Oral, not written, another inheritor of a long tradition. Not Homer, older still, picture caves and shadow puppets–

Damn it, her brother has crept in again. Stop devaluing stories, stop belittling metaphor. Stop pinning language like a dead thing—caterpillars on the tongue, snatched from their play post-metamorphosis to be restrained and framed.

I envision her eavesdropping on her brothers. She sees their speech cycling from their lips on wings. They flutter: becoming and becoming and becoming. Ephemeral immortals. Language knows no stasis, she thinks; whispers to herself, “A word is without singular meaning.” She remembers Plato’s poetry, wonders if he shuns his adolescence as a time of madness—furor poiesis—but then again, what else is it to be young? What else if not mad on passions? What else if not bucking animals, consigned by age and flesh and law? The yoke is heavy. Perhaps she is 16 when she gives birth to her son. Does it matter if she was as many as seven years older? Can you tell me honestly she was anything other than a child, not sheltered but sequestered, bearing womanhood only in her body, bought and torn and birthing her brother’s nephew, the inheritor of Plato’s renowned Academy?

I have lost the thread. I’ll begin again.

She is born. Third of her siblings. Two brothers first: Glaucon and Adeimantus. Fourth is Plato. (You know him.) Her mother is widowed. Her father may have tried to rape her mother before they married, who knows for sure. A vision of Apollo may have stayed his intent to make another attempt. In any case, they wed, he died, and a woman could not live on her own. Hers would be an illegal autonomy. She was given to her uncle. He was 50. She bore his son, the fifth child. At some point, her sole daughter—our protagonist, remember—marries, gives birth. There, we’ve caught up.

So what would she have become? Let’s give her wings. A swarm, seething upon itself. But you may accuse me of giving her too much credit. Very well, no flight. Let’s drape her in silks—she is wealthy enough for it—an imported chrysalis. Potential embodied. But there’s no body, just pieces suspended in ooze. And she’s nobody. She never emerges. She dies enclosed in her silken casing, scarcely known, digesting herself from the inside-out. Dissolving.

I know, I promise. But what a vision she could’ve been… The chrysalis splits. Just a seam; plenty entry to the world for a girl learned in the study of shrinking. She stretches her wings. They are soft and crumpled, asphyxiated and flooding now with blood. They straighten. She flies. The first of untold transformations. She may be so many things.

Mikaila Nalbantova is a writer and visual artist. After deciding to leave her path through law school to pursue her passion for storytelling and what it can accomplish, she is now completing her MFA at Sarah Lawrence College. Her literary and visual work has appeared in Statement Magazine and The Visual Art Review.

A Song for Mikaila