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Raphael added me to the School of Athens as an afterthought — he had already completed the fresco and had to insert me alone, apart from the others, sitting on a step in the foreground, writing on a stone, leaning on a marble block. The face is Michelangelo's. Raphael was paying tribute to the man downstairs in the Sistine Chapel.

But the position is correct. I was always apart. I wrote in riddles because obvious statements do not make people think. I wrote that the road up and the road down are the same road — that opposites are not contradictions but aspects of a single unity. Most of my fellow Greeks found this maddening. Most people still do. The fragment survives: I cannot step into the same river twice. The river and I are both different people every time.