The Likeness

by Plotinus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

Amelius came to the workshop on a morning when the wax would not take. Carterius had a panel of lime-wood on the bench, a merchant's widow half done upon it, and the brazier had been sulking since dawn, so that the spatula came out of the coals only warm and dragged the colour instead of laying it. He was scraping a cheek back to the bare wood when the curtain moved and a heavy man in a good cloak stood in the light from the street.

"You paint from life," Amelius said, before any greeting.

"I paint from whatever I am paid to paint from. Life is the usual thing."

"And from memory?"

Carterius put the spatula down on its iron rest. Men who began with questions of method were usually about to ask for a reduction.

It was not money, as it turned out. Amelius paid, and paid in gold, two aurei on the bench before the matter had been fully explained, and the explanation was strange enough that Carterius made him give it twice. There was a teacher in the city, an Egyptian by his speech though he would not say where he came from, who had been lecturing at the house of a widow called Gemina for some fifteen years. His students wished to have his likeness. He would not sit. He would not sit for a painter or a sculptor or a man with a tablet and a stylus. When Amelius had pressed him he had said that it was enough to carry about the image that nature had wrapped him in, without leaving a second image of that image for people to look at afterwards, as though it were something worth looking at.

"So he is vain," Carterius said, "in the other direction."

Amelius considered this with the seriousness of a man who has spent a long time being taught. "No," he said. "I do not think it is vanity. But you will see him. The conferences are open. Anyone may come in and sit at the back. Come every day if you like, look at him as long as you need, and paint him in your own house. I will tell you where you go wrong."

"And he is not to know."

"He is not to know."

Carterius looked at the gold. Then he looked at the widow on the panel, who was a good likeness and whom nobody would ever look at again after her heirs had sold the house, and he said he would come.

---

The house of Gemina stood on a street of tall houses, and the room where the teacher spoke had been made out of two rooms with the wall between them taken down. The marks of the wall were still in the floor. There were benches and a chair, and at the far end a window onto a small court where a fig tree was dropping its leaves. Carterius came in behind a pair of young men who were arguing about something called the undescended part, and took the end of the last bench, by the door, where the light would be behind him.

He had brought nothing to draw with. That was the agreement, and in any case he had decided on the way that he would not need it. He had painted the dead from a single look at the face on the bier, with the family weeping at his elbow. He had painted a tribune's son who could not keep still for the space of two breaths. A face was a set of measurements and a set of colours. The measurements could be taken by eye, and the colours stayed where they were.

The teacher came in without any ceremony and sat down. A man of near sixty, thin, not tall. The head long rather than broad. Hair thin at the temples, grey going white, cut short and not well. A straight nose with a small thickening at the bridge, as if it had been broken once in childhood and set by someone careless. The mouth wide and the lower lip full. The skin of the face poor, with a roughness along the jaw and a dullness to it, as though it saw little water. He wore the plain cloak of every teacher in Rome, and he wore it carelessly, and there was a stain near the hem.

Carterius took all this in in the time it took a boy to bring a scroll from a cupboard, and he began to put it away in the order in which he would need it: first the long oval and the line of the brow, then the eye sockets, then the nose against the light, then the mouth. He was pleased with the oval. It was an unusual oval and it would make a good panel.

A student read aloud from a commentary. Carterius did not follow it. It was something of Numenius on the Timaeus, the reader said, and the room listened the way a room listens to a thing it has heard before and expects to hear disputed. When the reading stopped the teacher was quiet for a little while. Then he spoke, briefly and not in order, as if he were not delivering a lecture at all but finishing a thought he had begun alone some time before and had now been interrupted in.

He made mistakes. Carterius noticed that at once, because he had expected a fine Greek and this was not one. The teacher dropped a syllable out of a long word, and when he came to the verb for remembering he said it wrongly, putting the sounds out of their places, anamnemisketai, and nobody in the room so much as blinked. Carterius was a little ashamed for him. He had painted rhetoricians, and they had sat for him the way they spoke, with every part of the face held exactly where they had set it.

Then the teacher reached the thing he had been coming towards, and the face changed.

Carterius would afterwards spend a good deal of time trying to say to himself what had changed, and he never managed it in a way that would have helped another painter. Nothing moved, or very little. The mouth did not widen. The brows did not lift. But the whole face seemed to have been turned a little towards some source of light that was not in the room, and it was not the light from the court, which was grey and came from the side. A small sweat stood on the forehead, just at the hairline. The poor skin did not become good skin. It became something else, not better or worse, but as if what was behind it had come forward and was standing just under the surface.

Carterius found that he had stopped taking measurements. He found, in fact, that he had not heard the last several sentences, and that a young man on the bench in front of him was now asking a question, and the teacher's face was listening, and it was only a face again, long, thin, poorly kept, with a stain on the cloak below it.

He went home and drew it from memory on a whitened board in charcoal, quickly, while it was fresh. The oval was right. The nose was right, with the little thickening. The mouth was right. When it was done he propped it against the wall and looked at it from across the workshop, and he saw at once that it was a portrait of a sick schoolmaster.

---

He went back the next day and the day after that. He went back for the better part of two months.

He learned the room. He learned which of the benches creaked and that the young man who asked about the undescended part was a physician named Zethus, an Arab by birth, and that the old man in the senatorial stripe who came on foot and sat near the front without a single slave beside him had been about to take up a praetorship, with the lictors already at his door, and had refused to come out to them, and had given up his house besides, and that people said his gout had grown better since. He learned that there were children in the house, a great many of them for a house without a father, boys and girls of good families whose parents had died and left them, with their property, in the teacher's keeping. They came through the back of the lecture room on their way to the court. Nobody stopped them.

He learned the face in its ordinary state until he could have drawn it with his eyes shut, and he came, in a way he did not like, to know it better than he knew his own. He did not see the light again for eight days.

When he saw it the second time he was ready for it, and it did him no good. He fixed on the forehead and tried to hold the exact place where the sweat stood, and the angle at which the head had come up, and the depth of shadow under the brow. He held them all the way home through the streets, repeating them under his breath like a boy carrying a message, and he drew them, and they were exact, and the board showed a man who was too warm.

Amelius came to the workshop and looked at the boards along the wall. There were eleven by then.

"The brow is too heavy," he said, of the first. "That is near," he said, of the fifth. Of the ninth he said, "He does not hold his head so. That is a man who wants to be looked at." He stood a long time in front of the tenth. "This is a good likeness," he said at last, and Carterius knew from the tone of it that he was being comforted.

"It is a good likeness," Carterius said. "It is the face. I can do the face. I could do it in my sleep now. It is not him."

"No," said Amelius. "Well." He looked as though he would have said more if he had been a different kind of student, and then he put on his cloak and left another aureus on the bench, which Carterius did not want.

---

There was a man who came to the conferences for a week in the autumn and sat apart with two friends, and on the third day he stood up without waiting to be asked, and said that all this was very fine, but that the teacher was a coward.

The room went quiet. The teacher did not seem offended. He waited.

The man said that the teacher spoke of the soul's home and its rising, but went on praising the world, the stars, the order of the seasons, as if this rotten prison were a temple. He said that the body was a garment of filth sewn on the soul by an ignorant maker, that matter was the enemy, that every honest man knew it in his gut every day and felt it in his bowels; and here he looked hard at the teacher, as if he had heard something. He said that if the teacher had the courage of his own philosophy he would spit on the world and be done with it.

Carterius, at the back, felt his own face grow hot, and he did not at first understand why. Then he understood that he had spent his life with his hands in this filth: beeswax from a hive, ochre dug out of a hill, the black of burnt bones, lime-wood, the white of eggs, the heat of the coals. He had made his living by looking at the garments of filth that men and women wore and putting them down on wood, as near as he could, so that someone would have them after.

The teacher let the silence go on a little longer than was comfortable.

"You have looked at the night sky," he said at last.

The man said that of course he had.

"And you were not moved by it."

The man said that he had been moved to contempt.

"Then I think you are not being honest with me," the teacher said, mildly, "or else not with yourself. Everyone has stood under that sky and been stopped by it. Your soul stopped, the way a man stops in the street when he hears his own name spoken. It knew something of its own up there. It is not wrong about that. The world is not a prison. It is the last place to which the light reaches, and it reaches here faintly, but it reaches. Why would you hate the furthest edge of the light because it is furthest? You do not hate the edge of a lamp's circle on the floor." He turned his hand over on his knee, palm upwards, as if there were something in it. "A man who despises the image has not understood what it is an image of. And a man who worships the image has made the same mistake from the other side." Then, without changing his tone at all: "As for my bowels, they are my own affair and the doctor's, and he is sitting just there."

There was a laugh, low, through the whole room. Zethus put his hand over his eyes. The man and his friends left before the end of the reading and did not come back.

Carterius went home that day and did not draw anything. He sat in the workshop with the brazier out and looked at the eleven boards along the wall, and at the merchant's widow, now finished, waiting for her heirs to send for her. He thought that if he had been asked he would have said that she was a good likeness and no more. He found that he did not want to say it any longer, and he did not know what he wanted to say instead.

---

In the last weeks of it he stopped trying.

He did not decide to. It happened the way a man stops listening for a sound that has not come. He went to the house of Gemina because he had gone every day for six weeks and his feet took him there. He sat on the last bench by the door and he looked at the teacher, but he no longer looked in order, oval and brow and socket and nose. He looked at him the way he had once, as an apprentice, looked at the sea at Ostia on the first morning he had ever seen it, before it had occurred to him that it was something that might be painted.

One afternoon the reading was short and nobody had questions, and the teacher was about to rise, and a girl of perhaps eleven came in by the back with a wax tablet held against her chest. She was one of the wards. Carterius had seen her before, though only going through. Behind her came a freedman with an account book under his arm, plainly the steward of her late father's estate, plainly ill at ease, and plainly expecting to be dismissed with a nod.

The teacher sat down again. He took the account book onto his knees and opened it, and he went down the columns of it with one finger, slowly, while the steward stood and the girl stood and the room waited. Twice he stopped and asked a question about a farm in Campania, the rent from it and what had been paid for a repair to the press-house roof. Once he turned back a page and added a column again, moving his lips. He found an error. It was not a great one, a few hundred sesterces carried wrongly from one year to the next, and the steward went red to the ears and began explaining, and the teacher said, without unkindness, that it should be put right, because until the young people took to philosophy their property must be kept whole for them. Then he looked up, past the steward, at the girl. She had been watching his finger on the page all this time with great seriousness. He smiled at her. It was not a large smile.

And the face did the thing it did. Not as it did when he was speaking of the soul, not that light. Something smaller, and nearer to the ground. And yet it was the same. Carterius saw that it was the same, and that it had been the same every time, and that he had been trying to catch a reflection off water by drawing the water.

He did not remember going home. He remembered that the brazier was lit, which meant that he must have lit it, and that it was drawing well for once, and that there was a new panel on the bench, lime-wood, primed, the size of a man's two hands. He did not look at the boards along the wall. He did not take up the charcoal. He took up the brush and the spatula and the wax, and he painted the face straight on to the panel without a sketch, as he had not done since he was young and stupid, in the dark of the evening, by the light of two lamps.

He did not know, as he did it, whether it was right. He did not have the feeling of being right. He had almost no feeling at all, except the warmth of the brazier on one side of his face and the smell of the wax. He did the long oval and he did the thinning hair and the poor skin, the thickening at the bridge of the nose, the wide mouth. He put no sweat on the forehead. He did not try to put a light in it. When he had finished it was the middle of the night and his apprentice was asleep across the doorway, and Carterius went and lay down without looking at it again.

---

Amelius came the next morning, and stood in front of the panel for a long time. Then he took off his cloak, which he had not done on any visit before, and sat down on the bench where the merchant's widow had been, and went on looking at it.

"There," he said. And after a while: "There. That is him."

He suggested two corrections, both small: the left ear sat a little lower, and the hair at the crown was thinner than Carterius had made it, which he ought to have known, having looked at the crown of that head for six weeks from behind. Carterius made both corrections with the warm spatula while Amelius watched. He was careful with them. He did not want to touch anything else.

Amelius paid him the rest of the fee and more than the rest, and wrapped the panel in a clean cloth, and carried it out himself under his arm, as if he did not trust a slave with it. At the curtain he turned back.

"You will not come to the conferences any more, I suppose."

Carterius said that he did not know.

He went, as it happened, the following week, and for some weeks after that. He sat at the end of the last bench by the door, where the light would be behind him. He listened to the reading from Numenius, or from Alexander, or from whichever of the commentators the boy brought out of the cupboard that day, and to the teacher's short, unordered talk afterwards, and to his wrong syllables, and the questions of Zethus. He did not look at the face more than he looked at anything else. Sometimes, in the middle of an afternoon, he found that he had not heard the last several sentences.

Once, near the end of the winter, as the room was emptying, the teacher stood up from his chair and his glance went down the length of the benches and rested a moment on Carterius by the door. Carterius had the sense, quite clear and quite unsupported by anything, that he was known, that he had perhaps always been known, and that it did not matter. The teacher nodded to him as he would have nodded to anyone. Then he went out by the back, into the court, where the children were, and the fig tree had no leaves.

Carterius took the eleven boards home from the wall that evening and sanded them down, one after another, to the bare wood. They were good boards. He would use them again.

---

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Plōtīnō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Plotinus, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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