It is a humid August day on the Greek island of Samos. Cicadas are making their repetitive racket, the Aegean Sea is sparkling in the afternoon sunshine and I am halfway up a vertical rock face clinging on to a rope for dear life.
“But you must climb,” the owner of a café had told me when I said I wanted to get to Pythagoras’s Cave. He’d looked dubiously at my leather skirt, tank top and polyester sandals.
There is no going back now. I have committed to the ascent and so has Stephen Blackwood, a prominent scholar of the Roman philosopher Boethius. I thought we were going to be speaking at Blackwood’s hotel and dressed accordingly. But instead we hopped into a lime-green jeep and drove up to the eastern slope of Mount Kerkis, so that I could see the ancient grotto in which the first man to call himself a philosopher is said to have lived.