By the time I stumbled into the kitchen that next morning, Dad was already up and totally wired. Professor Lewes’ manuscript was lying on the kitchen table.
Had he even gone to bed?
“Eugnosis!” he exclaimed as I entered the kitchen. “Dude’s da bomb! I think I'm in love!”
I was so not up for Dad in manic professor mode at that early an hour. “Jeez Dad, give it a rest. What’s for breakfast?”
He ignored my question. “I’m telling you; this is truly amazing stuff. Our Eugnosis traveled to India with a trading expedition some time in the late Hellenistic period and ended up staying there for eight years.”
Mom stumbled into the kitchen and started pouring a cup of coffee. I located a box of cornflakes and sat down. “India? I didn’t think they discovered India until…wasn’t it Vasco de Gama or somebody?”
Dad laughed. “Well it wasn’t exactly lost. Remember Alexander the Great set out to conquer the place until his men made him turn around and come home, and we have accounts of other Greek philosophers who visited India and studied with what they called the gymnosophists.”
“Gymnosophists?”
“Right. You can figure it out. Use your Greek.”
My Dad doesn’t believe in the art of a simple answer. “Uh, gymno is like, athletics, as in gymnasium or gymnastics…”
“Actually it means naked, but that’s because the Greeks did their athletic activities buck nekkid; so you’re right enough.”
I quickly forced the image of naked Greek guys doing gymnastics out of my mind and moved on. “Soph is wisdom, as in philosophy. Naked philosphers?”
“In India…” prompted Dad.
“Oh! Yoga! Gymnosophists would be guys doing yoga! Cool.”
“Exactly. But then what makes Eugnosis unique is that he somehow stumbled on a group of Buddhists and ended up spending nearly six years studying with them.”
That got Mom’s attention. “Buddhists? Ancient Greeks and Buddhism? That’s a first isn’t it?”
“A first and a last. No previous ancient texts have discussed Buddhism at any length. Near as I can tell, Eugnosis is the first European philosopher to be influenced by Buddhism, but whatever he may have developed out of his studies in India was buried with this manuscript.”
“Wow,” I stammered. “Pay-dirt.”
Dad laughed. “You got it junior. We done hit the jackpot. Marcus, my boy, there’s gold in that there steamer trunk! We done hit the mother lode!”
Mom piped in. “So what’s the plan? Exactly how do you propose to spin this scroll into gold?”
Dad pushed himself away from the table. “Ah yes, the plan. I was thinking about that last night…” he refilled his coffee cup, “…as opposed to sleeping, that is.”
He shook his head and took a gulp of coffee. “I intend to proceed along three fronts of attack. First, I’ll take those scraps of the scroll I collected to Dr. Forsythe in the physics department. You remember him from New Year’s Eve, don’t you dear? A rather stout fellow with a goatee?”
Mom frowned. “Yes, I remember him. He kept going on at length about how underfunded the physics department was and how much better things will be next year when the administration finally cuts more money from your classics department.”
“Yep that’s him,” Dad said. “And while I agree, he is an ass, he does have the facilities to do Carbon-14 dating on those scroll fragments. Besides, he’s completely oblivious to anything outside of his own field of study, so I doubt if he’ll ask too many questions. I figure he’ll just farm the job of dating our manuscript fragments out to a graduate student and forget about it.”
“And the second front?” Mom asked.
“The second…” Dad looked momentarily confused. “Oh right. Sorry, I’m a bit groggy here. Lack of sleep and all…”
He continued. “Next, I’ll need to go to the school’s copy center and get photocopies of everything: Lewes’ transcription of the manuscript, the photos of Eugnosis’ version, Lewes’ journals, all of it.
“You see, technically, all of this belongs to the college, even if they did ignore it for almost a century. Still, if they wanted to be nasty, they could take possession of the entire kit and caboodle and leave me out in the cold.”
“They wouldn’t!” I exclaimed.
Dad smiled wryly. “As our Eugnosis himself puts it: ‘Never underestimate the spitefulness of a learned man’.”
“And the third front?” Mom asked.
“The third front, my dear, is to translate Eugnosis of Alexandria into English and get my manuscript to a publisher before anyone manages to take my project away from me.”
. “What about A Synergetic Analysis of…blah blah blah!” I asked.
“Screw it!” Dad laughed. “Scholarly clap-trap! Sound and fury signifying nothing! We’ve got history to make here, Marcus; that nonsense can wait.”