I was present when someone asked the poet Sophocles: “How’s your sex life, Sophocles? Can you still make love to a woman?” “Shush, man,” the poet replied. “I am very happy to have escaped from that — as happy as a slave who has escaped from an insane and heartless master.”

 — Plato, Republic

Bergama, that autumn afternoon. We walked through the sort of streets that tourists don’t usually see, the sort of streets where noisy schools are and no one notices the lemon trees.

That is where it started, this episode. In Bergama.

I am sixty-two years old,…