(?) In their penchant for ceremonial public slaughter, the Alliance and Europe were more alike than either side grasped. In both places the public death was accompanied by the reading of ritual scripts. And in both the goal was to create cathartic powers of loyalty to the government-in the Mexica case, by recalling the spiritual justification for the empire; in the European case, to reassert the sovereign's divine power after it had been injured by a criminal act. Most important, neither society should be judged-or in the event judged each other-entirely by its brutality. Who today would want to live in the Greece of Plato and Socrates, with its slavery, constant warfare, institutionalized pederasty, and relentless culling of surplus population? Yet Athens had a coruscating tradition of rhetoric, lyric drama, and philosophy. So did Tenochtitl?n and the other cities of the Triple Alliance. In fact, the corpus of writings in classical Nahuatl, the language of the Alliance, is even larger than the corpus of texts in classical Greek.


The Nahuatl word tlamatini (literally, 'he who knows things') meant something akin to 'thinker-teacher'-a philosopher, if you will. The tlamatini, who 'himself was writing and wisdom,' was expected to write and maintain the codices and live in a way that set a moral example. 'He puts a mirror before others,' the Mexica said. In what may have been the first large-scale compulsory education program in history, every male citizen of the Triple Alliance, no matter what his social class, had to attend one sort of school or another until he was sixteen. Many tlamatine (the plural form of the word) taught at elite academies [i.e., like the French 'grandes ?coles'] that trained the next generation of priests, teachers, and high administrators.


Like Greek philosophy, the teachings of the tlamatine were only tenuously connected to the official dogma of Tlaca?lel. (True, Plato does have Socrates subtly 'correct' Homer, because the gods supposedly couldn't have behaved in the immoral way described by the poet. But by and large the Greek pantheon on Mount Olympus plays no role in either Plato or Aristotle.) But the tlamatine shared the religion's sense of the evanescence of existence. 'Truly do we live on Earth?' asked a poem or song attributed to Nezahualc?yotl (1402-72), a founding figure in Mesoamerican thought and the tlatoani [one of the leaders] of Texcoco, one of the other two members of the Triple Alliance. His lyric, among the most famous in the Nahuatl canon, answers its own question:


[quote]Not forever on earth; only a little while here.
Be it jade, it shatters.
Be it gold, it breaks.
Be it a quetzal feather, it tears apart.
Not forever on earth; only a little while here.