Chromatistes

Chromatistes is the name most trusted authorities give to the Pentagon who introduced colour to Flatland. His discovery briefly transforms the country’s visual and social life, making bodies and their orientation legible at a glance; later, the political movement built around colour becomes a pretext for mass killing, and Chromatistes himself is its most prominent victim. His rise and death bind an appealing innovation to the coercive social order that first resists it and then exploits it.

Identity and the Discovery of Colour

Tradition places Chromatistes in Flatland’s remote past, during an era when colour supposedly lent life a splendour absent from the narrator’s own colourless age. The account is uncertain about the inventor’s personal history: it describes a private Pentagon whose name is variously reported, and says he may have discovered the constituents of simple colours and a rudimentary method of painting by chance. The most reliable authorities, however, agree on the name Chromatistes.

The reported sequence of his experiments is domestic before it becomes public. He painted his house, then his slaves, followed by his Father, Sons, and Grandsons, and at last himself. The results appealed through both convenience and beauty. Where he turned his variegated frame, he attracted attention and respect, establishing colour not simply as decoration but as a conspicuous sign by which other Flatlanders could recognize him.

What Colour Changed

Colour altered the practical terms of recognition in a society whose inhabitants ordinarily perceived one another as lines. Neighbours no longer needed to feel Chromatistes to identify him, mistake his front for his back, or laboriously calculate his movements. They could avoid jostling him and make way for him. His voice, too, was spared the exhausting declarations by which colourless Squares and Pentagons had to assert their individuality among crowds of ignorant Isosceles.

The innovation spread with remarkable speed. Within a week, every Square and Triangle in Chromatistes’s district had imitated him, although some conservative Pentagons resisted. A month or two later even the Dodecagons had adopted the fashion; within a year, only the highest Nobility still held out. It then travelled to surrounding regions, and within two generations nearly all Flatlanders were painted. The exceptions were the Women and the Priests, whose social and geometric positions made the revolution’s principal argument—that Nature intended differences of sides to signal differences of colour—hard to apply to them.

From Innovation to Political Crisis

Colour’s capacity to make identity visible also made it useful for deception. During the conflict over the Colour Bill, a low-ranking Isosceles, described as possessing a brain scarcely above four degrees, acquired twelve colours by dabbling in a Tradesman’s paints. He appeared as a Dodecagon and entered the Market Place, where he approached a maiden whose affection he had previously sought without success. With a feigned voice, a string of fortunate accidents, and the bride’s relations’ failure to take ordinary precautions, he secured the marriage through fraud. The bride killed herself after discovering the deception.

News of the catastrophe changed the Women’s attitude toward the Colour Bill. Sympathy for the victim joined fear that similar fraud might threaten them, their sisters, and their daughters; some openly turned against the measure, and the rest needed little encouragement to do likewise. The Circles seized this moment to summon an extraordinary Assembly of the States, bringing in a large number of reactionary Women as well as the usual guard of Convicts. The fraudulent marriage had turned the abstract debate over colour into a question of personal safety and domestic trust.

Pantocyclus’s Reversal and Chromatistes’s Death

At the Assembly, Pantocyclus, the Chief Circle, faced the hisses and hoots of 120,000 Isosceles. He announced that the Circles would concede to the majority and accept the Colour Bill, prompting the crowd to change its uproar to applause. He then invited Chromatistes, leader of the Sedition, into the hall’s centre to receive the Hierarchy’s submission. The apparent victory placed Chromatistes before a mass gathering whose enthusiasm Pantocyclus would redirect.

Pantocyclus delivered a long speech that presented the concession as impartial while emphasizing the Bill’s dangers. He argued that universal colour would erase distinctions between Regularity and Irregularity, undermine the prospects of Workmen whose children might rise to the Regular Triangles, and strengthen the larger Criminal Classes at the expense of other groups. As the Artisans began to assent, Chromatistes tried to step forward and answer, but guards surrounded him and kept him silent. Pantocyclus then appealed to the Women, invoking the danger of marriage fraud and the loss of domestic security; his final cry that death would be preferable to such a future served as the prearranged signal for violence.

The Isosceles Convicts fell on Chromatistes and transfixed him. At the same time, Women directed by the Circles moved backward, so that they could approach the soldiers invisibly and strike with their stings; Regulars and Artisans opened their ranks to let them through, while Convicts sealed every exit. The assault killed Chromatistes at the moment when the Circles appeared to accept his cause. His death was not an incidental casualty of a confused debate: it was the opening move in a coordinated reversal that silenced the revolution’s leader and converted the Assembly into a trap.

Aftermath and Narrative Significance

The fighting lasted less than half an hour. Surprised, leaderless, attacked by invisible assailants, and unable to escape, the Isosceles lost their presence of mind and cried treachery. They then turned against one another; every Isosceles in the vast crowd was dead within half an hour, and the narrator presents their fragments as evidence of the triumph of Order. Chromatistes’s killing thus precedes the destruction of the movement’s mass following, while the Circles use the massacre to restore their control.

The repression continued beyond the Assembly. The Circles spared the Working Men but decimated them, called out the Equilateral militia, and destroyed Triangles suspected on reasonable grounds of irregularity without exact measurement by the Social Board. Inspections of Military and Artisan homes continued for more than a year, as the authorities purged towns and villages of excess lower-class populations. The narrator connects this restoration of the class balance to the neglect of criminal tribute to the Schools and University and to violations of Flatland’s constitutional laws.

Chromatistes consequently remains both an inventor and a political symbol. His colours ease everyday recognition, but the same visible signs can be forged, and the fear of forgery gives the ruling Circles a way to turn reformers, workers, and Women against one another. The character’s trajectory—from the respected discoverer who no longer needs to be touched, to a leader confined by guards and killed before his followers—condenses the account’s central reversal: a tool that promises clearer recognition cannot by itself overcome the institutions that govern who may be seen, believed, or allowed to rise.