by Jo Walton
At the end of the meal Ficino stood up, and after considerable hushing we all fell silent. “You are all gathered now, my little Florentines, ten sleeping houses gathered into this dining hall. You came from many different places, many different families. But now you are here in the city, and you are all brothers and sisters. Let your old life be to you like a dream on waking. Shake it off, as if you had come here fresh from Lethe. Imagine you had been sleeping in the soil of this island and dreaming all you remember, and that your life begins here and now. When you were under the soil the metals of the Earth mixed in you, so that you are all a mixture of iron and bronze and silver and gold. Soon you will learn which metals are uppermost in you, and what you are good for. Here in the Just City you will become your best selves. You will learn and grow and strive to be excellent.”
He beamed around at us all. I saw that Kebes was looking down and frowning. Then Ficino spoke again. “We begin today. Those who can read to my left, those who cannot to my right.”
I went to his right, and indeed, that was when my life truly began.
5
MAIA
A young lady from Queen Victoria’s England does not expect to have her prayers answered, or at least not in such a direct and immediate way, and certainly not by Pallas Athene. My first thought as I looked at all the variously dressed people around me, united only in their expressions of complete bewilderment, was that throughout history everyone had wanted to know the truth about God, about the gods, and now there could be no question. There were gods, they did care about humanity, and one of them was Pallas Athene. She stood still, looking gravely out over the hall. She was half again the height of the tallest of the men, just as Homer describes her, with her helmet, spear, and an owl tucked under her arm. The owl was looking at me. I nodded my head to it. I should have wondered if this was a dream, but there was no doubt whatsoever that it was real. It was the most real thing that had ever happened.
Then Athene spoke. I had never before heard anyone speak Greek, though my father and I had sometimes read it aloud. I was so overwhelmed by the naturalness of the way the syllables sounded that it took me a moment to catch up to what she was actually saying.
“You have come from many times, but with a shared purpose. You all wished to work to set up Plato’s Republic, to build the Just City. Here we are. This is your plan, but you have all asked me for help. I suggest we discuss how to go about it and what we will need.”
A long-haired young man in the habit of a Dominican monk stepped forward. “Are we dead, Sophia?” he asked. “Is this place the afterlife?”
“You are not dead,” Athene said, smiling kindly at him. “You stand here in your mortal bodies. Some of you who were near death have been healed of your infirmities.” She nodded to the Dominican. “You will age naturally. When you die here, in the course of time, your body will be returned to the moment you left.”
How would that work? I couldn’t quite imagine it. Would Aunt Fanny and Anne look around for me and find instead the corpse of an old lady? An old lady who had grown old in Plato’s Republic? I found myself smiling as I realised I didn’t care.
“And our souls?” a man in a toga asked.
“Your souls will also go back to that moment and be reborn from that time, not from this time.”
There was a murmur across the room, as three hundred people said to themselves happily in their native languages: “We have immortal souls! I knew it!” I could only understand Latin and Greek and English, and I heard it in all three of those languages.
A white-bearded man in a Greek kiton, looking the very image of a philosopher, asked “Are they three-part souls as Plato described?”
“Would anyone prefer to return to their own time now?” Athene asked, either not hearing or ignoring the attempt to clarify the issue of our souls. “This would seem like a dream, soon forgotten.”
To my surprise three men raised their hands. Athene blinked, and they disappeared. I was looking at one of them, a shabby man with a donnish look, wondering how he could possibly not want to stay, when he just wasn’t there anymore.
“Now, we need to make plans,” she said.
“But where are we, Sophia? You spoke of our own times. When are we?” It was a man in Renaissance clothes and a red hat.
“We are in the time before the fall of Troy. And we are on the doomed island of Kallisti, called by some Atlante.” Even I had heard of Atlantis.
“Then what we make cannot last?” he asked.
The goddess inclined her head. “This is an experiment, and this is the best time and place for that experiment. Nothing mortal can last. At best it can leave legends that can bear fruit in later ages.”
After that, with the big questions out of the way, we began to discuss how we would go about the work.
It soon became clear that we were united on many issues and divided on others, and that there were practical problems none of us had thought through. Plato’s Republic was extremely specific on some issues and distressingly vague on others. It wasn’t really intended to be used as a blueprint.
There were almost three hundred of us, from twenty-five centuries. There were close to equal numbers of men and women, which astounded me at first. I had never before met another woman who cared about scholarship. Now I did, and it was wonderful. Before long I realised that most of the women were much like me, young, and fortunate enough to obtain enough education to make their possible lives unsatisfactory. I met young women from every century, including several from my own and the century after.
“It does get better,” one of them reassured me. Her name was Kylee, and she was wearing what seemed to me a man’s suit, but cut to her form. “In the eighteen-seventies they established colleges for women at Oxford and Cambridge, and in America too. By the nineteen-twenties they began to grant degrees. By the nineteen-sixties they were actually nominally equal to the men’s colleges.”
“More than a hundred years from me,” I said.
“And even in my time it’s a wearisome business,” she said. “It’s not that I want to die, but not being allowed to offer to die for my country means that my country doesn’t consider me a true citizen.”
We young women from the Centuries of Progress were one clear group. The men of the Renaissance were another. The Neoplatonists made a third. This was Kylee’s name for the group led by Plotinus and sharing a particular mystical interpretation of Plato based around numerology. They called themselves simply Platonists, of course. Plotinus was the white-bearded man who had asked the question about three-part souls when we first arrived.
There were also many Romans, who could have been considered a fourth group except that they never agreed about anything and so could not be thought of as a faction. I was delighted to find Marcus Tullius Cicero among them, and his friend Titus Pomponius Atticus. Atticus was charming; he reminded me a little of my father. How I wished my father could have been here—but he would never have prayed to a pagan goddess. When Atticus introduced me to Cicero, whom he called Tullius, I found he was less delighted to meet me. He was not among those who believed Plato on the equality of women. He was flattered when he found how much of his work I had read, and how high his reputation stood in my century, but he could never really consider me, or any of us women, as people to be taken seriously.
The difficulties and complications of actually putting Plato’s ideas into practice were immense. But we had Athene, whom we all addressed as Sophia, meaning “wisdom.” She had brought the workers—automata that could follow orders and build and plant crops and perform even more wonders. “They come from the future. They are here to labor for you,” she said.
Very few of us had seen anything like them before. Kylee said they were robots, and “workers” was a good translation of that. She said they were more advanced than any such things in her own day.
We formed into committees to work on different aspects of the Republic. We came together to report on progress in formal sessions, whic
h we came to call Chamber. At first we had just that one hall, where we all slept in drafts on the cold marble floor. It was lucky it was summer. We drank water from a spring, and had the workers dig trenches for latrines. Then we had them build a fountain, and bathrooms, and kitchens. Few of us knew how to cook, but fortunately the workers had some limited abilities in that area.
As we had, as yet, no philospher kings, and as we could acknowledge no leader but Athene, we decided that for the time being, when we did not agree, we would vote on an issue. Athene smiled at this. The first divisive issue that came to a vote was names. We voted that those of us with inappropriate names would adopt new names, and that we would do the same with the children who came to us, naming them from the Dialogues and from Greek mythology. Kylee and some others felt strongly against this, but in the vote after the debate, the majority carried the day. I adopted the name Maia, for my birth month, and for the mother of Hermes. Kylee took the name Klio, as being the closest she could come to her original name. We also agreed that we would have one unique name each. The Romans and others who had multiple appropriate names would limit themselves to just one.
For the first time ever I was fully engaged in life. I cared about everything. I read the Republic over and over, I took part in debates in Chamber, I served on committees, I had opinions and was listened to. It was marvellous. I woke up every morning on the cold floor of the hall, happy simply to be alive. I daily thanked God, the gods, Athene, for allowing me to be there and part of all of it. That’s not to say that it couldn’t be infuriating.
I served on the Technology Committee. We had long debates about how much technology to allow. Some of us felt that we should do it with the technology of the day, or that which Plato would have understood. But we already had the workers, and without workers we should have needed slaves. The workers needed electricity, which was produced from the sun. Sufficient electricity to feed the workers would also provide good lighting, and a certain amount of heating and cooling. “The advantage of that,” Klio said, when she presented our recommendations to the whole Chamber, “will be to keep the library at a constant temperature to better protect the books.”
Most of the older people and all of the famous ones were men, but most of the people who understood technology in any way were young women. Though we had nominal equality, there were always those like Tullius who would not accept us as equals. In addition I saw in other women and detected in myself a tendency to defer to older men—as I had always deferred to my father. We had grown up in slavery and bore the marks of our shackles, as Klio said when I talked to her about this, but we were to raise a generation in the hope of true freedom. The committee on technology was almost entirely composed of young women, with only one man, the Dominican, whose name was now Ikaros. Somehow, imperceptibly, because of this, technology came to be seen among the masters as feminine and unimportant. We voted to have lights but not to have heating and cooling, except for the library. We voted to have plumbing everywhere, but only with cold water, which seemed like the morally better choice, and what Plato would have wanted. We made up Greek names for shower-baths and toilets.
Ikaros served on several of my committees—indeed, he had volunteered for every committee as they were being set up. He had been accepted onto an improbable number of them, and served on all those that did not meet at the same time. He seemed to have boundless energy and enthusiasm, as well as being notably younger than most of the other men. He was also extremely good-looking, with a wonderful smile and long chestnut hair. Working together so much, we became friends. He seemed to be everyone’s friend, moving through all the different circles charming everyone. He was even a favorite with Athene, who seemed to unbend a little when she spoke to him.
Plotinus and the Neoplatonists dominated the committee designing the physical form and organization of the city. They announced that Athene would bring in mature trees, and we voted that through. Then they proposed that there would be ten thousand and eighty children, divided into twelve tribes, each divided into a hundred and forty-four eating houses that would each be named after a famous city of civilization. We voted this through without dissent. A hundred and forty-four eating houses allowed everyone to get their favourite cities mentioned. The proposal was made that the eating houses be decorated in the style of their cities, which I thought a charming idea. There would be two masters attached to each eating house, as far as possible one man and one woman. “Are there any Florentine women here?” I asked Ikaros after a Tech Committee meeting. I hadn’t noticed any in their group.
“Not that I can think of,” he said. “Why, do you want to be attached to the Florence house?”
“I loved it so much. And it’s where I found Plato. I never got to Greece, only as far as Italy.”
“Talk to Ficino. He’s bound to be the man who gets Florence.” He sounded a trifle envious. Ficino’s name was now formally Fikinus, but everyone went right on addressing him as Ficino.
We voted that we would all adopt the kiton, and those who knew how to wear one instructed the rest. The workers wove the cloth for them. I had lessons in how to don one from Krito himself, the friend of Sokrates. Once I was used to it I found it charmingly practical and comfortable. The kitons had an unexpected benefit—once we were all dressed alike, the factions among us were less immediately visible, if no less real.
On the women’s committee, Kreusa, originally a hetaira from first-century Corinth, explained the use of menstrual sponges. We voted by acclamation that this method would be the usual and standard method of the Republic. We did not even present it to the full Chamber. Workers could easily harvest the sponges. We knew the men wouldn’t recognize or care about their significance. We had agreed that the masters should not have children of our own, and Kreusa told us about silphium root, which had the ability to prevent conception. We agreed that it should be available to all female masters who wanted it.
I was the only woman on the committee to select art, on which Ficino, Atticus, and, inevitably, Ikaros, also served. Plato is very clear about the purposes of art, and what forms of it should be permitted in the Republic. We were divided on whether we should have only original art or allow copies. This was an issue on which passions ran high, and on which Ficino, Ikaros and I were united—the children should see only originals if they wanted to learn excellence. We should ask Athene to allow us to rescue lost and destroyed art to adorn the city. Copies, especially copies created by workers and more than once, would make them see art in entirely the wrong light.
Atticus and some of the others argued against us. “We have already decided that the eating houses will be copies of buildings in the cities they are named for,” he said. “If the workers can build them, and if it won’t harm the children to see a hundred and forty-four copies of architecture, then how can art be different?”
“It would be better if we could get the original buildings too,” I said. “But it’s not possible. It is possible to get the art.”
“It might be possible to get some buildings,” Ficino said. “Sophia isn’t just wise, she’s powerful as well.”
“Were there enough suitable buildings that have disappeared?” I asked. “I don’t know about Greece, but when I was in Rome it looked as if every brick and piece of marble was being reused in some other building.”
Ikaros shook his head. “It’s completely different. It wouldn’t be better if we could get original buildings, because the real problem then would be that the buildings wouldn’t be so suited to our purposes as the ones we will build. The design for the sleeping houses, for example, is elegant and ideal.” He was on that committee as well, of course. “We want them to be identical and classical and useful, and that’s how they are. We don’t want the city to be full of repetition because that would teach the wrong lesson. The sleeping houses will all be the same; the palaestras where the children will exercise will be functionally the same, but have different decoration, for variety. And the same goes for the eating houses, te
mples, libraries, and practice halls. We want everything to be as well-suited to what we need it for as can be. Making new buildings in the style of old ones is best for that, for buildings. They won’t really be copies, not functionally.”
“Functionally?” Atticus repeated, frowning.
“The buildings for our city have different functions from the buildings in any existing city. Even if we had all the choice in the world, it would be difficult to find sufficient buildings with big eating halls and kitchens and rooms of the right size for classes,” Ikaros explained. “Ideally they’d all be new designs by wonderful architects, but as it is, we’ve decided to take the features of the old buildings, in the styles of the cities the halls are named after, and have the workers reproduce them on our buildings.”
“But why couldn’t we do that with art as well?” Atticus asked. “The workers could just as easily reproduce that.”
“But the original art best fits the Platonic purpose,” I said.
“Plato says art should show good people doing good things as an example to the children,” Atticus said.
“Yes, and also be an example of beauty, to open their souls to excellence,” I added.
Ikaros looked approvingly at me. “Yes! And when it comes to art, the best is definitely the originals.”
“Jupiter!” Atticus swore. “They won’t be able to tell if they’re originals or copies.”