by Jo Walton
“Can’t we ask Athene for more?” I asked.
“I suppose we could, but I don’t know where she got these from and whether it was difficult. Besides, I feel we ought to be self-reliant and go on with what we’ve got.”
“I’m sorry I can’t help, but I don’t understand how they work.”
“Nobody does, really. Not even Lysias. We’re just patching them up. But they shouldn’t be doing things we can do, like cooking and farming, when there are things we really need them for that we can’t do, like making roads and maintaining the ships and building things.”
“I’ll support you on that when we next have a Tech Committee meeting,” I said.
“The Tech Committee isn’t the problem. It’s when it comes to Chamber everybody has plans they want the workers for and nobody understands or is prepared to wait.” She sighed. “Well, some of them will just have to wait.”
It was hard work, but things did settle down. We couldn’t keep as close an eye on the children as we would have liked. I tried to know all seventy little Florentines as well as I could, so I could help them to become their best selves. Often I envied them, especially the girls, seeing them grow up with their bodies and brains exercised and thinking it entirely natural that they were as good as the boys.
I saw Ikaros at committee meetings. The Tech Committee was always busy. Ikaros did not pester me for eros, but he was always friendly and occasionally let me know that if I changed my mind he hadn’t changed his. I always said that I was happy to remain celibate. He really didn’t believe, even now, that he had done anything wrong. Ikaros had been assigned to Ferrara with Lukretia, a beautiful woman a little older than he was. There were soon rumors that he was having a less than Platonic relationship with her, in addition to whatever he was doing with Plotinus. She was from his own period, so perhaps they shared the same ideas of seduction. I hoped so. We never discussed the personal sexual morality of the masters in Chamber, though the children’s was a constant topic of debate.
The most contentious issue was age. A number of us, most of the young women and some of the older ones, wanted the age at which we instituted Plato’s practice of marriage and having wives and children in common to be kept to twenty, as Plato had written. Others wanted to lower it to sixteen. We suggested a compromise of eighteen. The real problem was that we all did want to divide the children up into their metals at sixteen. “We can’t go with Plato’s specific word,” Adeimantus said in the debate. “He says the girls should be twenty and the boys thirty, which is clearly impossible when they all started off at ten. Perhaps in future generations we can do this, but expecting celibacy until thirty seems too hard.” The vote was very close, and we decided on sixteen.
Then in the Year Five of the City, nine years after I had come there, when I was twenty-eight, there was an extraordinary Chamber meeting. Athene had brought Sokrates to us. “I brought him from Athens,” she said. “Krito asked me to help him get Sokrates away. Sokrates is an old man, and Krito and I thought it best to bring him here at this time so that he can teach the children rhetoric now that they are old enough.”
“Sokrates!” Ficino said, mopping his eyes, quite overcome.
Athene vanished. Sokrates stood before us, nut brown and weathered, with wild white hair and the toby-jug face Plato had described. “What nonsense is this?” he asked.
12
SIMMEA
It was my turn to serve breakfast the morning after we’d met Sokrates. As I took plates and porridge pots to all the tables, Ficino called me to come and sit with him when I was done. I gave a glance to my usual table, where Kebes and Klymene were sitting teasing each other, then went to join him. He was sitting at the cross-table, so when I sat down opposite him I found myself staring at Giotto’s Justice, a fine fresco to have, I suppose, extremely inspirational no doubt, but in my opinion Giotto was a moon to Botticelli’s sun.
“So you thought Sokrates was like me?” Ficino asked, with a twinkle in his eye.
I helped myself to porridge. “Yes. His eyes are like yours.” I saw that it was true what Sokrates had said when he laughed. Ficino was pleased, and even flattered, at the comparison.
“He wants to teach you. Do you want that?”
I looked at him, inquiringly. “Do I have a choice?”
“Oh yes. This coming year you’re all going to be choosing, or chosen. As we have always told you, some of you are iron, some bronze, some silver, some gold. You have bronze and silver and gold mixed into you, but not much iron I think!”
“I want most of all to be my best self. I always thought the masters would decide how the metals were mixed in us and assign us to our places when the time came.” I fingered the silver pin I had won at the Hermeia three years before.
“We will,” Ficino said.
“Good.”
“You think it’s a good system?” he asked.
“Oh, yes.” I hesitated, then went on, because I did trust Ficino. “So much better to be chosen for what we’re fit to work on by those who know us than being limited to what our parents could have taught us.”
“You were dreaming before you woke here, you grew under the soil,” he reproved me, but his eyes twinkled. “When I saw your painting of the footrace I had thought you would settle among the bronze. And you are fierce in the palaestra, and you did well racing in armor at the Artemisia last year, so you certainly have plenty of the silver spirit. And you are so quick at mathematics that Axiothea and I felt you ought to be allowed to try astronomy. And now Sokrates has singled you out! So you may be destined for gold after all. Don’t frown. All the metals are equally valuable, and the city needs them all.”
I tried to stop frowning and swallowed my mouthful of porridge. It gave me time to change what I would have said immediately, which was that if all the metals were equally valuable, why were they always listed in the same order, with gold in best and final place? “If I am not made of gold then I think bronze is my metal,” I said. “My soul leaps to painting and sculpture and architecture more than to gymnastics and fighting.”
“And to the pursuit of excellence?”
“Of course,” I said. “How not?”
“Sometimes I envy you children your certainty,” Ficino said. “Well, in the hour before dinner go to Sokrates. He has a house on the street of Athene near the library. The house is called Thessaly. He may not be there. As you may know, he is given to wandering about the city, engaging in dialogues. If he is not there, seek him about the place. He has said he wants to choose his friends, and not spend all his time besieged by those who admire him; and we have agreed to respect that. It seems that you are one of the friends he has chosen.”
“Isn’t it exciting that he’s here?” I said. “Sokrates himself. I thought he was dead.”
“And I knew he was dead, and had been dead for two thousand years,” Ficino said. Ficino was known as the Translator, and it was Plato he had translated from Greek to Latin, in Florentia in the days when few people understood Greek but every educated person knew Latin. I had read all the Plato I had been allowed, which was only the Apology and the Symposium and the Lysis. I knew there were lots more dialogues. I hoped to be allowed to read them when I was old enough to study rhetoric. It was a badly kept secret that the Just City was described in a book of Plato’s called the Republic, which was not in the library. (I felt sure there was a copy on Maia’s shelf next to that Botticelli book that was printed in a language that was not Latin.) “It’s the most wonderful mystery of all that he’s here. Bless Athene!”
I got through the morning in a flurry of impatience. In the early afternoon I saw Pytheas in the palaestra and rushed up to him. “Do you know who’s here?”
“Who?” At fifteen he was better-looking than ever, and still totally unconscious of the effect it had on everyone. I was used to him, and even so I could occasionally be distracted from my thoughts by seeing his lips part as he said something especially interesting. I knew other people who were beautiful
, but no other person moved me the way Pytheas did. The others were beautiful like themselves, but he was beautiful like a painting or a sculpture. That I was also secretly attracted to him only made this worse. The Symposium is extremely clear about the shame of lust, and I knew it was the attraction of soul for soul that I was supposed to feel. I was also most certainly drawn to his soul. Pytheas was the most unusual person I knew. In most ways he was the closest to true excellence of anyone I had ever met, but other spheres seemed completely closed to him. He was a paradox that continued to intrigue me.
“Sokrates!” I said. “I met him last night. He’s going to teach me!”
“I wonder why he came now,” Pytheas said, looking abstracted.
“Now? Not when all the other masters came?” I fell into a wrestling stance, and Pytheas automatically did likewise. We began to circle slowly.
“Yes. If he was going to be here, why wasn’t he here from the beginning when he could have the most effect?”
“I don’t know.” I feinted to the side, trying to think about it. “Perhaps he was doing something else—no, that’s silly. He could have done it and still arrived five years ago with all of us.”
“The masters were here before that.” He landed a blow on my arm and I raised my hand to mark it as we took up position again. “They must have been, I mean. They were here to build the city and decide what went into the libraries.”
“And rescue the art,” I said, plunging in suddenly to grapple. The only way to win against Pytheas these days was distract him and take him by surprise. I managed to bear him to the ground, and he tapped the sand.
“When are you seeing him? Can I come too?” We circled again. Pytheas was grinning, trying to get the sun in my eyes, one of his favorite tricks. I leaned the other way, bouncing on the balls of my feet.
“After this. What are you supposed to be doing? I can’t think he’d mind, considering what he was like.”
“I’m supposed to be in the library. I could come with you. What was he like?” Pytheas charged in and caught me at once in a grapple that I knew I could not break.
“He was fascinating,” I said. “Do come.”
“I’m not sure I should come without an invitation. Maybe you should ask him if I’d be welcome, and if I could come another day.” He was leaning his strength against me now, and even as I tried to hold myself back, I was acutely aware of how my breast was pressed up against his side.
“I think you should come today. You have to be ahead of where you’re supposed to be in the library, you always are, the same as I am. And I’d love to know what you make of him.” He pulled me off balance and I went down, meaning he won the bout.
“All right. I’ll meet you at the fountain after.” He ran off to look for another partner and I went to join the runners.
Kebes joined us at the fountain when it was time to leave. “Are you going to talk to Sokrates too?” he asked Pytheas, sounding dismayed.
“I thought I would,” Pytheas said, in a tone that invited Kebes to make something of it while they were still in the palaestra.
I put my kiton on and fastened it. “Come on, we’ve just got clean, we don’t want to get sand all over ourselves again. Besides, I don’t want to be late.”
The two of them blustered at each other as we walked along. I thought I detected something worse than usual in it. I started to dread what would happen when we found Sokrates and it became clear that Pytheas had been invited only by me.
We found Sokrates’s house with no difficulty. “I wonder why he called it Thessaly?” Pytheas mused. “He came from Athens.”
“He said last night that he had asked Krito what he would do in Thessaly, and Krito dragged him here,” I said. “I suppose he means that he’s thinking of the city as Thessaly.” I scratched on the door, and to my surprise it was opened immediately.
In the Symposium Alkibiades says that Sokrates looks like Silenus, and seeing him in daylight I could see that it was true. He has the same big nose and bulbous forehead and little goat-beard. But nobody would care how ugly he was once they’d seen his eyes and his smile. He smiled now, seeing us. “Why, Simmea and Kebes, how good to see you again. And who is your friend?”
Then he stepped forward to get a better look at Pytheas, and stopped dead, his head frozen in position jutting forward and staring. I hadn’t expected anything like this. He and Pytheas stared at each other for a long moment but neither spoke. “Do you recognise him?” Kebes asked. There was indeed something in his expression that looked like recognition.
“Do I?” Sokrates asked Pytheas, softly.
“My name is Pytheas, of the house of Laurel, the hall of Delphi and the tribe of Apollo,” Pytheas said, inclining his head. “And you, sir, are Sokrates the son of Sophronikos, than whom, I have long said, there is nobody more wise.”
“I am more delighted to meet you than you can imagine,” Sokrates said. “Perhaps now we will be able to find some answers. Come in, all of you. Come through to the garden.”
The house was much like Hyssop house. It had a bedroom of the same size, but with only one bed and one chest, with no other furnishings, and an identical fountain room. A door led out of it into a sheltered courtyard full of plants. There was a little statue of a Herm under the branches, which I noticed especially because it was made of limestone and not marble.
“Let us sit here in the shade of this olive tree and converse. If any of us are dry there is water close at hand.”
We sat on the ground under the tree. Sokrates, although he was old, had no difficulty in sitting or in crossing his legs comfortably. “Well, my friends,” Sokrates began, leaning back against the trunk of the tree, “For I believe as you are here that I can safely call you my friends. We began a discussion last night about the nature of trust, which we were forced to break off because of the lateness of the hour. This seems like the perfect time to resume it.”
“Have you been reading Plato’s dialogues?” Pytheas asked.
Sokrates laughed. He laughed like a happy child, absolutely irrepressibly. “How could I resist?” he asked. “You might be able to imagine what it is like to fall asleep in a prison cell and awake to find yourself in an experimental colony which one of your pupils claimed you had proposed yourself. I thought at first that it was a ridiculous dream, but as it keeps going on and becoming more and more detailed I have decided for the time being to treat it as reality and go along with it on that basis.”
“It’s not a dream,” I said. “That is, not unless I’m dreaming too. And I’ve been here for years.”
“I’ll grant, Simmea, that it is not your dream. But have you ever been a participant in somebody else’s dream, and could you prove you were not? I’ll let you off that one, for I feel it’s beyond human capacity.” He glanced at Pytheas again, and Pytheas smiled sideways at him.
“I believe it’s nobody’s dream,” Pytheas said. “And you do have the comfort of knowing you won’t be forgotten. People will still be having Socratic dialogues in thousands of years.”
“Not forgotten, perhaps, but what have they done to my memory! As for the question of the dream—well, that brings us back to the interesting question of trust. Who can we trust, and how do we decide? Do you trust each other?”
“No,” Kebes said, looking at Pytheas.
“But then we have established that you are not inclined to trust anyone,” Sokrates said. “Simmea?”
“I think that if we can trust anyone then we can trust each other,” I said.
“Well then, is it possible to trust anyone? To begin with, can we trust the gods?”
“Which gods?” Kebes asked.
Sokrates looked sideways at Pytheas. “We know, as Plato could not have known, that Athene at least is real, and much as Homer portrayed her. So how about Homer’s gods?”
“Then who can we trust if the gods disagree?” I asked. “Like at Troy, when the gods are taking sides in the battle. Odysseus could trust Athene but not Poseidon.”
“You’re using a very unplatonic idea of goodness,” I said, surprised. “Ficino says Plato says Goodness is absolute, not relative.”
“Considering relative goodness, I believe it’s more complicated, as you say,” Pytheas said to Sokrates. “The gods have their own agendas that may conflict.”
“Ah,” Sokrates said. “And how may we know if we are caught up in such a conflict, and if so, which god to trust?”
“Juno, that is Hera, was terrible to Aeneas,” I said. “He was much harassed both on land and sea because of the unrelenting rage of cruel Juno,” I quoted, naturally falling into Latin to do so.
“I can see I’m going to have to learn that infuriating language,” Sokrates said. “But not today. Translation, please.”
I repeated it in Greek. It seemed astonishing that he was so wise but did not know Latin. But Virgil wasn’t born until five hundred years after he died. In his time, Rome had been no more than a little village, founded by Romulus and Remus only a few centuries before, unheard-of away from Italy. Then Rome had grown great and spread civilization over the world, so that even when she fell, her language had preserved it in human minds, so that now—except that now in this moment Rome did not even exist. Aeneas, if he had even been born, had not yet sailed from Troy. “It’s like looking through the wrong end of a telescope,” I said. “History, from here.”
“You have at least had five years to learn about it. I’ve barely been here half a month.”
“Are you a master?” Kebes asked.
“What an interesting question,” Sokrates said, patting Kebes’s hand. “What is a master, in this city?”
“The masters came here from all over time, drawn by their shared wish to found the Just City,” Kebes recited. It was what we had been taught.