by Jo Walton
“They did this with the aid of Pallas Athene,” Pytheas added, in the manner of somebody politely adding a footnote, but Kebes frowned at him. Sokrates nodded to himself. “So it would seem that I am not a master, as I did not read Plato’s Republic nor pray to Athene to bring me here to work at setting it up.”
“But you’re not a child,” Kebes said.
“I’m seventy years old, I’m certainly not a child. Nor am I a youth, and still less a maiden. But perhaps I am wrong about this. Perhaps in this city I am a child. Is there nobody here but masters and children?”
“Unless you count the workers,” I said. “They are mechanical, but they seem to have purpose.”
“They’re just devices,” Pytheas said. “They don’t will what they do.”
“Do you know that?” Sokrates asked.
Pytheas closed his mouth, looking dumbfounded. After a minute said: “It’s my opinion and what I’ve been taught.”
“We will leave the question of the workers for now, if we may, and let us say that of human beings, there are in the city only youths and maidens, whom you are accustomed to call children, and masters?”
“That’s right, Sokrates,” Kebes said. “Or it was the case until you came.”
“Then let us consider. I am not a child because I am seventy years old. But I was brought here without being consulted, like a child.”
“You have a house to yourself like a master,” I said. “We all live in houses with six other children.”
“That seems a minor point, but we will let it stand on the side of masters.”
“The thing that marks you as different from children and masters considered together is that you came to the city now,” Pytheas said. “All the rest of us have in common that we came here five years ago, at the time of the founding of the city. Why did you come now?”
“They tell me that I came now because before this you were too young to learn rhetoric, and I am an old man and they feared that if I had been here from the beginning I would die before you were old enough to learn. For that is to be my purpose here, you see, to teach rhetoric to you children: I, who was never a teacher but who liked to converse with my friends and seek out the nature of things.”
“They have their own imagination of who you are, but you are not that,” Kebes said.
“Now that’s true,” Sokrates said. “And perhaps what I shall teach is not what they expect me to teach.”
13
APOLLO
Who would have guessed that Sokrates would recognize me? True, we had always been on good terms. But I was in mortal flesh and fifteen years old. Nobody else had recognized me. Nobody else had even come close to guessing, not even people I knew well. It isn’t as if we go around manifesting physically all the time. People don’t expect to see the voice in their ear incarnate in front of them in the form of a youth, and so they don’t see it. Sokrates, of course, didn’t ever see what he expected to see, he saw what was there and examined it. He knew me instantly, as fast as Athene had, faster.
The difficulty wasn’t that I cared that Sokrates knew. Sokrates was one of those people whose integrity really could be relied on. No, it was that I didn’t want Simmea or that lout Kebes to know. I was also a little afraid of giving away too much to Sokrates. This was never a problem before I became a mortal. Saying precisely as much as I want, with as many multiple meanings as words can be made to bear, has always been one of my oracular specialties. Composing oracles like that can be as much fun as really complex forms of poetry. But since I became Pytheas things had all been more complicated. I sometimes blurted out things I shouldn’t, and there were these huge areas of human experience that I kept blundering into with both feet. Simmea really helped with this. She was always prepared to put her time into working things out with me, sometimes even before I messed things up. I really valued that.
Being a mortal was strange. It was sensually intense, and it had the intensity of everything evanescent—like spring blossoms or autumn leaves or early cherries. It was also hugely involving. Detachment was really difficult to achieve. Everything mattered immediately—every pain, every sensation, every emotion. There wasn’t time to think about things properly—no possibility of withdrawal for proper contemplation, then returning to the same instant with a calm and reasonable plan. Everything had to be done in time, immediately. Paradoxically, there was also too much time. I constantly had to wait through moments and hours and nights. I had to wait for spring to see blossom, wait for Simmea to be free to talk to me, wait for morning. Then when it came, everything would be hurtling forward in immediate necessity again, pierced through with emotion and immediacy and a speeding pulse. Time was inexorable and unstoppable. I had always known that, but it had taken me fifteen years as a mortal to understand what it meant.
I found my own charged emotional states interesting to contemplate. Some were exactly the same, others analogous, and still others entirely new. Then there was the vulnerability, which is quite different in practice from the way it seems in theory. I could never have reasoned my way to understanding how it felt to stand in the palaestra, hoping that Simmea would hit me instead of walking away from our friendship. Even at that instant, even as I was waiting and not knowing how it would go, I knew that I would be making poetry from those emotions for centuries.
I certainly was learning lots and lots about equal significance. It was easy to grant it to Simmea, who was smart and brave and cared passionately about art, even though she was flat-nosed and flat-chested and had buck teeth. It was much harder in practice to extend this out to everyone. It took me a long time to realise that I’d been extending equal significance as a favor on an individual basis and that it really applied to absolutely everyone—funny cowardly Klymene, bad-mannered Kebes, and pretty Laodike. Everyone had their own internal life and their own soul, and they were entitled to make their own choices. I had to keep reminding myself of that regularly, and really I should have had it cut into my hand. I did an exercise at the end of every day, if I could keep awake long enough, when I tried to imagine the inner significance of everyone who had spoken to me that day.
Before I get on to the conversation with Sokrates, I should say a word about Kebes. He was big, one of the biggest of the youths in the city. He had clearly lied about his age and was a year or two older than most of the rest of us. His growth spurt had come early, and he had shot up. He had a head like a bull—a big broad forehead that could easily have sprouted horns, and a habit of setting his jaw belligerently. If I’d named him he would have been Tauros. He had a grudge against the world, and he hated everything. He wasn’t stupid, far from it. He’d have been easier to understand if he had been. He just hated everything and everyone and devoted his time and energy and considerable talents to hating them. He did exactly as little as he could get away with, and spent far more effort calculating that than he would have spent on trying to excel. He had a way of making one master after another believe that they would be the one who would succeed in motivating him, that they were on the verge of success, while in fact he mocked each in turn behind their back. He hated everyone—everyone except Simmea, that is. Once, while helping Manlius, he contrived to break a statue of Aphrodite by moving the plinth where a worker was supposed to set it down. Both statue and plinth fell three stories onto marble and shattered beyond retrival. I would have thought it an accident, save that he boasted about it to Phoenix, who thought it was funny and repeated it to lots of people.
Left to myself I’d have avoided Kebes entirely. As it was, he persisted in being around Simmea, and so I had to deal with him. We had fought twice in the palaestra when neither Simmea nor any masters were around. These were not athletic contests in which victory was marked with points; they were vicious all-out fights in which we tried to hurt each other. I won both times. They were not really fair fights. Yes, he was two handspans taller and much heavier, and likely his body was a year or two older, but I had been wrestling since the art was invented. I knew
tricks from centuries Kebes had never had the chance to visit, and when not bound by rules, I used them freely.
The second time, I had him on the floor with his head in a choke where I could easily have broken his neck. I thought about it. I would have had to pretend to be horrified at such an accident, and probably to purify myself before the gods. It wasn’t this that stopped me but that I didn’t want to deprive Simmea of anything she valued, even this. “Yield?” I whispered in his ear.
“Never,” he said, and in his tone I could see that if he had been on top he wouldn’t have had the same hesitation in killing me.
“Will you swear to behave civilly to me in front of Simmea?”
He was silent for a moment. I kept the pressure on. “Yes,” he said at last. “Civilly.”
“Do you swear?”
“By what?”
“By all that you hold sacred,” I said. “Do it.”
“I swear by God and the Madonna and Saint Matthew and my own true name that I will be civil to you in front of Simmea,” he said, and I let him up. He spat blood onto the sand in front of me and stalked away. He was limping, but then so was I.
And that was Kebes. He hated and distrusted me, and when I made him swear an oath he swore truly, and kept it. It was strange. He swore only to get out of my power, but he put himself more into it than ever. If I had chosen to denounce him to the masters for the gods he had chosen to hold his words, he could have been punished—flogged, even cast out of the city. Perhaps that was what he wanted. But he kept the letter of his oath—he was thereafter just barely civil to me if Simmea was there.
If I had been my real self I would have thoroughly enjoyed sitting in the garden of Thessaly talking with Sokrates and giving double-tongued answers. As it was, there was a knife-edge of fear running under it all. It didn’t stop me enjoying it, it didn’t stop me being aware of the delight of dappled shade and sharp wits. It was just another thread underlining everything.
Don’t think I was upset that Sokrates wasn’t happy to be in the Republic, even if he might be actively trying to undermine it. Nobody actually thought this was going to work perfectly. Plato had thought of it as a thought experiment. He’d been trying to design what he thought of as a system for maximizing justice, according to his best understanding of the world. We knew his understanding of the world was flawed—look at what he believed about the gods. All the same, it was such a noble idea when Plato had it, such an improvement on any of the ways to live he saw around him. It was of the classical world, but better. His understanding of the world and the soul were mistaken. But his city had never been tried before. This was the experimental proof. It needed to be able to stand up to Sokrates.
Maybe some of the masters really believed they could make it work, but I think what they really wanted wasn’t to do it themselves but for somebody else to have made it real and for them to have been born there. The masters were always envious of the children, that was obvious to me from the first. Athene and I certainly didn’t imagine it would really work the way Plato described it. We knew too much about the soul to hope for that. What was interesting was seeing how much of it could work, how much it really would maximize justice, and how it was going to fail. We could learn a lot from that.
“What will you teach?” Kebes asked Sokrates.
“I will teach rhetoric,” Sokrates replied. “It is a powerful weapon, in the right hands. I will teach small groups like this one, and I shall go about this city asking questions and discovering answers and seeing where those questions and answers lead us. For instance, who can we trust?”
Kebes looked at me, and I smiled cruelly back at him. The irony of the situation was not lost on me. Sokrates knew who I was. Kebes did not know who I was and did not trust me, nor did I trust him. Simmea did not know who I was and trusted all of us. She was looking from one to the other of us, leaning forward with her hands on her knees, looking like a chipmunk. “I think it’s the wrong question,” she said. “Trust isn’t an absolute. You can trust somebody for some things and not for others. I can trust Kebes not to break his word, but I can’t trust him to strive for excellence. I can trust Pytheas to do just that, always, but I can’t trust him to understand without an explanation why I am weeping if he finds me weeping.”
“So we might trust a person for one thing and not another?” Sokrates asked.
“Yes. And trust has an emotional component. When you asked me last night whether I trusted you and I replied that I did, that was an instinctive and emotional trust and only secondarily a logical one.”
“So before we can ask who we trust, we should ask in what way we can trust them, and in what way we do trust them.”
“Who do you trust?” I asked Sokrates.
“Have we established that the gods are divided and can be trusted in some circumstances and not in others?” he asked. “So that Odysseus was right to trust Athene and would have been wrong to trust Poseidon?”
“Yes, Sokrates,” I said obediently. “I believe we have established that.”
“Then I trust the gods who mean me well and distrust the gods who mean me harm. I have no way to distinguish them unless the gods themselves appear to me and disclose their intentions, or unless I send to ask an oracle. Perhaps I should do that, send to Delphi and Dodona and Ammon, those ancient oracles that are established even in this time. Then perhaps I would know if Apollo and Hera and Zeus were well disposed towards me.”
“You needn’t send to Delphi. You know Apollo has been well disposed towards you all your life,” I said, carefully. And it was true. Sokrates was one of my favourite people of all time.
“You said so in the Apology,” Simmea said, helpfully. “In your speech before the Athenians, that is. If Plato recorded accurately what you said.”
“Plato was there, though I don’t remember him taking notes,” Sokrates said. “I didn’t read that one. I remember that speech very well. It was only the other day.”
“So beyond Apollo—” Kebes began, but Sokrates interrupted, looking at me.
“I could trust Apollo in my mortal life, but I was brought here against my will by divine intervention, so can I still trust him?”
“Athene brought you here,” I said, which was weaseling really. I had known she intended to, and hadn’t objected to her doing it. But I loved him and certainly meant him well, and he was not wrong to trust me. “She brought everyone here. Many of the masters have talked to her, and have talked to us about talking to her.”
“She was on the ship when we came,” Simmea said. “Ficino called her Sophia.”
“That was Athene?” Kebes asked. “How do you know?”
“She had grey eyes.”
“Lots of people have grey eyes,” Kebes said, scornfully.
“And Ficino called her Sophia, which means wisdom.” Simmea went on, unruffled. “She was on the ship, and important, writing down names, and Ficino deferred to her. But she isn’t here. She isn’t one of the masters. She was owl-carrying Athene, and she was there to make the ship come here through time.”
“That does seem conclusive. I wish I’d known,” Kebes said. “I could have done something.”
“What?” Sokrates asked. “How would you fight a god?”
“Not by what I’d have done when I was twelve—not pushing her overboard or trying to tear her head off.” Kebes hesitated. “I don’t know how to fight a god. Do you know?”
“Until today I wasn’t sure whether the gods truly concerned themselves with us, and I only knew that they existed as part of a set of logical inferences which turn out to be based on a false assumption,” Sokrates said.
“What false assumption?” I asked, curious.
“That they were good,” he said, looking directly at me unsmilingly for a long moment. I don’t know what he saw in my eyes. The knife-edge had cut through me and it was very sharp.
“Good and well-meaning are different matters,” I said, after a moment.
“Wait, are you saying that to
overthrow the masters we’d have to fight the gods?” Kebes asked.
Sokrates turned to him. “Ah, Kebes, I see that you have learned to trust, at least to trust that I will not report what you are saying.”
“What if I report what you are saying?” Kebes asked.
“I have been inquiring into the nature of trust. Any purely theoretical issues that have been raised by that question—none of us are going to report each other, are we?”
Simmea looked really uncomfortable. “I want to learn rhetoric,” she said. “But I don’t want to overthrow the masters. I didn’t volunteer to come here but it’s the best place I can imagine being.”
“A valid point of view, and one we will need to examine in some detail,” Sokrates said. “I have by no means come to Kebes’s conclusions on that subject. The motivations of the masters and of Athene in setting up this city are very much worth examination, and I will be able to examine them much better with the help of somebody who thinks as you do, Simmea. But the point at contention is this—can we speak freely in pursuit of the truth? Can we trust that you’re not going to report what we’re saying?”
“She has never reported what I’ve said,” Kebes said.
Simmea looked at Sokrates. “I never have. And I won’t report what you’re saying as long as it’s only conversation. But I reserve the right to tell them if you were going to do anything to harm the city.”
“You don’t believe rhetoric could harm the city?” Sokrates asked.
“If rhetoric could harm it then it isn’t the Just City and it deserves it,” she said.
Sokrates beamed at her like a proud father, then he glanced back at me. “They’ll be using my methods for thousands of years, you say?”
I nodded.
“Then what are we doing here?”
14
SIMMEA
All through that winter I learned astronomy and rhetoric. I was constantly overturned by Sokrates in conversation. It was wonderful and terrible. In the palaestra I ran constantly, both in armor and out of it. Running felt as if it fitted the rest of my life. In music I resonated to the Dorian mode. I painted and embroidered and dyed cloth for kitons and robes for the statues. I tested everything constantly and wondered whether it was good. I went over my conversations with Sokrates in my head, running, swimming, trying to sleep, examining my own thoughts and trying to find better answers.