The Just City (15 page)

“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

S
IMMEA

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.

Sokrates was wonderfully wise and full of twisty edges. He was honest in debate, always absolutely fair—he reminded me sometimes of Pytheas marking the point when I hit him. But it was rare to trap him—he thought too far ahead. I tried to do that too, but he was always ahead of me. I was always either really debating with Sokrates, or debating with Sokrates in my head. The real Sokrates was much better, even though I could win debates in my head. It wasn't about winning, it was about finding the truth. Sokrates always thought of things I wouldn't think of, things that came from directions nobody would expect. Often enough he let the three of us debate, just putting in questions now and then. His questions were always the best.

One morning I went running up the mountain with Kryseis and Damon. The island of Kallisti had a diameter of about twenty miles, and it had many hills, some of them steep. “Running in the mountains” just meant an overland scramble. But when we said “the mountain” we meant only one thing, the volcano that stood behind the city. Up at the top was a constantly changing crater. Usually there were red cracks visible down through the fresh rock. Sometimes rock ran like streams over the edge. Occasionally the whole place seemed about to boil. That was when it sent up plumes of smoke that we could see from down below. When rain fell into the crater it sent up great clouds of steam.

The three of us were serious about running, and close in ability. We ran up the sides of the steep rugged cone, pacing each other and keeping close. The terrain changed rapidly up here. It was a clear winter day with no clouds. When we came to the top I stopped and looked at the view. The sea was turquoise where the island sloped, and further out wine-dark all around, with a little froth of whitecaps where the winds stirred it, like diamonds on sapphire. To the north-east I could just barely make out a blue shadow in the water, as if there might be another island there. Kryseis was staring down into the crater. “They say it'll explode one day and lava will cover the city.”

“Not for a long time,” Damon said, reassuringly.

“I wonder why they picked this site, knowing that?” I asked.

“Ask them?” Damon suggested.

I could, of course, but it was interesting to speculate about. I wondered what Sokrates would say.

Damon climbed up onto the raised edge of the rock-rim of the crater and started to walk along it, balancing. I jumped up after him and did the same. “Come down, you fools,” Kryseis said. “You'd cook if you fell in.”

“I'm not going to fall in,” Damon said. “It's almost a handspan wide.”

“What if it crumbles?” she called. “Come down!”

I jumped down, but even as I did I realised that walking that dangerous edge reminded me of talking to Sokrates.

What we debated so constantly that winter was whether the masters and Athene had been right to set up the Just City, and whether the Just City was the Just City or whether there could be one more just, and how that would be constituted. It was exciting and vitally important and deeply unsettling. “Are you debating like this with the masters?” I asked one day as we were leaving.

“Some of them,” Sokrates said. “They are not united any more than you children are. Some of them are ninnies, and others, sadly, have too much respect for me to enter into serious debate. But a few I have invited to be my friends.”

He spent his mornings wandering the city, falling into conversation with anyone and everyone, and his afternoons and evenings entertaining friends in Thessaly. He sometimes invited somebody else to join us for the hour we spent with him before dinner, but often it was just the four of us, as it had been the first day. He always seemed to pay a huge amount of attention to what Pytheas said, and to spend time considering it. I wondered sometimes as they sparred if they could have known each other before. But Pytheas would have been so young, it couldn't be possible. Kebes and me he treated as colleagues in search of the truth. He did not teach by instruction but always by demonstration.

“There's nobody like him,” Pytheas said one evening as we were walking away from Thessaly. It was close to midwinter, and the sky was a clear luminous dark blue, like the mantle of the ikon of Botticelli's Madonna on the cover of Maia's book. Kebes had stayed with Sokrates, so we were alone. “There never has been.”

“Nobody,” I said. “Not Ficino, not anybody. I doubt there ever could be. No wonder people remembered him for thousands of years. He's better at challenging assumptions than anyone.”

“He was challenging you a lot today.”

I looked at him questioningly. “He always challenges me a lot. I like it. It makes me think through my ideas.”

“You love this city,” Pytheas said. That was what we had been debating that day.

“I do,” I said, spreading out my arms as if I could hug the entire city. “I love it. But Sokrates has made me see that it's only the visible manifestation and earthly approximation of what I really love, the city of the mind. No earthly city, even with the direct help of the gods, can ever become that. But we're doing pretty well here, I think.”

“What do you think he and Kebes are doing now?”

“Thinking about ways of destroying the city, probably,” I said. Pytheas started. “What? Did you think I didn't know?”

“You—I don't know.” Pytheas looked disconcerted. “You're not concerned?”

“I said at the beginning that if debate can bring down the city, it deserves to fall. If they break it by debating it, then it's not much of an approximation of the Just City, is it?” I asked.

“How do you know they're only debating?” Pytheas asked.

“What would they be doing? Stealing quarrying explosives to blow up the walls?” I laughed. “Well, Kebes probably would, but Sokrates would think it was cheating, just as much as Krito dragging him off here was cheating. Sokrates hates cheating, he really does. He wants to do it all with dialectic, always, following logic through to where it leads. He wants to beat Athene.”

“In debate?” Pytheas asked.

“Yes, I think so. But I don't think he's ready yet. Meanwhile I'm painting and running and debating—if this isn't the good life, what is?” Daringly I reached out and took his hand. He let me, and even squeezed my hand once before letting go. Sometimes I wondered if what Pytheas and I had was close to being Platonic agape or if he really didn't want to touch me. We didn't talk about it. But seeing him every day was part of what made this the good life for me.

“Do you want to eat with us?” he asked. For the last month we had been allowed to invite guests to our dining halls. I almost never turned down an invitation, not because I wanted different food—the food was very similar, and our Florentine food was undoubtedly the best—but because I wanted to see all the pictures. I'd eaten in Delphi several times and admired the wall paintings of the Sack of Troy and Odysseus in the Underworld.