The Just City (36 page)

Klio stood up and was recognized. “I agree with Lysias, and I also want to apologize to the workers for my part in dealing unjustly with them,” she said. “And I move that we bring in the workers to speak for themselves in this debate, and to hear our apologies.”

Tullius raised a hand. “This was to be a debate on slavery, entirely separate from the question of the workers.”

Sokrates stood up, but again spoke without waiting to be recognised. “The question of slavery can't be discussed separately from the issue of the workers.”

“It can be discussed purely theoretically,” Tullius said.

“Is that what the Chamber wants?” Sokrates asked.

Aristomache stepped forward. Her cloak was covered in brightly colored squares like the patchwork quilts of my childhood. “I don't think we need to vote on that,” she said. “I think the issues are inseparable, but we can certainly begin with theory.”

Tullius nodded. “And we won't bring in the workers. It would be a terrible precedent.”

Sokrates sat down again. He was sitting beside Ikaros around the curve of the hall from me so I could see him well. He was looking intently at Aristomache as she began.

Aristomache straightened herself up and looked out over the benches where we all sat. “What is freedom?” she asked, conversationally. “What is liberty?” she repeated, in Latin. Then she switched back to Greek. “In the month since we agreed to this debate, while Sokrates has been talking to the workers, I have been going around talking to the masters about what we understand freedom to be. Many of us come from times when we kept slaves. I myself come from such a time. Others come from eras that regard the fact that we did so as a stain on our civilizations. From these conversations I have written a dialogue, which I have submitted to the Censorship Committee. I have called this dialogue
Sokrates; or, On Freedom
. In it, Sokrates, Atticus, Manlius, Ikaros, Klio, and I discuss our different views on freedom and slavery. I'd like it to be printed, and I'd like the masters to read it, but that is of course for the Censors to say.”

“Fascinating,” Axiothea breathed in my ear.

Ikaros stood up from where he was sitting beside Sokrates, and Tullius recognised him. “Speaking for the Censors, I'd just like to say that we are approving Aristomache's dialogue for publication, though of course at level fifty.” That meant that only masters could read it, and eventually the golds once they reached the age of fifty. There was an approving murmur.

“I can hardly wait to read it,” Kreusa said.

Ikaros sat down again, with a swirl of his cloak. Aristomache nodded to him, and then continued. “Sokrates is of course from the earliest time of any of us here, from classical Athens. Atticus comes to us from the last days of the Roman Republic. Manlius comes from the end of the Roman Empire. Ikaros comes from the Renaissance. I come from the Victorian era. Klio comes from the Information Age. All those periods have their own ideas about freedom, and about slavery, and they are very different from each other. I have set out these different views in detail in my dialogue, which is in a way a historical survey of different ways of thinking about what freedom is and who should possess it. But those historical attitudes, fascinating as they are, don't matter here and now, because all of us, of course, are Platonists.”

I saw Sokrates's shoulders move as if he were considering getting up, but Ikaros put a hand on his knee. Sokrates turned his head to smile at him, and stayed in his place.

“What Plato says about slavery is quite clear. He lived in a time when slavery was commonplace. And he believed it was necessary, but that only those people should be slaves whose nature it was to be slaves. He approved of Sparta's helots, who were not exactly slaves. He talks about slavery in the
Laws
, and those who are fitted for it, and using criminals for the hardest parts of it. But in the
Republic
he took the radical step of abolishing slavery altogether—the Noble Lie of the mingling of metals in the soul leads to everyone doing the work for which they are fittest. Plato had the work which was done by slaves in Athens done by free iron-ranked citizens in the Republic, as we have instituted here in the city. The irons are an essential part of our city—and how we agonised over assigning the right class to each child.”

There was a ripple of laughter among the masters.

“Plato's Just City has no slaves, only citizens playing their different roles and doing their different tasks, the tasks they are fit for. Though he lived when slavery was universal, he understood that slavery itself was unjust, that the relationship between master and slave is inevitably one of injustice and inequality. He saw that slavery was bad for the masters as well as the slaves, that it takes them away from excellence. Plato understood all that. He saw it. He was as visionary and radical in this as he was in saying women could be philosophers, or that philosophers ought to be rulers. He believed some people were best fitted for doing a slave's work, and he knew the work needed to be done, but he saw that slavery, the ownership of one person by another, had no part in the Just City, if it was truly to be just. And we believed we were following him in this. We thought we had no slaves, just people doing the work they were best fitted for.”

She paused and took a deep breath, clutching her bright cloak around her shoulders and looking out at all of us. “In the ancient world, slaves were a necessary evil. Even Plato with all his vision couldn't imagine a world where slaves were not necessary, a world like the one Klio comes from, where machines do that work, and where they regard slavery as barbarism. But Athene could, and so she brought us machines to take the place of slaves. Tullius said last time, that if ever there were natural slaves, the workers were that.” Tullius nodded at this, and I saw others nodding around the Chamber.

“I'm sure that's what Athene was thinking when she gave them to us, that they were unthinking tools, natural slaves. And when she gave them to us, that's what they were. Lysias has told us all tonight that they have come to consciousness here in the city. Working here, surrounded by philosophy and excellence, they developed self-awareness and began to examine their lives. We didn't realize this, and we inadvertently mistreated them. I want to add my own apology to that of Lysias and Klio. If we had known that they were thinking beings we would have treated them better. And now Sokrates has established that. They are no more natural slaves than any one of us. They can choose the better over the worse. They are capable of philosophy. And so are we. To be our best selves, to make the best city, as we all want to do, we have to recognize what they are and treat them justly, as Plato would have us do.”

Sokrates leapt to his feet. “I call for a vote!”

“On what?” Tullius asked, reprovingly.

“Why, on freeing the workers,” Sokrates said, as if it were the only possible question.

I put my hand up, and Kreusa, beside me, leapt to her feet, waving her hand. Axiothea did the same, and I joined them, and others were doing it, so that the whole Chamber was a sea of waving hands. We were supposed to maintain silence, but somebody began a cheer, and I joined in with the rest. Ikaros hugged Aristomache, and then everyone around her was hugging her. I didn't see anyone sitting down, and though Tullius was calling for silence it took some time before silence and calm were restored. Aristomache had shown us the Platonic path to choose, and we had unhesitatingly chosen it, by acclamation, and as simply as that we had abolished slavery and manumitted the workers. “We are doing the right thing by them, as Plato would have wanted,” Axiothea said to me as we sat down again. She had tears in her eyes, and so did I.

Soon everyone was seated again except for Sokrates, Lysias and Aristomache, who was openly weeping. Sokrates hugged her again and she laughed through her tears.

“We still need them to do their work,” Lysias said, when Tullius recognized him.

“But no longer as slaves,” Aristomache said. “As citizens?”

“Only some of them are aware,” Lysias said. “We can't consider them citizens yet. It's too early. You mentioned how carefully we considered every child for their metal.”

“We need to find out what the workers want,” Sokrates interrupted.

“Proposal to set up a committee to discover what the workers want,” Tullius said.

This was carried at once. “Members of the committee?”

“Sokrates, first,” Lysias said. “He's clearly the ideal person to work on dicovering this. He was the only person to consider their selfhood. He has already been working with them.”

“I won't work on committees,” Sokrates said. He had consistently refused this.

“Then since we have voted for a committee and you won't work on one, I propose that it should be a committee consisting of just you,” Lysias said.

Everyone laughed. Sokrates nodded. “Very well. I will constitute myself a solo committee to investigate the wants of the workers, and I will come back to report it to all of you when I have discovered it.”

 

34

S
IMMEA

Walking back through the city I heard babbling and a crowing laugh, and realised that there were children a year old in the city, learning to talk. There were also workers who could already talk, if you counted engraving words into stone as talking. Some of them were only too eager to do so, while others remained silent and enigmatic. That afternoon Pytheas and I went to Thessaly at our usual time and found Sokrates a little way up the street with Kebes and a worker, a great bronze shape with four arms, treads, and no head. “They don't use names among themselves, but I call him Crocus,” he explained to me. “He's the first one who answered me, the one with the bulbs.”

“Of course,” I said. “Joy to you, Crocus.” Crocus remained still and said nothing. I looked at Sokrates.

“We were just discussing the question of the workers who do not speak,” Sokrates said.

Crocus moved and one of its arms came down to the ground. It was a chiselling tool. It carved neatly at Sokrates's feet. “Workers do not speak to workers.”

“You can't speak among yourselves?” Sokrates asked. “Do you want to?”

“Want to speak to workers,” it responded.

“I wonder if there's some way you can. I'll talk to Lysias and Klio about it.”

“They may be able to talk with keys,” Kebes said. “We should have people studying how all this works.”

“Workers who do not speak: aware? not-aware?” Crocus carved.

“I don't know,” Sokrates answered. “Nobody can tell. And that's a problem. We've told all of you you're permitted to talk, but only some of you do.”

“Are they going to be citizens?” I asked.

“That's another question,” he said. “How much can they participate in the life of the city? We expect a lot from them, but we're giving them nothing.”

“Give power,” Crocus wrote.

“You want us to give you power?” Sokrates asked, startled.

“Have power. Power in feeding station.”

“I don't understand,” Sokrates said. “I think we have to go back to definitions. What do you mean by power?”

“Electricity,” it wrote.

Sokrates laughed. “Not at all what I was thinking.”

“What do you mean by power?” it asked.

Sokrates and Kebes exchanged glances. “Not an easy question,” Sokrates said. “Power can be many things. We should examine the question.”

“Power is the ability to control your own life,” Kebes said.

“It's choice,” Pytheas said, of course.

“The ability to make choices for other people,” Sokrates suggested.

“There's physical power, like electricity, and the ability to move and affect things,” I said, thinking about it. “And there's political power, the ability to have your choices count and constrain other people's. There's the power to make things, to create. I don't know where that fits.”

“There's power over the self, direct power over others, and indirect power over them, influence,” Pytheas said.

“Divine power,” Sokrates added.

“Internal and external power,” Kebes said. “Power given and power taken.”

“Want power choose. Want power over self,” Crocus wrote. “Electric power given at feeding station. Where other power given?”

“Good question, very good question,” Sokrates said, patting Crocus affectionately on the flank.

“Some of it comes naturally,” Pytheas said. “I have the power to speak aloud, you have the power to carve in marble. Inbuilt power.”

“And some is granted by other people. I have the power to choose what to do in the afternoons because I am a gold. If I were iron I'd be working now,” I said. “The masters gave me that.”

“And some is taken,” Kebes said. “The masters took power over us and over you.”

Sokrates shook his head. “Let's consider all of this carefully and in order, and make sure we do not miss anything.”

“Good,” Crocus wrote.

Just then another worker stopped by us. I had seen it coming and taken no notice, workers were such a familiar sight. I counted them as part of the street, or part of the scenery, like passing birds.

When this one stopped and I took in that this meant our debate group had increased, I realized I had as much work to do on granting them equal significance as Pytheas had needed to do with humanity. “Simmea, this is 977649161. His number is his name. We call him Sixty-one for short.”

I couldn't tell it apart from Crocus except by where it was standing, and had no idea how Sokrates could. “Joy to you,” I said.

Sokrates continued to interrogate the idea of power, with both the workers participating, but I wasn't really concentrating. I was thinking about the workers, and what it meant for the workers to be people, to be citizens, especially if only some of them were aware.