The Just City (38 page)

“And men and women from your future who revere your own work,” Klio said.

I gave up on the thought of getting any more work done and got up and began to mix wine.

“My work was as an intermediary, a translator, a librarian, more than as an original thinker,” he said, taking a wine cup and nodding.

“You always say that,” I said, taking wine to Klio, who was pacing. “But you underestimate your importance to the Renaissance and everything that came after.”

“Your commentaries on Plato—” Klio started.

“I know I can't compare to Cicero,” he said.

“But who can? I can't compare to you,” I said. “It's not a contest.”

Ficino sipped his wine. “I wonder sometimes whether Plato imagined this city. Not the Republic he wrote about, but our imperfect attempt to create it now. And if so, and knowing what we would need, whether that might have been why he wrote about the female guardians as equals, to draw all of you young women towards us because we would need you so much.”

“No, that's nonsense,” Klio said, stopping and turning to him. “Because he could have written about women as slaves and animals as Aristotle did, and you wouldn't have needed us then, if there was no need to train women in philosophy. You could have managed with workers, or buying female slaves to help with childbirth and childrearing.”

“It's a privilege to debate with philosophical women too,” Ficino said.

“Two sips and you're drunk already?” I asked.

“I'm sad because of Tullius, that's all. Death makes me think about mortality. Even though I know our souls will go on. Even though in one sense Tullius's soul has already gone on through many lives and I might even have known him by another name, death is sad because it is a parting.”

“We were contemplating what it would be like for our bodies to reappear at the moment of our disappearance,” I said. “Suddenly older. Suddenly dead.”

“I had decided to die at sixty-six, because it was the best number. Ninety-nine seemed difficult to accomplish.” We all laughed.

“When did you pray to be here?” I asked.

“Oh, all the time.” He shook his head. “When I first translated the
Republic.
And thereafter every time something went wrong politically in Florence, which was often, I assure you!”

“And you prayed to Athene,” Klio said, leaning back against the edge of my table.

“Often. But I'd pray to the Archangel Gabriel for it too, and to St. John and the Virgin.” He smiled wryly. “Have you heard Ikaros's interesting explanation that Athene is an angel?”

“He did mention it,” I said. “I'm more than a little conflicted about it.”

“He is the ultimate synthesist. He always was. I remember when he first came to Florence—he had everything going for him. He was so young, so good-looking, and a count! What he wanted was philosophy—he was in love with philosophy. Literally in love with it. He wanted a Socratic frenzy, that was his term. He sent me such letters! He had read everything in the world, in every language, and he was desperate for people to debate him. So he came, trailing young women he had seduced and sparkling with new ideas. I was so sad when he took up with Savonarola and then died. I was delighted to meet him again here.” Ficino sipped his wine then turned the wine cup in his fingers. “Do you remember that night at the beginning, when the three of us had no wine and pretended we did? I'm sorry you're not his friend any more.”

“Sometimes it's hard to be one of the women,” I said.

“You should have stuck to Plato,” Ficino said.

“I did. It's he who should have.”

“I think it's nonsense,” Klio said, getting up again. I stared at her. “Not that. Saying Athene's an angel. You two, and Ikaros as well, sort of want that to be true because you were Christians. I was never a Christian, though I lived in a country where most people were. She's not an angel. She's something from a different universe entirely. She's herself, the way Homer wrote about her. I don't see how Ikaros can deny that. He didn't think that at first. It's only since he hasn't seen her every day, hasn't been face to face with the reality of what she is, that he's been able to come up with this … comfortable explanation. Angels! I wonder what she thinks of it? It's a betrayal of her.”

“What's wrong with angels?” I asked.

“Angels are fluffy woolly nonsense. Guarding your bed while you sleep. Free of will, nothing but winged messengers in nightgowns, coming to tell us not to be afraid? Tame agents of an all-knowing creator God whom we're supposed to believe is good even though the world is so flawed?”

Ficino looked at her, amazed. “What? Fluffy? Guarding your bed? However could your age have come to believe that? They are the operators of the universe, divine messengers, full of awe and light. Athene could fit within my beliefs about angels. And I remember very well what she was.”

“I shouldn't have this, but look at it,” I said, reaching up to the high shelf and taking down the Botticelli book Ikaros had brought me. “Look at these angels. They're not tame, and they have agency.”

Klio looked at the angels for a long moment. “Not that Botticelli was painting from life, but I do see what you mean,” she admitted.

“Where did that come from?” Ficino asked.

“Ikaros brought it back from one of his art expeditions,” I said.

“You shouldn't have it. But I suppose it isn't doing any harm. As long as you haven't shown it to the children?”

“I showed Simmea the
Primavera
once, and the
Birth of Venus.
” She'd glimpsed the cover too, but she'd never mentioned it again. “And I showed it to Auge when she was just starting sculpting—and she's getting really good now. But I'm very careful with it.”

“I'm sure Ikaros is saying Athene was just doing what God told her to,” Klio said.

“That's nonsense,” I said. “She was unquestionably acting for herself. Goddess or angel, she wasn't just a mouthpiece.”

“If God exists and gave us free will, then he wanted us to use it,” Ficino said. “So she could be doing as he wanted and also acting freely.”

“If Athene was an angel, what would it change?” Klio asked, putting her fingertip on one of Botticelli's angels' faces.

“Perhaps how we worship,” I said.

“How would it change that?” she asked.

“Sokrates said in the
Apology
that you should worship in the manner of the city in which you live. Plato said in the
Laws
that they should send to Delphi to ask how to worship,” Ficino answered.

“What does Sokrates say now?” Klio asked, looking up from the book.

“He says Providence is a very interesting idea,” Ficino said. “But he's so obsessed with the workers at the moment that it's hard to get him to focus on anything else.”

“I don't know how we'd manage without the workers,” Klio said. “They do so much. They let us lead philosphical lives because they're doing all the hard work—all the farming and building and everything. We're comfortable because of them.”

“We're rich because of them,” Ficino said. “We have no poverty here, because of them.”

“The idea was always that they were here to help us at the beginning, while the children were growing, and that in future generations the irons would replace them. Then we will have poverty, or at least some of us will live less comfortable lives.”

“Not poverty,” I said, remembering poverty in my own time. “Well, in some ways we are all poor. We live with very few possessions. But nobody will be in want. Nobody will feast while others starve.”

“That would be unjust indeed,” Ficino said. “Are we going to lose the workers?”

Klio stopped and sat down. “Eventually, we'll lose them no matter what, unless Athene brings us more, and spare parts. They'll wear out. And if the city can only keep going by constant divine intervention then we're not doing very well, are we?”

“Having it to start us off—” Ficino said.

“Yes, but we had the workers to start us off too. After that, what? And it could be quite abrupt if we give them rights and then they stop working. At the moment it's only some of them, and they are working voluntarily, but who knows what will happen? Aristomache made a powerfully moving speech about slavery, but when it comes to it they are machines and all our comfort rests on them.” She held up her wine cup. “Who planted these vines, and pruned them? Who trod the grapes and added the yeast and bottled the vintage?”

“The children of Ferrara made these cups,” I said. “We're starting to replace what the workers do.”

“But we're only starting. It will take a long time before we have everything smooth. If they suddenly refused to help it would be a disaster. And even with them slowly failing, it's difficult. There are a lot of things they do that we can't teach the children because we don't know how to do them. Do you know how to make wine?”

“We have a number of skills between us,” Ficino said.

“Come and tell the Tech Committee that, and the Committee on Iron Work,” Klio said. “We have an odd number of skills between us, and we're very lacking in practical physical skills. I'm not sure we have three people who know how to fix the plumbing.”

“I've got much better at midwifery than I ever imagined I would,” I said. “I wanted the life of the mind, but here I am delivering babies and teaching girls how to breast feed.”

“On the whole, the women are better on practical skills than the men,” Klio said. “Which makes sense, really, when you think about it. Most of the men come from eras where they had slaves or servants to do the physical work. Even though some of the women did as well, they were still expected to do more of the hands-on things.”

“To my mother, the word
work
meant sewing,” I said.

“And if you'd stayed in your time, you'd have had to make most of your clothes,” Klio said. “Not so for your brother.”

“I'd have made most of his clothes as well,” I said. “My aunt did have some dresses made for me, but I made all my own underthings. Underthings! How very little I miss them!”

“Do you miss anything?” Klio asked.

“About the nineteenth century?” She nodded. “I miss my father. I wish so much he could have been here. He'd have loved it so much. Apart from that—no. Nothing. Everything here is so much better. I have books and companionship and work that's worth doing. Even when everything isn't perfect and ideal and as one would wish Plato could have had it, even when I have to do terrible things,” and here I was thinking of the baby with the hare lip that I had exposed, “It's still real work that's worthy of me. Nothing in my own time could have offered me that.”

“I miss recorded music,” Klio said. “Being able to listen to it whenever I wanted. Apart from that, nothing. But sometimes I wonder if we should have stayed in our own times and fought for the Republic there. If we should have tried to make our own cities more just.”

“That's what I did, for the first sixty-six years of my life,” Ficino said. “That gives me a different perspective. I did that, and I am remembered. We had a rebirth of the ancient world, and everyone acknowledges that my efforts made a contribution. But that was the most I could possibly do towards that, alone, in the company I had, without Athene. Without all of you. She brought us together here because we were so few, scattered throughout time.”

“We know we wouldn't have achieved anything further in our lives, or else we wouldn't have been brought here when we were,” I pointed out.

“I suppose you're right,” Klio said. She drained her wine and set down the cup. “I should get back to the practical tasks at hand that help make the city work.”

“The philosophy of the quotidian,” Ficino said, smiling.

“I don't know if what we have here is what Plato meant by The Good Life,” I said. “But it's
a
good life.”

 

36

S
IMMEA

Sokrates had once asked Kebes how he would fight a god. I had done it without even thinking about what I was doing, and I had used weapons Sokrates and Ficino had put into my hands, rhetoric and truth. I did not even understand what I had done in facing down Athene until the day before the festival of Hera when Pytheas met me, by arrangement, at the Garden of Archimedes. It was a fine night and I'd been looking through the telescope at the moons of Jupiter, and amusing myself by calculating their orbits. It was two months since I had been healed. For most of that time, Pytheas and Sokrates and I had been investigating mysteries and workers, without advancing very far on either front.

Pytheas looked angry. “She won't do it,” he said, without any preliminaries. “She hasn't calmed down at all. You can't imagine how angry with us she still is.”

“Even after all this time?” I asked. My heart sank. “She's still angry? Really?”

“Yes, well, you pushed her on her own ground. And I think she's upset about something else as well. She was already very impatient even before that. She will get over it, but it'll take time. Usually if I'd made her this angry I'd leave her alone for a decade or so.”

“Time is so different for you,” I said.

“Not any more,” he said, ruefully. “Or not for now, anyway. Now time is as urgent for me as it is for you, and she flat-out refuses to help. She was blisteringly sarcastic. She might even do something to make things worse.”

“What could make it worse?” I asked, and then immediately realized. “Oh, pairing us with awful people?”

“Klymene again,” he said, despondently.

“She wouldn't be so unjust,” I said.

“You're making Sokrates's mistake of assuming the gods are good,” Pytheas said. He led the way over to the little stone bench in the corner where we usually sat when we met here. There was a big lilac bush there and it always smelled sweet. Now at the heart of spring it was just coming into flower, and smelled overwhelming. “The gods are as petty and childish as any of the awful stories about us Plato wanted to keep out of the city. Athene's one of the best of us, but even she can be … spiteful when she's angry. Vengeful.”