The Philosopher Kings (3 page)

After Alkibiades left, our house got a lot quieter. I was sorry because he had always been my favorite brother—he was more generally prepared to put up with me than any of the others. He even took the trouble to say goodbye, though I didn't realize it until afterward—he took me to Sparta for a meal with some of his friends, and bade me joy afterward as I ran off to work in the fields. I didn't know until I got home late that night that he had left. He had left on my bed a copy of Euripides he had won as a school prize—they don't allow drama at all in Athenia, or even Homer.

Next in age come Phaedrus and Neleus, who both still live at home in Thessaly. Phaedrus is Father's son by Hermia, who lives in Sokratea. I've never met her, but she once sent Phaedrus an amazing skin drum which we still have. He looks a lot like a darker jollier version of Father. He excels at wrestling—he has won a number of prizes. He also sings beautifully—we sing together sometimes. He's a gold. Phaedrus's epithet is “Merry,” because he is—he's the most fun of all my brothers, the readiest to laugh, the fastest to make a joke. It's not that he can't be serious, but his natural expression is a grin.

Neleus is his complete opposite. He's Mother's son by somebody called Nikias, whom I've also never met because he left with Kebes. He must have been dark-skinned, because Neleus is darker than Mother. He unfortunately inherited Mother's jaw and flattish face, so his Homeric epithet could have been “Ugly,” but in fact it's “Wrathful” because he's so quick to anger and he bears grudges so well. He never forgets anything. He's a swimming champion, again like Mother, and he can't sing at all. He's a gold. He had a close friendship with a boy from Olympia called Agathon, and since that broke up a few months ago he has been worse-tempered than ever.

I have three more brothers, but I don't know them very well. Euklides and his mother Lasthenia live in Psyche. He visits for a few days every summer. Porphyry and his mother Euridike live in the City of Amazons. He's been here to visit twice. I always feel shy with both of them. I know Euklides better than Porphyry. He is a silver. Porphyry is a gold, and I don't know all that much about him. And I have another brother, somewhere, whose name I don't know and who I've never met at all. His mother Ismene went off with Kebes before he was born.

It's a complicated family, when I write it down like this, but most of the time in Thessaly we've just been five Young Ones with Mother and Father.

To begin again, I was born in the Remnant City fourteen years after it was founded, and I am now fifteen years old. If you consider that is too young to write an autobiography (Ficino does), then consider this an early draft for one, a journal or commonplace book in which I shall record what will become an autobiography in due course when I have more life to record. Though it seems to me that my life has been quite eventful so far, and that there is a lot that has already happened to me that is worthy of note.

I was born four years after the Last Debate. The cities had already divided themselves by then, though they were not in the state of almost constant skirmishing that they are now, and relations between them were generally cordial. Everyone knew each other in all the cities. About a hundred and fifty people had gone off with Kebes and left the island. We don't know what they did, though speculations about it are a favorite topic of conversation. Sometimes people call them the Lost City, or the Goodness Group, after the name of the ship they stole. There keep being rumors that people have seen the
Goodness
, but the truth is that Kebes left the island and nobody knows where he is or what he's doing or anything about his group.

Everyone else stayed on the island, and they all wanted to create Plato's Republic only to do it right this time. This was the case whether they stayed, or left the original city to set up their own. I believe there were fierce debates before everyone sorted themselves out. My parents stayed. By the time I was born, everything was more or less organized again, the new cities were well on the way to being built, and people seldom changed their minds about which city they wanted to live in, because the cities collected people by philosophical temperament, and people's temperaments don't tend to change all that much.

Psyche, the Shining City, was set up by the Neoplatonists, who wanted their city to reflect the mind, and the magic of numerology. It attracted those with a melancholic disposition. Sokratea, which was begun by those who believed that Sokrates was right in the Last Debate, that the City shouldn't have been founded, and that every point needed much more examination, attracted the choleric, though Sokrates himself was nothing like that from all I have read and heard. Athenia, founded by those who believed the opposite, that Athene had been right, and who tried to live even more strictly according to their interpretation of Plato, attracted the phlegmatic. That left the sanguine, who all wound up in the City of Amazons, founded on the principle of absolute gender equality.

Those who stayed in the Remnant were those whose humors were mixed. The other cities characterized us as lazy and indecisive and luxury-loving. At first, because we were the mother city, they came to us frequently to use the libraries and other facilities, but later this happened less and less often. We had a higher proportion of Young Ones than most of the other cities, because many people didn't take their babies with them when they left. This isn't as callous as it may sound, because they didn't know which babies were theirs. Some people could recognize their own babies, or thought they could. Many just couldn't. And none of the Children had been educated to expect that they'd bring up their own children; they'd had them on the understanding that the City knew how to do it best. So there are plenty of people here, like my good friend Erinna, who have no idea who their parents are. Now that we have families there won't be any more people like that, though of course they're still doing that in Athenia, and maybe in the City of Amazons too, I'm not sure.

People did change cities sometimes, as indeed they still do. As young people come of age and find themselves in a city that doesn't suit their temperament, they often leave it for another, the way Alkibiades did. And one of the first things I remember is Maia coming back. My earlier memories are muddled and confused with the cute baby stories Mother told about me—my first word was “beauty” and my second word “logos.” (It might sound conceited of me to record that, but honestly, anyone living in this house whose second word
wasn't
“logos” would have to be deaf.)

I must have been about four years old when Maia came back, so it was probably in the eighteenth year of the City, eight years or so after the Last Debate. My parents lived in the house called Thessaly that had once belonged to Sokrates. It was an extremely inconvenient house for a family, as are all the houses of the Remnant. There are enormous eating halls and public buildings, and little sleeping houses designed for seven people to sleep in. There were eight of us, but that wasn't the problem; the problem was that there wasn't room for anything but sleeping and washing and sitting in the garden debating philosophy. Mother had built a partition down the middle so that she and Father and I slept on one side and the boys slept on the other. I remember our three little beds all in a row, mine under the window.

One night, long after I had fallen asleep, I was wakened by a scratch at the door. Father went and opened it, and there was Maia, carrying a big book. I didn't know Maia then, of course. Mother was awake, and she went at once to Maia and hugged her, so I knew it was all right. The three of them went out into the garden, so as not to wake the boys, and as I was awake and curious I followed after. We all sat on the grass. I don't really remember the conversation, though I do remember Mother looking at the Botticelli book Maia had brought, and which I later came to know and love. I probably couldn't understand all the words they used, but I knew that Maia had left some other city and come back to ours, and she had just arrived that night. It shows how peaceful everything was then that she could do that. She was probably about forty at the time, and she had come alone, unarmed and unchallenged, halfway across the island, arriving after dark. The gates were guarded, but she had come in simply by saying she wanted to. The guards knew her, of course, because pretty much everyone knew everyone. That was before the art raids started, and it was the art raids that spoiled everything and led to the present lamentable state of affairs.

I remember sitting on the rough grass in the moonlight, looking at Maia as she talked to my parents. They knew her well, but I found her fascinating because she was a complete stranger. There were very few complete strangers in my world in those days. I remember noticing how white her skin was in the moonlight, whiter even than Father's. Her pale hair was braided and the braid was pinned up around her head.

“I thought you were all for women's rights,” Mother said.

“And don't women have rights here these days, Simmea?” Maia asked. “Or have I come to Psyche by mistake? Women's rights are certainly why I went there. But I couldn't stay in the City of Amazons.”

I don't remember if she explained why she had come, if they discussed the New Concordance or Ikaros. I only remember the colors and shapes of the three of them under the lemon tree in the moonlight, and the smell of the autumn night with rain coming on the wind.

Maia had been one of the Masters of Florentia, with Ficino, and with Ficino she became one of my teachers. There are three distinct generations in the city. The Masters were those who prayed to Athene to let them help set up Plato's Republic. They were all grown up when they came here, and some of them were old. Ficino was old—sixty-six when he came, he says, and he's ninety-eight now, though he's in better condition than a lot of the younger Masters. He says it's from eating a good diet and not letting his mind atrophy. Maia was only about twenty, so she's about fifty now. (I dared Kallikles to ask her exact age once, and she offered to box his ears for the impertinence.) Most of the Masters are somewhere in between, though a number of the older ones have died, of course.

Then there's my parents' generation, known as the Children. They are all the same age, with very little variation. They were all about ten years old when they came, though some of them were nine or eleven. They're all thirty-eight now, with that same slight range of variation.

Last comes my generation, the Children's children, whom we call the Young Ones. Our ages range between twenty-one and newborn, though far more of us are between twenty-one and nineteen—when they were holding Festivals of Hera three times a year, a lot of babies were born. After that, it wasn't organized, and people had to sort things out for themselves. There are other Young Ones my age and younger, but there aren't great cohorts of us, as there are of my brothers' age and the Children. I suppose the babies starting to be born now to the oldest of the Young Ones are a fourth generation. I don't know what they'll be called. Do they name generations, elsewhere? I haven't run across it in my reading. Cicero was older than Caelius and Milo and Clodius, but there wasn't a hard line. It would be like us younger Young Ones, I suppose, with overlap and people of all ages. Odd.

I don't plan to have children myself. Partly it's because the whole sex thing seems so awkward and complicated, and partly it's because I am Apollo's daughter, and what would my children be? Quarter-deities? But mostly it's because there isn't any posterity for us. They, or their descendants, would only be born to die when the volcano destroys us all. I suppose I could flee to the mainland like Kebes, and have children there whose genes could join the human mainstream, but there doesn't seem to be much point. What kind of a life would it be, without books or debate, at a Bronze-Age tech level? It's bad enough here when things break down and we have to do everything by hand. Maia says the Workers gave them freedom they didn't appreciate at the time, and that philosophy is harder when you're cold and hungry. What kind of life would it be for children in Mycenaean Greece? Especially as half of them would, statistically, be girls? I'm looking forward to seeing it, but I wouldn't like to live there. So I don't plan on having children. That doesn't mean I'll necessarily lead a celibate life, though I have so far, because there's a plant called silphium that prevents conception, and Mother told me all about it when my menses started.

I suppose it's unusual that my father is a god, and I should write about that. I don't know what to say though, because I've known about it all my life, and take it for granted. I don't know what it would be like to have any other kind of father. It's a secret from most people in the City, though. I used to wonder how it was they didn't guess, but it isn't all that obvious really. Father doesn't have his divine abilities, and while everyone can see how intelligent and musical and athletic he is, they tend to see him as just an exceptional success of Plato's methods. Some people don't like him and think that he's arrogant, but in general, everyone recognizes and admires his excellence. I think it helps that they see Father and Mother together—people have a tendency to see them and speak about them as Pytheas-and-Simmea, as if they were one thing. So they wouldn't think about Father's excellences without thinking about Mother's too. Lots of people in the City, and especially the Masters, tend to see my parents as the closest thing we yet have to Philosopher Kings, as the proof of the success of Plato's methods. It's a lot for me to live up to. Sometimes I feel squeezed by the pressure of expectations.

Ficino's wrong. I've written all of this already and I haven't even got up to where I thought I'd really start, with the day my mother died.

 

3

ARETE

I ate lunch in Florentia that day. It is an eating hall, as it had always been. When my parents were young and there were plenty of Workers, humans didn't need to do anything in Florentia except take their turn to serve the food one day a month. Now there are rotas for preparation and cooking and cleaning up, and I, along with everyone else who eats there, have to do one of those things every few days. The food is usually good. It was porridge and goat cheese and nuts and raisins that day. Neither of my parents were there, which wasn't unusual. I came in from the palaestra with my friends Boas and Archimedes. We were all exactly the same age, and were training together to pass our adulthood tests in five months' time, when we'd all turn sixteen.