The Philosopher Kings (4 page)

We sat down to eat with Baukis and Ficino. Baukis is three months younger than the rest of us, and she's a friend. Since Krito died, Ficino is the oldest and most generally respected person in the entire city. He's pretty much always in Florentia. He sleeps upstairs and spends most of his days either sitting in the hall talking to people, or teaching in one of the nearby rooms. He seldom leaves Florentia now except to go to the library. He'd been tutoring Baukis while the rest of us were in the palaestra. Boas and Archimedes ate quickly and then went off to work, and my brother Phaedrus joined us. This was awkward and uncomfortable because Baukis started flirting with him, though he's four years older than we are. After a while they left together to look something up in the library, both acting so stupid and coy that I felt myself squirming as I finished my nuts.

“It's quite natural,” Ficino said.

I looked at him inquiringly.

“Girls mature faster, and so they are naturally attracted to men a few years older. It's normal. It just seems strange to you because we have had such fixed cohorts that it hasn't been possible until now.” Ficino cracked a hazelnut and popped it into his mouth. He had a face not unlike a nut, wizened and brown.

I didn't at all want to talk to him about what girls were attracted to. “Why did you do it that way, then?”

“Plato,” he said, and held up a warning hand when he saw me open my mouth to protest. “Plato said to begin with ten-year-olds, and if you do that you will have a generation all the same age. It was one of those things that just happened that way. It was only ever intended to be for the first generation.”

“It was only ever
intended
as a thought experiment,” I said. Maia had told me that.

“Yes, but here it is, and you and I are living in it.” Ficino grinned.

I swallowed the last of my porridge and gathered our plates together to take to the kitchen. “I should go. I have to learn my lines.”

“Something Plato really wouldn't have approved of,” Ficino said.

“I know. I've never properly understood why he hated drama so much.”

“He thought it was bad for people to feel induced emotions, false emotions.”

I sat down again. “But it's not. It can be cathartic—and it can be a way of learning about emotions.”

“Plato didn't want people to learn those emotions. He wanted his ideal guardians to only understand honorable emotions.” Ficino shook his head. “He had a very hopeful view of human nature, when you think about it.”

I laughed. “He did if he thought jealousy and grief and anger could be excluded because we never saw
The Myrmidons
. I never saw any play until two years ago, unless you count the re-enactments of the
Symposium
on Plato's birthday, but I still felt all those things.”

Ficino nodded. “But that's what he really thought, and so that's why we excluded drama. Or rather, since almost all of the original Masters were people who loved the art of the ancient world, and much of what survived was drama, we decided to keep drama in the library but not allow it to be acted. Reading it quietly, we thought, wouldn't have such an emotional effect.”

“Why did you change your minds?” I asked. “Not that I'm not glad you did, because I'm really excited about playing Briseis at the Dionysia.”

“We didn't change our minds. It was debated several times, and always decided against, until two years ago.”

I was about to ask what happened two years ago, then I realized: the first cohort of Young Ones had become old enough to vote. “Are plays still banned in the other cities?”

“As far as I know they're allowed in Sokratea and the City of Amazons, but banned in Psyche and Athenia.”

“And is there any difference in how philosophical people are?”

Ficino laughed. “How would you measure that?”

I opened my mouth to answer, but he held up his hand again.

“No, think about it. Write me a paper on it, either an essay or a dialogue, as you prefer.”

I groaned, but only because it was work. It sounded like a really interesting question to think about. I also wanted to talk to other people about it, most especially Maia, and Simmea. I bade farewell to Ficino, gathered up the plates, and took them to the kitchen, thinking about it. How would you measure the general level of philosophy in a population—or even in an individual? There might be simple tests, like how many times books were checked out of the library, but that would only show how many people were studying philosophy, not how philosophical they were. It wasn't my turn to clean up, but they were short-handed so I helped for a while, still thinking about it. Some people were naturally philosophical. Others were not. That's why everyone was divided into their rightful metals, gold and silver and bronze and iron. My friend Erinna said she was glad to be a silver, relieved and pleased.

How philosophical a city was could be simply measured by how many golds it had, except that originally in the City (and even now in Psyche and Athenia) the proportions were worked out numerologically rather than justly. That had been one of the more telling points Sokrates made in the Last Debate. But in Psyche and Athenia they believed that numerology was magical, that numbers described true Forms underlying the world. And Father said he didn't know whether they did or not, and Mother said they had an inner logic and so perhaps they did, but not the way that Proclus and Plotinus wrote.

I hadn't read the
Republic
yet, but Ficino had told us Plato said that a Just City would hold justice and the pursuit of excellence as the highest good. He said that as such a city declined, it would become a timarchy, meaning that the citizens would prize honor above justice. Sparta had been a timarchy, and Plato thought it better than oligarchy, the next stage of decline, where the citizens would prize money and possessions above honor. I wondered what the signs of starting to prize honor above wisdom and justice might be, and how that could be measured.

I went home after the kitchen cleanup was done. I didn't have any work scheduled that day, and I had a calculus class later that afternoon. Mother was teaching it, so it was held in the garden of Thessaly. I knew I had a good hour before the class, and that Mother might be home but nobody else would. I wanted to tell her about being chosen to play Briseis, and I wanted to ask her about ways of measuring levels of philosophy. She wasn't home, but that meant I had the house to myself until everyone arrived for the class, which was good because I had to learn my lines.
The Myrmidons
was to be performed at the Dionysia in just over a month. I had only been given the part that morning, and I was full of the glory of it. I was thrilled to be given a part this year, especially such a good part. I wanted to know all my lines before the first rehearsal and be the best Briseis possible.

I took the book out into the garden. We had a statue of Hermes that Sokrates had carved himself. I raised my hands in greeting to it as I always did. Then I lay down in the dappled shade of the tree, chin on my hands and book open on the ground. I started to work through my lines by brute force memorization, trying to concentrate on the words and not the meanings, and certainly not letting myself be distracted by the thought of what I'd be wearing and how I'd manage my hair, which had to be loosened in mourning disarray for the end of the play. I read each line and then shut my eyes and repeated the words to myself. I was so glad I looked like Father and not like Mother, or I'd never have been chosen for the part of a beautiful woman, even though of course I'd be wearing a mask. I wondered what the mask would look like. “Son of Thetis,” I repeated to myself. I opened my eyes to read the next line and saw Father before me, looking absolutely devastated.

I am not using that word lightly. Father's face looked like a city that had been sacked and the fields sown with salt. He has a highly expressive face, the kind of face you see on statues of gods and heroes. Now you could have used it as a study for Niobe or grieving Orpheus. It wasn't just that he had been weeping. He wept quite easily; I'd often seen him with tears in his eyes at something especially moving. Mother used to tease him about it a little sometimes—she'd say she could tell him a story about a child finding a lost goat and he'd tear up. But now his face was ravaged. I'd never seen anything like it. I sat up at once, closing the book. “What's wrong?” I asked.

“Simmea,” he managed to say before he broke down again, and so I knew.

“Mother? Dead? How?” Having thought of Orpheus, my imagination went immediately to Euridike and the snake in the grass.

Father sat down beside me and put his arm around me in the most awkward, tentative way imaginable, as if he didn't know how hard to squeeze, or was afraid of breaking me. “Art raid,” he said.

I wanted to cry, I wanted to fling myself on his chest and be held and comforted, but the openness of his grief made mine close up somehow. I felt it as a gulf inside myself, but I didn't cry. An art raid. She had been killed by human greed and folly. And she had despised the art raids. “Instead of raiding each other for art, we should be making more,” she had said.

“I couldn't save her, she wouldn't let me,” he choked out.

“She wouldn't let you?” I echoed. “Why not?”

“Can you think of any reason? I can't,” he said.

I sat there in the awkward circle of his arm and tried to think. “
Could
you have saved her?”

“Easily, if I'd had my powers. And I could have had them before she was dead. I'd have been back in a moment.”

I shook my head. “She must have had a good reason.” I was only just starting to take it in that she was dead, that she wouldn't be coming in soon to teach the calculus class, that I'd never be able to tell her I'd be Briseis. On that thought I started to cry sudden hot tears. I hadn't really understood even then. I hadn't started to think about the long term. I hadn't even got any further than that afternoon.

Mother and I had fought about all kinds of things, mostly when she thought I wasn't working hard enough, or when I forgot to do things. She could be impossibly sanctimonious and stiff-necked. She never let me get away with sliding along as my friends sometimes did; she wanted me trying my hardest every moment. But we'd been the only women in a household of men, and even when she drove me mad with irritation she was still Mother. I loved her and knew she loved me. If she had no patience with irrationality, she would always listen to reason, and sometimes change her mind. “She was a philosopher,” I said.

“She was,” Father agreed. “She was a Philosopher King, she was what Plato wanted to produce, the ultimate aim of his Republic. And she was killed in a silly fight for the head of Victory.”

“The head of Victory?” I asked, and then I realized what he meant, the statue in the shrine outside the south gates. She was killed trying to stop the raiders from stealing the head of Victory. It sounded almost too symbolic to be true.

“We don't know who it was, but Klymene thinks it might be Kebes.”

“Kebes? The Goodness Group?” I pulled away from his arm, which wasn't giving me any comfort anyway, and leaned against the tree where I could see his face. “They've never taken part in an art raid before.”

“They've never had any communication with us since they left,” Father agreed.

“It was probably Psyche. Or the Amazons.” They were the two that raided us for art most frequently. It had been the Council of Psyche who had started the whole thing by demanding that the art be shared out equally to all the cities in proportion to their population. Some of us had wished ever since that we'd just agreed there and then. Plato had set out rules for warfare, but he only ever imagined one Just City, not five of them squabbling over a pile of sculpture.

“Klymene said the
Goodness
had been seen. And she said she didn't recognize anyone.”

I shook my head. “I never heard that Kebes wanted art.”

“Who knows what he wants? I never did. He broke a statue once, on purpose. He just wanted to get away, and to destroy the City if he could.” Father's eyes came into focus. “I remember him sitting where you are sitting now and saying as much.”

It was strange to think of Kebes as a real person my parents had known, and not a demon to be afraid of. He had left at the Last Debate, years before I was born. “Maybe—” I began to say, then stopped. I'd been going to say that maybe Mother would understand what Kebes wanted, and I had to face up to the fact that she might well, but she wouldn't be able to tell us.

Father wasn't all that good at knowing what people meant, but he seemed to guess that time. He started to cry again, tears streaming down his face. He was looking at me, but he seemed to be looking through me. “How am I going to manage the rest of my life without her, Arete?”

“I don't know,” I said truthfully. I didn't even know how I was going to manage the rest of the day. I couldn't think how I was going to cope with Father being like this. Yes, he's the god Apollo, but that often makes it harder, not easier, not just for him but for all of us. He's not used to ordinary human things. I'm sure he must have lost people before, but the ways he'd coped with that as a god wouldn't be possible for him as a human. He couldn't create a new species of flower and call it after Mother, for instance. And normally when he was having problems that arose out of being human he'd ask Mother about it, and they'd have a fascinating conversation, and she'd help him understand how it worked, logically, and then he'd be all right. Now, without her—was I supposed to help him with it? The thought was terrifying. I wasn't all that good at being human myself yet. I was only fifteen. I didn't know enough about it. It wasn't fair. I wanted to grieve for my mother, not to have to worry about helping my father cope.