The Just City (14 page)

Sokrates looked sideways at Pytheas. “We know, as Plato could not have known, that Athene at least is real, and much as Homer portrayed her. So how about Homer's gods?”

“Then who can we trust if the gods disagree?” I asked. “Like at Troy, when the gods are taking sides in the battle. Odysseus could trust Athene but not Poseidon.”

“Can we trust that the gods are good, or is it more complicated than that?” Sokrates asked. “Is Athene good and Poseidon bad? Certainly if Homer speaks truly then Poseidon was bad for Odysseus. But he was good to Theseus, who was his son.”

“You're using a very unplatonic idea of goodness,” I said, surprised. “Ficino says Plato says Goodness is absolute, not relative.”

“Considering relative goodness, I believe it's more complicated, as you say,” Pytheas said to Sokrates. “The gods have their own agendas that may conflict.”

“Ah,” Sokrates said. “And how may we know if we are caught up in such a conflict, and if so, which god to trust?”

“Juno, that is Hera, was terrible to Aeneas,” I said. “He was much harassed both on land and sea because of the unrelenting rage of cruel Juno,” I quoted, naturally falling into Latin to do so.

“I can see I'm going to have to learn that infuriating language,” Sokrates said. “But not today. Translation, please.”

I repeated it in Greek. It seemed astonishing that he was so wise but did not know Latin. But Virgil wasn't born until five hundred years after he died. In his time, Rome had been no more than a little village, founded by Romulus and Remus only a few centuries before, unheard-of away from Italy. Then Rome had grown great and spread civilization over the world, so that even when she fell, her language had preserved it in human minds, so that now—except that
now
in this moment Rome did not even exist. Aeneas, if he had even been born, had not yet sailed from Troy. “It's like looking through the wrong end of a telescope,” I said. “History, from here.”

“You have at least had five years to learn about it. I've barely been here half a month.”

“Are you a master?” Kebes asked.

“What an interesting question,” Sokrates said, patting Kebes's hand. “What is a master, in this city?”

“The masters came here from all over time, drawn by their shared wish to found the Just City,” Kebes recited. It was what we had been taught.

“They did this with the aid of Pallas Athene,” Pytheas added, in the manner of somebody politely adding a footnote, but Kebes frowned at him. Sokrates nodded to himself. “So it would seem that I am not a master, as I did not read Plato's
Republic
nor pray to Athene to bring me here to work at setting it up.”

“But you're not a child,” Kebes said.

“I'm seventy years old, I'm certainly not a child. Nor am I a youth, and still less a maiden. But perhaps I am wrong about this. Perhaps in this city I am a child. Is there nobody here but masters and children?”

“Unless you count the workers,” I said. “They are mechanical, but they seem to have purpose.”

“They're just devices,” Pytheas said. “They don't will what they do.”

“Do you know that?” Sokrates asked.

Pytheas closed his mouth, looking dumbfounded. After a minute said: “It's my opinion and what I've been taught.”

“We will leave the question of the workers for now, if we may, and let us say that of human beings, there are in the city only youths and maidens, whom you are accustomed to call children, and masters?”

“That's right, Sokrates,” Kebes said. “Or it was the case until you came.”

“Then let us consider. I am not a child because I am seventy years old. But I was brought here without being consulted, like a child.”

“You have a house to yourself like a master,” I said. “We all live in houses with six other children.”

“That seems a minor point, but we will let it stand on the side of masters.”

“The thing that marks you as different from children and masters considered together is that you came to the city now,” Pytheas said. “All the rest of us have in common that we came here five years ago, at the time of the founding of the city. Why did you come now?”

“They tell me that I came now because before this you were too young to learn rhetoric, and I am an old man and they feared that if I had been here from the beginning I would die before you were old enough to learn. For that is to be my purpose here, you see, to teach rhetoric to you children: I, who was never a teacher but who liked to converse with my friends and seek out the nature of things.”

“They have their own imagination of who you are, but you are not that,” Kebes said.

“Now that's true,” Sokrates said. “And perhaps what I shall teach is not what they expect me to teach.”

 

13

A
POLLO

Who would have guessed that Sokrates would recognize me? True, we had always been on good terms. But I was in mortal flesh and fifteen years old. Nobody else had recognized me. Nobody else had even come close to guessing, not even people I knew well. It isn't as if we go around manifesting physically all the time. People don't expect to see the voice in their ear incarnate in front of them in the form of a youth, and so they don't see it. Sokrates, of course, didn't ever see what he expected to see, he saw what was there and examined it. He knew me instantly, as fast as Athene had, faster.

The difficulty wasn't that I cared that Sokrates knew. Sokrates was one of those people whose integrity really could be relied on. No, it was that I didn't want Simmea or that lout Kebes to know. I was also a little afraid of giving away too much to Sokrates. This was never a problem before I became a mortal. Saying precisely as much as I want, with as many multiple meanings as words can be made to bear, has always been one of my oracular specialties. Composing oracles like that can be as much fun as really complex forms of poetry. But since I became Pytheas things had all been more complicated. I sometimes blurted out things I shouldn't, and there were these huge areas of human experience that I kept blundering into with both feet. Simmea really helped with this. She was always prepared to put her time into working things out with me, sometimes even before I messed things up. I really valued that.

Being a mortal was strange. It was sensually intense, and it had the intensity of everything evanescent—like spring blossoms or autumn leaves or early cherries. It was also hugely involving. Detachment was really difficult to achieve. Everything mattered immediately—every pain, every sensation, every emotion. There wasn't time to think about things properly—no possibility of withdrawal for proper contemplation, then returning to the same instant with a calm and reasonable plan. Everything had to be done in time, immediately. Paradoxically, there was also too much time. I constantly had to wait through moments and hours and nights. I had to wait for spring to see blossom, wait for Simmea to be free to talk to me, wait for morning. Then when it came, everything would be hurtling forward in immediate necessity again, pierced through with emotion and immediacy and a speeding pulse. Time was inexorable and unstoppable. I had always known that, but it had taken me fifteen years as a mortal to understand what it meant.

I found my own charged emotional states interesting to contemplate. Some were exactly the same, others analogous, and still others entirely new. Then there was the vulnerability, which is quite different in practice from the way it seems in theory. I could never have reasoned my way to understanding how it felt to stand in the palaestra, hoping that Simmea would hit me instead of walking away from our friendship. Even at that instant, even as I was waiting and not knowing how it would go, I knew that I would be making poetry from those emotions for centuries.

I certainly was learning lots and lots about equal significance. It was easy to grant it to Simmea, who was smart and brave and cared passionately about art, even though she was flat-nosed and flat-chested and had buck teeth. It was much harder in practice to extend this out to everyone. It took me a long time to realise that I'd been extending equal significance as a favor on an individual basis and that it really applied to absolutely everyone—funny cowardly Klymene, bad-mannered Kebes, and pretty Laodike. Everyone had their own internal life and their own soul, and they were entitled to make their own choices. I had to keep reminding myself of that regularly, and really I should have had it cut into my hand. I did an exercise at the end of every day, if I could keep awake long enough, when I tried to imagine the inner significance of everyone who had spoken to me that day.

Before I get on to the conversation with Sokrates, I should say a word about Kebes. He was big, one of the biggest of the youths in the city. He had clearly lied about his age and was a year or two older than most of the rest of us. His growth spurt had come early, and he had shot up. He had a head like a bull—a big broad forehead that could easily have sprouted horns, and a habit of setting his jaw belligerently. If I'd named him he would have been Tauros. He had a grudge against the world, and he hated everything. He wasn't stupid, far from it. He'd have been easier to understand if he had been. He just hated everything and everyone and devoted his time and energy and considerable talents to hating them. He did exactly as little as he could get away with, and spent far more effort calculating that than he would have spent on trying to excel. He had a way of making one master after another believe that they would be the one who would succeed in motivating him, that they were on the verge of success, while in fact he mocked each in turn behind their back. He hated everyone—everyone except Simmea, that is. Once, while helping Manlius, he contrived to break a statue of Aphrodite by moving the plinth where a worker was supposed to set it down. Both statue and plinth fell three stories onto marble and shattered beyond retrival. I would have thought it an accident, save that he boasted about it to Phoenix, who thought it was funny and repeated it to lots of people.

Left to myself I'd have avoided Kebes entirely. As it was, he persisted in being around Simmea, and so I had to deal with him. We had fought twice in the palaestra when neither Simmea nor any masters were around. These were not athletic contests in which victory was marked with points; they were vicious all-out fights in which we tried to hurt each other. I won both times. They were not really fair fights. Yes, he was two handspans taller and much heavier, and likely his body was a year or two older, but I had been wrestling since the art was invented. I knew tricks from centuries Kebes had never had the chance to visit, and when not bound by rules, I used them freely.

The second time, I had him on the floor with his head in a choke where I could easily have broken his neck. I thought about it. I would have had to pretend to be horrified at such an accident, and probably to purify myself before the gods. It wasn't this that stopped me but that I didn't want to deprive Simmea of anything she valued, even this. “Yield?” I whispered in his ear.

“Never,” he said, and in his tone I could see that if he had been on top he wouldn't have had the same hesitation in killing me.

“Will you swear to behave civilly to me in front of Simmea?”

He was silent for a moment. I kept the pressure on. “Yes,” he said at last. “Civilly.”

“Do you swear?”

“By what?”

“By all that you hold sacred,” I said. “Do it.”

“I swear by God and the Madonna and Saint Matthew and my own true name that I will be civil to you in front of Simmea,” he said, and I let him up. He spat blood onto the sand in front of me and stalked away. He was limping, but then so was I.

And that was Kebes. He hated and distrusted me, and when I made him swear an oath he swore truly, and kept it. It was strange. He swore only to get out of my power, but he put himself more into it than ever. If I had chosen to denounce him to the masters for the gods he had chosen to hold his words, he could have been punished—flogged, even cast out of the city. Perhaps that was what he wanted. But he kept the letter of his oath—he was thereafter just barely civil to me if Simmea was there.

If I had been my real self I would have thoroughly enjoyed sitting in the garden of Thessaly talking with Sokrates and giving double-tongued answers. As it was, there was a knife-edge of fear running under it all. It didn't stop me enjoying it, it didn't stop me being aware of the delight of dappled shade and sharp wits. It was just another thread underlining everything.

Don't think I was upset that Sokrates wasn't happy to be in the Republic, even if he might be actively trying to undermine it. Nobody actually thought this was going to work perfectly. Plato had thought of it as a thought experiment. He'd been trying to design what he thought of as a system for maximizing justice, according to his best understanding of the world. We knew his understanding of the world was flawed—look at what he believed about the gods. All the same, it was such a noble idea when Plato had it, such an improvement on any of the ways to live he saw around him. It was of the classical world, but better. His understanding of the world and the soul were mistaken. But his city had never been tried before. This was the experimental proof. It needed to be able to stand up to Sokrates.

Maybe some of the masters really believed they could make it work, but I think what they really wanted wasn't to do it themselves but for somebody else to have made it real and for them to have been born there. The masters were always envious of the children, that was obvious to me from the first. Athene and I certainly didn't imagine it would really work the way Plato described it. We knew too much about the soul to hope for that. What was interesting was seeing how much of it could work, how much it really would maximize justice, and
how
it was going to fail. We could learn a lot from that.