The Just City (41 page)

It was Aristomache and Ikaros. I heard them wishing Sokrates joy before they came outside and wished me the same thing. “Weren't you drawn in the lots today?” Aristomache asked as I returned their greetings. “Are you still recovering from childbirth?”

“I was drawn, and I have played my part and finished,” I said.

“It must be a very uncomfortable thing,” Ikaros said. “I'm glad I don't have to abide by it. A random partner every four months, sometimes friends, sometimes enemies, sometimes strangers.”

“We were just saying that we don't know what Plato was thinking,” Sokrates said.

They laughed, as if this was an often repeated joke.

I started to get up and excuse myself and leave them to their accustomed conversation. Sokrates waved me back. “I'm thinking about challenging Athene to a debate,” he said, to all of us. “On The Good Life. In front of everyone. In the Agora.”

“I haven't seen her for a long time,” Ikaros said, sitting down by the tree.

“She's here,” Aristomache said, sitting by the Herm. “I know how to get in touch with her if you need her. But a debate?”

“I'm an old man,” Sokrates said. He stayed standing in the middle of the garden. “I want to debate her before I die, like poor Tullius.”

“You're a long way from death,” Ikaros said. “But I'd love to hear you debate her. That would be…”

“Socratic frenzy?” Sokrates said, clearly teasing him, because Ikaros laughed.

“We'd all love to hear it,” Aristomache said. “But I don't know if she'd agree.”

“We'd all love to hear it too,” I said. “I can't think of anything we'd enjoy more.”

“The good life,” mused Ikaros. “I don't suppose you could consider asking her to debate my theory of will and reason?”

“What's that?” I asked.

“That will, or love, and reason are the two horses of the chariot in the
Phaedrus
, and it doesn't matter which one you follow if it's taking you closer to God.”

“So if you love something it doesn't matter if you understand it? It can still take you closer to divinity, just by loving it?” I asked.

“Yes!” Ikaros looked excited.

“That's just mystical twaddle,” I said. I wasn't in the mood for it.

“That's what Septima said,” Ikaros said, not discouraged at all. “But wait until you see how it fits with my theory of the gods.”

“Besides,” Aristomache interrupted, “Plato said one of the horses was human and one divine. Which would be which?”

“That's the beauty of this idea,” Ikaros said.

“If Athene agrees to debate me, you will be there, perhaps you could ask her to debate this afterwards,” Sokrates said, starting to pace again. “Or maybe I will mention your theory of the gods in my argument, if things take the right turn. Or we could have a whole series of debates.”

“Do you want me to invite her?” Aristomache asked.

“If you can find her, I'd like you to deliver a formal written invitation,” Sokrates said. “And don't keep it secret, let everyone know I want to do this so they can start anticipating it.”

“Are you really sure this is the best time?” I asked.

Sokrates smiled. “It feels to me like the very best time.”

 

37

A
POLLO

She came not helmeted but castle-crowned, Athene Polias, the builder of cities. She didn't look angry; to anyone who didn't know her she would have seemed serene, calm, entirely Olympian. The anger was all in the way she moved. What had angered her? She was getting bored, and something had upset her, and I had pestered her and made her act against her best judgement in petitioning to heal Simmea, and then Simmea had wrong-footed her. If Simmea had promised and sworn and acted awed and intimidated, she wouldn't have stayed angry. It was the way Simmea had bested her that did it, and of course, that made it the worst possible time for Sokrates to challenge her to a public debate.

Her petty revenge, at the Festival of Hera, had stung. I was chosen last, and paired with Euridike. Euridike was the very pattern of a Hellenic maiden, fair-skinned and crowned with golden braids. Her breasts, which had been magnificent, were sagging a little with child-bearing now, but she was probably the most beautiful and desirable of the golds available at that festival. I knew perfectly well what Athene meant by it—to show me that this was what I really wanted. When I had been free to choose this was what I had always chosen, and indeed, this was something I could easily have. I felt physical desire for Euridike that I did not, could not, feel for Simmea. And yes, that hurt, but it was a pinprick. The whole time I was with Euridike I naturally couldn't turn my mind away from poor Simmea matched with Kebes.

I didn't think for an instant that she would prefer him to me. As with the time we wrestled, that wasn't a fair contest. I was a god. She had said she loved me as stones fell down, and I trusted that. No lout like Kebes was going to affect the important thing. But I hated to think of him hurting her, either physically or emotionally. I kept thinking of it. He wouldn't want to hurt her. He loved her, in his way, like a dog loves his bone. And all Simmea had was philosophy. (And the silphium, which I was so glad I had remembered. I could not have endured watching her bear Kebes's child. It had been bad enough with tone-deaf Nikias.) And of course, Euridike was a person with equal significance and her own choices, and she found me desirable, and having been matched with me she deserved more of me than half my attention. (How could Plato have thought this was a good idea? How could he?)

Simmea insisted afterwards that everything was all right and it hadn't changed anything. But she was avoiding Kebes, and so was I.

The whole city came to the Agora for the debate. I saw Glaukon in his wheeled chair. The babies were there, even the smallest, so that their nursery-maids needn't miss it. The workers, those who had taken an interest in philosophy, were lining up at the edges to the Agora to listen. Old Porphyry had dragged himself from his sickbed and was sitting with the pregnant women eight months along, down near the front. There was nothing we loved more than a debate, and this was the debate of a century. I saw tears glitter in Ikaros's eyes as Athene made her way through the crowd to the rostrum. Ficino too was blinded by honourable tears. He introduced the debate.

Simmea, beside me, was the only person I could see who didn't look delighted at the whole event. “I was thinking about Plato in Syracuse,” she said. “The time when the tyrant sold him into slavery. That was after a debate on the good life.”

“I'm sure Sokrates knows about that,” I said. “I'm sure Sokrates was thinking about it when he suggested this.”

Sokrates was wearing a plain white wool kiton. He nodded and smiled at Ficino's introduction. He stood to the right and Athene to the left, which meant that she was going to begin. He did not look at all intimidated by her presence.

Her speech was splendid. She spoke of course of the Just City, of justice in the soul and justice in the city. I saw people in the crowd nodding at her eloquence. It was all straight out of Plato, and you couldn't have found a more appreciative audience. Nobody clapped when she finished, they knew the rules, but there was a deep murmur of appreciation. Sokrates took a step forward.

“I can't possibly compete with a beautiful speech like that,” he began. “I hope you'll let me off and allow me to talk in my usual manner, asking questions and trying to find the answers.”

There was a ripple of laughter from the crowd. Athene inclined her head gracefully. Simmea squeezed my hand.

“You've talked a lot about justice, and a lot about this city,” he said, conversationally. “Do you think this city is just?”

“I do.”

“Not merely that it's pursuing justice, or attempting to be just, but that it actually attains justice?”

“Yes.” I was surprised. I'd have thought she'd said that it was on its way to justice. The experiment wasn't anything like done yet. I'm not sure even Plato would have thought it was already just. But many among the crowd were nodding.

“And you find that justice in the relations of the part to the whole and the way things are laid out?”

“Yes.”

“Well it seems to me that there are a few issues that need to be cleared up before I'd call this the good life. First there's the question of choice. I'd say there can't be justice when people have no choice, do you agree? I'm thinking of people in prison, or condemned to row in a ship, shackled to the oar.”

“The sentence that sent them there might be just,” Athene countered.

“Yes, that could be so, but in their situation when they're there, when they're compelled to stay, or to row, they've had freedom taken from them and they're under the overseer's lash. There's no justice there, or don't you agree?”

“I agree, subject to what I said before.”

“And if the sentence that sent them there wasn't just, if the judge was bribed or the evidence was false, or if they were captured by pirates and chained to the oar, then there's no justice?”

“No, in that case there's no justice. The punishment is making them worse people, not better, and in addition the passing of the unjust sentence is making the judge worse.”

“Then I submit that the case is the same in this city, that the masters chose to be here but the children did not.” Sokrates leaned back a little as if to give her space to reply.

“The children were rescued from slavery,” she said.

“They were bought as slaves and brought here and given no choices about how to live.”

“Children are never given such choices.”

“Really?” Sokrates asked. “But I thought souls chose their lives before birth, as Plato wrote in the
Phaedo
.”

I smiled, hearing Sokrates cite that dialogue he disliked so much. Athene glared over at me, guessing I must have confirmed this for Sokrates. She caught me smiling, and glared even harder.

“Yes, that's true,” she admitted, reluctantly. The audience let out a sigh, as if they had all been holding their breath through the pause waiting to hear.

“Then in a way the children did choose to come here,” Sokrates said.

“It's not true,” Kebes burst out, from where he stood down near the rostrum. Simmea, next to me, winced. Kebes really was recalcitrant. He had to hold on to his anger and deny that he had in any way chosen to be here, even when he heard it from the mouth of Athene herself.

She ignored him. “They did. And once they were here we looked after them as if we were their loving parents with their best interests at heart. If you ask them now they are grown, they will say they are happy they came here.”

“Some of them will,” Sokrates said, and his eyes sought out Simmea, who stood straight at my side. “Will you agree with that, Simmea?”

“Assuredly, Sokrates,” she said, speaking up plainly. There was a ripple of laughter.

“But some of them will not.” He looked at Kebes, who was near him, at the front. “Kebes?”

“I never chose to come here. I have never been reconciled to having been dragged from my home and bought as a slave and brought here. I have never had any choice about staying. I still hate and resent the masters, and I am not the only one.” His voice was passionate and clear. The crowd were making unhappy murmurs. Athene looked daggers at Kebes.

Sokrates spoke again, and at once Athene's eyes were back on him. “It's a slippery argument to say that our souls gave consent before birth, because it would be possible to use that to justify doing anything to anybody. We don't remember what our souls chose or why. We don't know what part of our lives we wanted and what part we overlooked, or agreed to endure for the sake of another part. It may be a kind of consent, but it's not at all the same as giving active consent here and now.”

“I agree,” Athene said. “But in the case of the children, bringing them here has made them better people. It is the opposite of the case of the galley slave.”

“Except that even if it did good to them, it made you and the masters worse because you bought them as slaves and disregarded their choices, as in the case of the unjust judge who condemned the slave.”

“I do not think I am worse for it,” she said, confidently.

“So? Well, let me ask others. Maia? Do you think you are better or worse because you bought the children?”

Maia jumped when she was addressed. “Worse, Sokrates,” she admitted, after a moment.

“Aristomache?”

“Worse,” she said immediately.

“Atticus?”

“Worse,” he said, speaking out loudly. “And since reading Aristomache's dialogue, I have come to believe that I am worse because I kept slaves in my own time.”

“But whether or not it made anyone's soul less just, I agree that once you had the children here you treated them as best you knew, and certainly as Plato suggested,” Sokrates said.

“Yes, we did,” Athene agreed.

“But the next question is whether Plato was a good authority for these things. Did he have children?”

“You know he did not.”

“There are other ways of knowing about how to bring people up than being a parent. And indeed, I've read that after I knew him he became a teacher, he had a school in Athens, a famous school, the Academy, which became the very name for learning. Was it for children?”

“It was for older people. A university, not a school.”

“So what made him an expert in the education of younger people?” He hesitated for an instant and then moved on before Athene answered. “Nothing. And on the same grounds, I could ask what cities he founded. And I could ask what happened when he tried to involve himself in the politics of Syracuse, what wonderful results he had in that city? And similarly, his pupil Aristotle taught Alexander the Great, and Alexander did found cities and no doubt we see in Alexander the pattern of the philosopher king you wish to create, and in his cities the pattern of justice?”