The Just City

by Jo Walton

  “You still think you’re his?” he asked. “After that?”

  “I am my own,” I said, turning to face him. “I don’t belong to anyone. Pytheas doesn’t try to own me.” Though he had claimed me as a votary, which was disturbingly similar. But he had only done that to protect me from Athene. And after all, he was a god. And what he had offered me was exactly everything I most wanted—to make art, to build the future, to help each other become our best selves. “He honors me.”

  “I honor you!” he protested. “We were meant to be together. We were chained together. And now we were chosen together.”

  “Things like that are accidents, not fate,” I said. “And don’t you think I should have a choice?”

  “Yes, I do, but I think you should choose me.” He put his hand out to my face, awkwardly. “You’re mine. You’ll have my baby. We can run away together before he’s born, build a house, have a family. We can do this every night, have more children. My mother, my sisters, were lost, but I still have you and we can make a new family.”

  “Matthias! Will you listen to me?”

  He stopped.

  “I’m not your mother or your sisters. I have made my choice. I choose the city. And as a lover I choose Pytheas. I’m here in this room with you right now because I choose the city and the city chose us to be together now. I may have your child,” though I hoped the silphium would work and I would not, “but if I do, I will give it to the city to grow up here and be a philosopher. I don’t want to run away, as I’ve told you thousands of times. I don’t want to destroy the city.”

  I had said this often enough before, but either he hadn’t listened or he had twisted it in his mind and thought I meant I wasn’t ready. Even though he’d often heard me arguing with Sokrates for the merits of the city, he reacted as if I had struck him. “You can’t mean that. You’re mine.”

  “I can. I do.” I got up and picked up my kiton.

  “You don’t have to go. We can stay all night. We can do it again.”

  “We can stay, but we’re not obliged to. I’ve done what I was obliged to do and I’m leaving.” I put my kiton on.

  He stared at me in horror. “What—”

  “Kebes, I’m your friend, but I’m not your property. I can choose what I want.”

  His face crumpled for a moment. Then he lowered his head and scowled. “I don’t care anyway,” he said. “You’re not so special. You’re nothing but a scrawny flat-faced buck-toothed Copt.”

  I laughed. “That’s true. And I am also a gold of the Just City.”

  “I didn’t mean it. Come back.” He got up and put his hand on my bare shoulder.

  I pushed past him to the door. “I won’t mention this again if you don’t.”

  “Where are you going?”

  I hadn’t thought about it, but as he asked I knew. “I’m going to Thessaly.”

  The streets were quiet, though I passed numerous pairs of workers engaged in written dialogues. Pytheas’s vision of the streets being entirely paved in them was coming true. To my surprise, Sokrates was at home and answered the door to me at once. “Simmea! Joy to you. Is everything all right?” He drew me inside. There was nobody there. A book was open on the bed where he must have been reading it.

  “Joy to you, Sokrates. I was drawn with Kebes, and it was … awkward,” I said.

  “Oh dear. And it will be difficult for Pytheas.”

  “It will.” We went out into the garden. “I told Kebes I was coming here, so he won’t. But you’ll probably have to talk to him later. He thinks he owns me, and he just doesn’t.”

  “I can talk to him and try to make that clear to him,” Sokrates said. “Pytheas will be more difficult.”

  “I don’t know whether he will.” I was still sticky and uncomfortable between my legs as I sat in my usual place beneath the tree. When I leaned back my back felt bruised where it had been banged into the wall. “It’s going to be so awkward with both of them.”

  “I don’t know how Plato could have imagined that this would make everything easier,” Sokrates said.

  I laughed and rolled my shoulders to try to loosen my back. “If it wasn’t for his wanting women to be philosophers, I’d imagine that he thought wives were a fungible resource. Have you read the Republic?”

  “With a great deal of attention. But I’m afraid I can’t lend it to you, I have promised not to.” He sat down beside the limestone Herm he had carved himself during the Peloponnesian War.

  “Not to lend it to me?” I was astonished.

  “Not to lend it to any of you.” He stressed the plural.

  “Pytheas has read it, of course.”

  “Of course he must have. Before he came here.” Sokrates nodded. “How fascinating he is! I entirely understand your being in love with him. I don’t even accuse him of having used his powers to beguile you, as he seems remarkably fond of you in return.”

  “He doesn’t have any powers here. He’s just so amazingly wonderful,” I said. I couldn’t help smiling when I thought about him. “But being incarnate makes him vulnerable in odd ways, and I can help him with that.”

  “You don’t ever feel that he wants to take more of you than you want to give? That’s what they say about the gods.”

  “Never. Pytheas wants me to be my best self.” That was the problem with Kebes. Kebes didn’t see me, or my potential best self. He saw something he imagined as me, something he called Lucia. I hadn’t been Lucia for a long time now. “And I want Pytheas to be his best self.”

  “And I want the same for both of you,” Sokrates said.

  “You’re in love with him too,” I said, realizing it as he spoke. “And so you must know he doesn’t take more than you want to give.”

  “As long as you want to give everything.” Sokrates smiled wryly. “I have loved Athene and Apollo all my life, and between them they have consumed most of it.”

  “But aren’t you better for it? In your soul?”

  “I wouldn’t want to be any different,” he admitted.

  “And you love Pytheas the same way I do!” I was pleased, thinking it through, excited and not even a shred jealous. I trusted Sokrates, and this was something we shared. If we were both in love with Pytheas, then we could talk about it and maybe define agape more clearly. I leaned forward eagerly with my hands on my knees, ignoring the twinge in my back.

  “I love both of you, of course,” he said, gently, clearly disconcerted.

  “I know, and when it comes to philia I truly love you too, but that’s not what I mean, though of course that’s also really important.” I took a breath to compose my thoughts more clearly. “I love you and you love me, as teachers and pupils who are friends love each other.”

  “Yes,” he agreed, cautiously.

  “But you love Pytheas the same way I do. Agape.”

  He shook his head. I had argued with Sokrates about many things over the course of years, and had rarely seem him this disconcerted. “Not the same at all. I’m an ugly old man. I joke about being helpless before his beauty, but—”

  “And I’m an ugly young girl, and he’s Apollo, he’s thousands of years older than both of us. But he has chosen both of us as votaries because age and beauty are trivial; what really matters to him is excellence. What’s on the inside of our heads. And both of us can help him, we can give him new ideas and new ways of thinking!” I said all this as fast as I could get the words out. “It does make it a bit different that you don’t have any eros to struggle with conquering. But it’s still agape, and still very similar.”

  “I knew him as a god first, and was his votary, and only later came to know him as Pytheas, and vulnerable,” he said.

  “Yes, that’s a real difference,” I acknowledged. “You knew him as a god for so long. I did that the other way around. But you also loved him all that time. And now both of you passionately want to increase each other’s excellence, just the same as he and I do. This is so great! We both want that for him, and he wants it for
us,” I was so pleased I’d worked this out. “And we want that for him a lot.”

  “We do,” Sokrates said, staring at me. “Sometimes I think the most important thing I can be doing—and the same for you—is helping him to increase his excellence. More important than the workers or the city or anything. Because he’s not just our friend Pytheas, he really is the god Apollo. He’s the light. And what he learns and knows and understands is so important for the world. His excellence has a future, and nothing else here does.”

  “Well, ours does for our souls,” I amended. “But Pytheas still has so much to learn about being human, so much that he ought to understand about it. He really is wonderful. And he tries so hard. It’s marvellous that he says excellence is something even the gods must pursue.”

  “He certainly pursues it. I can’t speak for all the gods, and he doesn’t either. I do wonder what his Father pursues, alone in the centre.”

  “He said he didn’t know.”

  “That doesn’t stop me wondering about it all the more.” Sokrates tugged at his beard, as he sometimes did when thinking hard.

  “But Pytheas—Apollo—wants to increase my excellence, as I want to increase his. And it’s the same with you.” I beamed at him. I was so delighted to have figured this out.

  Sokrates focused on me and sighed. “You are truly very close to what Plato dreamed. You’re almost enough to justify this whole absurd structure.”

  “It’s not absurd,” I said. “Though I must admit it does have its absurd side sometimes.”

  “Plato understood so little about what people are like,” Sokrates said.

  “If I were making a plan for a Just City, there are things I’d change. I’d let people choose their partners, and whether to bring up their own children.”

  “It’s like a delicate mosaic, if you change anything the whole thing falls apart into incoherence. Plato had logical reasons for those things.”

  “I do wish I could read it. Maia says not until I’m fifty, which is ridiculous.”

  “Didn’t Pytheas tell you what it said?” Sokrates was looking at me alertly, his most characteristic expression. I wondered how many debates we’d had sitting just where we were in this garden, and how many more we would have in the years to come.

  “He told me about the masters cheating at the lots to get better children. Though it wasn’t the masters cheating that put me with Kebes, it was Athene, to punish Pytheas and me for annoying her.”

  “What?” Sokrates puffed up with anger. “That’s unjust!”

  “Pytheas says she can be spiteful. He says you shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming that they’re good.”

  “They shouldn’t have that power if they’re not responsible with it. This city is a great many things, but one of them is directly enforced with Athene’s power.” He leapt to his feet and began to pace around the garden. “I have a good mind to challenge her. I’ve been thinking about it for a while. I am her votary too. And what she is doing and learning here is also an issue that has very deep consequences for the world.”

  “You love her too, in that same way,” I said.

  “Of course I do. I have always loved wisdom. Pytheas says she wants to know everything. I have questions it would do her soul good to consider.”

  “Pytheas says she’s really angry now, but she’ll calm down. It might be better to wait until she calms down before you challenge her.”

  “Did he say how long it would take?” Sokrates asked, stopping and looking down at me.

  “He said maybe a decade.”

  “I don’t have a decade. I’m seventy-four years old.” He began to pace again.

  Nobody would have been able to tell he was that old, especially watching him pace. He looked a vigorous sixty. “You’re not about to drop dead. And I think she should have a little bit longer. She and Pytheas had an argument yesterday.”

  He spun around. “She’s the goddess of reason and logic. She shouldn’t quarrel and act in anger.”

  “I agree, but if that’s the way things are, there’s not much point saying they ought to be different because that would be better and more logical,” I said.

  Sokrates laughed. “I do have a tendency in that direction, yes. I want to challenge her—” There was a scratch at the outside door, and he went to open it. I hoped it wouldn’t be Pytheas, as I wasn’t ready to see him yet. I knew it wouldn’t be Kebes.

  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

  APOLLO

  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 wa
y 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.