by Jo Walton
If Plato had been right about the way the universe worked, he’d have been right about the Truth. As it is, he was regrettably and unavoidably wrong. Everything would be much simpler and better if he had been correct. But while people who grew up in Republics certainly do not in practice agree all the time, our priorities are a lot more alike than those of people who did not. It is therefore easier to minimize our unhappiness and create opportunities for our happiness than for others. It has been possible to see this in practice with the Lucian cities—as they become more Platonic, they have also become happier overall.
People from the Republics hold the pursuit of excellence as a goal. The other cultural goals I have encountered in my experience and researches seem much less conducive to producing happiness for individuals and societies. Additionally, we do all believe in constant examination of facts and positions; and even when this decays to pious lip-service, as it sometimes can, it is a valuable ideal. It can always be evoked and recalled in times of potential danger. Rigorous examination of a position will often expose assumptions and agendas hidden under rhetoric. Even for the power-hungry, the awareness that their opponents will call for this examination discourages corruption and acting in bad faith. I believe that Plato was correct in saying that our souls long for the Good, and that nobody chooses evil for themselves while recognizing that it is evil, though some may do it in ignorance.
Therefore, despite the innumerable failings of Plato’s system, if maximizing the happiness and well-being of the soul is the Good Life, then to this extent, Plato was right in his design.
V. On External Contacts
The first aliens to contact us were the Amarathi, who arrived in the consulship of Fabius and Theano, in the Forty-Eighth Year of the City, seventeen years after the Relocation of the cities to Plato. Their language was exceedingly difficult to learn, and without Arete’s special powers we would have been unable to communicate. There was much excitement at first, followed by many perplexities. We have mutually beneficial trade with the Amarathi, who provide us with many useful things in return for natural resources we extract from the planet.
The Saeli contacted us in the consulship of Maia and Androkles, in the Fifty-Second Year of the City. They said the Amarathi had suggested us as appropriate partners. At first Arete translated for them, as she had been doing for the Amarathi, but the Saeli soon learned Greek. They began to settle among us, at first only a few pods who stayed behind when their ships left, and then in larger numbers. In the Fifty-Sixth Year of the City, when I was consul for the third time, sharing the honor with Timon of Sokratea, the first pod of Saeli asked if they could stay permanently and study to become citizens. After much debate, in the Fifty-Seventh Year it was decided that this decision was one that should be settled by each city individually. Here in the Remnant, we decided that they and any other Saeli settlers who wished to could become citizens, provided they took the same course our ephebes took and upon its conclusion swore their oaths and accepted a classification. The argument that prevailed was that if the Saeli wished to dedicate themselves to Platonism and to philosophy, it would be wrong of us to prevent them. Saeli pods, which are family units with five members, were at the same time accepted as one of our approved forms of family.
We also agreed for the first time then to allow Saeli and humans who held citizenship elsewhere to live here, if they chose, as metics, subject to our laws but without taking oath or being classified. Metics can be expelled at any time, but the only time any have been expelled in practice was if they refused to live by our laws.
In the consulship of Marsilia and Diotima, in the Seventy-Third Year of the City, a human spaceship arrived in our solar system and began broadcasting to our planet. Communication was established, and the protocols were put into place which had been long prepared for such an eventuality.
We always knew that we would come into contact with Earth sooner or later. Zeus had promised Arete posterity, and how else might it be achieved? Besides, Porphyry had prophesied that such a thing would happen. We did not, however, know in advance exactly when it would occur. Nor could we have predicted what would follow from this recontact.
VI. On the Nature of the Gods
After Zeus moved the Cities to the planet Plato, which is considerably less convenient for some things than Greece, Pytheas and his children, with Maia, returned to us from Olympos. Pytheas could no longer keep it secret in the City that he was Apollo incarnate. He would answer some questions about the universe, but not others. “I don’t know everything, I certainly don’t know all the answers,” he said to me. “And sometimes I don’t answer because it’s better for people not to know.”
“Knowledge is good. How can ignorance be better?” I inscribed on a nearby marble plinth.
“Certainty closes many doors,” he replied. “It leads to dogmatism. Souls accept what they know and stop striving upwards.”
“Even among philosophers?” I asked.
He paused, and his eyes lost focus for a moment. “I don’t know,” he said. “True philosophers, who believe the unexamined life is not worth living, are usually very few in a population. Even here, a lot of people want to receive wisdom rather than work on it, even among the Golds. And what we can explain is only an approximation, an allegory, not Truth.”
In his later years, Pytheas used to joke about having the words Plato Was Wrong inscribed above the door of Thessaly, because people so often asked him questions based on Plato’s incorrect assumptions about the universe.
I shall now record a conversation I had with Pytheas in the garden of Thessaly, the day we rooted out the old lemon tree, which had not survived the harsher climate of our new planet. It was three years after the Relocation, and none of the new Workers had yet achieved self-consciousness, nor had we yet encountered any aliens. It was early spring, shortly after we had built the first speaking-boxes, and I was still excited to use my new ability to speak aloud. “Plato says the gods wouldn’t change shape because it would be changing to something less perfect,” I said. My voice buzzed as I spoke, as it always did until we bought better speaking-boxes from the Saeli years later.
“Perfect for what?” Pytheas asked. “A dolphin is much more suited to swimming than a human form. I never swam as a human until I came to the City—and I’ll probably never do it again, the sea here is freezing.”
“It has never fallen below freezing,” I pointed out. “We don’t have sea-ice.” It was spring, and air temperatures were above freezing now, except sometimes at night.
“Metaphorically freezing, even in summer,” Pytheas said, rolling his eyes.
“Was that pedantic?”
“Yes, it was pedantic, but never mind. I was simply complaining about the cold here, the way everyone does.”
I began to stack the wood against the wall, lining up the pieces. “I can measure temperature, but I don’t feel it.”
“When I’m a god, I can choose how much I feel it.”
“That’s closer to perfection,” I pointed out.
“I never said it wasn’t. Plato’s doing his thing there where he assumes there’s only one good.” He was bent over sweeping up the wood chips, and he hesitated, looking at me where I was stacking the logs, which would make useful material for so many things. “We have our perfect selves, if you like to call them that, the essential self, but that self can have several affinities, several forms that are all real and perfect in their own ways, for their own things. It’s a matter of personality. As a god, I have a human form, a dolphin form, a mouse form, a wolf form, a solar form … they’re all me, all part of what I am. It’s not falling away from being myself to choose which one to be at any time, no more than to choose whether to sing or not on a given occasion, whether to smile or frown. Though of course, Plato would see emotions as falling away from perfection too.”
“And what about Hephaistos?” I had a special interest in Hephaistos, because some accounts said he made Workers to help in his forge, and I felt he mig
ht therefore be our patron.
“Hephaistos?” Pytheas bent to his sweeping again.
“Being lame,” I elucidated.
“It happened before I was born, so he’s been lame for as long as I can remember. But I think that disability became part of his imagination of himself, after his fall to Lemnos. It became one of his attributes, in his own soul, an essential part of who he was.”
“And if he changed to another form, would that be the same?”
“A lion with a thorn in its paw? Yes. But he seldom does change. He seldom leaves his forge. He’s always busy making things.”
“Like the shield for Achilles,” I said. We’d recently read that part of the Iliad in the current rhapsode.
“Yes.”
“And can you take on other human forms?”
Pytheas laughed and straightened up, putting a hand to his back and wincing a little. “Yes. Briefly. And for exactly the purpose Plato says we never have: to deceive. If I want somebody to do something I can show up as myself and command and hope they obey, or I can send a dream, or give an oracle; but sometimes it’s much more effective to show up looking like somebody they trust and make a suggestion.” He brought the pile of chips over towards me as I went back to bring more branches to the stack.
“What about if you wanted to become a bull?” I asked.
“Bull is one of Father’s,” he said, picking up a bough and smelling it. Scent is a sense I do not share. “I could look like a bull if I wanted to, but I wouldn’t be a bull in essence, the way I’d be a dolphin, or Hephaistus a lion. I’d only seem like a bull, a disguise, exactly the same as looking like somebody’s charioteer.”
“But aren’t there other bull gods in other pantheons?” I asked.
“Yes. I expect it’s different for them.” He set the bough down neatly on the pile.
“But how, if there’s only one Form of the bull?” I asked, perplexed.
“It’s not like Plato’s Forms, really. And it’s connected to culture and place and personality, like I said.”
“But for Zeus—this is so difficult to understand.”
“Father has a lot of shapes. He likes shapes. That’s part of his essential nature, changing shape. It’s part of his perfection, if you want to put it that way.” He took up the broom again and began to sweep. “The thing Plato’s dead wrong about is thinking we don’t want anything and are perfectly happy and don’t care. We’re much calmer than humans, and I’m quite content most of the time, but I have projects, desires, plans, people and things I care about. We all do. And sometimes we come into conflict because of that.”
“Plato’s God could only really be one,” I said, coming over with more wood.
“It sounds really boring to me,” he said.
“It sounds to me like I was before I developed consciousness,” I said. “Unchanging, not wanting anything, no emotions.”
“Yes, a god like that wouldn’t need self-awareness and might be better off without it. A Worker god! I must tell—” He stopped and took a deep breath in the way he often did when he wanted to change the subject. “There’s a lot more of this wood than I thought there would be.”
“Trees often seem bigger when they are down.”
“Bigger and smaller both. I’m sad to see it go. It was a link with Sokrates and Simmea. We used to sit in this garden and talk. It was so different then. Warmer. Sokrates made that herm, you know. He’d stopped working as a sculptor before the attack on the herms, but he took up his tools again for that.”
“I knew he made the herm. It makes me happy that he was a sculptor too, though I did not know it when I knew him.”
“He’d have been excited by your work, as I am,” Pytheas said.
It made me happy to hear this said. But then Pytheas looked around sadly at the chilly space the garden had become.
“We will plant more green things out here. It’s sad that the lemon tree couldn’t survive the winters,” I said. “But the wood will be useful to make many good things. I could make you a comb, and when you used it you could think of them.”
“I’d like that,” he said.
“And a pen,” I added.
He nodded. He was no longer mad with grief, the way he had been immediately after Simmea’s death, but he still felt it, as I did myself. Now that I had comforted him, or at least made an effort towards trying, I wanted to get back to the conversation. “If Plato was wrong,” I said, and we both glanced at the arch over the door where the words could have been incised, “why did he imagine the gods that way?”
“He was wrong about the purpose of the gods,” Pytheas said. “He imagined that we existed as inspiration, examples, much the same way he imagined art.” He laughed. “He was wrong about art too.”
“And why do you exist?” I asked.
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” he said. “Not why we exist, or why humans do, or Workers either. I’m sure Father knows, but he probably wouldn’t tell me.” He smiled at me, the smile that wasn’t like anyone else’s smile. “Plato might have been wrong a lot of the time, but at least he was trying to figure important things out. He deserves credit for that.”
VII. On Friendship
The reason why Pytheas only joked about it and didn’t have me inscribe Plato Was Wrong over his doorway was to avoid distressing his friends, especially Maia and Aristomache.
5
JASON
Walking through the city with Thetis, I kept wanting to pinch myself so I could be sure it wasn’t a dream. Except that if it was a dream, I didn’t want to wake up, so there was that. I had my arm around her, around the outside of her cloak that is, which was fairly thick, whatever shimmery stuff it was made out of. But as we walked through the streets behind the harbor she sort of half-leaned into me, as if she couldn’t have managed to walk without my help. The sun was down now, not that we’d seen a glimpse of him since the morning. The clouds had been low out on the water. It had been grey all day, and raining on and off. Now twilight was closing in as we made our way through the streets, and a cold wind was coming up from the southwest. At first Thetis was crying, but after a little while, as we started heading uphill, she stopped. She wiped her face, took a deep breath, then turned her lovely eyes on me expectantly. “Well?”
“I don’t know what to say,” I admitted, completely at a loss. “It would be wrong to tell you to cheer up, when you’ve so recently lost your grandfather.”
“You don’t think it’s un-Platonic of me to grieve?” she asked.
I couldn’t remember what Plato had said about it. I’d read the Republic when I was an ephebe, like everyone else, but that was a while ago and I’d been busy since. “Unnatural not to, if you ask me. It’s five years since Leonidas and Aelia died, and I’ve recovered from the shock, mostly, but right away the grief was like an open wound.”
“Did you weep?”
She was exactly my height, taller than her sister although she was so much slighter. She must have used some flower scent in her soap, because I could smell it on her skin. “Yes, right away I did,” I said. “When we found the wreckage. And at the memorial, and then afterwards whenever I’d think about them I’d feel tears coming to my eyes. Even now sometimes. We all grew up together in the same nursery, sucked milk from the same breasts, as they say, and then we worked together on the boats. You can’t forget people you’re that close to as if they’d never been. Yes, I wept. There’s nothing shameful about tears like that.”
“Thank you.” She wiped her eyes again, unselfconsciously. “We should keep walking. It’s cold.” She took my arm and we walked on, past the Temple of Nike with its neatly swept gravel courtyard. “I never knew Leonidas, but I remember Aelia. She used to eat in Florentia sometimes, with the quilters. She helped old Tydeus when his sight was going. She was kind. And you’re kind too, Jason, you’re always kind.”
I didn’t know what to say. “I do my best,” I muttered. If it had been a dream I’d have had dream eloquence, but it was
waking life and the girl I’d been in love with since we were both fifteen was telling me I was kind and my tongue was thick in my mouth. “Tell me about your grandfather. I didn’t know him well.”
“He wasn’t like anyone else. Of course, he was the god Apollo, and you couldn’t forget that. But he was also a man, a man astonished at growing old, at grey hair, at weakening muscles.” We came to the walls and turned in at the gate. Thetis’s voice echoed for a moment as we passed beneath the arch. “I always loved him. He had so many grandchildren, and he cared about all of us. I’m not really his grandchild, did you know that?”
“Yes, Marsilia mentioned that your father, Neleus, was festival-born.” We came out from under the walls and were in the old city. I lived down by the harbor and worked at sea, and hardly ever came up here at night. I was surprised how many people were about in the evening chill. By the harbor, everything had been built for the climate of Plato, thick walls and narrow windows, all the houses huddling together against the cold, with light bars running along the sills of the buildings. Here you could tell everything had been intended for a warmer climate—there was a great variety of styles, but all of it was freestanding and mostly pillared, with individual sconces glowing gold above all the doors.
“Well, all of his children were except Arete. And she—” Thetis shrugged, as if to say that Arete was something special, which she definitely was. “He loved her. Dad’s mother. Simmea. And I think I must remind him of her in some way, because he’s always had a soft spot for me.”
“You don’t look like her.” I’d seen Crocus’s colossus of Simmea, the one by the steps of the library. She looked more like Marsilia.
“Yes, she was a true philosopher,” Thetis said, smiling a little, sadly.
“Marsilia says they only started saying that about philosophers being naturally ugly because of Simmea and Sokrates. She says Plato assumed beauty, and that there are plenty of good-looking philosophers. Pytheas himself was an example, and Ikaros was another.”
