As I grew it was interesting to discover how much of what I had thought was will was affected by the flesh. Food and sleep weren’t just pleasures but necessities. I found my thoughts were clouded when I was hungry or tired.
I grew fast and strong and my parents were loving and kind to me. Everything went according to plan, including the famine that came along a few months before my tenth birthday, which Athene and I had arranged to induce my loving parents to sell me into slavery. That didn’t go quite as planned. For one thing, I had no idea what famine really meant—needing to eat and starving instead is a form of pain. It was unbearable. I hate to remember it. The despair on my mortal father’s face when the last of the pigs died. The way my mortal mother wept when the slavers came and made their offer for me. I cared for them, of course I did, they had been my adoring worshipers for almost a decade. It broke my mortal mother’s heart to sell me. Athene and I had chosen all this and imposed it on them. They had not chosen to love a son and lose him in this terrible way, to be forced to choose between slavery for me and death for all three of us. I had never imagined how cruel we were being.
So, as you see, I had already learned quite a lot about mortal life and equal significance and meaningful choices before I even came to the Republic.
Athene was on the ship Excellence when I was brought aboard with a line of other children. She recognized me at once, although she had never seen this body before. She is my sister, after all. “Are you all right?” she asked.
“Never better,” I said. “You have to do something for my mortal parents. Cure the disease on their crops, send somebody through selling new livestock cheaply, and most of all let them have another baby as soon as possible.”
“I will,” she said, calmly. I hadn’t heard that tone of Olympian calm for ten years. She was dispassionate. She nodded to me, and inscribed my name in her ledger without asking me what it was. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “It’s barely been ten years. Did you get attached?”
“It feels like a lifetime,” I said.
She laughed.
“You’ll never understand this unless you do it,” I warned her.
“I’ll do it one day,” she said. “Right now they need my help too much.”
Part of my plan in experiencing mortal life from the beginning had been to avoid all the inevitable squabbling and mess involved with getting the City set up. Of course I could have stayed on Olympos and arrived as a ten-year-old at the moment the other children came, but I know that if I’d stuck around Athene would have made me run all over everywhere collecting things and getting involved in the arguments. This part worked perfectly. By the time I reached the city, everything had been built and decided. They had laid it out harmoniously, according to principles of proportion and balance. They had made some odd choices, like the half-size copy of the Palazzo Vecchio, but it all worked. It was full of variety and yet was all of a piece. Nobody could ask more of a city.
It was full of artworks Athene had rescued from disasters of history—she’d been everywhere from the Fourth Crusade to the Second World War. There were temples to all twelve gods—mine was particularly splendid, with a Praxiteles from Delos I’d always been fond of. The color choices were interesting. On the whole they had gone for white marble and unpainted statues, Renaissance style, but here and there you’d see a painted statue, or one dressed in brightly colored cloth. The kitons everyone wore were dyed and embroidered, so that the effect was of brightly coloured people in a chiaroscuro landscape. There were trees and gardens, of course, which helped soften things.
With a fine sense of irony, Athene had me assigned to Laurel house, in the dining hall of Delphi, in the Tribe of Apollo. There were twelve tribes, each devoted to a particular god, with twelve dining halls each. Each dining hall was made up of ten houses of seven children each. (These numbers weren’t in the Republic. They had some complicated Neoplatonist relevance, and had doubtless taken somebody a long time to work out. I was so glad I’d missed that discussion.) There were ten thousand and eighty children—a number which could, should one wish to, be evenly divided by every number except eleven.
Those first years in the Republic were fun. My body was a child’s body still, but it was my body, and now properly under my control. I was young and growing and I had music and exercise. I had the amusement of seeing where there were cracks in the structure that seemed so solid. Bringing together that many children with so few adults was something only somebody who knew nothing about children would have suggested. The children were wild and hard to control, and much more of this wildness was necessarily tolerated than Plato had imagined. The masters tried to set up a system where the children monitored each other, which had some limited success. But to track all the children the way they really wanted they could have done with four times as many adults—but they were limited to those who not only thought they wanted to set up the Republic, but who had read Plato in the original and prayed to Athene to help. There were probably a lot of good Christians who would have liked to have been there. As it was, there were more people from the Christian eras than I’d have guessed. I do have friends and votaries everywhere, but some times and places I seldom visit, largely for aesthetic reasons.
The thing that surprised me about the masters when I got to know them was that so few of them were from the Enlightenment. I’d have thought that era, so excitingly pagan after so much dull Christianity, would have produced a whole crop of philosophers who’d want to be here. I talked to Athene about it one day when I caught her reading Myronianus of Amastra, curled up on her favorite window seat in the library.
“There’s practically nobody here from the Enlightenment because they didn’t want this. The crown of the Republic is to get everything right, to produce a system that will produce Philosopher Kings who will know The Good.”
“With Capital Letters,” I said.
She looked down her nose at me, which wasn’t easy, since with both of us eleven years old, she was shorter than me. “Exactly. The Good with capital letters, the Truth, the one unchanging Excellence that stays the same forever. Once that’s established, the system goes on the same in ideal stasis for as long as it can continue to do so, with everyone agreeing on what is Good, what is Virtue, what is Justice, and what is Excellence. For the first time in the Enlightenment, they had the idea of progress, the idea that each generation will find its own truth, that things will keep on changing and getting better.” She hesitated. “They do pray to me, some of them. Just not for this. I find it fascinating in its own way. It’s bewildering. It’s one of those things I keep coming back to. I know I’ll never get tired of it. But you won’t find them here.”
“There are people here from ages with a notion of progress, though,” I pointed out.
“Mostly women,” Athene said. “You’ll always have the odd man who loves Plato so much he doesn’t care about progress. But the women—well, in those times women fortunate enough to be educated in Greek—and there aren’t that many of them—they have horrible circumscribed lives, and they read the Republic and they get to the bit about equality of education and opportunity and then they pray to me to be here so fast their heads spin. We have almost equal numbers of men and women among the masters, and that’s why. Many of the women are from later periods.”
“It makes sense,” I said. “And what you say about the Enlightenment is fascinating. I’ll go and hang out with Racine some more when I get home and get a better feel for it.”