The first children ran away the first night, ran off into the woods and had to be recaptured. After that we guarded the sleeping houses until the children were settled. We also instituted the watcher system, where one child in each house was responsible for the others and reported on them to a master. We kept them busy, which helped. Still some of them ran away from time to time. We brought them back and told them they would not be punished the first time. The Committee on Punishment was still in deliberations. Plato talks about punishments in some detail in the Laws, but he was thinking of adults, not frightened children. We tried to make them less frightened. Then another ship came, and we had four hundred children to three hundred of us.
I had never imagined the chaos ten-year-olds could cause. I could never have thought of children setting their chests alight or trying to sail off the island in them. “It will settle down,” Lysias said when I was in despair. “They’ll police themselves once it’s working properly. We just need to get it started right.”
“I think Plato was thinking of ten-year-olds as blank slates who know nothing,” I said. “These are anything but.”
“He must have been a ten-year-old himself,” Lysias said.
“Yes, but never a parent, was he?”
The first months were total chaos. We had new batches of children coming every few days. I often felt close to despair. One boy ran away and got his leg crushed beneath a robot who was trying to round them up again. That was the absolute low point, when we hurt a child and made his life worse instead of better.
After a while we got better at managing them. It became almost routine. We’d divide up the arriving children by fourteens into cities that still had room. When there were girls for Florentia I’d show them their sleeping room, teach them how to shower and use the toilets, choose a watcher, and take them to Florentia for dinner. Then I’d spend the night sleeping outside the door to make sure they didn’t escape.
Lysias was right that it did get easier. Keeping them busy all the time and too tired to keep awake and plot mischief helped. He himself was driven to exhaustion working in the palaestra—we really didn’t have enough young men. I was constantly exhausted myself, from being teacher and parent and continuing to sit on the organization committees. I didn’t have time to worry about anything except whether we were giving the children the right foundation, doing as Plato described. I worried about that all the time. “Ideally,” I kept saying, every time we had to compromise.
“In the next generation we will have enough people,” Klio said. “These children will have children, and they’ll help us with them. In that generation, the generation who come along when we are old, we’ll see our Philosopher Kings, the native speakers of the language of the Republic.”
“I have hopes for these children. Some of them are wonderful.”
“The longer it’s established, the closer we’ll get to Plato’s design and the better it will work,” Klio said, pushing her hair out of her eyes. She never let it grow long enough to braid neatly, and so except when she had just cut it, it was always falling into her face. “But I am worried about the workers. We’re overloading them. We don’t really have enough of them for everything we expect them to do. We’re going to have to find another way of doing some of those things before they break down. It’s ridiculous for them to rake the palaestras. Anyone could do that.”
“When the children are sixteen we’ll assign some of them to farming and weaving and raking the sand too,” I said.
“They could rake the sand now. Lysias and I are almost out of spare parts for the workers. We’re going to have to conserve them and use them for the essential things.”
“Can’t we ask Athene for more?” I asked.
“I suppose we could, but I don’t know where she got these from and whether it was difficult. Besides, I feel we ought to be self-reliant and go on with what we’ve got.”
“I’m sorry I can’t help, but I don’t understand how they work.”
“Nobody does, really. Not even Lysias. We’re just patching them up. But they shouldn’t be doing things we can do, like cooking and farming, when there are things we really need them for that we can’t do, like making roads and maintaining the ships and building things.”
“I’ll support you on that when we next have a Tech Committee meeting,” I said.
“The Tech Committee isn’t the problem. It’s when it comes to Chamber everybody has plans they want the workers for and nobody understands or is prepared to wait.” She sighed. “Well, some of them will just have to wait.”
It was hard work, but things did settle down. We couldn’t keep as close an eye on the children as we would have liked. I tried to know all seventy little Florentines as well as I could, so I could help them to become their best selves. Often I envied them, especially the girls, seeing them grow up with their bodies and brains exercised and thinking it entirely natural that they were as good as the boys.
I saw Ikaros at committee meetings. The Tech Committee was always busy. Ikaros did not pester me for eros, but he was always friendly and occasionally let me know that if I changed my mind he hadn’t changed his. I always said that I was happy to remain celibate. He really didn’t believe, even now, that he had done anything wrong. Ikaros had been assigned to Ferrara with Lukretia, a beautiful woman a little older than he was. There were soon rumors that he was having a less than Platonic relationship with her, in addition to whatever he was doing with Plotinus. She was from his own period, so perhaps they shared the same ideas of seduction. I hoped so. We never discussed the personal sexual morality of the masters in Chamber, though the children’s was a constant topic of debate.
The most contentious issue was age. A number of us, most of the young women and some of the older ones, wanted the age at which we instituted Plato’s practice of marriage and having wives and children in common to be kept to twenty, as Plato had written. Others wanted to lower it to sixteen. We suggested a compromise of eighteen. The real problem was that we all did want to divide the children up into their metals at sixteen. “We can’t go with Plato’s specific word,” Adeimantus said in the debate. “He says the girls should be twenty and the boys thirty, which is clearly impossible when they all started off at ten. Perhaps in future generations we can do this, but expecting celibacy until thirty seems too hard.” The vote was very close, and we decided on sixteen.
Then in the Year Five of the City, nine years after I had come there, when I was twenty-eight, there was an extraordinary Chamber meeting. Athene had brought Sokrates to us. “I brought him from Athens,” she said. “Krito asked me to help him get Sokrates away. Sokrates is an old man, and Krito and I thought it best to bring him here at this time so that he can teach the children rhetoric now that they are old enough.”
“Sokrates!” Ficino said, mopping his eyes, quite overcome.
Athene vanished. Sokrates stood before us, nut brown and weathered, with wild white hair and the toby-jug face Plato had described. “What nonsense is this?” he asked.
12
SIMMEA
It was my turn to serve breakfast the morning after we’d met Sokrates. As I took plates and porridge pots to all the tables, Ficino called me to come and sit with him when I was done. I gave a glance to my usual table, where Kebes and Klymene were sitting teasing each other, then went to join him. He was sitting at the cross-table, so when I sat down opposite him I found myself staring at Giotto’s Justice, a fine fresco to have, I suppose, extremely inspirational no doubt, but in my opinion Giotto was a moon to Botticelli’s sun.