We found Sokrates’s house with no difficulty. “I wonder why he called it Thessaly?” Pytheas mused. “He came from Athens.”
“He said last night that he had asked Krito what he would do in Thessaly, and Krito dragged him here,” I said. “I suppose he means that he’s thinking of the city as Thessaly.” I scratched on the door, and to my surprise it was opened immediately.
In the Symposium Alkibiades says that Sokrates looks like Silenus, and seeing him in daylight I could see that it was true. He has the same big nose and bulbous forehead and little goat-beard. But nobody would care how ugly he was once they’d seen his eyes and his smile. He smiled now, seeing us. “Why, Simmea and Kebes, how good to see you again. And who is your friend?”
Then he stepped forward to get a better look at Pytheas, and stopped dead, his head frozen in position jutting forward and staring. I hadn’t expected anything like this. He and Pytheas stared at each other for a long moment but neither spoke. “Do you recognise him?” Kebes asked. There was indeed something in his expression that looked like recognition.
“Do I?” Sokrates asked Pytheas, softly.
“My name is Pytheas, of the house of Laurel, the hall of Delphi and the tribe of Apollo,” Pytheas said, inclining his head. “And you, sir, are Sokrates the son of Sophronikos, than whom, I have long said, there is nobody more wise.”
“I am more delighted to meet you than you can imagine,” Sokrates said. “Perhaps now we will be able to find some answers. Come in, all of you. Come through to the garden.”
The house was much like Hyssop house. It had a bedroom of the same size, but with only one bed and one chest, with no other furnishings, and an identical fountain room. A door led out of it into a sheltered courtyard full of plants. There was a little statue of a Herm under the branches, which I noticed especially because it was made of limestone and not marble.
“Let us sit here in the shade of this olive tree and converse. If any of us are dry there is water close at hand.”
We sat on the ground under the tree. Sokrates, although he was old, had no difficulty in sitting or in crossing his legs comfortably. “Well, my friends,” Sokrates began, leaning back against the trunk of the tree, “For I believe as you are here that I can safely call you my friends. We began a discussion last night about the nature of trust, which we were forced to break off because of the lateness of the hour. This seems like the perfect time to resume it.”
“Have you been reading Plato’s dialogues?” Pytheas asked.
Sokrates laughed. He laughed like a happy child, absolutely irrepressibly. “How could I resist?” he asked. “You might be able to imagine what it is like to fall asleep in a prison cell and awake to find yourself in an experimental colony which one of your pupils claimed you had proposed yourself. I thought at first that it was a ridiculous dream, but as it keeps going on and becoming more and more detailed I have decided for the time being to treat it as reality and go along with it on that basis.”
“It’s not a dream,” I said. “That is, not unless I’m dreaming too. And I’ve been here for years.”
“I’ll grant, Simmea, that it is not your dream. But have you ever been a participant in somebody else’s dream, and could you prove you were not? I’ll let you off that one, for I feel it’s beyond human capacity.” He glanced at Pytheas again, and Pytheas smiled sideways at him.
“I believe it’s nobody’s dream,” Pytheas said. “And you do have the comfort of knowing you won’t be forgotten. People will still be having Socratic dialogues in thousands of years.”
“Not forgotten, perhaps, but what have they done to my memory! As for the question of the dream—well, that brings us back to the interesting question of trust. Who can we trust, and how do we decide? Do you trust each other?”
“No,” Kebes said, looking at Pytheas.
“But then we have established that you are not inclined to trust anyone,” Sokrates said. “Simmea?”
“I think that if we can trust anyone then we can trust each other,” I said.
“Well then, is it possible to trust anyone? To begin with, can we trust the gods?”
“Which gods?” Kebes asked.
Sokrates looked sideways at Pytheas. “We know, as Plato could not have known, that Athene at least is real, and much as Homer portrayed her. So how about Homer’s gods?”
“Then who can we trust if the gods disagree?” I asked. “Like at Troy, when the gods are taking sides in the battle. Odysseus could trust Athene but not Poseidon.”
“Can we trust that the gods are good, or is it more complicated than that?” Sokrates asked. “Is Athene good and Poseidon bad? Certainly if Homer speaks truly then Poseidon was bad for Odysseus. But he was good to Theseus, who was his son.”
“You’re using a very unplatonic idea of goodness,” I said, surprised. “Ficino says Plato says Goodness is absolute, not relative.”
“Considering relative goodness, I believe it’s more complicated, as you say,” Pytheas said to Sokrates. “The gods have their own agendas that may conflict.”
“Ah,” Sokrates said. “And how may we know if we are caught up in such a conflict, and if so, which god to trust?”
“Juno, that is Hera, was terrible to Aeneas,” I said. “He was much harassed both on land and sea because of the unrelenting rage of cruel Juno,” I quoted, naturally falling into Latin to do so.
“I can see I’m going to have to learn that infuriating language,” Sokrates said. “But not today. Translation, please.”
I repeated it in Greek. It seemed astonishing that he was so wise but did not know Latin. But Virgil wasn’t born until five hundred years after he died. In his time, Rome had been no more than a little village, founded by Romulus and Remus only a few centuries before, unheard-of away from Italy. Then Rome had grown great and spread civilization over the world, so that even when she fell, her language had preserved it in human minds, so that now—except that now in this moment Rome did not even exist. Aeneas, if he had even been born, had not yet sailed from Troy. “It’s like looking through the wrong end of a telescope,” I said. “History, from here.”
“You have at least had five years to learn about it. I’ve barely been here half a month.”
“Are you a master?” Kebes asked.
“What an interesting question,” Sokrates said, patting Kebes’s hand. “What is a master, in this city?”
“The masters came here from all over time, drawn by their shared wish to found the Just City,” Kebes recited. It was what we had been taught.
“They did this with the aid of Pallas Athene,” Pytheas added, in the manner of somebody politely adding a footnote, but Kebes frowned at him. Sokrates nodded to himself. “So it would seem that I am not a master, as I did not read Plato’s Republic nor pray to Athene to bring me here to work at setting it up.”
“But you’re not a child,” Kebes said.
“I’m seventy years old, I’m certainly not a child. Nor am I a youth, and still less a maiden. But perhaps I am wrong about this. Perhaps in this city I am a child. Is there nobody here but masters and children?”
“Unless you count the workers,” I said. “They are mechanical, but they seem to have purpose.”
“They’re just devices,” Pytheas said. “They don’t will what they do.”
“Do you know that?” Sokrates asked.
Pytheas closed his mouth, looking dumbfounded. After a minute said: “It’s my opinion and what I’ve been taught.”
“We will leave the question of the workers for now, if we may, and let us say that of human beings, there are in the city only youths and maidens, whom you are accustomed to call children, and masters?”