“I said at the beginning that if debate can bring down the city, it deserves to fall. If they break it by debating it, then it’s not much of an approximation of the Just City, is it?” I asked.
“How do you know they’re only debating?” Pytheas asked.
“What would they be doing? Stealing quarrying explosives to blow up the walls?” I laughed. “Well, Kebes probably would, but Sokrates would think it was cheating, just as much as Krito dragging him off here was cheating. Sokrates hates cheating, he really does. He wants to do it all with dialectic, always, following logic through to where it leads. He wants to beat Athene.”
“In debate?” Pytheas asked.
“Yes, I think so. But I don’t think he’s ready yet. Meanwhile I’m painting and running and debating—if this isn’t the good life, what is?” Daringly I reached out and took his hand. He let me, and even squeezed my hand once before letting go. Sometimes I wondered if what Pytheas and I had was close to being Platonic agape or if he really didn’t want to touch me. We didn’t talk about it. But seeing him every day was part of what made this the good life for me.
“Do you want to eat with us?” he asked. For the last month we had been allowed to invite guests to our dining halls. I almost never turned down an invitation, not because I wanted different food—the food was very similar, and our Florentine food was undoubtedly the best—but because I wanted to see all the pictures. I’d eaten in Delphi several times and admired the wall paintings of the Sack of Troy and Odysseus in the Underworld.
“No, tonight I’d rather look at Botticelli,” I said. “Do you want to come with me?”
“I’d rather look at Botticelli too,” he admitted. “But there’s Klymene.”
“Have you really never spoken to her since the day of the hunt?”
“Never. She doesn’t speak to me, and I can’t start it.” He hesitated. “I suppose I could apologize, but it seems a little late.”
“She’s braver than anyone now,” I said. “She has spent the last couple of years facing up to everything, going out of her way to find ways to train in courage. She’s braver now than somebody born brave.”
“Good. But…” he looked uncomfortable.
“Oh, come and look at the Botticellis and we won’t sit with Klymene,” I said. “I think it’ll be pasta with goat cheese and mushrooms tonight.”
At midwinter the Year Six began, and with it the ceremonies of Janus, the open door that swings both ways, to past and future. I always found it an unsettling festival, the hinge of the year. That year for the first time we were given wine, well mixed with water. I did not think it had affected my reactions, but when we went out to the fire at midnight I found that the lights of the sconces and the fire were brighter than they usually were, and the faces of my companions more beautiful. There was to be a dance around the fire, and Laodike and Klymene had been chosen to be part of it. I wished them good fortune and stepped back alone to join the spectators.
Sokrates was among them, talking with Kebes and Ikaros of Ferrara. Almost as many people had crushes on Ikaros as on Pytheas—he was young, for a master, and very good-looking, with a shock of chestnut hair and a smile that lit up his whole face. He had never taken any notice of me, except once when he commended my sketch of Pytheas. They seemed deep in debate, and I did not want to interrupt. I looked around for Pytheas, and found him on the other side of the fire and surrounded. One especially beautiful girl was at his side—the blond girl who had been chained next to me long ago in the slave market. Her name was Euridike, and she belonged to Plataea. Pytheas was attending to whatever she was saying, but when he saw me his eyes softened and he began to make his way towards me through the crowd.
At that moment Sokrates too noticed me and greeted me. “Do you know Simmea?” he asked Ikaros. “She has a very sharp mind and she thinks things through.”
I glowed with his praise and was speechless.
Ikaros nodded to me. “She has a good eye for design too. Did you know we chose your cloak pins? With the bees?”
“Chose them to be the real design?” I asked, thrilled. Ikaros nodded. Then Pytheas came up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder, and Sokrates began to introduce him.
“I may not always have this, but I have this now,” I thought. “I am perfectly happy in this moment and I know it.” It wasn’t the wine, though the wine might have helped me recognize it.
Then the dance began, very beautiful and precise, which it had to be with with lifted torches and flowing draperies.
The next morning there was a great assembly in the Agora, in the exact center of the city. The city was laid out in a grid, with two diagonal streets crossing it. Whenever one street met another there was a little plaza, and often a temple or other building that was open to the whole city, and it was in those plazas that artworks usually stood. The Agora was the plaza in the centre of the city, where two straight roads and both diagonal roads all crossed. The Chamber was there, where the council met, and the big library and the temples of Apollo and Athene, and the civic offices where records were kept. It was the only space in the city big enough for all ten thousand of us to gather, and it had been designed for the purpose, being shaped as an auditorium with a rostrum at the end where speakers could be heard.
Today Krito and Tullius were at the rostrum. The other masters stood with their halls. The few who were not assigned to any one city, and Sokrates, stood behind the rostrum. Sokrates was clearly scanning the children as we stood gathered in halls and tribes, looking at all of us. It was a chilly morning and we were all in our cloaks. Our breath steamed as we stood there. I wondered if there would be snow—there had been snow in the winter of the Year Two, all melted away by mid-morning, and I had never seen it since. I thought of Botticelli’s painting, which was my only real conception of winter somewhere colder than Greece.
Tullius and Krito both made speeches welcoming us to adulthood. Then they called the name of each city, and each city advanced to the rostrum, where each child’s name was called and the child given their pin. This took hours—from just after breakfast until almost dinnertime. We cheered each name, but the cheers grew thinner as we grew colder and wearier. Florentia came about halfway through. I had known I would be given a gold pin since Sokrates had chosen me, but I still choked up as I was handed it. It was partly that it was my own design, and partly that it was gold, after all, the most precious metal. I was going to be a guardian of the city. I hardly heard how many people cheered for me. I tucked my scroll inside my kiton and fastened my cloak with the pin at once. I was very pleased, but I didn’t feel the rush of joy I had felt at the fire.
Florentia filed back into our places and Delphi went up. “They should have done it in the halls at breakfast,” Damon grumbled behind me. “There’s no need to keep all of us standing here in the cold.”
“What did you get?”
“Silver,” he said. “No surprise. There aren’t any surprises. This wasn’t worth making a fuss over. I think everyone knows where they belong.” He unrolled his scroll. “Weapon training. That’ll be fun. Horse training. Great!”
“I’m hoping for training with weapons too,” I said. Then I cheered as Pytheas was announced. Gold, of course. The sun came out for a moment as he put up his hand for his pin and made it flash. I pulled out my scroll and read it. It said only that I was to study philosophy and keep up my work at music and gymnastics. Did that mean no more art, I wondered, or did that count as one of the parts of music?
I was about to ask Klymene if she knew when I realized she was weeping. I put my arm around her. “What’s wrong? Did they make you iron after all?”