“It’s good to see you want it,” I said.
“Yes, I was so sick for the first three months.” She patted her belly, which was just starting to show. We were all excited about the first babies. “Now I’m starving all the time.”
We settled ourselves in my study. There was a new hanging on the wall in gold and green and brown which some of the Florentines I’d been teaching weaving had given to me. The cloth wasn’t as even as the worker-made cloth, but they had sewn the different coloured stripes together in a charming way. I stroked the edge of it as I sat down. “Problems in Hyssop?” I asked.
Klymene swallowed her bread. “No. Well, yes, the same thing, Auge and Iphis, you know. Nothing different.”
“You should insist that they sleep in their own beds,” I said.
“I do. But it disrupts everybody. And even needing to keep insisting is disruptive. I wonder sometimes—well, that’s what I came to see you about.” She took a deep breath. “Who decided which metals were strongest in our souls?”
“Ficino and I did,” I said. “With advice from other masters who knew you.”
“Do you think you might have made any mistakes?” she asked.
“We thought about it very hard and talked about it a lot, and we don’t think we did. Why are you asking? Is it because you think Auge and Iphis aren’t behaving like philosophers?”
“No,” she said. “It’s me. This is so difficult.”
“You’re only seventeen,” I said. “Nobody expects you to be perfect right away. You have new responsibilities, and they’re difficult, but you’re dealing with them. It can be easy to feel discouraged when things go wrong, but philosophy will help. And we weren’t just looking at how you are now, we were looking at how you’re going to develop.” It was why it had been so difficult and such a tremendous responsibility.
“You don’t understand.” Klymene picked up an olive and turned it over and over in her hand, staring down at it. “Can I talk about before we came here?” she asked, not looking up.
“You shouldn’t,” I said. “But you can if you really need to. If it will help me understand what you’re worried about.”
“I was a slave,” she said, as if it cost her an effort to admit it. After she said it, she looked up from the olive at last to meet my eyes.
“There’s no shame in that. You all were,” I said, surprised.
“But I was born a slave. Most of the others were captured, or sold into captivity quite a short time before they were brought here. My mother was a slave, and I was born one and grew up one. All that time, I never even imagined being free. I think it did something to me. I think I have shackles on my soul and a slave’s heart, and I’m not really worthy to be a gold.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said, gently. I ate a piece of cheese while thinking what to say. “You’ve been here for seven years, you’ve been trained. You were very young when you came. Nothing that happened before counts.”
“Yes, it does,” she said. She was close to tears. “Can I please explain?”
“Go on then,” I said.
“My name has always been Klymene. I was born in Syracuse, at the time of the Carthaginian wars. My mother was a bath slave. She was Carthaginian. Her name was Nyra. I don’t know who my father was, but it was probably our master, whose name was Asterios.”
I listened, trying to imagine a life like that. “Was he unkind to you?”
“No, he petted me and indulged me when he saw me, which wasn’t all that often. He was Greek, of course. I look like my mother. I imagined I would grow up to have a life like hers, serving at the bath, sleeping with the master. It didn’t seem so bad. I carried water and bath oils. I was learning massage. I spoke Greek, and Punic, that was the slave language, and a little bit of Latin. Nobody taught me to read, though they easily could have. There were slave clerks in the house, but they were all men. They never thought of it. I never thought of it.”
“For most of history it was really unusual for women to be taught to read,” I said. Nobody except Plato had seen that we were human. It still made me angry to think of all those wasted lives.
“I was pretty, like my mother, and if I had dreams it was that some man would fall in love with me because of that and I could cajole him into treating me well. It’s what my mother did. What she was teaching me.” She shook her head and put the olive down on her untouched plate. “The overseer was called Felix. He terrorized us all. He had a dog on a chain at the door to the slave quarters. I hated to pass it, it always leapt at me snarling, and Felix laughed and said it would eat me up one day. But that’s not what happened.”
“What did happen?” I got up and poured her a cup of wine, and one for myself. Imagining her early life was distressing; living through it must have been appalling. I thanked Athene in my heart that I had been so lucky.
“When I was nine years old, my master caught my mother in bed with Felix. She had no choice about it. Felix had a dog and a whip, and what did she have? But Asterios didn’t see it that way. He didn’t punish Felix, he punished her. He whipped her in the courtyard in front of everyone, to punish her supposed lusts. Then, to punish her more, he had me whipped. And then immediately, the same afternoon, he dragged me down to the harbor and sold me onto a slave ship going east, where there would be no chance that my mother would ever see me again.” She picked up the cup and took a deep swallow. “He didn’t even say so to me. He said it to the slaver he was selling me to, and I heard. I wasn’t even a person to him. He shook me when I tried to speak, to remind him how he had always been good to me. And he slapped me hard when I bit his hand. I was just a thing to him, a thing he could use on my mother. He petted me to make her loving to him, and then he sold me away to punish her. He didn’t see me as human, let alone as a daughter. He had his real family on the other side of the house. I’d served at his real daughter’s baths. I wasn’t real, do you see?”
“You were real,” I said. I was shaken. “You were absolutely real and you were a child and I’m so glad we rescued you from that.” I wished we could do the same for every slave there ever was, that we could buy them and bring them here to live free.
“You rescued my body, but part of my soul is still there,” she said. “It’s why I ran, that time, with the boar, because I’m slave-hearted. And now I can’t keep order in Hyssop. I’m just no good.”
“You’re keeping order. And you’ve worked and worked to become brave!” I wanted to hug her, but she held herself in a way that didn’t invite it.
“Yes, but others didn’t have to do that,” she said, fiercely. “And I wonder what else there is like that about me, where my soul is still stuck there. With being the watcher, I keep wanting to cajole instead of being decisive. And that’s not the worst of it. I always thought like a slave. I wanted to please the masters, not to seek for the truth. I’d see Simmea arguing with Ficino, going after a point like a terrier, and at first I’d just be amazed that she dared, and that he didn’t slap her down for it. I don’t know how long it was before I understood that it was what he wanted.”
“But you did understand,” I said.
“Yes, but you don’t see. I still thought like a slave. I was trying to give you what you wanted, not trying to become my best self. And you didn’t see that, you didn’t, you made me a gold and I’m not fit to be a guardian, it was all pretense. I was pretending to be free, but in my heart I’m still a slave.”
I tried to make sense of this. “Are you saying that you’re still trying to please us instead of striving for excellence?”
She hesitated, and touched her belly. “No. I realized what I was doing and why it was wrong. My duty—wanting to do my duty, even when I could have got out of it without anyone knowing. Reading Plato, debating with Kebes about freedom and choices, and especially thinking about the baby, about him or her growing up in the city. I finally realized I am free. And I do love wisdom, and I do love the truth. I’ve been coming to that for some time. And I can’t build it on a lie. That’s why I’ve come to you now. To confess my deception. Before the baby’s born. I want to become my best self, and I don’t want to deceive you any more.”