“Fascinating,” Axiothea breathed in my ear.
Ikaros stood up from where he was sitting beside Sokrates, and Tullius recognised him. “Speaking for the Censors, I’d just like to say that we are approving Aristomache’s dialogue for publication, though of course at level fifty.” That meant that only masters could read it, and eventually the golds once they reached the age of fifty. There was an approving murmur.
“I can hardly wait to read it,” Kreusa said.
Ikaros sat down again, with a swirl of his cloak. Aristomache nodded to him, and then continued. “Sokrates is of course from the earliest time of any of us here, from classical Athens. Atticus comes to us from the last days of the Roman Republic. Manlius comes from the end of the Roman Empire. Ikaros comes from the Renaissance. I come from the Victorian era. Klio comes from the Information Age. All those periods have their own ideas about freedom, and about slavery, and they are very different from each other. I have set out these different views in detail in my dialogue, which is in a way a historical survey of different ways of thinking about what freedom is and who should possess it. But those historical attitudes, fascinating as they are, don’t matter here and now, because all of us, of course, are Platonists.”
I saw Sokrates’s shoulders move as if he were considering getting up, but Ikaros put a hand on his knee. Sokrates turned his head to smile at him, and stayed in his place.
“What Plato says about slavery is quite clear. He lived in a time when slavery was commonplace. And he believed it was necessary, but that only those people should be slaves whose nature it was to be slaves. He approved of Sparta’s helots, who were not exactly slaves. He talks about slavery in the Laws, and those who are fitted for it, and using criminals for the hardest parts of it. But in the Republic he took the radical step of abolishing slavery altogether—the Noble Lie of the mingling of metals in the soul leads to everyone doing the work for which they are fittest. Plato had the work which was done by slaves in Athens done by free iron-ranked citizens in the Republic, as we have instituted here in the city. The irons are an essential part of our city—and how we agonised over assigning the right class to each child.”
There was a ripple of laughter among the masters.
“Plato’s Just City has no slaves, only citizens playing their different roles and doing their different tasks, the tasks they are fit for. Though he lived when slavery was universal, he understood that slavery itself was unjust, that the relationship between master and slave is inevitably one of injustice and inequality. He saw that slavery was bad for the masters as well as the slaves, that it takes them away from excellence. Plato understood all that. He saw it. He was as visionary and radical in this as he was in saying women could be philosophers, or that philosophers ought to be rulers. He believed some people were best fitted for doing a slave’s work, and he knew the work needed to be done, but he saw that slavery, the ownership of one person by another, had no part in the Just City, if it was truly to be just. And we believed we were following him in this. We thought we had no slaves, just people doing the work they were best fitted for.”
She paused and took a deep breath, clutching her bright cloak around her shoulders and looking out at all of us. “In the ancient world, slaves were a necessary evil. Even Plato with all his vision couldn’t imagine a world where slaves were not necessary, a world like the one Klio comes from, where machines do that work, and where they regard slavery as barbarism. But Athene could, and so she brought us machines to take the place of slaves. Tullius said last time, that if ever there were natural slaves, the workers were that.” Tullius nodded at this, and I saw others nodding around the Chamber.
“I’m sure that’s what Athene was thinking when she gave them to us, that they were unthinking tools, natural slaves. And when she gave them to us, that’s what they were. Lysias has told us all tonight that they have come to consciousness here in the city. Working here, surrounded by philosophy and excellence, they developed self-awareness and began to examine their lives. We didn’t realize this, and we inadvertently mistreated them. I want to add my own apology to that of Lysias and Klio. If we had known that they were thinking beings we would have treated them better. And now Sokrates has established that. They are no more natural slaves than any one of us. They can choose the better over the worse. They are capable of philosophy. And so are we. To be our best selves, to make the best city, as we all want to do, we have to recognize what they are and treat them justly, as Plato would have us do.”
Sokrates leapt to his feet. “I call for a vote!”
“On what?” Tullius asked, reprovingly.
“Why, on freeing the workers,” Sokrates said, as if it were the only possible question.
I put my hand up, and Kreusa, beside me, leapt to her feet, waving her hand. Axiothea did the same, and I joined them, and others were doing it, so that the whole Chamber was a sea of waving hands. We were supposed to maintain silence, but somebody began a cheer, and I joined in with the rest. Ikaros hugged Aristomache, and then everyone around her was hugging her. I didn’t see anyone sitting down, and though Tullius was calling for silence it took some time before silence and calm were restored. Aristomache had shown us the Platonic path to choose, and we had unhesitatingly chosen it, by acclamation, and as simply as that we had abolished slavery and manumitted the workers. “We are doing the right thing by them, as Plato would have wanted,” Axiothea said to me as we sat down again. She had tears in her eyes, and so did I.
Soon everyone was seated again except for Sokrates, Lysias and Aristomache, who was openly weeping. Sokrates hugged her again and she laughed through her tears.
“We still need them to do their work,” Lysias said, when Tullius recognized him.
“But no longer as slaves,” Aristomache said. “As citizens?”
“Only some of them are aware,” Lysias said. “We can’t consider them citizens yet. It’s too early. You mentioned how carefully we considered every child for their metal.”
“We need to find out what the workers want,” Sokrates interrupted.
“Proposal to set up a committee to discover what the workers want,” Tullius said.
This was carried at once. “Members of the committee?”
“Sokrates, first,” Lysias said. “He’s clearly the ideal person to work on dicovering this. He was the only person to consider their selfhood. He has already been working with them.”
“I won’t work on committees,” Sokrates said. He had consistently refused this.
“Then since we have voted for a committee and you won’t work on one, I propose that it should be a committee consisting of just you,” Lysias said.
Everyone laughed. Sokrates nodded. “Very well. I will constitute myself a solo committee to investigate the wants of the workers, and I will come back to report it to all of you when I have discovered it.”
34
SIMMEA
Walking back through the city I heard babbling and a crowing laugh, and realised that there were children a year old in the city, learning to talk. There were also workers who could already talk, if you counted engraving words into stone as talking. Some of them were only too eager to do so, while others remained silent and enigmatic. That afternoon Pytheas and I went to Thessaly at our usual time and found Sokrates a little way up the street with Kebes and a worker, a great bronze shape with four arms, treads, and no head. “They don’t use names among themselves, but I call him Crocus,” he explained to me. “He’s the first one who answered me, the one with the bulbs.”