“Well it seems to me that there are a few issues that need to be cleared up before I’d call this the good life. First there’s the question of choice. I’d say there can’t be justice when people have no choice, do you agree? I’m thinking of people in prison, or condemned to row in a ship, shackled to the oar.”
“The sentence that sent them there might be just,” Athene countered.
“Yes, that could be so, but in their situation when they’re there, when they’re compelled to stay, or to row, they’ve had freedom taken from them and they’re under the overseer’s lash. There’s no justice there, or don’t you agree?”
“I agree, subject to what I said before.”
“And if the sentence that sent them there wasn’t just, if the judge was bribed or the evidence was false, or if they were captured by pirates and chained to the oar, then there’s no justice?”
“No, in that case there’s no justice. The punishment is making them worse people, not better, and in addition the passing of the unjust sentence is making the judge worse.”
“Then I submit that the case is the same in this city, that the masters chose to be here but the children did not.” Sokrates leaned back a little as if to give her space to reply.
“The children were rescued from slavery,” she said.
“They were bought as slaves and brought here and given no choices about how to live.”
“Children are never given such choices.”
“Really?” Sokrates asked. “But I thought souls chose their lives before birth, as Plato wrote in the Phaedo.”
I smiled, hearing Sokrates cite that dialogue he disliked so much. Athene glared over at me, guessing I must have confirmed this for Sokrates. She caught me smiling, and glared even harder.
“Yes, that’s true,” she admitted, reluctantly. The audience let out a sigh, as if they had all been holding their breath through the pause waiting to hear.
“Then in a way the children did choose to come here,” Sokrates said.
“It’s not true,” Kebes burst out, from where he stood down near the rostrum. Simmea, next to me, winced. Kebes really was recalcitrant. He had to hold on to his anger and deny that he had in any way chosen to be here, even when he heard it from the mouth of Athene herself.
She ignored him. “They did. And once they were here we looked after them as if we were their loving parents with their best interests at heart. If you ask them now they are grown, they will say they are happy they came here.”
“Some of them will,” Sokrates said, and his eyes sought out Simmea, who stood straight at my side. “Will you agree with that, Simmea?”
“Assuredly, Sokrates,” she said, speaking up plainly. There was a ripple of laughter.
“But some of them will not.” He looked at Kebes, who was near him, at the front. “Kebes?”
“I never chose to come here. I have never been reconciled to having been dragged from my home and bought as a slave and brought here. I have never had any choice about staying. I still hate and resent the masters, and I am not the only one.” His voice was passionate and clear. The crowd were making unhappy murmurs. Athene looked daggers at Kebes.
Sokrates spoke again, and at once Athene’s eyes were back on him. “It’s a slippery argument to say that our souls gave consent before birth, because it would be possible to use that to justify doing anything to anybody. We don’t remember what our souls chose or why. We don’t know what part of our lives we wanted and what part we overlooked, or agreed to endure for the sake of another part. It may be a kind of consent, but it’s not at all the same as giving active consent here and now.”
“I agree,” Athene said. “But in the case of the children, bringing them here has made them better people. It is the opposite of the case of the galley slave.”
“Except that even if it did good to them, it made you and the masters worse because you bought them as slaves and disregarded their choices, as in the case of the unjust judge who condemned the slave.”
“I do not think I am worse for it,” she said, confidently.
“So? Well, let me ask others. Maia? Do you think you are better or worse because you bought the children?”
Maia jumped when she was addressed. “Worse, Sokrates,” she admitted, after a moment.
“Aristomache?”
“Worse,” she said immediately.
“Atticus?”
“Worse,” he said, speaking out loudly. “And since reading Aristomache’s dialogue, I have come to believe that I am worse because I kept slaves in my own time.”
“But whether or not it made anyone’s soul less just, I agree that once you had the children here you treated them as best you knew, and certainly as Plato suggested,” Sokrates said.
“Yes, we did,” Athene agreed.
“But the next question is whether Plato was a good authority for these things. Did he have children?”
“You know he did not.”
“There are other ways of knowing about how to bring people up than being a parent. And indeed, I’ve read that after I knew him he became a teacher, he had a school in Athens, a famous school, the Academy, which became the very name for learning. Was it for children?”
“It was for older people. A university, not a school.”
“So what made him an expert in the education of younger people?” He hesitated for an instant and then moved on before Athene answered. “Nothing. And on the same grounds, I could ask what cities he founded. And I could ask what happened when he tried to involve himself in the politics of Syracuse, what wonderful results he had in that city? And similarly, his pupil Aristotle taught Alexander the Great, and Alexander did found cities and no doubt we see in Alexander the pattern of the philosopher king you wish to create, and in his cities the pattern of justice?”
“Below the belt,” Simmea muttered. I grinned. She was completely caught up in the debate.
“Plato had a dream which was never tried until now, but now that it has been tried it is successful,” Athene said, wisely avoiding the issues of Syracuse and Alexander.
“So you brought the children here and put them into an experiment, in the hope it would be successful,” Sokrates said.
“Yes,” Athene conceded.
“And you believe it has been?”
“Yes.”
“Successful at maximizing justice?”
“Yes,” she insisted.
“Well, I think there are other points of view possible on that subject. To take just one aspect of this supposedly Just City consider the festival of Hera, which instead of increasing happiness is visibly making everyone miserable. Human relationships can’t work like that. Eating together is different from sharing eros together. I’ve seen people made unhappy by being drawn together, or unhappy by being drawn together once and never again.” Again Sokrates was seeking out people in the crowd. I was grateful he did not look at us. “Damon?”
“Yes, Sokrates?”
“Is the system of having wives and children in common making you happy, or unhappy?”
“Unhappy, Sokrates,” Damon said, clearly.
“Auge?”
“Unhappy, Sokrates,” she said promptly.
“Half the children are cheating on the system, and almost nobody likes it. Plato knew a lot about love and was notably eloquent on the subject, far more eloquent than I could ever be, though he set the words in my mouth. How could he then set up such a travesty? But you will say, will you not, that the purpose of the system is not to maximize individual happiness but the justice of the whole city?”
“Yes,” she said.
“And how does this maximize justice?”
“People do not form individual attachments but are attached to all the others, and people do not care more about their own children than all the children of the city.”