“More than a hundred years from me,” I said.
“And even in my time it’s a wearisome business,” she said. “It’s not that I want to die, but not being allowed to offer to die for my country means that my country doesn’t consider me a true citizen.”
We young women from the Centuries of Progress were one clear group. The men of the Renaissance were another. The Neoplatonists made a third. This was Kylee’s name for the group led by Plotinus and sharing a particular mystical interpretation of Plato based around numerology. They called themselves simply Platonists, of course. Plotinus was the white-bearded man who had asked the question about three-part souls when we first arrived.
There were also many Romans, who could have been considered a fourth group except that they never agreed about anything and so could not be thought of as a faction. I was delighted to find Marcus Tullius Cicero among them, and his friend Titus Pomponius Atticus. Atticus was charming; he reminded me a little of my father. How I wished my father could have been here—but he would never have prayed to a pagan goddess. When Atticus introduced me to Cicero, whom he called Tullius, I found he was less delighted to meet me. He was not among those who believed Plato on the equality of women. He was flattered when he found how much of his work I had read, and how high his reputation stood in my century, but he could never really consider me, or any of us women, as people to be taken seriously.
The difficulties and complications of actually putting Plato’s ideas into practice were immense. But we had Athene, whom we all addressed as Sophia, meaning “wisdom.” She had brought the workers—automata that could follow orders and build and plant crops and perform even more wonders. “They come from the future. They are here to labor for you,” she said.
Very few of us had seen anything like them before. Kylee said they were robots, and “workers” was a good translation of that. She said they were more advanced than any such things in her own day.
We formed into committees to work on different aspects of the Republic. We came together to report on progress in formal sessions, which we came to call Chamber. At first we had just that one hall, where we all slept in drafts on the cold marble floor. It was lucky it was summer. We drank water from a spring, and had the workers dig trenches for latrines. Then we had them build a fountain, and bathrooms, and kitchens. Few of us knew how to cook, but fortunately the workers had some limited abilities in that area.
As we had, as yet, no philospher kings, and as we could acknowledge no leader but Athene, we decided that for the time being, when we did not agree, we would vote on an issue. Athene smiled at this. The first divisive issue that came to a vote was names. We voted that those of us with inappropriate names would adopt new names, and that we would do the same with the children who came to us, naming them from the Dialogues and from Greek mythology. Kylee and some others felt strongly against this, but in the vote after the debate, the majority carried the day. I adopted the name Maia, for my birth month, and for the mother of Hermes. Kylee took the name Klio, as being the closest she could come to her original name. We also agreed that we would have one unique name each. The Romans and others who had multiple appropriate names would limit themselves to just one.
For the first time ever I was fully engaged in life. I cared about everything. I read the Republic over and over, I took part in debates in Chamber, I served on committees, I had opinions and was listened to. It was marvellous. I woke up every morning on the cold floor of the hall, happy simply to be alive. I daily thanked God, the gods, Athene, for allowing me to be there and part of all of it. That’s not to say that it couldn’t be infuriating.
I served on the Technology Committee. We had long debates about how much technology to allow. Some of us felt that we should do it with the technology of the day, or that which Plato would have understood. But we already had the workers, and without workers we should have needed slaves. The workers needed electricity, which was produced from the sun. Sufficient electricity to feed the workers would also provide good lighting, and a certain amount of heating and cooling. “The advantage of that,” Klio said, when she presented our recommendations to the whole Chamber, “will be to keep the library at a constant temperature to better protect the books.”
Most of the older people and all of the famous ones were men, but most of the people who understood technology in any way were young women. Though we had nominal equality, there were always those like Tullius who would not accept us as equals. In addition I saw in other women and detected in myself a tendency to defer to older men—as I had always deferred to my father. We had grown up in slavery and bore the marks of our shackles, as Klio said when I talked to her about this, but we were to raise a generation in the hope of true freedom. The committee on technology was almost entirely composed of young women, with only one man, the Dominican, whose name was now Ikaros. Somehow, imperceptibly, because of this, technology came to be seen among the masters as feminine and unimportant. We voted to have lights but not to have heating and cooling, except for the library. We voted to have plumbing everywhere, but only with cold water, which seemed like the morally better choice, and what Plato would have wanted. We made up Greek names for shower-baths and toilets.
Ikaros served on several of my committees—indeed, he had volunteered for every committee as they were being set up. He had been accepted onto an improbable number of them, and served on all those that did not meet at the same time. He seemed to have boundless energy and enthusiasm, as well as being notably younger than most of the other men. He was also extremely good-looking, with a wonderful smile and long chestnut hair. Working together so much, we became friends. He seemed to be everyone’s friend, moving through all the different circles charming everyone. He was even a favorite with Athene, who seemed to unbend a little when she spoke to him.
Plotinus and the Neoplatonists dominated the committee designing the physical form and organization of the city. They announced that Athene would bring in mature trees, and we voted that through. Then they proposed that there would be ten thousand and eighty children, divided into twelve tribes, each divided into a hundred and forty-four eating houses that would each be named after a famous city of civilization. We voted this through without dissent. A hundred and forty-four eating houses allowed everyone to get their favourite cities mentioned. The proposal was made that the eating houses be decorated in the style of their cities, which I thought a charming idea. There would be two masters attached to each eating house, as far as possible one man and one woman. “Are there any Florentine women here?” I asked Ikaros after a Tech Committee meeting. I hadn’t noticed any in their group.
“Not that I can think of,” he said. “Why, do you want to be attached to the Florence house?”
“I loved it so much. And it’s where I found Plato. I never got to Greece, only as far as Italy.”
“Talk to Ficino. He’s bound to be the man who gets Florence.” He sounded a trifle envious. Ficino’s name was now formally Fikinus, but everyone went right on addressing him as Ficino.
We voted that we would all adopt the kiton, and those who knew how to wear one instructed the rest. The workers wove the cloth for them. I had lessons in how to don one from Krito himself, the friend of Sokrates. Once I was used to it I found it charmingly practical and comfortable. The kitons had an unexpected benefit—once we were all dressed alike, the factions among us were less immediately visible, if no less real.