Ficino’s wrong. I’ve written all of this already and I haven’t even got up to where I thought I’d really start, with the day my mother died.
3
ARETE
I ate lunch in Florentia that day. It is an eating hall, as it had always been. When my parents were young and there were plenty of Workers, humans didn’t need to do anything in Florentia except take their turn to serve the food one day a month. Now there are rotas for preparation and cooking and cleaning up, and I, along with everyone else who eats there, have to do one of those things every few days. The food is usually good. It was porridge and goat cheese and nuts and raisins that day. Neither of my parents were there, which wasn’t unusual. I came in from the palaestra with my friends Boas and Archimedes. We were all exactly the same age, and were training together to pass our adulthood tests in five months’ time, when we’d all turn sixteen.
We sat down to eat with Baukis and Ficino. Baukis is three months younger than the rest of us, and she’s a friend. Since Krito died, Ficino is the oldest and most generally respected person in the entire city. He’s pretty much always in Florentia. He sleeps upstairs and spends most of his days either sitting in the hall talking to people, or teaching in one of the nearby rooms. He seldom leaves Florentia now except to go to the library. He’d been tutoring Baukis while the rest of us were in the palaestra. Boas and Archimedes ate quickly and then went off to work, and my brother Phaedrus joined us. This was awkward and uncomfortable because Baukis started flirting with him, though he’s four years older than we are. After a while they left together to look something up in the library, both acting so stupid and coy that I felt myself squirming as I finished my nuts.
“It’s quite natural,” Ficino said.
I looked at him inquiringly.
“Girls mature faster, and so they are naturally attracted to men a few years older. It’s normal. It just seems strange to you because we have had such fixed cohorts that it hasn’t been possible until now.” Ficino cracked a hazelnut and popped it into his mouth. He had a face not unlike a nut, wizened and brown.
I didn’t at all want to talk to him about what girls were attracted to. “Why did you do it that way, then?”
“Plato,” he said, and held up a warning hand when he saw me open my mouth to protest. “Plato said to begin with ten-year-olds, and if you do that you will have a generation all the same age. It was one of those things that just happened that way. It was only ever intended to be for the first generation.”
“It was only ever intended as a thought experiment,” I said. Maia had told me that.
“Yes, but here it is, and you and I are living in it.” Ficino grinned.
I swallowed the last of my porridge and gathered our plates together to take to the kitchen. “I should go. I have to learn my lines.”
“Something Plato really wouldn’t have approved of,” Ficino said.
“I know. I’ve never properly understood why he hated drama so much.”
“He thought it was bad for people to feel induced emotions, false emotions.”
I sat down again. “But it’s not. It can be cathartic—and it can be a way of learning about emotions.”
“Plato didn’t want people to learn those emotions. He wanted his ideal guardians to only understand honorable emotions.” Ficino shook his head. “He had a very hopeful view of human nature, when you think about it.”
I laughed. “He did if he thought jealousy and grief and anger could be excluded because we never saw The Myrmidons. I never saw any play until two years ago, unless you count the re-enactments of the Symposium on Plato’s birthday, but I still felt all those things.”
Ficino nodded. “But that’s what he really thought, and so that’s why we excluded drama. Or rather, since almost all of the original Masters were people who loved the art of the ancient world, and much of what survived was drama, we decided to keep drama in the library but not allow it to be acted. Reading it quietly, we thought, wouldn’t have such an emotional effect.”
“Why did you change your minds?” I asked. “Not that I’m not glad you did, because I’m really excited about playing Briseis at the Dionysia.”
“We didn’t change our minds. It was debated several times, and always decided against, until two years ago.”
I was about to ask what happened two years ago, then I realized: the first cohort of Young Ones had become old enough to vote. “Are plays still banned in the other cities?”
“As far as I know they’re allowed in Sokratea and the City of Amazons, but banned in Psyche and Athenia.”
“And is there any difference in how philosophical people are?”
Ficino laughed. “How would you measure that?”
I opened my mouth to answer, but he held up his hand again.
“No, think about it. Write me a paper on it, either an essay or a dialogue, as you prefer.”
I groaned, but only because it was work. It sounded like a really interesting question to think about. I also wanted to talk to other people about it, most especially Maia, and Simmea. I bade farewell to Ficino, gathered up the plates, and took them to the kitchen, thinking about it. How would you measure the general level of philosophy in a population—or even in an individual? There might be simple tests, like how many times books were checked out of the library, but that would only show how many people were studying philosophy, not how philosophical they were. It wasn’t my turn to clean up, but they were short-handed so I helped for a while, still thinking about it. Some people were naturally philosophical. Others were not. That’s why everyone was divided into their rightful metals, gold and silver and bronze and iron. My friend Erinna said she was glad to be a silver, relieved and pleased.
How philosophical a city was could be simply measured by how many golds it had, except that originally in the City (and even now in Psyche and Athenia) the proportions were worked out numerologically rather than justly. That had been one of the more telling points Sokrates made in the Last Debate. But in Psyche and Athenia they believed that numerology was magical, that numbers described true Forms underlying the world. And Father said he didn’t know whether they did or not, and Mother said they had an inner logic and so perhaps they did, but not the way that Proclus and Plotinus wrote.
I hadn’t read the Republic yet, but Ficino had told us Plato said that a Just City would hold justice and the pursuit of excellence as the highest good. He said that as such a city declined, it would become a timarchy, meaning that the citizens would prize honor above justice. Sparta had been a timarchy, and Plato thought it better than oligarchy, the next stage of decline, where the citizens would prize money and possessions above honor. I wondered what the signs of starting to prize honor above wisdom and justice might be, and how that could be measured.