“The issue of the Lucians,” I said. I’d been thinking how to address this. “First Pytheas will explain succinctly what happened on the voyage, and then Aristomache will explain what they were doing and what they want. Questions afterward. I’ll open up the debate to the whole room and we’ll have plenty of time for everyone. But let’s hear this quietly first.” I had caught both of them on my way to lunch and asked them to be ready.
Everyone in the room probably knew what Pytheas told them, but there were still some surprised gasps as he went through it. Then Aristomache came up and described the Lucian mission. “We have reading, plumbing, pottery, iron working, medicine, Yayzu, and Plato,” she said “How can we sit safely on an island while there are people out there who have none of these things? Join us, and help us spread civilization.”
Many agreed with her message, though some of us wanted to leave Jesus out of the lists of benefits. Kallikles spoke in support of Aristomache: “I was really shaken by what I saw on Naxos,” he said, describing the ignorance and poverty of the village he had visited. “People shouldn’t be living like that when we can help them. The Lucians like Adrastos prove it can be done. We should be doing it.”
Others, especially the Athenians, were horrified at the very notion. “Athene put us here where the volcano would wipe out every trace of what we do. We can’t go running around the Mediterranean interfering with everything! Who knows what harm it might do!”
I was sympathetic with that view myself. So was Klio. “We don’t know how history works,” she said. “But consider that it might be a wax tablet like the ones we use every day. After it has been written, it can be erased and rewritten. If we step out of the margins where Athene has set us, we could wipe out everything that comes after. What Kallikles said about helping those poor people sounds entirely good. But we don’t know enough. What if the Trojan War needs to come out of the poverty and dirt we saw in the Kyklades? If so we would be wrong to change it, however painful seeing it may be. What if people handed the secret of iron-making will be content to make iron forever and never move on to steel, as they would have if they’d discovered it for themselves? And we don’t know, we can’t know, what matters, or what is and isn’t safe to change. We have seen too much here of what comes from good intentions and ignorance. We should leave them alone to find their own destiny and stay here on our island.”
Everyone had their own theory of history, and many aired them. Ikaros was absolutely sure that Athene wouldn’t have put us here if there was any danger. He believed in Providence, and his argument was essentially that we could only do good by trying to increase excellence.
Finally Patroklus argued that the people of the Aegean had their own Fate and that we had no right at all to change that, or to judge them for living differently from the way we thought right. “You have described their art. What right have we to impose our ideas of art on them instead? Perhaps they have religions and philosophies that are equally valuable. I’m not arguing in support of Klio, that we don’t know what it’s safe to change. I agree with that, but my point is different. What right have we to judge and to say what is better or worse?”
I called an end to the day without calling for a vote. “Lots of people haven’t had a chance to speak yet. We’ll resume in the morning.”
“You’re not setting up a committee on the nature of time?” Pytheas asked as I stepped down.
“Why, do you have any pertinent information for it?” He was always such a funny mixture. I remembered him as a boy, so intent on everything, so serious. They were all my children.
“Nothing that I want to talk about right now,” he said. “But it seems to me that the debate has been all about that, and only what Patroklus said was about whether we want to help.”
“I think there would be a clear majority for helping if not for the worry about time,” I said. “The suggestion that the Lucian cities are the cities Plato heard about was popular.”
“I suspect it’s what Simmea would have wanted.” He sighed. “It’s never easy, is it? But I think you’re doing very well in the chair.”
Ikaros was waiting on the steps when I came out. The sun was setting, and in this light I had to touch his arm to get his attention.
“Where shall we go?” he asked.
“Let’s go to my house,” I said.
“Oh marvelous!” he said.
“My house isn’t so wonderful,” I said, taking his arm to lead the way.
“But if you’ll invite me there it means you have forgiven me. Some things your pupils said led me to believe you might not have. That’s really why I wanted to speak to you.”
I didn’t want to say that he was old and almost blind and I felt sorry for him and not at all afraid any more. “Of course I forgive you. I forgave you years ago, before I left the City of Amazons. What pupils?”
“Pytheas said something very gnomic. And Arete said you were still upset about me saying you were afraid to love,” he said.
“I do think of that sometimes, wondering if it’s true,” I admitted. We came to my house. I pushed the door open and turned on the light. “I think it made me uncomfortable because it was a little bit true. If it wasn’t partly true it wouldn’t have stung.”
He stood inside the dim room. I guided him to the bed, where he sat, cautiously. “And it was my fault you were afraid,” he said.
“Yes,” I said, as I mixed wine. “But it was a long time ago, and I have forgiven you. And I realized when Ficino died how much I loved him all this time.” I gave him a cup of wine, putting it into his hand.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“We can’t undo the past. We go on from where we are.” I sat down on a cushion on the floor, against the wall. “And here you are back in the original city, and in my house. Tell me about your eyes. How much can you see?”
“I do all right in sunlight,” he said. “Though I mistake things even then, as you saw this afternoon. It’s grown much worse this last year. But it’s been three years now since I was able to read.”
“Oh Ikaros, how terrible for you! I’m so sorry.”
“It was Crocus’s fault really, not yours,” he said. I’d only meant to convey sympathy, not admit fault, but if it was translating Aquinas that had made him lose his vision it was indeed partly my fault. “I’ve wondered sometimes if it’s Providence, if it’s punishment for what I did to you and destroying your joy.”
“No,” I said at once, then wondered. Could it be? “I have had plenty of joy, even though I was afraid. And I still do.” And I can read, I thought, looking at my bookshelves.
“I think it would have happened more quickly and more directly,” he said. “If this is a punishment for anything it’s probably for buying those books.”
“Forbidden books,” I said. “How did Crocus know you had them?”
“And he was there. I told Sokrates about them. Sokrates couldn’t read Aquinas, because it was in Latin, of course.” He hesitated, and sipped his wine. “Speaking of Latin and forbidden books, could I ask you to read something to me?”
“Of course,” I said, with no hesitation.
He pulled a book out of his kiton. It was black and had a cross on the cover. I recognized it immediately as a Bible. “It’s Jerome’s Latin Bible,” he said.
Written on the cover was Versio Sacra Vulgata. It was the Vulgate, the Latin Bible of the Catholic Church. I had heard about it but never seen it before. We didn’t allow it in the Republic, of course, and I had only read the King James Version when I was young.
“I thought you allowed Bibles in Amazonia?”