“Death is a terrible thing,” he said.
“What do I have to do to not die?” I blurted. I’d often wondered about this, but never asked directly.
“Not die?”
“To become a god. I’m your daughter. I could.” I hoped I didn’t sound childish or hubristic. Fortunately, he took me seriously.
“You could. Several of my sons have.” It sounded so strange to hear him mention sons and know he didn’t mean my brothers. “You’d have to decide to do it, and you’d have to find your power, and you’d have to find a new and original way of being Arete. Being excellent, that is!” He was still weeping, but his eyes were focused on me now. “You’d still have to die. If you became a god it would happen afterward.”
“But you have a body when you’re a god?”
“Yes, but it’s not the same as a mortal body. Nothing’s the same. I’ll have to die to get back to being a god. It’s the only way. What you should do, if you want to be a god, is to find something to be responsible for, something you can take charge of. That’s what my sons who are gods did. It could be something that no god cares about now, or it could be something of mine that I’d devolve onto you. It would have to be something that needed a patron, something you cared about. And then after you died, instead of going on to Hades your soul would go to Olympos and you’d become a god. But you might prefer to stay mortal and go on to have new lives. You get to start again and forget. And there are things humans can do that gods can’t—humans can do whatever they can, but we’re bound by Father’s edicts—or, if we break them, we are subject to punishment. There’s a lot to be said for being mortal … but it is also awful, I’ll admit.” He wiped his hand over his eyes and tried to smile. “I would still grieve if I were my proper self, but it wouldn’t swallow me up this way.”
“If it’s awful for you when you know what happens after death, think how awful it is for everyone who doesn’t know!”
“I have thought about that a lot, since I talked to Sokrates and Simmea about it, and of course since Athene admitted it to everyone at the Last Debate.” He looked at different spots in the garden, as if he could see where they had sat for that conversation. “But while it might be better for individual people to know, it’s better for the world for people not to be sure.”
“If people knew for sure that they had immortal souls, and that they needed to pursue—” I stopped, because I heard a sound from inside. I thought it was probably the other students come for the calculus class, and I’d have to tell them that Mother wasn’t here and the calculus class was canceled not just for today but for always. There wasn’t anyone who could take it over, either, not that I could think of.
But it wasn’t a student who came out, it was my brother Neleus. He looked almost as bad as Father. His face seemed entirely bloodless. I was delighted to see him—anything to relieve the burden of being alone with Father in this state. I got up and hugged him tightly. “You know?”
“Sophoniba told me,” he said. “An art raid.”
“Nobody knows who,” Father said, without moving from where he sat, staring at the space by the tree where I had been.
Neleus looked down at him and shook his head. “What are you two doing sitting in the garden? We need to find the others, and we need to get drunk.”
“Is that what people do?” Father asked.
“Yes,” Neleus said firmly. “That’s what people do, and it’s what we shall do. Come on, let’s go to Florentia. Ficino will be there, and they always have wine and won’t grudge it to us. I asked Sophoniba to find the others and send them there, and all of Mother’s especial friends. We’ll gather there and drink and talk about her. Come on.”
Father got up slowly. “All right,” he said. “If that’s what people do.”
So that’s what we did.
4
MAIA
I am a teacher. I have also worked as a midwife to babies and cities, but it is on teaching that I have spent most of my life. I have the temperament of a scholar. I always have had.
In the years after the Last Debate I had cause to regret a lot of things I had done in the name of Plato, but I never regretted that we had made the attempt to create the Just City. I agree with a lot of the criticisms that have been made of us, of the Masters. Buying slave children was wrong. I always thought so. I should have been more forceful in my opposition. In those days I was young, and too easily cowed by male authority. I grew up in England in the 1850s. It wasn’t until I saw the girls who grew up in the Just City that I really understood what free women could be like. That in itself justifies us in what we did, in my eyes—how marvelous they are, their natural assumption of equality. What was a hypothesis to me is an axiom to them. Only Plato in all the thousands of years between his time and my own saw that women could have philosophical souls, only Plato allowed that we were people. Only in the City were women truly liberated, for the first time in history.
All the same, we Masters did and allowed things that were wrong, and I am as guilty as any of us. These days I defer to those whose authority I respect, but I try not to automatically defer to anyone. I accept my share of the guilt for what we did, but I still say that what we tried to achieve was a noble goal, and what we did achieve was wonderful, even if it fell short of perfection. There is no perfection in human things, only in the world of Forms. We tried our best. Our intentions were good.
They don’t allow Masters in Sokratea. I suppose they’re justified, but I am hurt whenever I think of it. We, and Plato, meant nothing but the best for them! And when I say the best I mean it literally; what we wanted for them was nothing but excellence, virtue, arete. They say you can’t want that for somebody else, they have to want it for themselves. Well, perhaps they have a point. But Plato wrote that seeking to increase someone else’s excellence is the best form of love. We loved them and we sought their excellence; and if the means were not always ideal, then I contend that we were limited by the constraints of reality. Though Athene, of course, was not.
She turned Sokrates into a fly and vanished, and Sokrates too flew off and vanished, so we had to manage as best we could without either of them.
In the many debates that followed the Last Debate there were more voices crying for going than staying. Trying to fix the City we had seemed less appealing to many than trying to start again, this time with like-minded volunteers. Athenia wanted to do everything exactly the same, only more strictly. Having seen some of the pain caused by being strict, this had very little appeal for me. Sokratea, as I said, excluded Masters from the beginning, when it was only a group of hot-headed children headed by Patroklus. Kebes, with what we came to call the Goodness Group, left immediately that first afternoon, without participating in any of the subsequent debates. That left the Remnant City, which felt at first like a patched-up compromise, and Psyche, and the City of Amazons.
It was Psyche that drove me to the Amazons. Psyche, the city the Neoplatonists set up, decided to manage without the difficult requirement of allowing women to be full participants in their city and in the life of the mind. They made women second-class citizens, as they usually have been, historically. It’s amazing to me that any women at all agreed to move there. Psyche is the smallest of the cities even now, and disproportionately male. But some women went willingly—and I know it was willingly, because I argued with them, personally and at length. Some of my girls from Florentia chose Psyche of their own will. It was those debates that drove me to the other extreme and the choice of the City of Amazons—those debates, and the necessity for them. There were women trained in logic who were prepared to argue that they didn’t deserve citizenship, and that they were inferior to men.