“Was I swimming?” he asked.

“You’ve made a good beginning. And now you should go out and run around on the sand to stir your blood, and then we should both clean the salt off with oil. Tomorrow you’ll do better.”

We ran up out of the water and raced on the beach with some other children who were there, none of them people I knew well. Then Pytheas sought me out with a jar of oil and a strigil and we oiled each other and scraped it off. This always feels good after swimming, much better than the wash-fountain, because salt water strips out the body’s oil.

We were not encouraged to have erotic feelings towards the other children—indeed, the opposite, we were discouraged from ever thinking about sex or romantic love. Friendships were encouraged, and friendship was always held out to us as the highest and best of human relationships. Yet as I scraped the strigil down Pytheas’s arms I remembered the feel of his body above mine in the water, and I knew that what I felt was attraction. I was as much frightened by the feeling as drawn by it. I knew it was wrong, and I truly wanted to be my best self. Also, I did not know how to tell if he felt any reciprocal feelings. I said nothing and scraped harder.

“Tomorrow,” I said, when we were done. “Same time. You’ll make a swimmer yet.”

“I will,” he said, as if any alternative was unthinkable, as if he meant to attain all excellence or die trying. I raised my hand in farewell and took a step away, but he spoke. “Simmea?”

I stopped and turned back. “Yes?”

“I like you. You’re brave and clever. I’d like to be your friend.”

“Of course,” I said, and stepped back towards him and clasped his hand. “I like you too.”

7

APOLLO

Athene cheated. She went to the Republic as herself to help set it up, and then once all the work was done she transformed into a ten-year-old girl and asked Ficino to name her. He named her Septima, which I thought served her right for asking him. She knew he was obsessed with magic numbers.

I, however, did the whole thing properly. I went down through Hades and set down my powers for the length of the mortal life I chose from the Fates. Clotho looked astonished, Lachesis looked resigned, and Atropos looked grim, so no change there. I then went on to Lethe, where I wet my lips, to allow me to forget the details of the future life I had chosen, though not, of course, my memories. (The river Lethe is full of brilliantly colored fish. Nobody ever mentions that when they talk about it. I suppose they forget them as soon as they see them, and so they are a surprise at the end and the beginning of each mortal life.) I went on into a womb and was born—and that in itself was an interesting experience. The womb was peaceful. I composed a lot of poetry. Birth was traumatic. I barely remember my first birth, and the images from Simonides’s poem about it have got tangled up in my real earliest memories. This mortal birth was uncomfortable to the point of pain.

My mortal parents were peasant farmers in the hills above Delphi. I had wanted to be born on Delos again, for symmetry, but Athene pointed out that in most eras neither birth nor death are permitted on Delos, which would have made it difficult. I had to master my new tiny mortal body, so different from the immortal body I normally inhabited. I had to cope with the way it changed and grew, at an odd speed, entirely out of my control. At first I could barely focus my eyes, and it was months before I could even speak. I would have thought it would be unutterably boring, but in fact the sensations were all so vivid and immediate that it was intriguing. I could spend hours sitting in the sun looking at my own fingers.

As I grew it was interesting to discover how much of what I had thought was will was affected by the flesh. Food and sleep weren’t just pleasures but necessities. I found my thoughts were clouded when I was hungry or tired.

I grew fast and strong and my parents were loving and kind to me. Everything went according to plan, including the famine that came along a few months before my tenth birthday, which Athene and I had arranged to induce my loving parents to sell me into slavery. That didn’t go quite as planned. For one thing, I had no idea what famine really meant—needing to eat and starving instead is a form of pain. It was unbearable. I hate to remember it. The despair on my mortal father’s face when the last of the pigs died. The way my mortal mother wept when the slavers came and made their offer for me. I cared for them, of course I did, they had been my adoring worshipers for almost a decade. It broke my mortal mother’s heart to sell me. Athene and I had chosen all this and imposed it on them. They had not chosen to love a son and lose him in this terrible way, to be forced to choose between slavery for me and death for all three of us. I had never imagined how cruel we were being.

So, as you see, I had already learned quite a lot about mortal life and equal significance and meaningful choices before I even came to the Republic.

Athene was on the ship Excellence when I was brought aboard with a line of other children. She recognized me at once, although she had never seen this body before. She is my sister, after all. “Are you all right?” she asked.

“Never better,” I said. “You have to do something for my mortal parents. Cure the disease on their crops, send somebody through selling new livestock cheaply, and most of all let them have another baby as soon as possible.”

“I will,” she said, calmly. I hadn’t heard that tone of Olympian calm for ten years. She was dispassionate. She nodded to me, and inscribed my name in her ledger without asking me what it was. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “It’s barely been ten years. Did you get attached?”

“It feels like a lifetime,” I said.

She laughed.

“You’ll never understand this unless you do it,” I warned her.

“I’ll do it one day,” she said. “Right now they need my help too much.”

Part of my plan in experiencing mortal life from the beginning had been to avoid all the inevitable squabbling and mess involved with getting the City set up. Of course I could have stayed on Olympos and arrived as a ten-year-old at the moment the other children came, but I know that if I’d stuck around Athene would have made me run all over everywhere collecting things and getting involved in the arguments. This part worked perfectly. By the time I reached the city, everything had been built and decided. They had laid it out harmoniously, according to principles of proportion and balance. They had made some odd choices, like the half-size copy of the Palazzo Vecchio, but it all worked. It was full of variety and yet was all of a piece. Nobody could ask more of a city.

It was full of artworks Athene had rescued from disasters of history—she’d been everywhere from the Fourth Crusade to the Second World War. There were temples to all twelve gods—mine was particularly splendid, with a Praxiteles from Delos I’d always been fond of. The color choices were interesting. On the whole they had gone for white marble and unpainted statues, Renaissance style, but here and there you’d see a painted statue, or one dressed in brightly colored cloth. The kitons everyone wore were dyed and embroidered, so that the effect was of brightly coloured people in a chiaroscuro landscape. There were trees and gardens, of course, which helped soften things.

With a fine sense of irony, Athene had me assigned to Laurel house, in the dining hall of Delphi, in the Tribe of Apollo. There were twelve tribes, each devoted to a particular god, with twelve dining halls each. Each dining hall was made up of ten houses of seven children each. (These numbers weren’t in the Republic. They had some complicated Neoplatonist relevance, and had doubtless taken somebody a long time to work out. I was so glad I’d missed that discussion.) There were ten thousand and eighty children—a number which could, should one wish to, be evenly divided by every number except eleven.