Those first years in the Republic were fun. My body was a child’s body still, but it was my body, and now properly under my control. I was young and growing and I had music and exercise. I had the amusement of seeing where there were cracks in the structure that seemed so solid. Bringing together that many children with so few adults was something only somebody who knew nothing about children would have suggested. The children were wild and hard to control, and much more of this wildness was necessarily tolerated than Plato had imagined. The masters tried to set up a system where the children monitored each other, which had some limited success. But to track all the children the way they really wanted they could have done with four times as many adults—but they were limited to those who not only thought they wanted to set up the Republic, but who had read Plato in the original and prayed to Athene to help. There were probably a lot of good Christians who would have liked to have been there. As it was, there were more people from the Christian eras than I’d have guessed. I do have friends and votaries everywhere, but some times and places I seldom visit, largely for aesthetic reasons.

The thing that surprised me about the masters when I got to know them was that so few of them were from the Enlightenment. I’d have thought that era, so excitingly pagan after so much dull Christianity, would have produced a whole crop of philosophers who’d want to be here. I talked to Athene about it one day when I caught her reading Myronianus of Amastra, curled up on her favorite window seat in the library.

“There’s practically nobody here from the Enlightenment because they didn’t want this. The crown of the Republic is to get everything right, to produce a system that will produce Philosopher Kings who will know The Good.”

“With Capital Letters,” I said.

She looked down her nose at me, which wasn’t easy, since with both of us eleven years old, she was shorter than me. “Exactly. The Good with capital letters, the Truth, the one unchanging Excellence that stays the same forever. Once that’s established, the system goes on the same in ideal stasis for as long as it can continue to do so, with everyone agreeing on what is Good, what is Virtue, what is Justice, and what is Excellence. For the first time in the Enlightenment, they had the idea of progress, the idea that each generation will find its own truth, that things will keep on changing and getting better.” She hesitated. “They do pray to me, some of them. Just not for this. I find it fascinating in its own way. It’s bewildering. It’s one of those things I keep coming back to. I know I’ll never get tired of it. But you won’t find them here.”

“There are people here from ages with a notion of progress, though,” I pointed out.

“Mostly women,” Athene said. “You’ll always have the odd man who loves Plato so much he doesn’t care about progress. But the women—well, in those times women fortunate enough to be educated in Greek—and there aren’t that many of them—they have horrible circumscribed lives, and they read the Republic and they get to the bit about equality of education and opportunity and then they pray to me to be here so fast their heads spin. We have almost equal numbers of men and women among the masters, and that’s why. Many of the women are from later periods.”

“It makes sense,” I said. “And what you say about the Enlightenment is fascinating. I’ll go and hang out with Racine some more when I get home and get a better feel for it.”

It was a few months after that when a boy deliberately shoved me in the palaestra when I was lifting weights, knocking me off balance and making me fall. He wasn’t anyone I’d especially noticed before, a Florentine and not a Delphian. Yet he acted as if he had some grudge. I didn’t understand it. I tried to talk to him about it and he pretended it had been an accident. After that I thought about some other incidents that had seemed accidents—spilled food, spoiled work—and wondered about them.

I went to Axiothea, one of the two masters assigned to Delphi. She taught mathematics to both Delphi and Florentia. I believe she came from the first years of Girton. I told her about the incidents, and asked her if she had any idea why they had happened.

“There will always be some who see excellence and envy it instead of striving to emulate it,” she said. “We aim to eradicate that as far as possible, but you are children, after all.”

“But everyone loves Kryseis, and she’s the best at gymnastics,” I said.

“She’s terrible at music, and she laughs at herself,” Axiothea said. “You’re good at everything, and seemingly without trying.”

I shrugged. “I try.”

“You’re too old for your years. When the rest of them grow up a bit, you’ll make some friends.”

I hadn’t realized I didn’t have friends, but it was true. I had companions, people to wrestle with, people who asked me for help with their letters. I had six boys who slept in Laurel beside me whose jokes I endured. The problem was indeed that my mind was not twelve years old. The only real friend I had was Athene, and of course our friendship was thousands of years old and subject to the usual constraints of our history and context. Besides, she had the same problem. She dealt with it by taking on a strange status halfway between child and master, and retreating into the library, where she was always most at home. But she had a way out if she wanted one. She could transform herself back into a goddess at any moment. I didn’t have that luxury. Having taken it up I had to go through this life. I would have to die to resume my powers. That had seemed almost exhilarating at first, but it intimidated me now. Unlike mortals, I knew what happened after death. But unlike them, I had never died.

And then I tried to learn to swim, and I couldn’t. Always before, learning things had been easy, both as a god and as a mortal. But as a god I’d never known how to swim in human form—if I’d wanted to swim I’d always transformed into a dolphin. Now this earnest copper-skinned Florentine girl was telling me to relax and lie back on the water, and every time I tried, seawater went up my nose. It was the first time I had ever failed at anything when I wasn’t being directly thwarted by the will of another god—and over something as trivial as swimming. I couldn’t let it defeat me. I felt an actual lump in my throat—not tears in my eyes, which are as honourable and natural as breathing, but a hot lump in my throat, as if I would cry shameful tears of defeat and frustration. Then Simmea thought of another way to teach me, a dangerous way, dangerous to both of us, but she risked it. It was difficult and sensual and strange, but at last I swam, or half swam.

And I had made a friend, a courageous friend who would risk her life for my excellence. That felt like even more of a victory.

8

SIMMEA

I had lots of friends, but Pytheas was different. It took a long time to teach him to swim. He mastered it eventually through sheer force of will. He was never especially good at it, but he knew enough not to drown and could propel himself through the water with a surging stroke. I thought I would see less of him once he had mastered the art, but he continued to seek me out. We were, that year and the next, about the same weight for wrestling. But the thing that really brought us together was our shared love of art.

In the city, art was supposed to open our souls to beauty, and also to set a good example. When I looked at Michaelangelo’s bronze Theseus at the Isthmus, with his foot set on the head of the giant Kerkyon, I was supposed to want to emulate Theseus and kill giants to protect my homeland. Of course, I would willingly have gone up against any giant that was threatening Kallisti, had I not been trampled in the rush. But Kallisti was an island extremely lacking in giants or other such threats. There were no cities there but our city. We never saw strangers. Had it been needful, I would have given my life for it without a second thought. But this was not what I thought of when I saw the Theseus. My strongest emotion was an ache at how beautiful it was, and a great admiration for Michaelangelo’s skill in creating it. That humans could do such things made me long to emulate them, to follow them in creating beauty. If this was a possible thing, it was a thing I wanted to do.