“No, he petted me and indulged me when he saw me, which wasn’t all that often. He was Greek, of course. I look like my mother. I imagined I would grow up to have a life like hers, serving at the bath, sleeping with the master. It didn’t seem so bad. I carried water and bath oils. I was learning massage. I spoke Greek, and Punic, that was the slave language, and a little bit of Latin. Nobody taught me to read, though they easily could have. There were slave clerks in the house, but they were all men. They never thought of it. I never thought of it.”

“For most of history it was really unusual for women to be taught to read,” I said. Nobody except Plato had seen that we were human. It still made me angry to think of all those wasted lives.

“I was pretty, like my mother, and if I had dreams it was that some man would fall in love with me because of that and I could cajole him into treating me well. It’s what my mother did. What she was teaching me.” She shook her head and put the olive down on her untouched plate. “The overseer was called Felix. He terrorized us all. He had a dog on a chain at the door to the slave quarters. I hated to pass it, it always leapt at me snarling, and Felix laughed and said it would eat me up one day. But that’s not what happened.”

“What did happen?” I got up and poured her a cup of wine, and one for myself. Imagining her early life was distressing; living through it must have been appalling. I thanked Athene in my heart that I had been so lucky.

“When I was nine years old, my master caught my mother in bed with Felix. She had no choice about it. Felix had a dog and a whip, and what did she have? But Asterios didn’t see it that way. He didn’t punish Felix, he punished her. He whipped her in the courtyard in front of everyone, to punish her supposed lusts. Then, to punish her more, he had me whipped. And then immediately, the same afternoon, he dragged me down to the harbor and sold me onto a slave ship going east, where there would be no chance that my mother would ever see me again.” She picked up the cup and took a deep swallow. “He didn’t even say so to me. He said it to the slaver he was selling me to, and I heard. I wasn’t even a person to him. He shook me when I tried to speak, to remind him how he had always been good to me. And he slapped me hard when I bit his hand. I was just a thing to him, a thing he could use on my mother. He petted me to make her loving to him, and then he sold me away to punish her. He didn’t see me as human, let alone as a daughter. He had his real family on the other side of the house. I’d served at his real daughter’s baths. I wasn’t real, do you see?”

“You were real,” I said. I was shaken. “You were absolutely real and you were a child and I’m so glad we rescued you from that.” I wished we could do the same for every slave there ever was, that we could buy them and bring them here to live free.

“You rescued my body, but part of my soul is still there,” she said. “It’s why I ran, that time, with the boar, because I’m slave-hearted. And now I can’t keep order in Hyssop. I’m just no good.”

“You’re keeping order. And you’ve worked and worked to become brave!” I wanted to hug her, but she held herself in a way that didn’t invite it.

“Yes, but others didn’t have to do that,” she said, fiercely. “And I wonder what else there is like that about me, where my soul is still stuck there. With being the watcher, I keep wanting to cajole instead of being decisive. And that’s not the worst of it. I always thought like a slave. I wanted to please the masters, not to seek for the truth. I’d see Simmea arguing with Ficino, going after a point like a terrier, and at first I’d just be amazed that she dared, and that he didn’t slap her down for it. I don’t know how long it was before I understood that it was what he wanted.”

“But you did understand,” I said.

“Yes, but you don’t see. I still thought like a slave. I was trying to give you what you wanted, not trying to become my best self. And you didn’t see that, you didn’t, you made me a gold and I’m not fit to be a guardian, it was all pretense. I was pretending to be free, but in my heart I’m still a slave.”

I tried to make sense of this. “Are you saying that you’re still trying to please us instead of striving for excellence?”

She hesitated, and touched her belly. “No. I realized what I was doing and why it was wrong. My duty—wanting to do my duty, even when I could have got out of it without anyone knowing. Reading Plato, debating with Kebes about freedom and choices, and especially thinking about the baby, about him or her growing up in the city. I finally realized I am free. And I do love wisdom, and I do love the truth. I’ve been coming to that for some time. And I can’t build it on a lie. That’s why I’ve come to you now. To confess my deception. Before the baby’s born. I want to become my best self, and I don’t want to deceive you any more.”

“Deception is a crooked road to truth, but that’s where it’s leading you,” I said, standing up.

“What?” She looked up at me, confused.

“You’re confessing your deception because in feigning loving truth you’ve truly come to love it,” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“And so you are worthy to be gold. Maybe I was wrong, maybe I made a mistake and was deceived, but Ficino saw into your soul. There are people whose souls are ideally suited from birth for them to be philosophers, but there are others whose souls have to be trained, like vines on a trellis. We built the trellis in the city, and though you started twisted you grew straight.”

“Like Simmea’s legs,” she said, utterly confounding me.

“Simmea’s legs?”

“When we came, Simmea’s legs were bandy. Now they’re straight and strong. You’re saying the same thing happened to my soul?”

“Yes,” I said, and I hugged her hard. “Your children will start clean, without any bad memories or twisted beginnings. They’ll prove everything Plato believed, become what he wanted. We masters are helping you and you will help them and they will make the Just City.”

She hugged me back. “I’m free,” she said, marvel in her voice.

22

SIMMEA

One morning Kebes and I went from breakfast to follow Sokrates around the city as we often did. We found him questioning a worker planting bulbs outside the temple of Demeter. “Do you like your work? Do you feel a sense of satisfaction doing it? Are there some jobs you enjoy more than others?”

“I don’t know why you keep doing that when you know they’re not going to answer,” Kebes said.

“I don’t know that,” Sokrates said. “Joy to you, Kebes, joy to you Simmea! I know they haven’t answered yet, but I don’t know whether they might answer in the future. I don’t even have an opinion on the subject.”

“Everyone knows they’re tools,” Kebes said.

“They’re not like tools,” Sokrates said. “They’re self-propelled, and to a certain extent self-willed. That one is making decisions about where to space the bulbs, precise and careful decisions. Those are going in a row, look, and then that one at an angle. It’s deliberate, not random. It may be a clever tool, but it may have self-will, and if it has self-will and desires, then it would be very interesting to talk to.”

“A tree would be interesting to talk to—” Kebes began, but Sokrates interrupted.

“Oh yes, wouldn’t it!” We laughed and followed him on.

A few months later, early in Gamelion, Kebes and I were walking along with Sokrates debating one morning when we happened to come back to the place outside the temple of Demeter where the worker had been planting bulbs when Sokrates asked it questions. A set of early crocuses had come up, deep purple with gold hearts. They were arranged in an odd pattern, two straight lines connected by a diagonal and then a circle. Sokrates glanced at them. “Spring after winter is always a joy to the heart,” he said, though he never seemed to feel the cold.