“But some of them will not.” He looked at Kebes, who was near him, at the front. “Kebes?”

“I never chose to come here. I have never been reconciled to having been dragged from my home and bought as a slave and brought here. I have never had any choice about staying. I still hate and resent the masters, and I am not the only one.” His voice was passionate and clear. The crowd were making unhappy murmurs. Athene looked daggers at Kebes.

Sokrates spoke again, and at once Athene’s eyes were back on him. “It’s a slippery argument to say that our souls gave consent before birth, because it would be possible to use that to justify doing anything to anybody. We don’t remember what our souls chose or why. We don’t know what part of our lives we wanted and what part we overlooked, or agreed to endure for the sake of another part. It may be a kind of consent, but it’s not at all the same as giving active consent here and now.”

“I agree,” Athene said. “But in the case of the children, bringing them here has made them better people. It is the opposite of the case of the galley slave.”

“Except that even if it did good to them, it made you and the masters worse because you bought them as slaves and disregarded their choices, as in the case of the unjust judge who condemned the slave.”

“I do not think I am worse for it,” she said, confidently.

“So? Well, let me ask others. Maia? Do you think you are better or worse because you bought the children?”

Maia jumped when she was addressed. “Worse, Sokrates,” she admitted, after a moment.

“Aristomache?”

“Worse,” she said immediately.

“Atticus?”

“Worse,” he said, speaking out loudly. “And since reading Aristomache’s dialogue, I have come to believe that I am worse because I kept slaves in my own time.”

“But whether or not it made anyone’s soul less just, I agree that once you had the children here you treated them as best you knew, and certainly as Plato suggested,” Sokrates said.

“Yes, we did,” Athene agreed.

“But the next question is whether Plato was a good authority for these things. Did he have children?”

“You know he did not.”

“There are other ways of knowing about how to bring people up than being a parent. And indeed, I’ve read that after I knew him he became a teacher, he had a school in Athens, a famous school, the Academy, which became the very name for learning. Was it for children?”

“It was for older people. A university, not a school.”

“So what made him an expert in the education of younger people?” He hesitated for an instant and then moved on before Athene answered. “Nothing. And on the same grounds, I could ask what cities he founded. And I could ask what happened when he tried to involve himself in the politics of Syracuse, what wonderful results he had in that city? And similarly, his pupil Aristotle taught Alexander the Great, and Alexander did found cities and no doubt we see in Alexander the pattern of the philosopher king you wish to create, and in his cities the pattern of justice?”

“Below the belt,” Simmea muttered. I grinned. She was completely caught up in the debate.

“Plato had a dream which was never tried until now, but now that it has been tried it is successful,” Athene said, wisely avoiding the issues of Syracuse and Alexander.

“So you brought the children here and put them into an experiment, in the hope it would be successful,” Sokrates said.

“Yes,” Athene conceded.

“And you believe it has been?”

“Yes.”

“Successful at maximizing justice?”

“Yes,” she insisted.

“Well, I think there are other points of view possible on that subject. To take just one aspect of this supposedly Just City consider the festival of Hera, which instead of increasing happiness is visibly making everyone miserable. Human relationships can’t work like that. Eating together is different from sharing eros together. I’ve seen people made unhappy by being drawn together, or unhappy by being drawn together once and never again.” Again Sokrates was seeking out people in the crowd. I was grateful he did not look at us. “Damon?”

“Yes, Sokrates?”

“Is the system of having wives and children in common making you happy, or unhappy?”

“Unhappy, Sokrates,” Damon said, clearly.

“Auge?”

“Unhappy, Sokrates,” she said promptly.

“Half the children are cheating on the system, and almost nobody likes it. Plato knew a lot about love and was notably eloquent on the subject, far more eloquent than I could ever be, though he set the words in my mouth. How could he then set up such a travesty? But you will say, will you not, that the purpose of the system is not to maximize individual happiness but the justice of the whole city?”

“Yes,” she said.

“And how does this maximize justice?”

“People do not form individual attachments but are attached to all the others, and people do not care more about their own children than all the children of the city.”

“But that’s nonsense,” Sokrates said gently. “They do form individual attachments, they’re just pursuing them in secret. And they do care more about their own children, they’re just prevented from seeing them.”

“It may not be perfect, but it is more just than the existence of families,” Athene said. “Plato was successfully attempting to avoid nepotism and factionalism. We have none of that here. Ficino, you can speak for the evil which families can cause to a republic.”

Ficino nodded sadly. “Yes, it’s true, family rivalries did great harm to Florentia. The Guelphs and the Ghibellines, and then later in my own time the rivalry between the Medici and the other noble families. It can tear a city apart, and there is no justice possible.” I saw many of the masters nodding. “The worst thing is with inheritance. Even if you educate an heir carefully, they will not always be the best person to succeed to power. And unless rulers happen to be childless, they will always prefer their children, regardless of fitness.”

“We saw that in Rome,” Manlius said. “Caligula, Commodus, we have innumerable examples. Whereas when the emperor was childless and chose the best succesor we had rulers like Hadrian and Marcus Aurelius. But family love can be a wonderful consolation when things go wrong in the state.”

“It can indeed be very pleasant when things go well in the family,” Athene said, nodding to him in a friendly way, and then turning back to Sokrates. “Just as you called on one or two children to say that Plato’s system makes them unhappy, there are many among the masters I could call on to talk about how families did the same for them.”

“And I could call on many more among the children to witness that they are forming individual attachments in secret, but I will not, because I would be putting them in danger of being punished if they spoke the truth.”

Athene was silent, and so was the crowd. Everyone kept still and tried to avoid Sokrates’s eyes.

Then Klymene spoke up, astonishing me. Her voice sounded very soft in the big space, but everyone was so quiet that she could be heard clearly. “I have not made any individual attachment. But I see it all around me. In my sleeping house, I am the only one who is not in some kind of love affair. Sokrates is completely right about this. Almost everyone has individual attachments. And while I believe the city knows best how to bring up children, and I understand what you’re saying about the dangers of factionalism and preference, I do miss my own boy, that I only saw for a few minutes after he was born.”

“Bravely spoken,” Sokrates said, smiling at her. “I think that point is made. Now, let’s move on. I questioned whether Plato was wise enough to write the constitution for a city like this. He was only a man. But you are a god, are you not?”

“I am,” Athene said, cautiously stepping into Sokrates’s unavoidable rhetorical trap.