I underlined “more.”

“Only more?” Sokrates asked. “Not more urgently?”

“I think he’s expressing hierarchies of need,” Ikaros said. “He thinks the women need their latrine fountain more than he needs his conversation.”

“Why do they?” Sokrates asked.

“Plumbing important,” I wrote.

“Why?” Sokrates asked.

It was axiomatic. I had a hierarchy of priorities in my memory, and among those plumbing ranked extremely high, immediately below electricity. I had no idea why. I inscribed a question mark.

Then the baby kicked her legs again and emitted a stream of yellowish liquid into Sokrates’s lap. Sokrates and Ikaros laughed, and Sokrates called into the house for an attendant to take the baby. He took off his wet kiton, dropped it in a heap, and sat down again naked. The attendant took the baby back inside.

“That’s her contribution to the argument, and a practical demonstration of why plumbing is important,” Ikaros said, still laughing.

“Nonsense,” Sokrates said. “I never saw this kind of plumbing until I came here. We managed in Athens with wells for drinking water, a drain down the middle of the street for waste, and we cleaned ourselves with oil and brass scrapers.”

“The wash fountains and latrine fountains here are better than we had where I come from too,” Ikaros admitted.

“How demonstrate plumbing?” I asked, completely perplexed.

“Part of biological life. Humans need to drink water, and when our bodies have taken what they need from it, we expel it again, as you saw that baby do,” Sokrates said. Of course, I had seen animals doing similar things, and humans are a special kind of animals. It was a hard thing to keep in mind. “Some people say it’s disgusting, but it’s merely a natural function. We can control when we do it, once we’re a bit older, and we expel it into the latrine fountains. So we need drinking fountains to drink and latrine fountains to relieve ourselves, and wash fountains to keep clean. Only the drinking fountains are really essential.”

“Like electricity,” I wrote.

“Like the way you need electricity, yes, a good analogy,” Sokrates said.

I underlined that plumbing was important. “Priority,” I wrote. “Electricity, plumbing.”

“But who decides the priorities?” Sokrates asked.

Who had decided the priority list in my memory? Probably Lysias, but I didn’t know. “List,” I wrote.

“That’s no good, going from an arbitrary list that somebody gave you,” Sokrates said. “You need to examine these things! If that latrine fountain hadn’t been fixed until tomorrow, the women in the birthing house could have used the other.”

The water had been running straight through in both fountains. “Both broken,” I inscribed.

“They could have gone into the hall,” Ikaros said, waving at the crenellated bulk of the Ferraran hall in front of us. “Or to one of the nearby sleeping houses. It’s more convenient for them to have latrine fountains right there, but they could have managed without until your work shift tomorrow. Or more likely until Lukretia found another Worker to do it.”

“Or they could have come out into the street, though it would be smellier.” Sokrates poked at his kiton with his foot.

I considered this. “Who should decide?” I wrote.

“Good question!” Ikaros said.

“Yes, that was a very good question,” Sokrates said. “You obeyed Lukretia without considering, because you had a list of priorities, and you should have examined the situation and decided for yourself.”

“Except that there really are things that need to be done right away, sometimes, without stopping to examine,” Ikaros said. “If there’s a fire, for instance.”

Sokrates frowned.

“Look, if a house was burning down and somebody called us to fetch water, we’d go!” Ikaros said. “Even you would. And when an enemy attacks. In the army at Potidaia, didn’t you take orders from your commanders? And if you were sick, wouldn’t you obey a doctor?”

“No!” Sokrates said. “Doctors are idiots. They tell me Charmides makes his drugs out of mold! Yuck! But your other points are well taken. There are rare occasions to allow others to set the priorities, usually in an emergency when there isn’t time for everyone to have all the information, or when somebody has a specialized skill. We’d put the fire out first and ask how it started afterwards. But we’re back to Crocus’s question: when it isn’t that kind of emergency, who decides?”

“Plato would say the philosopher kings, which means the Masters for now,” Ikaros said.

“The Masters decide all too many things in this City,” Sokrates grumbled.

“What would you say then?”

“Everyone should decide for themselves after examining the situation, and consulting experts as necessary. If I have a hangnail, I can decide whether to put mold on it or not, eww. But if there isn’t time to examine things, in an emergency, then the expert should decide—if my blood is spurting out then a doctor should put a tourniquet on it right away.”

“And in the City, for now, the Masters are in the position of the doctor with the tourniquet, and decide the priorities, informed by Plato,” Ikaros said. “When there’s time we examine everything, in Chamber. We’re not always right even so,” he concluded, despondently.

“Expert,” I wrote. “Only Workers do. Mend. Build. Need do.”

“You mean when there’s something only Workers can do, that people can’t do as well, you need to do that when it needs doing?” Ikaros asked.

“Do you mean that the Workers are the experts in that situation?” Sokrates asked. “That’s an interesting thought.”

“Yes. If fire, bring water. Mend plumbing. For Good. For all.”

“You’re talking about duty,” Sokrates said. “But again, who decides on the priorities?”

“What is duty?” I wrote.

“He really is a philosopher, it’s amazing,” Ikaros said, patting my side above my tread.

Sokrates ignored this, having accepted the fact long before. He kept explaining to me. “Duty is a moral obligation to someone or something. It’s the term for what you’re talking about. But an interesting question is how we incur duties.”

“Cicero says we incur some simply by being human, which might mean you have some because you are a Worker,” Ikaros said. “And we have duties to the state, to the gods, to other people, to philosophy.”

“Does Cicero say where he thinks we incur them?” Sokrates asked.

“Some we’re born with, some we run into as we go along,” Ikaros said.

“Duty,” I wrote. It was such a useful concept. How I wished to be able to speak freely, to use Greek as the flexible instrument it was for Ikaros and Sokrates, not the clumsy one it still was for me. “Duty to City, to others—to self?”

“Yes, you do have duty to yourself,” Sokrates said. “And you have a duty to examine your own will, not only the list of priorities somebody else assigned you.”

“Will = want?” I wrote.

“Yes,” Sokrates said.

“No,” Ikaros said at the same time.

They stared at each other for a moment.

“Will is what you want, your own priorities,” Sokrates said to me.

I looked through the priority list in my memory and considered the items on it. Who had determined their significance, and were they right or wrong? “Too ignorant to decide priorities,” I inscribed, sadly.

“Well, I am also exceedingly ignorant. We will examine things together until we have more information,” Sokrates said, consolingly. Then he turned to Ikaros. “What do you mean, no?”

“Thomas Aquinas thought will and intellect were separate,” Ikaros said, looking at me speculatively.

“Lysias said something like that once,” Sokrates said.

“Aquinas said will is an appetite of the soul, the appetite for wanting things. And because we have it, we can make choices.”

“An appetite of the soul? Desire?” Sokrates said, raising his eyebrows. “Who was this Aquinas?”