The Just City

The whole city came to the Agora for the debate. I saw Glaukon in his wheeled chair. The babies were there, even the smallest, so that their nursery-maids needn’t miss it. The workers, those who had taken an interest in philosophy, were lining up at the edges to the Agora to listen. Old Porphyry had dragged himself from his sickbed and was sitting with the pregnant women eight months along, down near the front. There was nothing we loved more than a debate, and this was the debate of a century. I saw tears glitter in Ikaros’s eyes as Athene made her way through the crowd to the rostrum. Ficino too was blinded by honourable tears. He introduced the debate.

  Simmea, beside me, was the only person I could see who didn’t look delighted at the whole event. “I was thinking about Plato in Syracuse,” she said. “The time when the tyrant sold him into slavery. That was after a debate on the good life.”

  “I’m sure Sokrates knows about that,” I said. “I’m sure Sokrates was thinking about it when he suggested this.”

  Sokrates was wearing a plain white wool kiton. He nodded and smiled at Ficino’s introduction. He stood to the right and Athene to the left, which meant that she was going to begin. He did not look at all intimidated by her presence.

  Her speech was splendid. She spoke of course of the Just City, of justice in the soul and justice in the city. I saw people in the crowd nodding at her eloquence. It was all straight out of Plato, and you couldn’t have found a more appreciative audience. Nobody clapped when she finished, they knew the rules, but there was a deep murmur of appreciation. Sokrates took a step forward.

  “I can’t possibly compete with a beautiful speech like that,” he began. “I hope you’ll let me off and allow me to talk in my usual manner, asking questions and trying to find the answers.”

  There was a ripple of laughter from the crowd. Athene inclined her head gracefully. Simmea squeezed my hand.

  “You’ve talked a lot about justice, and a lot about this city,” he said, conversationally. “Do you think this city is just?”

  “I do.”

  “Not merely that it’s pursuing justice, or attempting to be just, but that it actually attains justice?”

  “Yes.” I was surprised. I’d have thought she’d said that it was on its way to justice. The experiment wasn’t anything like done yet. I’m not sure even Plato would have thought it was already just. But many among the crowd were nodding.

  “And you find that justice in the relations of the part to the whole and the way things are laid out?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well it seems to me that there are a few issues that need to be cleared up before I’d call this the good life. First there’s the question of choice. I’d say there can’t be justice when people have no choice, do you agree? I’m thinking of people in prison, or condemned to row in a ship, shackled to the oar.”

  “The sentence that sent them there might be just,” Athene countered.

  “Yes, that could be so, but in their situation when they’re there, when they’re compelled to stay, or to row, they’ve had freedom taken from them and they’re under the overseer’s lash. There’s no justice there, or don’t you agree?”

  “I agree, subject to what I said before.”

  “And if the sentence that sent them there wasn’t just, if the judge was bribed or the evidence was false, or if they were captured by pirates and chained to the oar, then there’s no justice?”

  “No, in that case there’s no justice. The punishment is making them worse people, not better, and in addition the passing of the unjust sentence is making the judge worse.”

  “Then I submit that the case is the same in this city, that the masters chose to be here but the children did not.” Sokrates leaned back a little as if to give her space to reply.

  “The children were rescued from slavery,” she said.

  “They were bought as slaves and brought here and given no choices about how to live.”

  “Children are never given such choices.”

  “Really?” Sokrates asked. “But I thought souls chose their lives before birth, as Plato wrote in the Phaedo.”

  I smiled, hearing Sokrates cite that dialogue he disliked so much. Athene glared over at me, guessing I must have confirmed this for Sokrates. She caught me smiling, and glared even harder.

  “Yes, that’s true,” she admitted, reluctantly. The audience let out a sigh, as if they had all been holding their breath through the pause waiting to hear.

  “Then in a way the children did choose to come here,” Sokrates said.

  “It’s not true,” Kebes burst out, from where he stood down near the rostrum. Simmea, next to me, winced. Kebes really was recalcitrant. He had to hold on to his anger and deny that he had in any way chosen to be here, even when he heard it from the mouth of Athene herself.

  She ignored him. “They did. And once they were here we looked after them as if we were their loving parents with their best interests at heart. If you ask them now they are grown, they will say they are happy they came here.”

  “Some of them will,” Sokrates said, and his eyes sought out Simmea, who stood straight at my side. “Will you agree with that, Simmea?”

  “Assuredly, Sokrates,” she said, speaking up plainly. There was a ripple of laughter.

  “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.

  “So you know more than mere mortals, isn’t that so?”

  “Of course,” Athene said.

  “So we should trust you to be doing what is right for us, even if we can’t quite understand why?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you have been deeply involved in setting up this city from the beginning?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you have constantly used your power to make things work out for the city, things that might otherwise not have worked?”

  “Yes.”

  “The trouble with that is that even though you are a god you too are ignorant in some areas. One area I can easily cite is to do with the workers. Until I discovered it, just recently, nobody knew that they had free will and intelligence.” Sokrates raised an arm to indicate the workers who were there listening in a circle around the outside of the agora. Axiothea was standing near Crocus and read aloud the response he carved.

  “Volition,” she read. “Want to choose, want to talk, want to make art, want to debate, want to stay.”

  “Wait,” Manlius called. “Sixty-one is writing something.”

  “What is it?” Sokrates asked.

  “No choice brought, choose stay city,” Manlius read out.

  “Precisely,” Sokrates said. “They wanted to choose and to talk and to make art, they wanted a say in their own lives. They didn’t choose to come, but they do choose to stay. But you didn’t even know they could think, nobody did.”

  “But as soon as you discovered it, we agreed to consider them people. Now they spend ten hours a day working and ten being educated and the rest recharging, their equivalent of eating and sleeping.” Athene looked pleased. “Once we realized we were committing an injustice we moved at once to redress it.”

  “Indeed. That speaks very well of you, of the city in general. I think Aristomache deserves especial thanks for this.” He smiled at Aristomache where she stood near him in the crowd. “But my point is that the reason you were treating them unfairly is because you were not even aware, until Crocus and I discovered it, that the workers were people.”

  “He’s got her,” Simmea muttered.

  “Yes, I was unaware,” Athene admitted.

  “So even though you are a goddess you don’t know everything?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Of course not,” I echoed. “He knows that.”

  “Yes, but not everybody does,” Simmea said. “Hush.”

  “So, for instance, you didn’t know how well Plato’s experiment would work until you tried it?”

  “No.”

  “It was an experiment?”

  “Yes. I said so.”

  “An experiment, and nobody knew what would happen. And to perform this experiment, why didn’t you do as Plato said?”

  “We did,” Athene said, indignant.


  “Plato said you should take over an existing city and drive out everyone over ten years of age, you didn’t do that?”

  “No. It seemed better to start fresh.”

  “Seemed better to you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even though it wasn’t what Plato said?” Sokrates pretended surprise. There was a ripple of laughter.

  “What Plato said wasn’t possible,” Athene snapped.

  “Wasn’t possible even for you?” Sokrates sounded even more surprised.

  “Not everything is possible even for the gods,” Athene said.

  Sokrates paused, then shook his head sadly. “Not everything is possible, and you do not know everything?”

  “I already said so.” Athene was clearly irritated now.

  “To return to what Plato said. He thought his city would be near other cities, would trade with them and make war with them. Why did you decide instead to put it on an island far away from other cities and with no contact with the outside world?”

  Athene hesitated. “It seemed it would work better that way.”

  “So you felt free to change things Plato wrote when you thought they would work better a different way, but you kept them the same and held Plato’s words up as unchangeable writ when you didn’t want to change them?”

  She hesitated again. “There were a number of good reasons to choose this island.”

  “Yes, the volcano that will erupt and destroy all the evidence of your meddling. That was going to be my next point. If you believe that this is the Just City, that the life here is the good life, why did you situate it in this little corner of the world that will be destroyed, at a point in time where it can influence nothing and change nothing? Why is it set here in a sterile backwater? Why didn’t you put it in a time and place where it could really have an effect, where it could have posterity, where all humanity could benefit from the results of this experiment and not just you?”

  There was a swelling murmur through the crowd at that, especially from the masters. Everyone must have wondered about that.

  “This was a time when it was possible. The more things affect time, the less power the gods have to do things.” She sounded even more irritated now.