The Philosopher Kings: A Novel

  “They’ve lied before. Psyche have lied. They just can’t be trusted,” Maia insisted. “It probably was them. Or the Amazons.”

  Father hesitated for a moment. “How could we find out? Send spies?”

  “Perhaps,” Maia said. “But it will be sure to come out sooner or later. Whoever has the head will be sure to display it, eventually, and then we’ll hear.”

  “And go to war,” Phaedrus said, fiercely, slapping the table and making the cups and plates bounce.

  “Unless it is Kebes,” Father said. “Then we’d never hear and there would be no vengeance and … nothing. I want a voyage of exploration so we have more information.”

  “More information would be a good thing, certainly,” Aeschines said. “I’ll suggest it to the committee.”

  Ficino raised his cup. “It’s my birthday. I’m ninety-nine years old. It seems the perfect time to set out on a voyage. To exploration!”

  We all drank.

  6

  ARETE

  I wasn’t in the Chamber for the debate, or in the Assembly for the vote, but I was in Thessaly for the family fight.

  It was just after the midwinter celebrations. It had been a mild clear day with a promise of spring in the air. The Assembly had voted that the voyage of exploration would take place when spring came, and now the question was of who was to go. Father was going, there was no question of that. Klymene was going with the Florentia troop. Erinna was going, as one of the few people who properly understood how the Excellence worked. And Ficino was going, and so was I—I had won that battle without any need to fight. This was to be a voyage safe for old men and children, and Ficino and I were the exemplary old man and child. That I was only a child for three more months didn’t matter. I was going!

  My brothers all wanted to go. Well, Plato-loving Alkibiades didn’t. He had written to us—he had sent a letter to Father with the envoy who went to Athenia. Father let me read it. In addition to saying all you’d expect about Mother, he said to trust that the head of Victory wasn’t in Athenia, and that he would let us know immediately if he heard anything. He sent love to all of us and said he had made the right choice and was happy.

  Phaedrus and Neleus were at home in Thessaly on the evening when Kallikles came around with a jar of wine after dinner. “We need to talk,” he said.

  I broke the resin seal and mixed the wine without being asked, using the big red-figure krater decorated with Apollo killing the dragon Pytho, and the cups that matched it. (Apollo on the krater didn’t look at all like Father, but I liked the coils of the snaky dragon.) I watered the wine half and half, as Plato recommends, and then gave a cup to everyone.

  It was too cold to go into the garden now that the sun was down, which was inconvenient as it was the only space suitable for sitting and talking. There was a reason the houses were known as “sleeping houses.” We were supposed to do everything else elsewhere. Most of the year this worked out well enough, and even now it would have been all right if we could have gone to Florentia or another eating hall to have our conversation in public. As it was, we all sat on the beds. I passed around some dried figs and goat cheese and missed Mother, who would have made the boys help.

  “I want to go with you on the voyage,” Kallikles said, once we were all settled. I sat down beside him on the bed.

  “It isn’t up to me,” Father said. “The Chamber is deciding who goes. Apply to them.” Father was looking a little better now that the voyage had been agreed on.

  “We all want to go,” Phaedrus said.

  “You can’t all go,” Father said. “What if the ship went down?”

  “What if it did?” Kallikles asked. “That’s part of the hazard of life.”

  “All of you lost at once?” Father said. “No.”

  “The city wants to send the best,” Phaedrus said. He grinned at me. He was constantly making jokes about my name—it was he who had first thought up the game of pursuing Arete. “And in addition to my little sister, the most excellent people they can find. We brothers are the certainly among the best of the Young Ones.”

  Father took a deep draught of his wine. “Arete’s going,” he said. “No more.”

  “The problem with that is that we’re heroes,” Kallikles said, spreading his hands. “You know we are. And this is a heroic mission, where we will have the chance to prove ourselves. It’s like the voyage of the Argonauts. We all ought to have that chance. The Chamber gives us the chance, on our own excellence. If they turn us down, then they do. But if you speak against us they will turn us down.”

  Father shook his head. “Not all of you,” he began, but wrathful Neleus interrupted.

  “I insist on going, even though I’m not a hero!” He looked furiously at Kallikles.

  We all looked at him. And suddenly I saw us all looking at him. It was strange. They were all my brothers, and I knew them well, Neleus among them, but now I saw them all with new eyes. Neleus sat alone on his bed, and we were all looking at him, and we were all one thing, and he was another. We all looked like Father, and he did not. We all had Father’s calm blue eyes and chiseled features. We had all shades of skin color—or all the shades of the Middle Sea, as Maia put it: Kallikles’s chalk pale, Father’s olive, mine brown, and Phaedrus’s near-black. We had hair that curled wildly and hair that lay flat as silk. Kallikles was short and Phaedrus was tall and I was a girl. We were an assorted set, but we were all Father’s children, children of Apollo, of a god. We knew we were all heroes, and Neleus knew he was not. My father and my brothers looked coolly at Neleus, and I looked with them, ranged myself with them in that moment. I had to whether I wanted to or not. I was a hero. I could not make myself be like Neleus. I was human—we were all human. But we all had something else in addition, and Neleus did not, and we all knew it.

  “It shouldn’t make any difference,” Neleus said, into that long silence. His voice wavered a little.

  “It shouldn’t,” Phaedrus said, gently enough. “But you have to see that it does.”

  “You’re not any better than I am,” Neleus blazed.

  Phaedrus lifted an eyebrow. “You know I am. I’m faster and stronger. We’re exactly the same age but I haven’t been able to wrestle with you in the palaestra since we were six.”

  “It’s not fair!”

  “It may not be fair, but it’s the way it is,” Kallikles said. He reached out a hand toward Neleus across the space between the beds, but Neleus ignored it.

  “It’s not your fault,” Phaedrus said.

  “Being heroes doesn’t make you better people,” Father said. He sounded immensely weary. “It might even make you worse. Knowing about it might. Simmea was afraid of that.”

  “What does it mean, exactly?” I asked.

  “Arete, even you must see that this isn’t the time for a Socratic debate clarifying terms!” Kallikles said, turning on me angrily.

  “I don’t see that at all,” I said, keeping my voice even as Mother would have. “I think this would be a splendid time to discuss it properly. We all know we’re heroes, except Neleus, sorry Neleus, but we don’t know what that means in real and practical terms. We don’t know what difference it can make.”

  Kallikles looked at Father, but Father was staring down at the blankets and said nothing.

  “I’m going on the voyage,” Neleus said, in a calm and decided tone. “I appreciate that you all despise me, but I am going. I have more right than anyone, and more need to prove myself than any of you. If the Chamber won’t accept me for the voyage I’ll stow away. I am her son. I am Simmea’s only son, and I am going to avenge her.”

  I made a little sound when he said he was her only son, because why should gender matter so much? But then I stopped myself from protesting, because he needed to be special, and when it came down to it he wasn’t a hero and I was.

  There was another long silence. Then Father spoke. “Being a god made me worse at being a human being. She saw that. And she saw that being heroes might be a
problem for you. And she was afraid that you would be unkind to Neleus because he isn’t, and that he’d suffer from that.” She had been right to worry about that, because we had been and he had. Father went on without hesitating, still looking down at the bed and not at any of us. “She thought that people needed more training to bring up children than we had had, but she understood that we had to bring you up and take responsibility for you. Most of the people with the training left after we voted to have families, and the rest were rushed off their feet.”

  Now he looked up, and it was Neleus he looked at. “You are indeed her only son. She loved you very much. It almost killed her soul having you. She hated to give you up. She was so glad to get you back! I remember it so well, when we first brought all of you here.” He looked around the room, shaking his head at the memory. “She loved all of you, but Neleus was indeed her only son.”

  Then he looked at me, and I saw he must have been aware of the little noise of protest I made. “You are her only daughter, and the only child of her milk.”

  “What difference does milk make?” I asked, puzzled.

  “All the difference in the world,” he answered, as if he thought I should know this already. “Mothers give their milk to their children, and with it their strength and their stamina, their ability to survive disease. There’s a bond in that milk.”

  “And I didn’t have her milk?” Neleus asked in a small voice.

  Phaedrus answered quickly. “You know you didn’t. You’ve read what Plato says, no mother shall set eyes on her own child—they went to the nurseries when their breasts were full and fed some random child who was there.” Phaedrus shook his head. “She might have fed me, but never you.”

  Everyone except me had read the Republic. Reading it was now part of the adulthood rite for our city.

  “She fed you the night you were born, Neleus,” Father said. “She told me so. But after that you were fed by any woman but your mother, and the same for the rest of you. No doubt Plato meant it to even out the advantages given by the milk, so that all could share with all.”

  “Plato was crazy on some subjects, and that was one of them,” Kallikles said dismissively. “Father, where are you going with this line of argument?”

  Father hesitated. “I don’t remember.” He looked over at Mother’s bed, where Phaedrus was sitting, and then quickly away. Mother often used to be able to see when Father got ahead of himself and give him his next point. She had a way of laughing as she did it that I could almost hear. Father wiped his eyes with the corner of his kiton. “I just can’t lose all of you as well as her.”

  “You’d be lost too,” Phaedrus pointed out.

  “I’d be back on Olympos, and you’d all be in Hades after having achieved very little in this life. You’re heroes. Arete asked what that means. It doesn’t mean anything if you don’t live like heroes.”

  “I’m going,” Neleus said, stubbornly. “I’m not a hero, but I am her son, and I am going on this voyage.”

  “We’re all going,” Kallikles said. “It won’t be all of your sons, Father. Alkibiades and Porphyry and Euklides would still be on the island even if the ship sinks. And how can we live as heroes if we don’t get the chance to join the one heroic venture in our lifetimes so far?”

  Father looked from one to the other of them, then he slowly set down his cup, got up, and went out of the street door.

  “Where are you going?” Kallikles asked, but Father kept on walking and didn’t answer.

  “Where is he going?” Phaedrus asked.

  Since nobody else was going to, I got up and followed Father. He was walking aimlessly south down the middle of the street. “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “To visit the lion,” he said.

  I put my hand through his arm. “I’ll come too.” I knew the lion he meant. It was a bronze statue of a lion on a street corner near Florentia. Mother had been especially fond of it. One of my first memories was walking to visit the lion, one of my little hands held in each of my parents’ big ones. We walked down briskly through the night’s chill that made me wish for my cloak. Father felt warm, but then he always does. I don’t know if it was his divine fire burning even in his mortal incarnation or just a natural warmth. We reached the lion, and he patted it the way Mother used to. I patted it too. The lion’s face was very expressive, but it was hard to say just what it expressed. It seemed to change from time to time. Tonight the shadows made it seem worried. We turned around and walked back toward home.

  It was a cold night and the stars were burning bright and clear, so distinct that I could see colors in some of them. “I can see all the stars in Orion’s belt,” I said.

  “We’ll go there one day,” Father said.

  I looked at him, startled. “You and me?”

  “People,” he clarified. “They’ll settle planets out around those distant suns, one day, far ahead. I haven’t been there yet. I’m always reluctant to leave the sun. But eventually I will, and you will too. I promised your mother I’d see her out there one day.” He wiped his eyes.

  “But what does it mean?” I asked. “She might be out there on another planet far in the future, but she won’t remember us, or her life here.”

  “No,” he agreed, sadly.

  “And the civilization that settles the stars won’t be our civilization. They won’t have learned anything from this experiment, they won’t know anything about the Just City except the legend of Atlantis in the Timaeus and Critias.”

  “Time is so vast—they probably wouldn’t anyway,” he said. But as he stared up at the stars he began to weep again. We walked on in silence.

  “I had not meant this grief to unman me so,” he said quietly, when we were getting close to Thessaly.

  “It might be better on the ship. Here everything reminds us of her,” I said.

  “The boys are right. They are men, and heroes, and they have to act as they think best. I can’t keep them children, or keep them safe.”

  “I’m going,” I said, guessing where this conversation might be going. “The Chamber have approved me. I’m going!”

  “Arete,” he said, then stopped and began again in a different tone. “And you have to decide for yourself too. Equal significance means letting people make their own choices. But it’s so difficult! Do you think she wanted me to learn this and that’s why she stopped me?”

  “It’s possible,” I said. And then I dared to say what I’d been thinking for a long time now. “She would want you to command your grief with philosophy.”

  “I know,” he said, bleakly. “Oh yes, I do know that. I shouldn’t be sad and I shouldn’t indulge my grief. She is gone on to a better life. I should remember her and love the world for her. I know all that. I really do know it. But knowing it doesn’t actually help at all when I want to talk to her so much my whole body aches.”

  “I know,” I said. “I miss her every day.”

  “I wish I understood why she wouldn’t let me heal her. It might all make more sense if I could understand that.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. I shivered.

  “Come on, we should go in and tell the boys they can ask the Chamber if they can go on the voyage.” He was trying to sound cheerful. “And we can have more wine. Arete—do you think revenge will actually help me feel better?”

  “No,” I said, surprised into honesty.

  7

  APOLLO

  “How now shall I sing of you, though you are a worthy subject for song?” That’s from the Homeric hymn to me—the same line is in both Homeric hymns to me actually, the Delphian and the Delian. Mortals find it intimidating to write about me, sometimes. It’s as if they think I’ll be listening over their shoulder. I find myself thinking it writing this, about Simmea and Sokrates, about Ficino and Maia and Pico. How shall I sing of you? I promised Father there would be songs.

  There are already songs on Olympos about the sorrows and miseries of humanity and how badly people deal with death, and
certainly there are songs enough about those subjects sung by mortals. I had felt grief myself often before. But this grief resisted being transmuted to art. You have to understand that transmuting emotion into art is what I do. It’s one of the reasons I like emotions. But this emotion was bigger than I was. It’s not that I didn’t try to write songs for Simmea. I tried to write them, and for the first time my art failed me. I wrote songs, but they were pale thin things, they would not catch fire. They were true enough, but they left so much unsaid. I wanted vengeance, and yet at the same time as I struggled so desperately toward it I knew that revenge wasn’t really what I wanted. I knew that art would come. It always had. The depth of this grief was different and unusual, and so would be the songs that came of it. Her name would live forever, as would her soul. That was the only way I could comfort myself, and it was thin comfort. Meanwhile, I was making an even poorer job of being a human being than usual. I was developing more sympathy for Achilles than I ever had before.

  About a month after she died I decided to open her chest and sort out her belongings. She didn’t have much—a winter cloak that doubled as a blanket, a pen and ink, some paints and brushes caught up in a scrappy paint-spattered rag, needles and thread, a scraper and a comb, another, finer comb with three broken teeth, a set of menstrual sponges. Underneath these things, all of which I had seen her use a million times and which seemed to miss the touch of her hands, was a pile of paper notebooks. I had seen her writing in them from time to time. “What are you doing?” I’d ask.

  “Making notes,” she’d reply, shutting the book and putting it away. They were small, the standard little notebooks the Workers had produced and which we continued to produce now with rather more effort. They had buff covers and were sewn together. I had never realized how many of them she had. I counted—twelve. If they were full and each held five thousand words, which would be about right, that was sixty thousand words she had written. I expected them to be notes, perhaps dialogues. They had her name on the covers, and under that they were numbered with Roman numerals. I wasn’t sure how to read them—whether to glut myself on them all at once, or to save them. They represented something more of Simmea, which I had not expected. I was excited, and at the same time afraid of disappointment. I picked up the one labeled as number I and opened it and read.