Free The Just City by Jo Walton Page B

assigned to Laurel house, in the dining hall of Delphi, in the Tribe of Apollo. There were twelve tribes, each devoted to a particular god, with twelve dining halls each. Each dining hall was made up of ten houses of seven children each. (These numbers weren’t in the Republic. They had some complicated Neoplatonist relevance, and had doubtless taken somebody a long time to work out. I was so glad I’d missed that discussion.) There were ten thousand and eighty children—a number which could, should one wish to, be evenly divided by every number except eleven.
    Those first years in the Republic were fun. My body was a child’s body still, but it was my body, and now properly under my control. I was young and growing and I had music and exercise. I had the amusement of seeing where there were cracks in the structure that seemed so solid. Bringing together that many children with so few adults was something only somebody who knew nothing about children would have suggested. The children were wild and hard to control, and much more of this wildness was necessarily tolerated than Plato had imagined. The masters tried to set up a system where the children monitored each other, which had some limited success. But to track all the children the way they really wanted they could have done with four times as many adults—but they were limited to those who not only thought they wanted to set up the Republic, but who had read Plato in the original and prayed to Athene to help. There were probably a lot of good Christians who would have liked to have been there. As it was, there were more people from the Christian eras than I’d have guessed. I do have friends and votaries everywhere, but some times and places I seldom visit, largely for aesthetic reasons.
    The thing that surprised me about the masters when I got to know them was that so few of them were from the Enlightenment. I’d have thought that era, so excitingly pagan after so much dull Christianity, would have produced a whole crop of philosophers who’d want to be here. I talked to Athene about it one day when I caught her reading Myronianus of Amastra, curled up on her favorite window seat in the library.
    â€œThere’s practically nobody here from the Enlightenment because they didn’t want this. The crown of the Republic is to get everything right, to produce a system that will produce Philosopher Kings who will know The Good.”
    â€œWith Capital Letters,” I said.
    She looked down her nose at me, which wasn’t easy, since with both of us eleven years old, she was shorter than me. “Exactly. The Good with capital letters, the Truth, the one unchanging Excellence that stays the same forever. Once that’s established, the system goes on the same in ideal stasis for as long as it can continue to do so, with everyone agreeing on what is Good, what is Virtue, what is Justice, and what is Excellence. For the first time in the Enlightenment, they had the idea of progress, the idea that each generation will find its own truth, that things will keep on changing and getting better.” She hesitated. “They do pray to me, some of them. Just not for this. I find it fascinating in its own way. It’s bewildering. It’s one of those things I keep coming back to. I know I’ll never get tired of it. But you won’t find them here.”
    â€œThere are people here from ages with a notion of progress, though,” I pointed out.
    â€œMostly women,” Athene said. “You’ll always have the odd man who loves Plato so much he doesn’t care about progress. But the women—well, in those times women fortunate enough to be educated in Greek—and there aren’t that many of them—they have horrible circumscribed lives, and they read the Republic and they get to the bit about equality of education and opportunity and then they pray to me to be here so fast their heads spin. We have