“My children will settle down into this world,” Pytheas said to me afterwards. “One day you’ll worship them. They and their children will be your pantheon, appropriate to this place. But for now, let them grow up. Let them be human while they can. They’ll be gods long enough.”

Eight years afterwards I thought of this conversation while I was working with Arete, educating a class in preparation for their oath-taking. This was the first class to contain Workers as well as human ephebes, and so I had been invited to help. I was enjoying the stimulation of all the questions they came up with.

“Plato thought of his system for humans, but it works very well for Workers,” Arete said as we watched the class go off debating noisily with each other, making necessary but not unnecessary distinctions between human and Worker.

“Yes. He could imagine humans who grew up in a Just City, but he could not imagine what it would be like for either Workers or gods,” I said. “But we all have souls that yearn for excellence and justice.”

Arete laughed with surprise. “We all do,” she said.

A little while after that, I was talking to Klio on a train ride where we happened to find ourselves together. Klio was another Master, younger than Aristomache and Lamprokleia but older than Maia. She came from the twentieth or twenty-first century, and had been a classical scholar there. We found ourselves talking about religion. Klio was an Ikarian, and she was still in the process of adjusting her ideas after the apotheosis of Ikaros. She was not disturbed by the direct intervention of Zeus in our affairs—she said she had always considered that he and Ikaros’s primal God the Father were identical. “You don’t need to come to the New Concordance from Christianity,” she insisted.

“I see no need of it,” I said. As the train sped across the black volcanic plains, with the distant mountains sending up sullen plumes or sudden hot blasts of flame, I explained to her how I had come to understand things. “Pytheas’s children will one day be our pantheon, he told me so. And Arete agreed that their souls long for justice and excellence. They have grown up in the Republic. When that day comes that they are our pantheon and we worship them, we will have appropriately Platonic gods.”

“I wish Ikaros could hear that,” Klio said.

VI. On Old Age