A. We consider ourselves to be a daughter city of the Original City, and continue to count dates from the founding of that city, except when talking about history, when for convenience we use dates in CE. Plato years are four hundred and sixty-one days of nineteen hours each, which makes them very close to the Earth year of three hundred and sixty-five twenty-four-hour days, 8759 to 8760 hours. For convenience, and to keep in step, like all Platonic Cities, we add a day to the Festival of Janus every nineteen years.

Q. How do you celebrate the Festival of Hera?

A. Sexual people always ask that! Plato says such festivals should be held as often as necessary to produce a new generation. We certainly wish to honor Hera as patron of marriage, and Ilythia as patron of birth, and to produce new generations of Workers. So we hold such a festival every twenty-five years, as that seems to be the optimum spacing for generations and also, according to our numerologist Sixty-One, a happy and generative number. Some of us are chosen and allotted partners and spend a day garlanded together in pairs, and then all those chosen help to assemble the new Workers and regard themselves as the parents of that whole generation, exactly as Plato says.

III. On Wisdom

A few years after Sokrates came back, though of course I can’t tell when it was for her, Athene came to visit me in the City of Workers. It was an evening in early spring. I’d spent the day, and the night before, working on a new colossus, and I was recharging, alone in the station. I recognized Athene at once as she strode towards me out of the shadows. She stood as tall as a Worker, with her castle-crown and spear. Her owl swooped up before her and settled silently on top of the charger, staring at me. When I looked back at Athene she had lost the crown and height and looked instead like Septima, the girl she had been in the original Republic. She looked like an ephebe, slight and grey-eyed, wearing an embroidered kiton fastened with a gold pin which matched the painted gold bee I wore. We were both Golds of the Just City, and in that way, if no other, equals. It was interesting that this was the aspect she chose to show me.

“Joy to you, Sophia,” I said. I wasn’t afraid, although I knew she could do anything to me, since I was her votary.

“Joy,” she echoed. “Who would have imagined that it would have been you who succeed in making Plato’s City work?”

“Wasn’t this your plan?” I asked.

“Not mine and not Jathery’s,” she admitted. “Neither of us ever believed it could work properly. Sokrates must have guessed that I thought that, or else Apollo told him.”

“I think he guessed,” I said.