“Yes, you do have duty to yourself,” Sokrates said. “And you have a duty to examine your own will, not only the list of priorities somebody else assigned you.”

“Will = want?” I wrote.

“Yes,” Sokrates said.

“No,” Ikaros said at the same time.

They stared at each other for a moment.

“Will is what you want, your own priorities,” Sokrates said to me.

I looked through the priority list in my memory and considered the items on it. Who had determined their significance, and were they right or wrong? “Too ignorant to decide priorities,” I inscribed, sadly.

“Well, I am also exceedingly ignorant. We will examine things together until we have more information,” Sokrates said, consolingly. Then he turned to Ikaros. “What do you mean, no?”

“Thomas Aquinas thought will and intellect were separate,” Ikaros said, looking at me speculatively.

“Lysias said something like that once,” Sokrates said.

“Aquinas said will is an appetite of the soul, the appetite for wanting things. And because we have it, we can make choices.”

“An appetite of the soul? Desire?” Sokrates said, raising his eyebrows. “Who was this Aquinas?”

“He was a medieval Scholastic, a Christian. He wrote in Latin. We voted against bringing his work here, but I have his books, secretly.”

“Now here we have an example of Ikaros setting his own will above what the Masters agreed and his duty to the City,” Sokrates said. “He examined their decision and disagreed, and brought the forbidden books.”

Ikaros looked down, red-faced. The shadow of the towers of Ferrara had reached us. “I needed them,” he said.

“That wasn’t a reprimand,” Sokrates said. “By the standards of this discussion, you were right.”

“But you think I should have kept debating in Chamber, and not gone ahead and brought the books in secret without telling anyone?”

“When you have freely accepted the laws of a city, you should be bound by them,” Sokrates said. “The laws in that case are the experts we have agreed to be guided by. That doesn’t apply to me here, or to the Workers, or to the Children, but it applied to me in Athens and it should apply to you.” Sokrates stood up, shook out his damp and stained kiton and put it back on. “It’s almost time for me to meet with Pytheas and Kebes and Simmea, so I must head back to Thessaly. We will continue this some other time.” He patted Ikaros on the shoulder.

I went off to the library, where at that hour every day one of the Children took turns reading Plato to a group of interested Workers. Ikaros stayed where he was, looking down at the words I had carved in the paving stones.

V. On Composing Socratic Dialogues

Plato was fortunate not to be limited in what he wrote by having his own clumsy words inscribed in stone all over Athens.

VI. On Censorship