Title Page

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Dedication

This is for Ada, who has the best thoughts.

Epigraphs

Quid me mihi detrahis?

—OVID, Metamorphoses, Book VI

What a wondrous and sublime thing it is to be human, to be able to choose your state, whether among the beasts or among the angels.

—GIOVANNI PICO DELLA MIRANDOLA, Oration on the Awesomeness of Humanity (Oratio de Hominis Dignitate)

I am voyaging too.

We will need the foundation as much as the dome

For those worlds to come true.

—ADA PALMER, “Somebody Will”

Nothing befits a man more than discourse on the soul. Thus the Delphic injunction “Know thyself” is fulfilled, and we examine everything else, whether above or beneath the soul, with deeper insight.

—MARSILIO FICINO, letter to Jacobo Bracciolini

I had a queer obsession about justice. As though justice mattered. As though justice can really be distinguished from vengeance. It’s only love that’s any good.

—ELIZABETH VON ARNIM, The Enchanted April

1. Apollo

1

APOLLO

Very few people know that Pico della Mirandola stole the head of the Winged Victory of Samothrace. In fact he stole it twice. The first time he stole it from Samothrace, before the rest of it was rediscovered. That time he had the help of my sister Athene. The second time was thirty years later, when he stole it from the Temple of Nike in Plato’s Republic. One of Plato’s Republics, that is; the original, called by some the Just City, by others the Remnant, and by still others the City of Workers, although by then we only had two. In addition to our Republic, there were four others scattered about the island of Kallisti, an island itself known at different times as Atlantis, Thera, and Santorini. Almost everyone who had been influenced by living in the original Republic wanted to found, or amend, their own ideal city. None of them were content to get on with living their lives; all of them wanted to shape the Good Life, according to their own ideas.