Athene thought we should be grateful to her for the opportunity to be in the City—and I was. I can’t imagine any life that could have been better for me personally that led on from the nineteen years of my life I lived in the nineteenth century. I would never stop being grateful for the rescue that allowed me to be myself, to be respected as a scholar and a teacher. My feelings about Christianity were conflicted, while my gratitude to Athene was unfailing. On the other hand, Sokrates made some valid points in the Last Debate. I continued to question whether she had the right to do what she had done. But I still prayed to her nightly, and to the other Olympians on appropriate occasions.

What Ikaros did was to build a whole logical edifice reconciling everything—Plato, Aristotle, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, Stoicism, Epicureanism, Hedonism, Pythagoras, and sundry other ideas he’d picked up here and there. Bits of it were brilliant. For instance, he deduced from Athene saying that the City was just that justice must be a process, not a Form, and that reconciled contradictions between Plato and Aristotle’s views of justice as well as being a fascinating idea about dynamic ideals. In fact, all of it was brilliant, if you considered it as pure logic. The problem was his axioms.