I didn’t say anything. If Simmea were alive, we wouldn’t have been here. And if we had been, and she’d been here, Kebes would have been civil to me in her presence, as he had promised years ago. And besides, I have never truly understood what Plato meant by agape, especially when it came to men and women. I wasn’t sure that Plato even really understood that men could fall in love with women, or that women could fall in love at all. It wasn’t until the Renaissance that Platonic love was interpreted that way. There aren’t any simple words for what Simmea and I were to each other. She was my friend and my votary. That was enough.

“Why didn’t you just kill him?” Phaedrus asked. “When he said that and you hit him?”

“I didn’t think,” I said, and it was true. I’d smashed him to the ground with a blow. I could just as easily have crushed his throat and watched him choke to death. I had acted entirely without thinking, and on that instinctive level I was used to drawing back and not killing Kebes.

Neleus had the wine. I waited until he had swallowed. “I need you to help me,” I said to him. “You haven’t accepted their hospitality.”

He nodded, eager. “I haven’t. Not here, and not at Marissa.”

“Good. That was well thought through. The rest of you did accept it, didn’t you.”

“Sorry,” Phaedrus said.

“I didn’t think,” Kallikles said.

“They’re not all Kebes. They’re good people, doing good work. Mother would have liked them,” Arete said.

“They’ll be utterly forgotten,” I said, confident of it. I’d been shaken for a moment at Marissa, but I knew the future couldn’t be changed, that anything done here was nothing more to history than a marginal note. I’d been to the future, after all. On the beach where we were sitting there would one day be a wonderful little restaurant that made mouth-watering kalimari and grilled fish, crisp outside and moist within. “Forgotten. Kebes and all his works.”

“Maia says they’re the cities Plato heard about. The ones that lived according to his rule, and then degenerated to timarchy and so on,” Arete said. “And they do show signs that way.”

I laughed, amused. “Then maybe they are.”

I looked back at Neleus. “Kebes said the judges couldn’t be our children—by which I assume he’s not practicing clerical celibacy and he has some children here. But you’re technically not my child, which is a good thing, because it means you can be one of the judges. And because you haven’t accepted their hospitality, you’re not restricted in what you can do. If Kebes tries to cheat, you’re free to act without any inhibitions.”