“And don’t women have rights here these days, Simmea?” Maia asked. “Or have I come to Psyche by mistake? Women’s rights are certainly why I went there. But I couldn’t stay in the City of Amazons.”

I don’t remember if she explained why she had come, if they discussed the New Concordance or Ikaros. I only remember the colors and shapes of the three of them under the lemon tree in the moonlight, and the smell of the autumn night with rain coming on the wind.

Maia had been one of the Masters of Florentia, with Ficino, and with Ficino she became one of my teachers. There are three distinct generations in the city. The Masters were those who prayed to Athene to let them help set up Plato’s Republic. They were all grown up when they came here, and some of them were old. Ficino was old—sixty-six when he came, he says, and he’s ninety-eight now, though he’s in better condition than a lot of the younger Masters. He says it’s from eating a good diet and not letting his mind atrophy. Maia was only about twenty, so she’s about fifty now. (I dared Kallikles to ask her exact age once, and she offered to box his ears for the impertinence.) Most of the Masters are somewhere in between, though a number of the older ones have died, of course.

Then there’s my parents’ generation, known as the Children. They are all the same age, with very little variation. They were all about ten years old when they came, though some of them were nine or eleven. They’re all thirty-eight now, with that same slight range of variation.

Last comes my generation, the Children’s children, whom we call the Young Ones. Our ages range between twenty-one and newborn, though far more of us are between twenty-one and nineteen—when they were holding Festivals of Hera three times a year, a lot of babies were born. After that, it wasn’t organized, and people had to sort things out for themselves. There are other Young Ones my age and younger, but there aren’t great cohorts of us, as there are of my brothers’ age and the Children. I suppose the babies starting to be born now to the oldest of the Young Ones are a fourth generation. I don’t know what they’ll be called. Do they name generations, elsewhere? I haven’t run across it in my reading. Cicero was older than Caelius and Milo and Clodius, but there wasn’t a hard line. It would be like us younger Young Ones, I suppose, with overlap and people of all ages. Odd.