“One thing I have learned about grief,” I said to her, “is that nothing anyone says to you is useful, but it can still be comforting sometimes to know you’re not alone and not the only person who cares about missing them. Ficino was my friend too.”

She smiled through her tears. “Thank you, Pytheas. And Simmea was also my friend.”

“We have to do the work they left undone,” I said.

“I know,” she said. “Oh, I know. But it makes me so tired to think of it.”

“We have to stop the art raids, and come to an equitable solution with the Lucians, and bring up the next generation to be more excellent than their parents.”

“The Lucians skin heretics, and have gladiatorial fights, and their irons are almost like slaves,” Maia said. The edge of the sun showed red over the rim of the world.

“Nobody’s perfect,” I said. “The Romans had gladiatorial combats, they dislocated the arms of heretics in Renaissance Florence, all of the classical world had slavery, and so did we in the City before we realized that the Workers were self-aware.”

“Plato—”

“Plato was laying out an unachievable ideal, to spur people to excellence,” I said. “What was it Cicero said about Cato?”

“That Cato acted as if he was living in Plato’s Republic instead of the dunghill of Romulus?” She switched into Latin to quote it.

“That’s it. Plato wanted to give people something to aspire to. That’s why he isn’t here, he didn’t really imagine it as a possibility, just as something to encourage everyone to think, and to work toward excellence. In reality, while we aim for excellence, we’re always living on somebody’s dunghill. But that doesn’t mean we’re wrong to aim to be the best we can be. And the Lucians aren’t all like Kebes. If they were we’d all be dead. We can find a way to help them toward excellence.”

She sighed. “Everything is complicated and compromised.”

“It is,” I said. “That’s the nature of reality.” A gull swooped down low over the water.

“Ficino understood how to go on amid the compromise and find a way forward,” Maia said.

“Yes. He took over the Laurentian Library for the Florentine Republic after Piero de Medici fled,” I agreed.

“How do you know that?” she asked. “Were you there?”

I had frequently been there, but of course I didn’t want to tell her so. “I’ve heard him talk about it,” I said, truthfully. “I know nobody is supposed to talk about their lives before they came to the City, but everyone does.”