I was sympathetic with that view myself. So was Klio. “We don’t know how history works,” she said. “But consider that it might be a wax tablet like the ones we use every day. After it has been written, it can be erased and rewritten. If we step out of the margins where Athene has set us, we could wipe out everything that comes after. What Kallikles said about helping those poor people sounds entirely good. But we don’t know enough. What if the Trojan War needs to come out of the poverty and dirt we saw in the Kyklades? If so we would be wrong to change it, however painful seeing it may be. What if people handed the secret of iron-making will be content to make iron forever and never move on to steel, as they would have if they’d discovered it for themselves? And we don’t know, we can’t know, what matters, or what is and isn’t safe to change. We have seen too much here of what comes from good intentions and ignorance. We should leave them alone to find their own destiny and stay here on our island.”

Everyone had their own theory of history, and many aired them. Ikaros was absolutely sure that Athene wouldn’t have put us here if there was any danger. He believed in Providence, and his argument was essentially that we could only do good by trying to increase excellence.

Finally Patroklus argued that the people of the Aegean had their own Fate and that we had no right at all to change that, or to judge them for living differently from the way we thought right. “You have described their art. What right have we to impose our ideas of art on them instead? Perhaps they have religions and philosophies that are equally valuable. I’m not arguing in support of Klio, that we don’t know what it’s safe to change. I agree with that, but my point is different. What right have we to judge and to say what is better or worse?”

I called an end to the day without calling for a vote. “Lots of people haven’t had a chance to speak yet. We’ll resume in the morning.”

“You’re not setting up a committee on the nature of time?” Pytheas asked as I stepped down.

“Why, do you have any pertinent information for it?” He was always such a funny mixture. I remembered him as a boy, so intent on everything, so serious. They were all my children.

“Nothing that I want to talk about right now,” he said. “But it seems to me that the debate has been all about that, and only what Patroklus said was about whether we want to help.”