Neleus looked at me in astonishment. “What a great idea!” he said. “Let’s do all that. Let’s give them more choices and make all of their lives better.”

“It was Kallikles’s idea, when he saw them yesterday,” I admitted. “But I agree: if it doesn’t break history we have a moral obligation to help them.”

“Wait,” Father said. “It won’t break history, but it can break you if you try to go against Fate and Necessity. And you can’t teach philosophy to every starving peasant in the Aegean.”

“Why not?” Neleus asked. “Mother would have.”

Father stared at him for a moment. “She would have,” he admitted.

10. Maia

10

MAIA

One of the strangest things about the multiplication of cities after the Last Debate was that we were all doing variations of Plato’s Republic, and so we came to feel that attempting to create Plato’s Republic was the normal thing people did. It might have been different for some of the older Masters, like Ficino. I had only been nineteen when I came to the City, and the Children had been no more than ten. When I thought about it, of course, I remembered a world of people who went from one year to another without thinking twice about Plato, but I did not care to think about them often. There had been no place for me in that world. So the argument in my mind was never whether to set up the Just City, always how best to do it.

With the founding of the City of Amazons I found myself doing things for the second time, and trying to fix the errors we had made the first time. For the Children, of course, it was the first time, and they viewed the errors they had found growing up in the City quite differently from the way we Masters did. One of the first decisions we made was that there would be no more Masters and Children. We all agreed that the Children were much closer to what Plato wanted than we were. Nevertheless, we were the ones with the experience of setting up the original city, and with working on committees, and with making decisions. It was decided that Masters ranked with silvers, auxiliary guardians, but that we could serve on committees, which were otherwise for golds alone. The Children were used to deferring to us.