The other great early debate was over marriage and families. None of us wanted to carry on Plato’s idea of arranged matings at festivals. We had all seen the misery and complications it caused. But some of us wanted traditional marriage and families, while others wanted to try other varieties of Plato’s idea of having wives and children in common. I was torn on this subject. We Masters had been very loose about this. Klio and Axiothea might as well have been married, except that they were both women. Lysias and I had a friendship that included some sex. Ficino had been strictly celibate while openly admiring all the beautiful youths. Ikaros, in addition to his spectacular public Platonic relationship with Plotinus, had an ongoing private arrangement with Lukretia, and sex with anyone he could charm into lying down with him. We masters were not a good example. I felt that this was an area where Plato should perhaps have stayed with tradition.

This time Ikaros was firmly on the other side. He wanted to keep everything fluid and flexible, where people could live together if they chose but everyone should be available to everyone else with no exclusivity. Ikaros read Plato’s passage on this aloud, very movingly. Many Children spoke about their love for each other and their desire to form families and bring up their own children. Lukretia expanded on Athene’s point in the Last Debate about the damage done to cities and states by families and factions, with chilling examples from her own experience. Eventually we came to a kind of compromise where families would be permitted but not marriages or inheritance, and those families could be of any number and any gender, and could form and reform at will. Thus Porphyry was born into the family Euridike had formed with Castor, Hesiod, and Iris, although his father was Pytheas, who had stayed behind in the Remnant City.

I was sharing a house with Lysias, and if the vote had gone the other way we had agreed to marry. When I came home exhausted after Porphyry’s birth, he brought me apple porridge and rubbed my feet.

“We could have children now,” he said, looking up at me. “You’re not too old. If you stopped taking the silphium.”

I shook my head. “It’s not what I want.”

He looked disappointed and got up from the floor to sit beside me on the bed. “Why not?”

I had seen a great deal of childbirth, enough to put anyone off, but that wasn’t it. “I want a life of the mind, not to be mired in domesticity. All that milk and washing.”

“But you have maternal instincts. You’re such a good teacher.”