On the beach some people were preparing food, and others were racing and wrestling on the sand as if they were in the palaestra. The Excellence was bobbing sedately at anchor. Clouds were blowing up out of the west and glowing rose and violet in the rays of the lowering sun. (Since I’d left home I seemed to spend a lot of time looking at the sky. It was always changing, yet it was the one thing that was the same everywhere.) Nobody took any notice of us coming back, except Erinna, who waved happily as she caught sight of us, and Neleus, who raked us with a dark-eyed glance before turning back to the fire he was building.

13. Apollo

13

APOLLO

I had guessed that Delos might have an effect on my Young Ones, but had not quite thought through what that would mean. I knew it when I saw them coming back aboard to sleep that night. The three of them had a new look about them that I nevertheless recognized. They were always beautiful, and always moved well—everyone brought up in the City knew how to move well. But now there was something about them, a certain sleekness, a not-quite-hidden glitter, as of a scarf draped carelessly over treasure. They looked like Olympians in disguise.

After the Last Debate, Simmea and I set up housekeeping together in Thessaly, which had been Sokrates’s house. We took all the children belonging to us—Neleus, and my three boys. I took Kallikles, Alkibiades and Phaedrus from the city crèches. Many people wanted their babies but couldn’t identify them. There was no difficulty with mine. I’d have known them by their heroic souls, but anyone could tell at a glance from their eyes and bone structure. Phaedrus’s blue eyes looked strange against his dark skin, especially then, when he was five months old. Alkibiades was nine months old, and Kallikles was just over a year.

We also collected Neleus, who was also five months old. Simmea frowned when I carried him into Thessaly. “I swore to Zeus and Demeter not to treat him differently from the others,” she said. “They’re all my children.”

“They’re all your children, and you won’t be prejudiced in his favor in any way, but here he is,” I said. Then she took him and hugged him as if she’d never let him go.

It only took a couple of days for Simmea to decide that Plato was right, or at least that the two of us couldn’t manage four lively boys all day and all night. We took to leaving them in the nursery for several hours in the day so that we could get things done. There they were being brought up according to the precepts of Plato, communally, by people trained in early infant care. It didn’t hurt them, or at least I don’t think it did.