Read The Just City for Free Online Page B

souls?” a man in a toga asked.
    â€œYour souls will also go back to that moment and be reborn from that time, not from this time.”
    There was a murmur across the room, as three hundred people said to themselves happily in their native languages: “We have immortal souls! I knew it!” I could only understand Latin and Greek and English, and I heard it in all three of those languages.
    A white-bearded man in a Greek kiton, looking the very image of a philosopher, asked “Are they three-part souls as Plato described?”
    â€œWould anyone prefer to return to their own time now?” Athene asked, either not hearing or ignoring the attempt to clarify the issue of our souls. “This would seem like a dream, soon forgotten.”
    To my surprise three men raised their hands. Athene blinked, and they disappeared. I was looking at one of them, a shabby man with a donnish look, wondering how he could possibly not want to stay, when he just wasn’t there anymore.
    â€œNow, we need to make plans,” she said.
    â€œBut where are we, Sophia? You spoke of our own times. When are we?” It was a man in Renaissance clothes and a red hat.
    â€œWe are in the time before the fall of Troy. And we are on the doomed island of Kallisti, called by some Atlante.” Even I had heard of Atlantis.
    â€œThen what we make cannot last?” he asked.
    The goddess inclined her head. “This is an experiment, and this is the best time and place for that experiment. Nothing mortal can last. At best it can leave legends that can bear fruit in later ages.”
    After that, with the big questions out of the way, we began to discuss how we would go about the work.
    It soon became clear that we were united on many issues and divided on others, and that there were practical problems none of us had thought through. Plato’s Republic was extremely specific on some issues and distressingly vague on others. It wasn’t really intended to be used as a blueprint.
    There were almost three hundred of us, from twenty-five centuries. There were close to equal numbers of men and women, which astounded me at first. I had never before met another woman who cared about scholarship. Now I did, and it was wonderful. Before long I realised that most of the women were much like me, young, and fortunate enough to obtain enough education to make their possible lives unsatisfactory. I met young women from every century, including several from my own and the century after.
    â€œIt does get better,” one of them reassured me. Her name was Kylee, and she was wearing what seemed to me a man’s suit, but cut to her form. “In the eighteen-seventies they established colleges for women at Oxford and Cambridge, and in America too. By the nineteen-twenties they began to grant degrees. By the nineteen-sixties they were actually nominally equal to the men’s colleges.”
    â€œMore than a hundred years from me,” I said.
    â€œAnd even in my time it’s a wearisome business,” she said. “It’s not that I want to die, but not being allowed to offer to die for my country means that my country doesn’t consider me a true citizen.”
    We young women from the Centuries of Progress were one clear group. The men of the Renaissance were another. The Neoplatonists made a third. This was Kylee’s name for the group led by Plotinus and sharing a particular mystical interpretation of Plato based around numerology. They called themselves simply Platonists, of course. Plotinus was the white-bearded man who had asked the question about three-part souls when we first arrived.
    There were also many Romans, who could have been considered a fourth group except that they never agreed about anything and so could not be thought of as a faction. I was delighted to find Marcus Tullius Cicero among them, and his friend Titus Pomponius Atticus. Atticus was charming; he reminded me a little of my father.