The Just City Read Online Free PDF Page A

my mother. Aunt Fanny was not wrong when she said that men dislike bluestockings. I could perhaps keep house for Edward as he had suggested, and write his sermons, but what would then become of me if he were to marry?
    In Plato’s Republic, as never in all of history, my sex would have been no impediment. I could have been an equal to anyone. I could have exercised freely, and learned philosophy. I wished fiercely that it existed and that I had been born there. He had written two thousand three hundred years ago, and never in all that time had anyone paid any attention. How many women had led stupid wasted unnecessary lives because nobody listened to Plato? I was furious with all the world except Plato and my father.
    I went back to my seat and took up the book again, reading on faster and faster, no longer wanting to disagree with Socrates, saying yes in my heart, yes to everything; yes, censor Homer, limit the forms of music, why not; yes, take children into battle; yes, by all means exercise naked if you think it better; yes, indeed, begin with ten-year-olds—how I would have loved it at ten. Yes, please, please, dearest Plato, teach the best of both sexes to become philosopher kings who discover and understand the Truth behind this world. I turned up the gas lamp and read most of the night.
    The next morning Aunt Fanny complained that I looked fatigued, and said that I should not exhaust myself. I protested that I was very well, and an outing would revive me. The guide took us to see the Trevi Fountain, a huge extravaganza which Anne admired, and then on to the Pantheon, a round temple to all the gods, built by Marcus Agrippa and since reclaimed as a Christian church. The dome leads the eye up inexorably to a circle of clear sky. I looked at all the Catholic clutter of crucifixes and icons down below and saw it as impious in this place which led the heart to God without any need of it. Surely the philosopher kings would have divined God in the Truth. Surely nobody could come in here without apprehending Him, even the pagans who had built the place. Surely behind the façade of the mythology they understood, perhaps without knowing what they understood. They had no saints and prophets. Their gods were the best way for them to comprehend the divine.
    My thoughts turned to the Greek gods, and to the idea of the female principle within God that had struck me in Florence. Without in the least intending it I found myself praying to Athene, the female patroness of learning and wisdom. “Oh Pallas Athene, please take me away from this, let me live in Plato’s Republic, let me work to find a way to make it real.”
    I am sure that the next instant I would have realized what I was doing, and been shocked at myself and fallen to my knees and begged Jesus to forgive me. But that next instant never came. I was standing in the Pantheon looking up and praying to Athene, and then without any transition I was on Kallisti, in a pillared chamber full of men and women from many different centuries, all as bewildered as I was, with grey-eyed Athene herself standing unmistakably before us.

 
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    I have never known what year it was when they bought me in Smyrna, or even what century. The masters wanted us to forget our old homes, and when once much later I asked Ficino, he said he could not recall. Perhaps he truly could not. He must have been on many of those voyages, into many years. They gathered up ten thousand Greek-speaking children who appeared to them to be ten-year-olds. I have often thought since how much better it would have been for them to have gathered up the abandoned babies of antiquity—but then they would have needed wet nurses, so perhaps that would not have worked either.
    We spent two nights on the Goodness before we came to the city on the afternoon of the third day.
    My first sight of the city was overwhelming. The masters brought us out in groups to see it as we approached. Kebes and