The Philosopher Kings Read Online Free PDF Page A

expectations.
    Ficino’s wrong. I’ve written all of this already and I haven’t even got up to where I thought I’d really start, with the day my mother died.

 
    3
    ARETE
    I ate lunch in Florentia that day. It is an eating hall, as it had always been. When my parents were young and there were plenty of Workers, humans didn’t need to do anything in Florentia except take their turn to serve the food one day a month. Now there are rotas for preparation and cooking and cleaning up, and I, along with everyone else who eats there, have to do one of those things every few days. The food is usually good. It was porridge and goat cheese and nuts and raisins that day. Neither of my parents were there, which wasn’t unusual. I came in from the palaestra with my friends Boas and Archimedes. We were all exactly the same age, and were training together to pass our adulthood tests in five months’ time, when we’d all turn sixteen.
    We sat down to eat with Baukis and Ficino. Baukis is three months younger than the rest of us, and she’s a friend. Since Krito died, Ficino is the oldest and most generally respected person in the entire city. He’s pretty much always in Florentia. He sleeps upstairs and spends most of his days either sitting in the hall talking to people, or teaching in one of the nearby rooms. He seldom leaves Florentia now except to go to the library. He’d been tutoring Baukis while the rest of us were in the palaestra. Boas and Archimedes ate quickly and then went off to work, and my brother Phaedrus joined us. This was awkward and uncomfortable because Baukis started flirting with him, though he’s four years older than we are. After a while they left together to look something up in the library, both acting so stupid and coy that I felt myself squirming as I finished my nuts.
    â€œIt’s quite natural,” Ficino said.
    I looked at him inquiringly.
    â€œGirls mature faster, and so they are naturally attracted to men a few years older. It’s normal. It just seems strange to you because we have had such fixed cohorts that it hasn’t been possible until now.” Ficino cracked a hazelnut and popped it into his mouth. He had a face not unlike a nut, wizened and brown.
    I didn’t at all want to talk to him about what girls were attracted to. “Why did you do it that way, then?”
    â€œPlato,” he said, and held up a warning hand when he saw me open my mouth to protest. “Plato said to begin with ten-year-olds, and if you do that you will have a generation all the same age. It was one of those things that just happened that way. It was only ever intended to be for the first generation.”
    â€œIt was only ever intended as a thought experiment,” I said. Maia had told me that.
    â€œYes, but here it is, and you and I are living in it.” Ficino grinned.
    I swallowed the last of my porridge and gathered our plates together to take to the kitchen. “I should go. I have to learn my lines.”
    â€œSomething Plato really wouldn’t have approved of,” Ficino said.
    â€œI know. I’ve never properly understood why he hated drama so much.”
    â€œHe thought it was bad for people to feel induced emotions, false emotions.”
    I sat down again. “But it’s not. It can be cathartic—and it can be a way of learning about emotions.”
    â€œPlato didn’t want people to learn those emotions. He wanted his ideal guardians to only understand honorable emotions.” Ficino shook his head. “He had a very hopeful view of human nature, when you think about it.”
    I laughed. “He did if he thought jealousy and grief and anger could be excluded because we never saw The Myrmidons . I never saw any play until two years ago, unless you count the re-enactments of the Symposium on Plato’s birthday, but I still felt all those things.”
    Ficino nodded. “But that’s what