The Just City (Thessaly Book 1)

Nothing mortal can last. At best it can leave legends that can bear fruit in later ages.”

He did not teach by instruction but always by demonstration.

How could I not have been happy? I was in the Just City, and I was there to become my best self. I had wonderful food—porridge and fruit every morning, and either cheese and bread or pasta and vegetables every night, with meat or fish on feast days, which came frequently. On hot days in summer we often had iced fruit. I had regular congenial exerci

Florentia came about halfway through. I had known I would be given a gold pin since Sokrates had chosen me, but I still choked up as I was handed it. It was partly that it was my own design, and partly that it was gold, after all, the most precious metal. I was going to be a guardian of the city. I hardly heard how many people cheered for me. I tuc

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 atte

“Sooner or later they will have to teach us to sail them,” he said. “We will make for somewhere, either a civilization where we can live free, or a deserted island where we can found our own city.” “What city could be better than this?” I asked. “A free city, Lucia, where we could use our own names, and would not be forced into the molds of others.

“Until today I wasn’t sure whether the gods truly concerned themselves with us, and I only knew that they existed as part of a set of logical inferences which turn out to be based on a false assumption,” Sokrates said.

Children need guidance; adults can learn to guide themselves.

I was a woman, a young lady, and this constrained me in everything. My choices were so unbearably narrow. If I wanted a life of the mind I could work at nothing but as a governess, or a teacher in a girls’ school, teaching not the classics but the proper accomplishments of a young lady—sketching, watercolors, French and Italian, playing the piano.