The Just City (Thessaly Book 1)

Necessity is the line drawn around what anyone can do. Life is full of randomness and chance and choices, and only some things matter to fate. The difficulty is knowing which things.” She sighed. “I talked to Krito once about why most of the male masters here were old when most of the women were young. It seems it’s because men achieve so much more

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

“The masters didn’t kill your family,” I said. “It’s like when you poked me back in the slave market, because you couldn’t reach those who could hurt you and I was there. You can’t reach the ones who hurt you, and you want revenge on those who have done you nothing but good.” “If there weren’t any buyers there wouldn’t be any slavers,” Kebes said.

“Plato’s Just City has no slaves, only citizens playing their different roles and doing their different tasks, the tasks they are fit for. Though he lived when slavery was universal, he understood that slavery itself was unjust, that the relationship between master and slave is inevitably one of injustice and inequality. He saw that slavery was bad

“The real trouble with Christianity is that the morality can do so much harm.”

one of the things Plato says in the Republic is that the purpose of the city isn’t to make the guardians the happiest people in the world, it’s to make the whole city just. It’s absolutely true that you might be happier if you could have one lover or if you could know which was your own child. But the whole city would be less just. Think about that

“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.

Sokrates spoke again, and at once Athene’s eyes were back on him. “It’s a slippery argument to say that our souls gave consent before birth, because it would be possible to use that to justify doing anything to anybody. We don’t remember what our souls chose or why. We don’t know what part of our lives we wanted and what part we overlooked, or agre

He did not teach by instruction but always by demonstration.