You say that this city is the good life, but how can it be the good life if it takes constant divine intervention to keep it going! It can’t be the good life unless people can choose to stay or leave, and can choose for themselves how to make it better.

“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.

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

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.

He did not teach by instruction but always by demonstration.

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

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

“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

“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.