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

Children need guidance; adults can learn to guide themselves.

“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

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

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

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.

“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.

“Don’t you see it doesn’t matter? We’re never going to Mars. Humanity may, one day. It may already have gone there, in the far future that they won’t tell us about. But we’ve been deliberately brought into a sterile backwater of history where nothing we do can achieve anything.”

I couldn’t tell it apart from Crocus except by where it was standing, and had no idea how Sokrates could. “Joy to you,” I said.