He beamed around at us all. I saw that Kebes was looking down and frowning. Then Ficino spoke again. “We begin today. Those who can read to my left, those who cannot to my right.”

I went to his right, and indeed, that was when my life truly began.

5

MAIA

A young lady from Queen Victoria’s England does not expect to have her prayers answered, or at least not in such a direct and immediate way, and certainly not by Pallas Athene. My first thought as I looked at all the variously dressed people around me, united only in their expressions of complete bewilderment, was that throughout history everyone had wanted to know the truth about God, about the gods, and now there could be no question. There were gods, they did care about humanity, and one of them was Pallas Athene. She stood still, looking gravely out over the hall. She was half again the height of the tallest of the men, just as Homer describes her, with her helmet, spear, and an owl tucked under her arm. The owl was looking at me. I nodded my head to it. I should have wondered if this was a dream, but there was no doubt whatsoever that it was real. It was the most real thing that had ever happened.

Then Athene spoke. I had never before heard anyone speak Greek, though my father and I had sometimes read it aloud. I was so overwhelmed by the naturalness of the way the syllables sounded that it took me a moment to catch up to what she was actually saying.

“You have come from many times, but with a shared purpose. You all wished to work to set up Plato’s Republic, to build the Just City. Here we are. This is your plan, but you have all asked me for help. I suggest we discuss how to go about it and what we will need.”

A long-haired young man in the habit of a Dominican monk stepped forward. “Are we dead, Sophia?” he asked. “Is this place the afterlife?”

“You are not dead,” Athene said, smiling kindly at him. “You stand here in your mortal bodies. Some of you who were near death have been healed of your infirmities.” She nodded to the Dominican. “You will age naturally. When you die here, in the course of time, your body will be returned to the moment you left.”

How would that work? I couldn’t quite imagine it. Would Aunt Fanny and Anne look around for me and find instead the corpse of an old lady? An old lady who had grown old in Plato’s Republic? I found myself smiling as I realised I didn’t care.

“And our souls?” a man in a toga asked.

“Your souls will also go back to that moment and be reborn from that time, not from this time.”

There was a murmur across the room, as three hundred people said to themselves happily in their native languages: “We have immortal souls! I knew it!” I could only understand Latin and Greek and English, and I heard it in all three of those languages.

A white-bearded man in a Greek kiton, looking the very image of a philosopher, asked “Are they three-part souls as Plato described?”

“Would anyone prefer to return to their own time now?” Athene asked, either not hearing or ignoring the attempt to clarify the issue of our souls. “This would seem like a dream, soon forgotten.”

To my surprise three men raised their hands. Athene blinked, and they disappeared. I was looking at one of them, a shabby man with a donnish look, wondering how he could possibly not want to stay, when he just wasn’t there anymore.

“Now, we need to make plans,” she said.

“But where are we, Sophia? You spoke of our own times. When are we?” It was a man in Renaissance clothes and a red hat.

“We are in the time before the fall of Troy. And we are on the doomed island of Kallisti, called by some Atlante.” Even I had heard of Atlantis.

“Then what we make cannot last?” he asked.

The goddess inclined her head. “This is an experiment, and this is the best time and place for that experiment. Nothing mortal can last. At best it can leave legends that can bear fruit in later ages.”

After that, with the big questions out of the way, we began to discuss how we would go about the work.

It soon became clear that we were united on many issues and divided on others, and that there were practical problems none of us had thought through. Plato’s Republic was extremely specific on some issues and distressingly vague on others. It wasn’t really intended to be used as a blueprint.

There were almost three hundred of us, from twenty-five centuries. There were close to equal numbers of men and women, which astounded me at first. I had never before met another woman who cared about scholarship. Now I did, and it was wonderful. Before long I realised that most of the women were much like me, young, and fortunate enough to obtain enough education to make their possible lives unsatisfactory. I met young women from every century, including several from my own and the century after.

“It does get better,” one of them reassured me. Her name was Kylee, and she was wearing what seemed to me a man’s suit, but cut to her form. “In the eighteen-seventies they established colleges for women at Oxford and Cambridge, and in America too. By the nineteen-twenties they began to grant degrees. By the nineteen-sixties they were actually nominally equal to the men’s colleges.”

“More than a hundred years from me,” I said.

“And even in my time it’s a wearisome business,” she said. “It’s not that I want to die, but not being allowed to offer to die for my country means that my country doesn’t consider me a true citizen.”

We young women from the Centuries of Progress were one clear group. The men of the Renaissance were another. The Neoplatonists made a third. This was Kylee’s name for the group led by Plotinus and sharing a particular mystical interpretation of Plato based around numerology. They called themselves simply Platonists, of course. Plotinus was the white-bearded man who had asked the question about three-part souls when we first arrived.

There were also many Romans, who could have been considered a fourth group except that they never agreed about anything and so could not be thought of as a faction. I was delighted to find Marcus Tullius Cicero among them, and his friend Titus Pomponius Atticus. Atticus was charming; he reminded me a little of my father. How I wished my father could have been here—but he would never have prayed to a pagan goddess. When Atticus introduced me to Cicero, whom he called Tullius, I found he was less delighted to meet me. He was not among those who believed Plato on the equality of women. He was flattered when he found how much of his work I had read, and how high his reputation stood in my century, but he could never really consider me, or any of us women, as people to be taken seriously.

The difficulties and complications of actually putting Plato’s ideas into practice were immense. But we had Athene, whom we all addressed as Sophia, meaning “wisdom.” She had brought the workers—automata that could follow orders and build and plant crops and perform even more wonders. “They come from the future. They are here to labor for you,” she said.

Very few of us had seen anything like them before. Kylee said they were robots, and “workers” was a good translation of that. She said they were more advanced than any such things in her own day.

We formed into committees to work on different aspects of the Republic. We came together to report on progress in formal sessions, which we came to call Chamber. At first we had just that one hall, where we all slept in drafts on the cold marble floor. It was lucky it was summer. We drank water from a spring, and had the workers dig trenches for latrines. Then we had them build a fountain, and bathrooms, and kitchens. Few of us knew how to cook, but fortunately the workers had some limited abilities in that area.