He rubbed his eyes again, and I noticed that they were red-rimmed from too much rubbing. “Maia, you’re one of the few people here who really can follow my thought, who’s really capable of being an equal. So it’s very frustrating when you disagree without a logical reason behind it. Won’t you forgive me and let us start again?”

I considered that. “I don’t know whether I can trust you,” I said. Perhaps it was true that before Klio explained he just wasn’t capable of understanding. His world had shaped him as badly as mine had shaped me. In a better world, in the City we both wanted to build, we could both have been philosopher kings. Perhaps then we could have loved each other as Plato wanted.

“Are you afraid of me? I don’t want you to be afraid.”

The children were mangling their scales behind us. Crocus went past carrying the window glass for the new crèche. “I’m not afraid that you’re about to ravage me here and now. But you make me very uneasy. Today is the first time you’ve ever acknowledged what you did. You always laughed about it and dismissed it.”

“I didn’t understand. In my time women had no way to say yes to anything except marriage and keep their self-respect, so they had to make formal protests without really meaning them. That’s what I thought you were doing. Klio had to explain to me that if people can’t say yes, they can’t say no either. It was a new idea.”

“I understand that,” I acknowledged. “But I’m afraid you’re apologizing now because you want something, that you’re trying to manipulate me. And you’re making up all these theories about why I disagree, just like you make up all these theories about the gods, and none of it has any basis in reality. What do you want from me?”

“I want you to be my friend,” he said, with no hesitation at all. “And I would like you to forgive me, if you can. And I don’t want you to leave this city.”

I stopped and thought for a moment, trying to examine my own feelings with philosophical rigor. It wasn’t easy. I asked myself whether I could forgive him. I found that I could—I did understand what he had been thinking, and also I appreciated the effort he had made now to understand what he had done and accept that it was wrong. “I don’t know whether it’s possible for me to trust you enough to be your friend,” I said, after a moment. “But I do understand what you did, what you were thinking. And I suppose I forgive you.” He closed his eyes for a moment when I said that and his face went slack. I realized that my forgiveness really did matter to him. He was so naturally playful, even at his most serious. It was rare to see him this unguarded.

He opened his eyes again and looked at me. “So if I’m wrong about my theories about why you disagree, and you disagree logically, what’s wrong with my logic?” he asked.

I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding, and sat down tailor-fashion on the wall, leaning back against the pillar. “It’s not your logic-structures, it’s your axioms. I’ve said this before. Examine your assumptions. You say Athene is an angel, and you say angels are perfect. I can’t see how you can believe that after the way Athene behaved in the Last Debate.”

“She’s an angel, and she’s perfect. What she did may seem imperfect to us, but that’s because our perceptions are imperfect. If we had complete knowledge, we’d be able to understand what she did.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. We know she exists. We know we can trust what she told us directly. And she said in the Last Debate that the gods don’t know everything, and that part of her motivation in setting up the City was to see what happened. That’s not something we don’t understand because we’re not perfect.”

“She’s of a lesser order of perfection than the Persons of the Trinity,” he said. “But she’s still perfect.”

“She turned Sokrates into a gadfly!” I said.

“If we understood more, we’d understand why.”

“I have no difficulty understanding why. How can you possibly argue that she was justified in what she did to him? She lost her temper. I have lost my own temper with students often enough to recognize that. It isn’t the slow ones that make me do it, it’s the insolent ones. Sokrates had some good arguments, but he was behaving like an insolent ephebe pushing the limits. He wanted to make her angry, and he did. But anger and power go badly together, and she is a goddess. Power comes with responsibility. She killed him, or the next thing to it. She was wrong to do what she did and walk away.”

Ikaros rubbed his eyes again. “She is wisdom. She had reasons we don’t understand. She must have.”

“Why is it hard to understand that she lost her temper?” I asked. Kreusa went by with two of her apprentices, all carrying baskets of herbs. She nodded to me, and I waved.

“You’re trying to understand her as if she were human. But she’s an angel,” Ikaros said.

“It seems to me that she’s a Homeric god, acting exactly the way Homer described the gods acting. We know that gods exist, gods like Athene, who have incredible powers that nevertheless have limits. We know they can make mistakes, and lose their tempers. We might think they should be more responsible, but we can’t affect that. We also know they can be open to persuasion. For instance, Athene agreed to take us to rescue art treasures for the city, though she hadn’t wanted to at first. She changed her mind. We know they can be kind to their worshippers. Athene brought all of the Masters here because we prayed for it. For me it was a rescue, and for most of the others too.”

“For me, certainly,” he acknowledged. “I was dying. She brought me here and healed me. But this is part of her goodness, her perfection.”

“But we also know she can be unkind and imperfect, as witness losing her temper. You have to acknowledge that too.”

He frowned, and reached toward his eyes then drew his hand back. “We don’t understand everything she did, so it seems to us unkind. But if we knew more, we would understand. Exactly like the way Klio explained my actions so that I understand I committed an injustice, only the other way around. If it were explained to us properly, we would see that what she did was just, however it seems.”

“I don’t think there’s any need for such an explanation—” He rubbed his eyes hard and I broke off. “Is there something wrong with your eyes?”

“Just a little tired and sore from so much close work. It’s getting all the theses straight all day, and then working by lamplight translating Aquinas. I’m nearly done. At this rate I’ll be done by spring. Or next summer anyway.” He sighed, and squinted at me.

“You should try bathing them in warm milk at night,” I suggested.

“Does that work?”

“It’s what my father used to do.” I could remember him so clearly, dabbing at his tired eyes when we’d been poring over a book all day.

He smiled at me. “I’ve been using oil. But I’ll try it. Go on. You were going to give me the reason you don’t believe the angelic orders are perfect. Do you believe that God is perfect?”

“Plato talks about the world of Forms and the nature of reality, and the perfect God that is Unity. You think that’s the same God as the Christian God the Father, but I see no evidence for it.”

“It makes logical sense. Why do you want evidence?”

I shook my head. “Why do you deny the need for evidence, and try to explain away evidence that doesn’t fit your structure? We know Athene exists, and we know she’s pretty much the way Homer describes her, and so we can make a reasonable guess from that and from the way she behaved and the way she talked when she was here and from things like encouraging us building temples and having festivals and sacrifices, that the Olympians exist and are pretty much, if not exactly, the way the Homer described them. Plato was wrong about that. Plato would have censored Homer because of showing the gods behaving exactly the kind of way Athene behaved.”