Pytheas laughed. “On the one hand you admire their vision, on the other you’ve noticed their flawed nature?”
“Yes. I mean they’re not philosopher kings themselves, so how can they guide us into that? Or not us, the babies I suppose.”
“Some of them would love to be philosopher kings. Ikaros, for example. Tullius. They almost think they are.”
I yawned. It was very late now. “Do they think we will be? Or the babies?”
“Plato doesn’t say.”
“Oh, I wish I could read it!”
Pytheas shook his head. I could feel it through my body. “Would you want Kebes to read it? How about Damon?”
“Deception is never right. We’re not children to be given medicine hidden in a spoonful of honey and a bedtime story. How could we get to be philosopher kings starting from lies and secrets?”
“Try all that on Sokrates. He might get you a copy.”
“It’s Ficino I want to try it on. He might understand. I don’t want a clandestine copy for me. I want everyone to be able to read it and discuss it.” I stood up. “It’s really late. I should go to bed. See you tomorrow at Thessaly?”
25
APOLLO
I don’t know what Agape is.
In my opinion, Plato would have been better off sticking to poetry. There are cultures, charming cultures some of them, that have a word for love of a close friend, specifically excluding a romantic or sexual partner. You can use that word to your grandmother, or your child, or your best friend, but not to your husband or lover. The Celts, who call me Apollo Bellenos or Apollo Ludensis, (Shining or Playful, both epithets that suit me) have a word like that. Not so the Greeks. There’s a word for family love, that can’t be extended to people outside blood family. Eros was obvious, eros was erotic love, and the word also covered romantic obsessions. Philia I understood perfectly well, philia was the dominant note of my being, friendship, sometimes very close friendship. Agape was supposed to be this amazing passionate but non-sexual love. Plato was always going on about it. It would be all very well, except that you’re supposed to yearn for each other and suppress it.
Plato wrote this wonderful poetic dialogue called the Phaedrus in which Socrates makes speeches about love. There’s a metaphor about a charioteer controlling a chariot with one lustful horse and one heavenly horse, while pursuing a chariot drawn by a god with two heavenly horses. I am a god. But when I was in the city as a mortal I, didn’t have any more difficulty controlling my metaphorical horses than I do on Olympos. I didn’t have any less difficulty either.
What I can’t see is why Plato’s so obsessed with feeling eros and suppressing it. What’s wrong with agape where you’re passionate about the other person and they don’t move you that way? Or where you’re both passionate together about some shared obsession? Can’t that be agape? And what’s wrong with a relationship where you’re passionate about the other person and they want you too and sex is all part of it? What’s the problem with adding sex to agape, in other words? What’s the benefit of abstinence?
Well, according to Plato, it makes your soul grow wings, and cuts down on your necessary reincarnations. But that’s nonsense. Take it from me: it doesn’t. You’re going to be reincarnated steadily throughout time no matter what you do. You’ll choose lives where you can learn to increase your excellence, and that’s how things gradually improve for everyone everywhere. There’s no end point to time, it just keeps on unscrolling. It doesn’t stop. And though we live on Olympos and outside time, we’re limited in what we can do about those things. Athene had no choice about setting things up so that bodies and souls went back where they came from at death. She could snatch Cicero away while the assassins were knocking on his door and send him back to the same moment after he’d lived out his natural lifespan in the city, but she couldn’t start messing about with where souls were supposed to be. And before you start worrying about the children born in the city, souls come out of Lethe. The children born there had souls from that time. (There. Now you can’t say you were reading all this in the hope of divine revelation and only discovered way too much about my personal issues.)
Even without affecting reincarnation, I suppose there can be a benefit to Platonic agape because sex can be a distraction. Lusting after someone can prevent you from focusing on how wonderful they are, because fulfilling the lust is what you think you want. Focusing on that without any desire getting in the way is what I think Plato meant when he talked about the lover wanting to increase the excellence of their beloved. You don’t want anything from them except for them to exist and you to see them sometimes and talk to them, and maybe for them to like you back. But that only works if you don’t feel the lust, not if you feel it and suppress it.
Have I totally contradicted myself? I said I didn’t understand agape.
I respected Simmea. I liked her. I needed her friendship. I knew she was in love with me, so in a way that made me the beloved if you wanted to think of it in those terms. Plato was always talking about two men, and everyone else who had written about it and considered men and women always makes the man the lover and the woman the beloved, but there’s no reason it has to be like that. Looking at it from that way round, it meant that she wanted to increase my excellence, which of course she did, always.
Anyway, I cared about Simmea. I would have gone to a great deal of trouble to avoid hurting her. If she hadn’t been pregnant that night on the wall I’d have mated with her then, not because I lusted for her but because she lusted for me and I could have given her something she wanted. I did feel peculiar about her mating with other people, and specifically having somebody else’s baby. I was afraid the other people would hurt her, and I wanted to protect her. And I felt it was perfectly fine—indeed better, as I didn’t want her—that we didn’t have sex; but if she was having sex with anyone it ought to be me. Also, I was going to ask Athene to make sure nobody even considered exposing her baby. If she was going to go through all that, there ought to be a result worth having. Even with Nikias, whose scansion was as heavy as lead. And I’d decided that her next baby would definitely be mine. That would be a hero worth having!
Some of these feelings were not ones I would have had without being incarnate. Most of them weren’t, in fact, because if I had all my powers I wouldn’t have needed her in the same way, and I might never have put in the time to come to know her. I needed her because I was incarnate and she was helping me so much with that.
We’ve established, I think, that what Plato knew about love and real people could have been written on a fingernail paring. Look how well his arrangements for having “wives and children in common” were going. Practically nobody was comfortable with it, and almost everybody was violating it in some way or other. We had long-term couples, and dramatic breakups, and casual sex, and cautious dating. We just had it all in secret. The masters either didn’t know or turned a blind eye.
(And before I leave the subject of Platonic love, you remember the bit in the Symposium where Socrates reports Diotima’s conversations with him about love? Do you picture them side by side in bed with the covers pulled up to their waists? I always do.)
A few days after the conversation on the wall, Klio, Simmea, Sokrates and I went back to the robot recharging station after dinner one evening. This trip was Klio’s idea. She wanted Sokrates to talk to the robots without Lysias and she wanted to tell him some things. She’d talked to him and suggested it, and he’d said we should go too. I think he’d also suggested bringing Kebes and she’d put her foot down on that one, because she half-believed that Kebes might have been hoaxing everyone with the flowers, and she didn’t want him to know any more about the robots than he did already.