29
MAIA
During the month before the debate on slavery, evidence for the intelligence of the workers piled up. Sokrates was openly and visibly engaging them in dialogue, and their halves of the dialogue remained written in stone for anyone to read later. It was no longer possible for anyone to believe it was a hoax, unless they accused Sokrates of being in on it, which was unthinkable.
I was on my way home from the palaestra one day when I saw Sokrates squatting beside a worker in the middle of the street. I hesitated, curious. We had all agreed when Sokrates first arrived that we would not treat him like a celebrity but allow him to select his own friends. I had never been one of those chosen, nor had I expected to be. He concentrated on teaching the children, those who could really hope to become philosopher kings, and those among the masters who were the most brilliant and who had something to teach him. I had seen him in Chamber, and around the city. We’d exchanged a few words from time to time, naturally. But I didn’t know him well. Now, as I walked around him, he looked up from what the worker was engraving and grinned at me. His face had always reminded me of a Toby jug, and from above, with him grinning like that, the resemblance was unavoidable. But amid all that ugliness, his eyes were very keen.
He straightened up. “Joy to you. I’m trying to get him to understand the concept of names. Are you busy, or can I use you as an example? It might take a few minutes.”
“Of course,” I said, slightly flustered. “And joy to you. I have a little while before I’m due to teach my weaving class.”
“Good. Thank you.” He turned back to the worker. “You see this human?” he asked.
The worker wrote something. I craned to see what. Sokrates moved slightly so that I could read it. “Master.” It wrote the Greek word in Latin letters, as we had all been told they did.
“Yes. Good. She’s a master,” Sokrates said. “And her name is Maia.”
“Master Maia,” it wrote.
“How does it know I’m a master?” I asked.
“They’ve been told to take orders from masters and not children, so they recognize you as being part of the class of people called masters,” Sokrates explained.
“But I practically never give them orders,” I protested.
“That doesn’t matter. Say something to him now,” Sokrates instructed me.
“Joy to you, worker,” I said to it, awkwardly.
It underlined where it had written my name, and began to write neatly underneath. “Sokrates means only-you, Maia means only-her?” it engraved. And as easily as that, I was convinced. It didn’t matter what Lysias said, the worker was obviously thinking and putting ideas together. He might be huge and yellow and have treads and four arms with tools at the end of them, but he was a philosopher all the same.
“That’s right,” Sokrates said. “Well done. These are names. And what name means only you?”
The worker was still for a moment, and then he inscribed a long number. After it, he wrote the word “Worker.”
Sokrates pulled a little notebook out of his kiton, one of the standard buff notebooks we all used. He opened it up and checked the number against a list he had written down. “Is that what other workers call you?” he asked as he read. He found the number and put a little check mark against it.
“No,” he wrote.
“What name do they call you?”
“Call?”
“To address you, or talk about you when you’re not there,” Sokrates said, stuffing the notebook and pencil back into his kiton. “Watch how we use names. Joy to you, Maia. How are you, Maia?”
“Joy to you Sokrates. I am well. How are you, Sokrates?” It felt very unnatural, and he laughed at my wooden delivery.
“I am very well. How is Simmea?”
I forgot what we were supposed to be doing and spoke normally. “Simmea is a little better, I think, but she’s still very low and bleeding a great deal, and she keeps fainting. Charmides says she’ll get over it, but I’m worried about her.”
Sokrates frowned. “Tell her I miss her,” he said.
The worker was writing something. We bent over to read it.
“Workers do not call names,” the worker had written.
“How about what the masters call you when they want you to do something?” Sokrates asked.
“Do not call name.”
“I don’t think Lysias and Klio distinguish between them very much,” I said. “Lysias never seems to when he’s talking about them. He thinks of them as interchangeable, except when they break down.”
“They’re not interchangeable, they’re definitely individuals and different from each other,” Sokrates said. “They’ve all been given permission to talk, but only some of them do.”
“Only-me,” the worker carved. “Individual. No name.”
“You should have a name,” I said. “A proper name, not a number.”
“What name only-me?” he asked.
I looked at Sokrates, and he shrugged. “How do you usually choose names?”
“From Plato’s dialogues, or from mythology,” I said. “And we keep names unique. I don’t know all the ones that have been used already. Ficino would know. He chooses the names for Florentia.”
“It’s easy enough to think of appropriate mythological names,” Sokrates said, patting the worker. “But what kind of name would you like?”
He didn’t answer, and then he inscribed a circle, twice. Then underneath he neatly inscribed the word “Write.”
“You can’t be called Write,” Sokrates said. “A name can have meaning, but that’s too confusing.”
“Learn?” he suggested.
I looked at Sokrates. “Does he really want to be called write, or learn?”
“He’s just learning what names are, you can’t expect him to understand at once what kind of things work for them,” Sokrates said.
“I understand that. But that those are the things he wants to be called speaks very well of him.” I was impressed.
“He has come to understanding in your city; naturally he is a philosopher,” Sokrates said.
“Give name?” the worker inscribed.
“You want me to give you a name?” Sokrates asked.
“Want Sokrates give name means only-me.”
I was moved, and Sokrates plainly was too. “You are the worker who answered me with the bulbs,” he said.
“Yes,” he wrote.
“Then I will call you Crocus,” Sokrates said. “Crocus is the name of that spring flower you planted. And that was the first action of any worker that replied to me, that showed what you were. I’ll name you for your deeds. And nobody else in the city will have that name.”
“Worker Crocus,” he wrote, and then repeated the long serial number. “Only-me,” he added.
Then, without a word of farewell he trundled off up the street and began to rake the palaestra. I stared after him. “That is unquestionably a person,” I said.
“Now if only I can persuade him to give three hundred such demonstrations to each of the masters individually,” Sokrates said, smiling. “Sometimes they’re not as clear as that,” he went on. “My dialogues with them can be very frustrating sometimes when I can’t explain what things mean.”
“Well, that was clear to me. He’s a person and a philosopher,” I said.
“A lover of wisdom and learning, certainly. If that is what makes a philosopher.”
“Plato said they had to have that and also be just and gentle, retentive, clever, liberal, brave, temperate, and have a sense of order and proportion.” Then I looked at Sokrates. “But you must know that. You said it yourself.”