The Just City (Thessaly, #1)

by Jo Walton

There were probably a lot of good Christians who would have liked to have been there. As it was, there were more people from the Christian eras than I’d have guessed. I do have friends and votaries everywhere, but some times and places I seldom visit, largely for aesthetic reasons.

I did an exercise at the end of every day, if I could keep awake long enough, when I tried to imagine the inner significance of everyone who had spoken to me that day.

“Plato didn’t have as much experience of humanity as he needed to write a book like the Republic,” Sokrates said. “Perhaps nobody does.”

“Give me the good for which I do not know to ask,” I prayed.

If Plato had been trying to maximize justice, what did that mean? This was the Just City, of course it was, we had always been told that. But why justice, not happiness, or liberty or any other excellence? What was justice really?