The Just City Read Free

music and gymnastics and philosophy was by far the best fate I might have hoped for once I stood in that slave market. But I had heard the men who raided our village saying they were especially seeking children of about ten years of age. The masters visited the market at the same time every year to buy children, and they had created a demand. Without that demand I might have grown up in the Delta and lived the life the gods had laid out before me. True, I would never have learned philosophy, and perhaps I would have died bearing children to some peasant farmer. But who can say that might not have been the path to happiness? We cannot change what has happened. We go on from where we stand. Not even Necessity knows all ends.
    I was eleven. I had rarely left the farm. Then the pirates came. My father and brothers were killed immediately. My mother was raped before my eyes and then led off to a different ship. I have never known what happened to her. I spent weeks chained and vomiting on the ship they threw me onto. I was given the minimum of bad food and water to keep me alive, and suffered many indignities. I saw a woman who tried to escape raped and then flogged to death. I threw buckets of seawater over the bloodstains on the deck and my strongest emotion was relief at breathing clean air and seeing daylight. When we arrived at Smyrna I was dragged onto the deck with some other children. It was dawn, and the slope of the shore rising out of the water was dark against the pink sky. At the top some old columns rose. Even then I saw how beautiful it was and my heart rose a little. We had been brought up on deck to have buckets of water thrown over us to clean us off for arrival. The water was bone-chillingly cold. I was still standing on the deck as we came into the harbour.
    â€œHere we are, Smyrna,” one of the slavers said to another, taking no more notice of us than if we were dogs. “And that was the temple of Apollo.” He gestured at the columns I had seen, and more fallen pillars that lay near them.
    â€œArtemis,” one of the others corrected him. “Lots of ships here. I hope we’re in time.”
    From the harbour they brought us all naked and chained into the market, where there were men and women and children of every country that bordered on the Middle Sea. We were divided up by use—women in one place, educated men in another, strong men who might serve to row galleys in another. Between the groups were wooden rails with space for the buyers to walk about and look at us.
    I was chained with a group of children, all aged between about eight and twelve, of all skin colours from Hyperborean fair to Nubian dark. My grandmother was a Libyan and the rest of my family all Copts, so I was slightly darker than the median shade of our group. There were boys and girls mixed indiscriminately. The only thing we had in common besides age was language—we all spoke Greek in some form. One or two of the others near me had been on my ship, but most of them were strangers. I was starting to realize how very lost I was. I had neither home nor family. I was never going to wake up and find that everything was back as it had been. I began to cry and a slaver backhanded me across the face. “None of that. They never take the snivelling ones.”
    It was a hot day and tiny flies rose all around and plagued us. With our hands bound before us at waist level we could not prevent them from getting into our eyes and noses and mouths. It was a tiny misery among many great miseries. I almost forgot it when the boy chained immediately behind me began to poke at me with his bound hands. I could not reach him except by kicking backwards, which he could see and I could not. I landed one hard kick on his shin but after that he dodged, almost pulling the whole line of us over. He taunted me as he did this, calling me fumble-foot and clumsy-cow. I held my silence, as I always had with my brothers, waiting for the