Owls to Athens

1

From the men’s room-the andron-Menedemos son of Philodemos watched the rain patter down in the courtyard of his father’s house. It dripped from the red roofing tiles at the edge of the eaves. The drips had scored little grooves in the dirt; this was as heavy a rain as Rhodes ever saw, and heavier than usual for so late in winter. Spring-sailing season-would be here soon, but the skies didn’t seem to know it.

As if he were a caged animal, Menedemos rocked back and forth on his stool. “I want to be away,” he said to his cousin. “I want to be out and doing things.” He was a handsome man in his late twenties, muscular and well built though a little below average height, his face cleanshaven in the style Alexander the Great had set.

His cousin dipped his head in agreement. Though Alexander was sixteen years dead, Sostratos son of Lysistratos wore a full, rather shaggy beard. He was a few months older than Menedemos, and taller by a palm and a couple of digits. Sostratos didn’t carry his height well, though, and, thanks to his diffident manner, usually followed Menedemos’ lead. Menedemos could be a great many things, but hardly ever diffident.

“I wish it would clear out, too,” Sostratos said. “If we get to Athens early enough, we can see the plays at the Greater Dionysia.” Like Menedemos, he’d grown up speaking Greek with the Doric drawl of Rhodes. But he’d studied philosophy at the Lykeion in Athens; like those of many educated Hellenes, his accent these days had a heavy Attic overlay. “Tragedies, satyr plays, comedies…” He sighed longingly.

“Comedies nowadays are thin-blooded things,” Menedemos said. “Give me Aristophanes any time.”

Sostratos tugged at the front of his chiton, as if wagging the enormous phallos a comic actor wore. “A lot of those jokes have got tired in the hundred years since Aristophanes told them,” he said.

“Then why can’t the new poets come up with anything better?”

Menedemos retorted; this was an old argument between them.

“I think they can,” Sostratos said. “Menandros, for instance, is a match for your precious Aristophanes any day.”

“Oh, nonsense,” Menedemos declared. “The old plays are the best ones.”

“Maybe Menandros will put on a new one at the Dionysia,” Sostratos said. “Then you’ll see.”

“See what?” Menedemos’ father asked, coming up behind them.

“Hail, Uncle Philodemos,” Sostratos said. “How are you today?”

“Not too bad, thanks,” Philodemos answered. He was nearer sixty than fifty, his beard and hair silver, but he still held himself erect- exercise at the gymnasion had helped there. And he’d kept most of his teeth, which let him sound like a younger man.

“If we get to Athens in time for the Greater Dionysia, Menedemos may see what a fine comedian Menandros is,” Sostratos said.

“Ah.” Philodemos’ voice encompassed the gray sky and the wet courtyard. “Nobody’s going anywhere as long as the weather stays like this. Put to sea with clouds and fogs and who knows what and you’re asking to wreck your ship.”

“It should clear out soon, Father,” Menedemos said.

“I doubt it,” Philodemos replied.

Menedemos sighed. Had he said he expected bad weather to last, he was sure his father would have contradicted him there, too. They never had got on well. Menedemos thought his father was a stubborn old stick-in-the-mud. For his part, Philodemos was convinced Menedemos was a wild youth who had no respect for anything. Sometimes each seemed determined to prove the other right.

Philodemos also had another excellent reason for not getting along with Menedemos. Fortunately, he didn’t know he had it. Menedemos was determined that he never find out.

Sostratos said, “Regardless of whether we get to Athens in time for the Dionysia, that is where we ought to take the Aphrodite this year.”

“Oh, yes. I agree,” Philodemos said. “That’s where you’ll get the best prices for the goods you brought back from Phoenicia last season.”

Oh, yes. I agree. The words echoed sourly inside Menedemos’ head. His father never would have been so quick to agree with him, or to admit it if he did. But Philodemos gave his nephew the approval he withheld from his son. Of the two young men, Sostratos was usually the one who was cautious and sensible. The one who’s boring, Menedemos thought. That wasn’t wholly fair. He knew as much. The thought formed all the same.

Voice sly, he said, “You’re as eager to go back to Athens for the sake of your philosophical friends as you are for trade.”

His cousin didn’t even try to deny it, which spoiled the jab. Sostratos just dipped his head in agreement and said, “Of course I am.”

“And what about you? Why are you so eager to go to Athens?” Menedemos’ father asked him. He answered his own question: “You’re eager on account of all the loose women there, that’s why-all the bored, faithless wives who don’t care about their husbands or about doing what’s proper. You’d sooner hunt piggies than hares any day.” With sardonic relish, he used the slang for a female crotch singed free of hair.

Menedemos gave back a bland smile. “Spearing them is more fun.” That was slang, too, of an obvious sort.

Sostratos snorted. Philodemos rolled his eyes. He said, “Joke all you want about adultery now, but it’s landed you in more trouble than anybody since Paris ran off with Helen.”

That wasn’t fair. Menedemos’ father undoubtedly knew it wasn’t fair. But it held enough truth to make it sting. Menedemos did make a hobby of seducing other men’s wives, and he had found himself in trouble because of it. Trying to forestall any more of Philodemos’ wit, he said, “Well, we won’t stop in Halikarnassos on the way to Athens.”

There was a husband in Halikarnassos who would kill him on sight-who almost had killed him a few years before. Menedemos hoped the fellow had perished when Ptolemaios laid siege to the city a couple of years before. He wished it had fallen and been sacked, but no such luck. Antigonos’ older son, Demetrios, had quick-marched an army up from the southeast and relieved it.

Philodemos surely would have brought up Halikarnassos if he hadn’t. Even though he had, his father leaped on it: “A terrible thing, when our firm can’t do business in a polis because you outraged the wife of one of the leading citizens.”

“She wasn’t outraged, by Zeus,” Menedemos said. “She loved every minute of it. Her husband, on the other hand…”

“No point in quarreling about it now.” Sostratos did his best to make peace. “We can’t change it. It’s over. It’s done. No man can step into the same river twice.”

That was a philosophical tagline; Menedemos knew as much, even if he’d had less education than his cousin. If Philodemos knew, he didn’t care. “I want to keep him from jumping into this river of adultery again,” he said. Then he pointed at Sostratos. “And you, too, as a matter of fact.”

Sostratos winced. In Ioudaia the summer before, he’d bedded an innkeeper’s wife. Now he was tarred with the same brush as Menedemos-and Menedemos’ father wasn’t shy about using that brush to paint him black. “Sir, that’s over and done, too,” Sostratos said.

“Which means what?” Philodemos asked. “That you won’t do it anymore? I hope that’s what it means, by the gods.”

“I hope it does, too,” Sostratos said. He’d enjoyed his little foray into adultery much less than Menedemos enjoyed his affairs. “I hope so, but who can know for certain? The future’s a book that hasn’t yet been unrolled.”

Philodemos bristled. He wanted promises, not hesitation. Before he could say anything, though, someone knocked on the door. A house slave hurried over to see who it was. A moment later, the man came back to the andron and spoke to Philodemos: “It’s your friend Xanthos, master.”

Sostratos leaped off the stool where he’d been sitting. “Well, I’d better be getting back to my father’s house,” he said. Xanthos was honest and sincere and friendly-and deadly dull, never a man to use a word when an oration would do.

“Bring him in, Bryaxis,” Philodemos said. “Bring him in out of the rain and fetch him some wine. You’ll stay and talk with him, won’t you, son?” He turned to Menedemos with appeal in his eyes.

“Stay and listen to him, you mean?” Menedemos said as the slave- and Sostratos-headed for the door. Now he had his chance to take revenge on his father for giving him a hard time about his habits-had it and used it. “No, thank you, sir. I have some things I need to do upstairs, and I’m afraid they won’t keep. I’m sure Xanthos will have a great many-a very great many-interesting things to say. Farewell.”

He left the men’s chamber as Bryaxis brought Xanthos toward it. The other merchant, plump and gray-haired, waved to him. He waved back-and kept walking to the wooden stairway that would let him escape. Behind him, he heard Xanthos drone out a greeting to his father, and Philodemos’ valiantly polite reply. Chuckling, Menedemos went on up the stairs.

Behind the closed doors of the women’s quarters, his father’s second wife and a slave woman were making cloth from wool. The frame of the loom creaked and rattled as Baukis worked. Menedemos had always found it impossible to think of her as his stepmother. How could he, when she was ten or eleven years younger than he was?

She said something to the slave, who answered. The closed door muffled sounds so that Menedemos could hear voices, but not words. Both women laughed. Menedemos wondered what sort of women’s gossip had amused them.

He went on to his own room. It held a bed, a stool, and a chest of drawers. At the moment, with the shutters closed against the rain, it was dark and gloomy and dull. Menedemos didn’t care. Anything- including a dull, gloomy room-was better than staying in the andron and listening to Xanthos rehearse a speech he was going to give in the Assembly or, worse yet, repeat a speech he’d already given there.

After a while, the rising and falling cadences of Xanthos’ rather froggy baritone came from downstairs. Menedemos smiled to himself. Sure enough, his father’s friend was in full rhetorical flight. Menedemos wondered how long his father would have to endure the drivel. Xanthos could go on for a couple of hours without noticing he was making people around him wish they were dead or he was dead or everyone was dead.

Instead of dying, Menedemos fell asleep. When he woke up, Xanthos was still going on. Menedemos yawned, stretched, and chuckled softly. Philodemos couldn’t match him there, no matter how much he might want to. If he started to snore and fell off his stool down there in the andron, Xanthos might notice. On the other hand, he might be so carried away with his own eloquence that he didn’t. Still, it was a chance a polite man wouldn’t take.

And Philodemos was polite, especially to everyone but his son. Menedemos chuckled again. Now his father was paying the price for his good manners.

When Sostratos got out of bed and opened the shutters, he blinked in delighted surprise. Yesterday’s rain clouds had blown away. The sky was a brilliant, velvety dark blue, shading toward pink in the east. Something flew by overhead: by its skittering path through the air, probably a bat returning to wherever it would hide during daylight hours.

Sostratos went back to his bed and pulled the chamber pot out from under it. After he’d used the pot, he dumped it out the window into the street below. This early in the day, he didn’t have to worry about splashing passersby with its contents. He stuck the pot under the bed once more, put on his chiton, and went downstairs for breakfast.

His father was already sitting out in the courtyard with a chunk of bread, a plate of olive oil into which to dip the bread, and a cup of un-watered wine. “Hail, son,” Lysistratos said. He was Philodemos’ younger brother, and a good deal more easygoing than Menedemos’ father. “How are you today?”

“Not bad, thanks,” Sostratos answered. “Yourself?”

“Tolerable, tolerable,” his father said. “My bones ache when I get up in the morning, but that comes of living as long as I have.” He smiled. “If I weren’t alive, I don’t suppose I’d ache at all.”

“Well, no,” Sostratos said. He went into the kitchen and came out with a breakfast identical to his father’s. He was just sitting down beside Lysistratos when a slave girl emerged, yawning, from her little room. “Hail, Threissa.”

“Hail, young master,” she replied in accented Greek. As her name suggested, she came from Thrace. She was red-haired and snub-nosed, a few years younger than Sostratos himself. She yawned again, then went to get her own breakfast. Lysistratos wasn’t a slaveowner who measured out his slaves’ rations to the last grain of barley. Threissa would eat about what he and his son had had.

Sostratos and Lysistratos both followed her with their eyes. Lysistratos always contented himself with watching her: a man who slept with a slave girl in his own house was asking for trouble with his wife. Sostratos took her up to his room every now and again. Had she shown any sign of enjoying his attentions rather than simply enduring them as a slave had to do, he would have made love to her more often.

The first rays of the sun touched the roof tiles. A few birds began to sing. More would come to Rhodes later, as they returned from the south. Lysistratos said, “I wonder how long this weather will hold. If it stays good, you’ll be able to put to sea before long.”

“I hope so!” Sostratos exclaimed. The thought of sailing for Athens so excited him, he hardly noticed Threissa coming out of the kitchen with bread and wine.

His father chuckled. “Athens is your beloved, sure enough.”

“I’ve never said otherwise,” Sostratos replied. He laughed, mostly at himself. “I couldn’t very well, could I?-not if I wanted to tell the truth, anyhow.”

“I was sorry to have to bring you home from the Lykeion as soon as I did,” Lysistratos said. “We needed a good toikharkhos, though, and you’re the one in the family with far and away the best head for figures.”

“No, that’s Menedemos-or aren’t you talking about women?” Sostratos asked innocently.

His father rolled his eyes. “You know I’m not. And you know I’m right, too.”

With a sigh, Sostratos dipped his head. He was the one best suited to keeping track of the cargo a ship carried, and of how much money, to the obolos, every item brought. He did know as much. He was a good bargainer, too, though his cousin might have been even better.

All the same… He sighed again. All the same, he wished he could have gone right on studying in Athens. Some men were lucky enough- and rich enough-to be able to pursue the love of wisdom their whole lives long. He wasn’t. He’d had to come back to Rhodes to help his family and make his own way in the world. Though five years had passed since that sorry day, he still felt as if he’d torn his heart out and left it behind when he sailed away from Peiraieus.

Most of him still longed to return. The rest… For the rest, it was too late. He’d quoted Herakleitos the day before at Uncle Philodemos ’ house. The Ionian philosopher had surely been right: you couldn’t step into the same river twice. When you went back in, it wasn’t the same river any more.

And I’m not the same any more, either, Sostratos thought. Knowledge for its own sake did still matter to him. It mattered very much; he hoped it would for the rest of his life. One day, he wanted to write a history of his times to rival those of Herodotos and Thoukydides. But he was more practical, more hard-headed, than the weeping, gangling young man who’d so unwillingly come back to Rhodes when Lysistratos summoned him. He’d been dealing with trade goods and money these past few years, and they’d inevitably left their mark on the way his mind worked.

He said, “Do you know, Father, there’s a bit of me that dreads going back to Athens? I never would have imagined that.”

“I can see why,” Lysistratos answered. “If you’re very much in love with a hetaira when you’re a young man, do you really want to see her again twenty years later? Do you want to find out she’s got fat and gone gray and lost a front tooth? Wouldn’t you rather recall the beauty you knew once upon a time?”

“That’s it,” Sostratos agreed. “That’s exactly it. How can Athens live up to the way I remember her?”

“She probably won’t,” his father said. “But it isn’t the city’s fault. Cities don’t usually change that much, not in a few years. People are the ones who change.”

“Yes, I was thinking the same thing.” Sostratos didn’t think the changes he’d seen in himself were necessarily for the better, but saw no point in mentioning that to Lysistratos. He feared his father wouldn’t have agreed with him.

A sparrow fluttered down into the courtyard. Sostratos tossed it a scrap of bread. The little bird hopped over, cocked its head to one side as it examined the morsel, and then pecked at it. Satisfied, it snapped it up and flew away.

“You should have put some wine out for it, too,” Lysistratos said, amusement in his voice.

“Put some wine out for what?” Sostratos’ mother asked as she came out into the courtyard.

“Oh, good day, Timokrate,” Lysistratos said. “Sostratos gave a sparrow some crumbs for breakfast, and I was saying it should have had wine, too.”

“It probably wouldn’t have been able to fly straight if it had,” Timokrate said. She was in her early forties, gray beginning to streak her brown hair. Smiling at Sostratos, she said, “You always did like to feed the birds.”

“Well, why not, Mother?”

“No reason at all,” she said, walking toward the kitchen. “It’s just funny how you haven’t changed much through the years.”

“Oh.” That made Sostratos scratch his head. Here he’d been thinking he was a different man from the one who’d left Athens, and his mother still saw him as the same little boy who’d played in this courtyard back when Alexander the Great was alive. Which of them was right?

Timokrate came out with bread and wine, too. Smiling at her son and her husband, she took her breakfast back upstairs to eat in the women’s quarters. Erinna, Sostratos’ younger sister, had always chafed under the restrictions Hellenic custom placed on respectable women. She wanted to be out and doing things, not shut away inside a house. His mother seemed perfectly content to stay indoors most of the time. People are different, Sostratos thought with profound unoriginality.

Erinna had lived with her second husband, Damonax, for the past year (her first had died after they’d been married only three years). She wouldn’t be going out of his house for a while, anyhow; their little boy, Polydoros, was just over a month old. Sostratos said, “I’m glad Erinna had a boy.”

“So am I.” Lysistratos dipped his head. “Both because it’s better to have a boy and because…” His voice trailed away.

Sostratos finished the thought: “Because Damonax might have exposed it if it were a girl.”

“Yes.” His father dipped his head again. “Whether or not to rear a baby is a husband’s privilege.”

“I know. But Erinna would have been very unhappy if Damonax had decided not to raise it,” Sostratos said. When his sister came back to live at the family home after losing her first husband, she’d fretted that she would never remarry and never have the chance to bear children. To have a child and then lose it at a husband’s whim… That would have been cruelly hard.

“On the whole, your brother-in-law seems a pretty reasonable fellow,” Lysistratos said.

“On the whole, yes,” Sostratos said. “When it comes to olive oil, no. How many times do we have to tell him we’re not going to fill the Aphrodite to the gunwales with the stuff and haul it to Athens? I thought you and Uncle Philodemos had made him understand why we can’t do it.”

“Oh, we did,” his father answered. “But he can’t be reasonable-or what we think of as reasonable-about that. He’s got his own family’s interests to worry about, too, you know. They still aren’t all the way out of debt, and olive oil is what they’ve got to sell. And so…” He sighed and shrugged.

“It’s good oil. I’ve never said it’s not good oil. But it’s not the right cargo for a merchant galley, not with the overhead costs we’ve got because of all the rowers we need.” Sostratos sighed, too. “I almost wish we hadn’t done so well with it last sailing season. Then Damonax could really see why we don’t want anything more to do with it.”

“Especially not going to Athens,” Lysistratos said.

“Especially not going to Athens,” Sostratos agreed. “I can’t imagine a worse place in the world to try to bring in olive oil. They stopped growing grain there a couple of hundred years ago, by the gods, so they could plant more olive trees. They export oil; they don’t import it. Zeus on Olympos, Father, at the Panathenaic Games they give the winners amphorai of olive oil-their own olive oil.”

“We both know that…” his father began.

“Damonax knows it, too,” Sostratos said. “He studied at the Lykeion in Athens before I got there. How can he help knowing it?”

Lysistratos let out a sad little chuckle. “Well, son, when someone marries into the family, you don’t just get the good. You get all the problems he brings with him, too. And Damonax and his family probably think of us as a bunch of stingy whoresons.”

Sostratos dipped his head. “That’s true. But there’s a difference- we’re right.” He knew he was being silly. So did his father. They both laughed. But it wasn’t as if he didn’t mean it, too.

Two days of bright sunshine in a row made Menedemos want to rush down to the Great Harbor to make sure the Aphrodite was fully laden and ready to put to sea. His father said, “You don’t want to go out too early, you know. Better to wait a few extra days than to get caught by the last big blow of winter.”

“But others will be setting sail now,” Menedemos protested. “I don’t want them to get the jump on me.”

“Some skippers always set sail sooner than they should,” Philodemos said. “A lot of the time, they end up paying for it.” Menedemos fumed. Watching him fume, his father smiled a thin smile and added, “I’m going down to the agora, to find out what the news is. I expect you to be here when I get back.”

“Why don’t you just hire a pedagogue to take me here and there, the way you did when I was seven years old?” Menedemos said bitterly. His father took no notice of that. He hadn’t really expected that Philodemos would. But the look of smug satisfaction on his father’s face when he left for the market square stung like sweat dripping onto a raw sore.

Fuming still, Menedemos went into the kitchen. Sikon the cook would listen to him grumble, or give him something tasty to make him forget about grumbling. But Sikon wasn’t there. He’d probably gone to the agora, too, or to the harborside fish markets to see what he could bring home for the evening’s supper. Barley porridge still simmered above a low fire. Menedemos had eaten some for breakfast. He’d hoped for something better now: tunny or octopus, perhaps. Those failing, he dipped out another bowl of porridge. His father would have complained about his eating at midmorning, too. But Father’s not here, he thought, and ate. The porridge, bland stuff, tasted better for being illicit.

Splashes that had nothing to do with rain greeted his ears when he went back out into the courtyard. At the direction of Philodemos’ second wife, a slave poured water from a hydria onto the flowers and herbs in the garden there. “Careful, now,” Baukis told him. “Don’t miss the marjoram.”

“I won’t, mistress.” The slave turned the stream from the big, heavy water jug where she pointed.

“That’s better,” she said, and dipped her head. When she looked up again, she saw Menedemos. She smiled. “Hail.”

“Hail,” he answered gravely. “How are you?”

“Well enough. Glad of this sunshine,” Baukis said.

“It is nice, isn’t it?” Menedemos agreed. Nothings, commonplaces… but he could look at her while they talked. Here inside her own household, she went unveiled, of course. She was no great beauty, but, except for front teeth that stuck out, pretty enough-and, at seventeen, any woman seemed fresh and glowing and ripe. Her figure had certainly ripened, these past few years. When she’d wed Philodemos, she’d been hardly more than a girl, with hardly more than a girl’s shape. No more.

“Will you be sailing soon?” she asked.

“Before long, anyhow,” Menedemos said. “Sostratos wants to get to Athens as fast as he can, and I don’t blame him. We’ll put to sea as soon as Father decides the weather’s likely to hold.”

“I hope you have good fortune.” Baukis watched his face, as he watched hers-as was only polite when two people talked. If her gaze traveled the length of him, as his now and then paused at her rounded bosom or at the sweet flare of her hips… If her gaze swung so, it was only in the most casual way, a way on which, for instance, the patient slave with the hydria could not remark.

“Thanks,” Menedemos replied. His glances were every bit as circumspect. Philodemos raved because he made adultery a game. But he knew adultery with his father’s young wife would be, could be, no game. He’d realized he might want her not long after his father wed her. Only since the autumn before had he known she might want him, too.

They’d kissed only once. They’d never done more than kiss. Whatever else Baukis wanted, she also wanted to make Menedemos’ father a good wife. Lying with Menedemos might not merely cause scandal. It might cause murder.

Since she couldn’t speak of love, she spoke of travel: “Athens must be a wonderful place.”

“Sostratos knows it better than I do. It’s his second home,” Menedemos said.

The hydria gurgled dry. The slave sent Baukis a look of appeal. She tossed her head and tapped her sandaled foot on the ground. “Go fill it again, Lydos,” she said. “You can see some of the plants here still need more water. With the rains lately, the cistern’s nice and full.”

“With the rains lately, the plants shouldn’t need all that much water,” Lydos said.

“They’ll dry up if you don’t keep them moist,” Baukis said sharply. “And if you don’t dry up, I’ll find something for you to do that you’ll like a lot less than watering the garden.”

Muttering to himself in a language that wasn’t Greek, the slave shouldered the hydria and carried it back toward the cistern. Had it been late summer, with the cistern dry, Baukis would have sent a slave woman to the well a few blocks away. Menedemos laughed to himself. Who could guess when the woman would have come back from the well? Men talked in the market square. Women gossiped around the wellhead.

For that matter, who could guess when Lydos would come back from the cistern-and it was only at the rear of the house? By the way he dragged his feet going there, he was in no hurry to get on with his work. But then, what slave ever was in a hurry, except maybe to go out and get drunk on a festival day?

Menedemos wasn’t about to rush him, either. Now he could gaze his fill at Baukis… provided he didn’t do it too openly. They still weren’t alone. As if to prove that, Sikon the cook came into the house, his face a thundercloud-shopping for fish must not have gone well. He stormed into the kitchen and made a racket as he started on the day’s baking. Maybe he was working out his anger. Maybe he thought that the noisier he was, the busier everybody would think he was. That was another slave trick old as time. The doorman was puttering around, too, and the slave women upstairs. In a household full of slaves, you could never count on being alone for very long.

Baukis took not quite half a step toward Menedemos. Then she stopped, a rueful-and more than a little frightened-smile on her face. She knew the risks of living in a house full of slaves as well as he did. They were lucky they hadn’t been found out the one time their lips did touch.

We can’t, she mouthed silently. They’d been saying that to each other ever since discovering they both wanted to.

I know, Menedemos mouthed back. They’d been saying that, too, each trying to convince the other, both trying to convince themselves.

The past two springs, when Menedemos had known he longed for Baukis but hadn’t known they shared a longing, he’d wanted to flee Rhodes as soon as he could. Now… Now at least part of him wished he could stay and wait for a chance that might never come, a chance he might not take even if it did come. Hellenes agreed love was a mad, dangerous passion. What to do if one fell into it anyhow? On that, there was no agreement.

He started to mouth, I love you, but he couldn’t even do that. Here came Lydos back with the water jug. He was still grumbling. Baukis had had her problems with the house slaves, and especially with the cook, but she was wise enough to affect not to notice this. All she said was, “Oh, good-that didn’t take too long,” and showed him the plants that still needed watering. As he bent to moisten the dirt around them, Baukis shot Menedemos another glance full of harried amusement.

And Menedemos could only dip his head. Had he fallen in love with any other wife in all of Rhodes… For a long time, he’d tried to make himself believe this hadn’t happened. Life would have been much easier-much safer, too-if it hadn’t. But the world was what it was, not what he wished it would be.

Lydos’ second jar of water ran dry. He looked up at Baukis in mute appeal; the garden was almost done. She knew exactly what he was thinking. “Go get enough water to finish the job,” she said.

“Oh, by the gods!” Lydos turned to Menedemos in appeal. “Young master-”

Menedemos tossed his head. “I can see the corner that’s still dry,” he said before Lydos could go any further. “My father’s wife is right. If you’re going to do something, do it properly. That’s a lesson you learn at sea-or, if you don’t, you pay for it.”

Lydos let out a theatrical groan, as if Menedemos had just ordered him sold to the mines. When that failed to soften either Menedemos’ heart or Baukis’, he carried the hydria away again, moving like an old, old man whose joints pained him.

Baukis snorted. “It must be terrible for a man to be made into a slave.”

“Yes, it is.” Menedemos looked right at her, as if to say she had made him into hers.

She spent a lot of time indoors, which kept her skin fair. He watched, enchanted, the flush that rose from her neck to her cheeks to her forehead. Stop that, she mouthed.

She was right, of course. The more such foolish things he did, the likelier someone would notice: his father, which would be the worst disaster of all; or a slave, who might tell his father or extort who could guess what by threatening to tell; or even Sostratos, who’d puzzled over why Menedemos had been so eager to get away from Rhodes the past couple of sailing seasons.

As Baukis had, Menedemos snorted. His cousin, sometimes, thought too much for his own good. A more perceptive man, one who felt more and perhaps thought a little less, might well have realized what was wrong with Menedemos. Or maybe Sostratos needed to fall in love himself before he could recognize the symptoms in others. They weren’t-or Menedemos hoped they weren’t-something that could be known by reason alone.

He stole another glance at Baukis… and caught her stealing a glance at him. Their eyes met for a heartbeat, then jerked away. Hers went to the stairway leading up to the second story, his to the stone bench in the courtyard. He pointed. “Look-there’s a wall lizard, soaking up the sun. He thinks spring is here.”

The motion of his arm made the grayish-brown lizard dash to the edge of the bench, leap off, and disappear amongst the plants in the garden. Baukis said, “I’m glad to see it. They eat insects. Have you ever seen one with a grasshopper in its mouth?”

“Oh, yes.” Menedemos dipped his head.

Talk of lizards was safe enough. When Lydos returned with the hydria, he couldn’t have noticed anything the least improper. A sour expression on his face, the slave emptied the jar not far from where the little animal had taken shelter. It fled again, this time across the courtyard. It vanished into a crack in the mud-brick inner wall of the house.

Menedemos laughed. “Poor thing must have thought Deukalion’s flood was sweeping down on it.”

“Yes.” Baukis gave Lydos a severe look. “You don’t need to drown the plants, you know.”

“Sorry.” He sounded anything but.

“Be more careful next time,” Baukis told him. His nod was so impatient, so perfunctory, that Menedemos would have called him on it if Baukis hadn’t. But she did: “Be more careful, Lydos, or you will be sorry.”

That got through. “Yes, mistress. I’ll remember,” the slave said, and this time Menedemos believed him.

“See that you do, because I’ll remember, too,” Baukis said. “Now go on.” Lydos hurried away, carrying the hydria.

“You handled that very well,” Menedemos said.

“Oh, slaves aren’t so hard. I was dealing with slaves before I was married, too, you know,” Baukis said. But then she checked herself. “Most slaves aren’t so hard. On the other hand, there’s Sikon.”

“Yes.” For a moment, Menedemos left it at that. Baukis and Sikon had feuded ever since she came to Philodemos’ house. She wanted to be a good household manager, and was convinced he was trying to bankrupt the place with the fancy fish he bought. He wanted to turn out the best suppers he could, and was convinced she wanted everyone in the house to live on barley porridge, beans, and salt fish. The truth, as usual, lay somewhere in between-or so Menedemos thought, anyhow. He said, “Cooks are a law unto themselves, you know.”

“Really? I never would have noticed,” Baukis said tartly. But then she relented: “I suppose it is better not to be quarreling with him all the time.”

They’d come to a tentative truce the autumn before. It had already held longer than Menedemos had expected. He said, “I’m glad you’re not squabbling anymore.” That gave him another excuse to smile at Baukis. It gave her another excuse to smile back. And no one who saw them or listened to them could have noted anything out of the ordinary.

Sostratos held his nephew with exaggerated care, as if afraid Polydoros were about to leap from his arms and precipitate himself headfirst onto the dirt of the courtyard at Damonax’s house. For all his care, both Erinna and a wet nurse hovered close by, ready to snatch the baby out of his inexperienced hands.

Trying to reassure them that he had some idea what he was doing, he said, “He sure looks a lot better than he did right after he was born.”

His sister scowled. “What was wrong with him right after he was born?” she demanded in irate tones.

“He looked just fine, I’ll have you know,” the wet nurse added.

“All right. All right. Fine. I didn’t mean anything by it,” Sostratos said hastily. The women relaxed. Sostratos looked down at Polydoros. The baby was a healthy pink now, not the reddish-purple color he’d been. His head had been almost cone-shaped. It was much rounder now, and getting more so each time Sostratos saw him. Even his expression seemed more alert, less confused, than it had when he first came into the world.

Some things hadn’t changed, though. Sostratos suddenly realized the cloths around the baby’s middle were moist. He thrust Polydoros at the wet nurse and wiped his hands on his chiton.

“There, there,” the woman told the baby. “We’ll take care of that. Don’t you worry about a thing.” She carried him away.

When she came back, she sat down on a bench, slipped her chiton down from one shoulder, and gave Polydoros her breast. Sostratos watched the baby suck, as interested in the process as he was in the bare breast. He also listened to his nephew nursing; he hadn’t realized it could be so noisy. He could hear every gulp Polydoros took. Then the baby swallowed wrong and choked. The wet nurse took him away from the breast and held him up against her shoulder, patting him on the back till he belched: a surprisingly large, surprisingly deep sound. Then she brought him down and let him nurse some more.

“You’ll be sailing soon, won’t you?” Erinna asked.

“What?” When Sostratos concentrated on something, he did so to the exclusion of everything else around him. He had to pause and make himself remember what his sister had said before he could dip his head and answer, “Yes, very soon, especially if the weather stays fine like this. Athens!” He couldn’t hold the excitement from his voice.

“Athens.” Erinna sounded resigned-or was it merely wistful? For her, leaving her husband’s house was an adventure. Sailing off to another city? When she’d come back to Lysistratos’ household after losing her first husband, she’d listened with endless fascination as Sostratos told her stories of the distant places he’d seen. With the circumscribed lives respectable women led among the Hellenes, listening was all she could do. She would never see distant places herself.

Sostratos eyed her with some concern. Like him, she’d always been on the lean side. Now, though, she still kept the flesh she’d put on while carrying Polydoros. To his eye, it didn’t suit her frame: it seemed added on, not a natural part of her. “How are you, my dear?” he asked, hoping his worry didn’t show.

“Tired,” she answered at once. “After you have a baby, you feel as though someone’s dropped a wall on you. I don’t think you can help it.”

“Oh, yes.” The wet nurse dipped her head. “That’s true, by the gods.”

“What… What is it like? Having a baby, I mean,” Sostratos asked hesitantly. As they often did, curiosity and decorum warred within him. This time, curiosity won.

Not that it got him much. Erinna only laughed. “It’s not like anything,” she said. “It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I think it’s the hardest thing anyone can do.”

“Oh, yes,” the wet nurse said again, and then, softly, “‘What’s it like?’ Men!” She didn’t have to worry about keeping Sostratos sweet.

“I can’t very well know unless I ask, can I?” he said, stung by the scorn in her voice.

If he thought his question would get him less, he rapidly found himself wrong. “Men!” the wet nurse said again, this time not bothering to hold her voice down. “What you don’t understand is, you can’t know even if you do ask.”

“Gorgia’s right, I’m afraid.” Erinna sounded sad. She knew of Sostratos’ unrelenting itch to find out whatever he could. Sad or not, though, she tossed her head here. “Unless you had a baby yourself, you couldn’t know what it was like. You’re not.. equipped for it.” That made the wet nurse-Gorgia-giggle.

It made Sostratos angry, at least for a moment. “But-” he began. Then he spread his hands in defeat. “No, I suppose not, any more than you can understand what growing a beard is like.” He scratched his own hairy chin. Most Hellenes of his generation, Menedemos among them, shaved their faces as Alexander had done. Sostratos thought his beard made him look like a philosopher. Maybe he was right.

Someone rapped on the front door. Erinna said, “That’s Damonax-I know his knock.” By the way one of the house slaves hurried to the entrance, he recognized his master’s knock, too.

The door scraped as it turned on pivots set into the floor and the lintel above. The house slave spoke to Damonax in a voice too low for Sostratos to make out what he said. He didn’t need to have studied logic to figure out what it must have been, though, for Damonax replied, “He is? Well, good. I’ve been meaning to talk with him for the past few days, anyhow.”

Erinna’s husband strode into the courtyard. He was a handsome man of above average height, though not so tall as Sostratos. Unlike his brother-in-law, he bore himself with the air of a man who knew he was somebody. His chiton was of fine, soft white wool. A gold ring on the index finger of his right hand flashed in the sun. Sostratos smiled to himself. Damonax looked and acted like a rich man, as befitted one whose wealth lay in land. But Sostratos knew whose family was really better off.

“Hail,” Damonax said with a smile that showed off the teeth he took fastidious pains to keep white. “How are you today?”

“Fine, thanks.” Sostratos held out his hand. “And you?”

“Couldn’t be better.” Damonax clasped it: a firm, manly grip. Like Sostratos, he’d studied at the Lykeion. Also like Sostratos, he flavored the Doric dialect of Rhodes with a strong Attic accent. “What do you think of your nephew these days?”

“That’s obvious, O best one,” Sostratos answered, looking toward Polydoros, who’d fallen asleep in Gorgia’s arms. “He’ll have the strength and beauty of divine Akhilleus and the wit of resourceful Odysseus.”

Erinna sent Sostratos a sharp glance. She knew irony when she heard it. Damonax didn’t, or didn’t always. He complacently dipped his head and said, “Yes, I think so, too.” He looked around. “Haven’t they given you any wine? No olives or figs to munch on? What is this place coming to?”

Not wanting either his sister or Damonax’s slaves to get in trouble, Sostratos spoke quickly: “I’ve been so busy admiring your son and talking with Erinna, I didn’t even notice.”

“Kind of you to say such a thing, best one, but really, there are standards,” Damonax said. “Come into the andron with me, why don’t you, and we’ll set you to rights.”

Sostratos would rather have gone on talking with Erinna, of whom he was fond, than gone with his brother-in-law. He had a pretty good idea why Damonax wanted to talk with him, and didn’t anticipate a happy result. But he couldn’t very well say no, not without a shocking breach of manners. Swallowing a sigh, he said, “Lead on, and I’ll follow.”

At Damonax’s heels, he stepped up into the men’s chamber. As in most houses, it was raised a step above the level of the courtyard and the other ground-floor rooms. No sooner had he perched on a stool than the slave who’d let Damonax into the house brought wine and olives. Damonax and Sostratos both poured a little wine on the floor as an offering to Dionysos.

When Sostratos drank, he raised an eyebrow. “My dear fellow! This can’t be mixed any weaker than one to one. That’s potent even at a symposion, but in the morning? Do you want your slaves to have to carry me home? What would people say?”

“One cup won’t send you raging through the streets looking for women to ravish like a satyr,” Damonax said easily.

Aren’t you thinking of Menedemos? But, though that got to the tip of Sostratos’ tongue, he didn’t say it. He had more reasons to be loyal to his cousin than to his brother-in-law. He took a cautious sip from the cup-a big, deep piece of earthenware in the Spartan style, not one of the shallow, graceful, two-handled kylikes that didn’t hold nearly so much. “The wine is very nice,” he admitted. “Where’s it from?”

Damonax’s chuckle was self-deprecating. “Just a local vintage, I’m afraid.”

Rhodes made good wine, good enough to export. But no one would confuse even her best with what the vintners of Khios or Lesbos or Thasos turned out. That Damonax served a Rhodian wine said his family’s fortunes had declined. That he served a good Rhodian wine said either that they hadn’t declined too far or that he still had good taste even if he needed to be more careful about indulging it these days.

Sostratos ate an olive. Spitting the pit onto the floor of the andron, he said, “These are tasty, too.”

“Glad you like them, my dear,” Damonax replied. “They’re from the family farm.” Oh, a pestilence, Sostratos thought. I’ve given him an opening. But Damonax didn’t charge right into the breach like a soldier entering a besieged city. Instead, with another of his charming smiles, he asked, “Have you ever been out to the farm?”

“Why, no, O best one, I never have,” Sostratos said.

“You must visit one day,” Damonax said. “Do you good to see there’s life on the land as well as here in the bustling polis. It’s in the western part of the island, you know, between Ialysos and Kameiros- not far from the Valley of the Butterflies.”

“Ah?” Sostratos pricked up his ears. “Now that I would like to see one of these days.” Farm life interested him very little. For better or worse, he was a creature of the polis, of the agora. He was sure he would go mad in short order with only the same handful of faces to see and to talk to month after month, year after year; with news filtering in long after it was fresh, if it ever came at all. An interesting natural phenomenon, on the other hand…

Damonax smiled and dipped his head. “It’s quite something. Myriad upon myriad of butterflies perching in the valley through the heat of summer. They cover the rocks, especially by the waterfall, like one of those carpets the Persians lay on the floor.”

“The summer…” Sostratos sighed. “It’s also the sailing season, you know. I’m likely to be away from Rhodes.”

“They don’t disperse over the island till the fall rains start, and you’re usually home by then,” Damonax said. “Why don’t you pay me a call when you get back from Athens? That should be just about olive-harvest time, too. The oil from the first ones picked is always the best, you know, and if you’re there to dip a barley roll into it when it comes out of the last settling pit…” He smiled again, a voluptuary’s smile.

“You tempt me,” Sostratos said.

“Good. I mean to,” Damonax answered. “The invitation is open, believe me. And when you see the oil pressed from the olives, when you taste it before it even goes into the amphora… Till then, you don’t know what oil can be. Rhodian wine may not be of the very finest, but Rhodian oil is, by the gods. And we make some of the best of any farm on the island.”

Now we come down to it, Sostratos thought unhappily. “No one has ever said you didn’t, O marvelous one,” he said.

His brother-in-law gave him a sour look, as any educated man would have done. Sokrates had been fond of using that salutation when he felt sarcastic, so that marvelous meant something like marvelously foolish. Damonax went on, “Your family has been most unreasonable about taking some of my olive oil aboard the Aphrodite this sailing season.”

Sostratos didn’t like quarrels. He especially didn’t like quarrels with people with whom he had marriage ties. But he also didn’t like problems with trade, and trade came first. Sighing, he said, “We’ve been over this ground before, you know-more than once, in fact-and you can pour lots of strong wine down my throat, but you still won’t seduce me.”

“If you’d only be reasonable-” Damonax said.

“No.” Sostratos tossed his head. “I’m afraid you’re the one who’s being unreasonable, not me or my father or uncle or cousin. You do know where the akatos is going this spring?”

“Athens, of course,” Damonax replied.

“That’s right.” Now Sostratos dipped his head in agreement. “And since you studied there, the same as I did, you’ll have heard the phrase ‘owls to Athens,’ too, won’t you?” He waited. When Damonax didn’t answer right away, his voice got sharper: “Won’t you?”

“Well… yes,” Damonax said.

“And you’ll also know what it means, isn’t that so?”

His brother-in-law flushed angrily. “Don’t play the game of elenkhos with me. You’re not Sokrates, by the dog of Egypt!”

“All right, my dear. Fine. If you want me to spell it out for you, I will, alpha-beta-gamma.” Sostratos let out an angry exhalation of his own. “ ‘Owls to Athens’ means taking something someplace where they don’t need it. Athens doesn’t need owls, because she already stamps them on her coins. And Athens doesn’t need imported olive oil, because Attica already makes more of it than any other district in Hellas. Athens imports grain so she can grow more olives. You know that, too. You know it, but you don’t want to think about it. What a lover of wisdom that makes you.”

“My family needs the silver the oil would bring,” Damonax said. “It’s very fine oil-you know that.”

“I also know I haven’t a chance of selling it in Athens, no matter how fine it is. They’re glutted with what they make themselves,” Sostratos snapped. “And I know it’s not a proper cargo for a merchant galley anyhow-not enough profit even if it does sell.” He held up a hand. “Don’t tell me about last season, either. Yes, we made money, but we would have made more with other cargo we couldn’t carry because of your big, bulky amphorai full of oil.”

“What am I supposed to do, then?” Damonax demanded.

“What we’ve been telling you all along: put it in a round ship, where the crew is small and the overhead is low. Sell it someplace where they don’t grow so much on their own-Kos, maybe, or Khios, or the cities up along the Thracian coast where the weather’s cooler and they don’t always get good crops.”

His brother-in-law pooched out his lower lip and looked sullen. “You have no family feeling whatsoever.”

“On the contrary.” Sostratos tossed his head. “My first loyalty is to my father. My next loyalty is to Uncle Philodemos and Menedemos. If the only way I can help you is by hurting them-and, incidentally, myself-what would you have me do?”

“Go to the crows,” Damonax said.

Sostratos got to his feet. “Good day,” he said, and strode out of the andron.

Erinna knew something was wrong. “Where are you going?” she called to Sostratos as he stalked across the courtyard.

“Home.” He pushed past a startled slave and out the front door to Damonax’s house. Menedemos, no doubt, would have slammed it in his wake. Instead, Sostratos closed it as quietly as he could. As far as he was concerned, Damonax was the one in the wrong, and he wanted to do nothing to put himself there with his brother-in-law-or his sister. That didn’t keep him from seething as he stormed away. Oh, no. On the contrary.

Menedemos spent as much time as he could outside his father’s house. For one thing, that kept him and Philodemos from locking horns. For another, it eliminated temptation, or at least the chance to do anything about temptation. And, for a third, he was a man who liked crowds and noise and excitement. Going to the agora was a lot more fun than sitting around watching flowers begin to bloom.

Potters and woodcarvers and leatherworkers cried their wares from stalls that had sometimes been in their families for generations. Jewelers showed off brass bracelets that gleamed like gold, beadwork necklaces, and silver rings. Farmers in from the countryside offered up grain and olive oil, olives in brine and vinegar, cabbages and lettuces, beets and mushrooms, eggs from ducks and hens. A dentist reached into a man’s mouth with iron forceps to pull a rotted tooth while a crowd gathered round to watch and point and call advice. Hearing the victim groan, Menedemos thanked the gods his own teeth were sound.

A mountebank strolled through the crowd, juggling a stream of cups and balls and knives. Every so often, someone would throw him an obolos. He caught the little silver coins without losing control of everything he kept in the air. A grotesquely overmuscled strong man lifted a fellow of ordinary size over his head and tossed him about as if he weighed nothing at all. An artist of sorts perched on a stool in front of a patch of smooth-raked sand. For an obolos, he would use a long stylus to sketch a man’s portrait in the sand. Menedemos watched him work. His strokes were quick and sure; he caught a man’s essence with a minimum of wasted motion. Each portrait remained to be admired till the next customer gave him some silver.

“Here.” Menedemos took an obolos out of his mouth and handed it to the artist. “Do me.”

“Certainly, O best one.” After popping the coin into his own mouth, the man smoothed the sand once more. The fellow whose portrait had been there muttered under his breath; his picture hadn’t lasted long. A few lines delineated Menedemos’ sharp chin, his straight nose and strong cheekbones, the eyebrows that were almost too bushy, and the hairline that had retreated perhaps a digit’s width at each temple. After a couple of minutes, the sketch artist looked up. “Here you are, my friend: you.”

“Looks like me,” agreed Menedemos, who had often seen his image in a mirror of polished bronze. A poor man from the countryside, though, might have no true idea what he looked like till this fellow showed him.

As Menedemos turned away, someone just coming up peered at his portrait and said, “There’s a good-looking fellow.” He preened. Even though he was no longer a youth for suitors to pursue, he never got tired of praise.

Not far away, half a dozen men were arguing about what this year’s campaigning season would likely bring in the wars among Alexander ’s marshals. “Mark my words, someone will triumph over all the rest,” a gray-haired man declared.

“I don’t know about that,” a younger fellow said. “As soon as one of those polluted Macedonians looks like he’s getting on top, the others gang up on him and pull him back down again. That sort of thing can go on for a long time.”

Menedemos walked over to join them, saying, “It’s already gone on for a long time. Alexander ’s been dead-what?-sixteen years now.”

The men who were talking shifted a little to give him room. If a man couldn’t hash things out with his fellow citizens in the agora, he couldn’t do it anywhere. A stocky fellow of about Menedemos’ age whose scars said he’d fought as a mercenary dipped his head. “That’s right,” he said. “Sixteen years, and we’ve still got Antigonos and Ptolemaios and Lysimakhos and Kassandros in the field against each other.” He sounded cheerful-as long as the marshals brawled, mercenaries would never lack for work.

“And Seleukos,” somebody else said. “Don’t forget Seleukos, way off in the east. Antigonos tried to squash him a couple of years ago, but he couldn’t do it.”

“You’re right,” Menedemos said. “He’s like a reveler who hears a symposion and invites himself in. I think the other four will have to keep an eye on him now that he’s inside the andron, or he’ll walk off with the furniture.”

“Anybody old One-Eye can’t beat is someone to keep an eye on, sure enough,” said the man who looked like a mercenary.

“ Alexander showed the world one man could lead the Hellenes- and the Macedonians, too,” the gray-haired fellow said. “Now that he’s proved it can be done, the marshals will keep banging away till only one’s left standing, the way pankratiasts do at the Olympic Games.”

“They’ll try-that’s certain enough,” Menedemos said. “But they don’t fight the way pankratiasts do. It’s not one against one. They make treaties with one another-they make ‘em, and then they break ‘em. For one man to win, he’d have to defeat all the others at once, and nobody’s managed it yet.”

“Which probably means it can’t be done,” said the younger man who’d first disagreed with the older one. “Don’t you see that, Xenomenes?”

“No.” The man with gray hair tossed his head. “Fifty years ago, you would have told me nobody could ever rule all the Hellenes. Then Philip of Macedon went and did it, and Alexander held on to them afterwards. So I don’t see why the same shouldn’t hold true here.”

That produced a thoughtful silence. Menedemos wondered what Sostratos would have had to say about it; his cousin was fond of such arguments, too. But he stubbornly stuck to his own view: “Maybe it can happen, but that doesn’t mean it’s likely to.”

“Ha!” Xenomenes said. “Tell it to Antigonos, not me. He’s the one the rest worry about the most-and they need to.”

“Ptolemaios stung him a couple of years ago, taking away the southern coast of Anatolia,” the man who looked like a mercenary said.

“But he’s still got Phoenicia and a lot of the Hellenic cities along the west coast of Anatolia,” Menedemos said. “That means he can still build up his navy-and he hires pirates, the same as he hires men to fight on land.”

All the Rhodians muttered at that. Their polis lived by trade. They hated pirates, and used their navy to try to keep them down. Menedemos had fought them on each of his last two voyages. He had no use for a man who abetted them.

Neither did any of the others. One of them said, “If he hires pirates, he’s liable to hire them against us one fine day, unless we do just what he tells us.”

Menedemos pulled at the neckline of his tunic and spat into his bosom to turn aside the evil omen. Three other Rhodians did the same thing. Mournfully, Xenomenes said, “All we want to do is stay free and autonomous-well, really free and autonomous.”

A lot of poleis that called themselves by those two proud names were free to do whatever the marshal controlling them said and autonomous of the rest of the marshals. Such was the level to which Hellenic independence had sunk in the past generation. Even Rhodes had briefly had a Macedonian garrison, but had expelled it after Alexander died. Now she truly was free and autonomous, able to do business with Ptolemaios and Antigonos alike-and with the other, more distant, marshals as well.

Xenomenes went on, “How can we hope to keep our freedom, though, if one of the Macedonians triumphs over the rest? He’d swallow us up, the same as he’d swallow everything and everybody else.”

“But you’re still assuming something you haven’t shown: that one marshal could beat all the rest,” Menedemos said. “Until you show that, it’s like worrying about what would happen if an elephant fell out of the sky without showing how an elephant could fly in the first place.”

The older man gave him a nasty look. Several of the other Rhodians laughed, which only made Xenomenes more irate. They argued about the marshals and whatever else came to mind for the next couple of hours. Every now and then, someone new would join the circle, as Menedemos had, or one of the men already there would wander off to do something else. Menedemos couldn’t think of a better way to pass the time-unless it was keeping company with a woman, of course.

When he finally went back to his house, his father was waiting in the andron. Menedemos politely dipped his head and walked toward the stairs. He didn’t feel like another argument now. But when Philodemos waved in a peremptory way, he had no choice but to stop and go over and ask, “What is it, Father?”

“How soon can the Aphrodite sail?” Philodemos rapped out.

Menedemos dug a finger into his ear, wondering if he’d heard straight. “How soon can she sail?” he echoed, half in disbelief.

“That’s what I said, isn’t it?” his father replied irritably.

“Yes, sir.” Menedemos frowned in thought. “Loading her and rounding up a crew won’t take more than a day or two. Wouldn’t even be that long if we didn’t need so many rowers. But most of them will be men who’ve pulled an oar in her before.”

“Go ahead and get ready, then,” Philodemos said. “The sooner, the better. Can’t be too soon, by Poseidon ’s beard.”

“Wait.” Menedemos held up a hand. “Just a couple of days ago, you were complaining I wanted to go out too early to suit you. Why have you changed your mind all of a sudden?”

Before Philodemos could answer, a slave brought him a cup of wine. He poured out a small libation, then drained the cup. “Ahh!” he said, wiping his mouth on his arm, and then, “I’ll tell you what made me change my mind: I just had another session with your cousin’s brother-in-law, that’s what. Zeus on Olympos!” By the way he looked around, he wished he had more wine.

“Papai!” Menedemos exclaimed. “I thought you’d persuaded him we weren’t going to load the Aphrodite up with his olive oil, and that was the end of it.”

“I thought the same thing,” his father said. “I thought so, but I was wrong. The only way to persuade Damonax of anything is to clout him in the head with a rock. Even then, you have to keep clouting him, because the first wallop doesn’t get through.”

“Why can’t he understand we won’t make enough money with his oil for it to be worth our while? We’ve told him often enough,” Menedemos said.

“I think he does understand,” Philodemos answered, peering down into his winecup as if hoping it held more. “I don’t think he cares, which isn’t the same thing. He’s convinced we owe him a living, regardless of what that does to our prospects.”

“Well, Furies take him, then,” Menedemos said.

“That’s just what I told him, when I saw I couldn’t get through to him any other way,” his father said.

“Good for you.” Menedemos dipped his head in complete agreement. He and his father might-did-quarrel about a great many things. Neither of them, though, suffered fools gladly.

“And so, you see, that’s why I want you to sail,” Philodemos said now. “If you’re gone, Damonax can’t possibly nag me about loading oil onto the merchant galley-at least, not till next sailing season rolls around.”

“I’ll take care of it. You know I’ve been eager to go for a while now,” Menedemos said. That was true. He couldn’t squabble with his father if a couple of thousand stadia separated them. He couldn’t make love to his father’s wife if a couple of thousand stadia separated them, either. Part of him regretted that. The more sensible part-and the larger part, as well-knew nothing but relief. A slow smile stole over his face. I’ll make love to other men’s wives instead, he thought.

“I know what you’re thinking,” his father growled, and pointed an accusing finger at him. “You’re thinking about adultery with all those loose Athenian women again, that’s what. I can tell.”

Menedemos hoped his father didn’t see him wince. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said with such dignity as he could muster.

“A pestilence take me if you don’t,” Philodemos said. Menedemos did his best to look innocent. He was guilty of what his father had accused him of, yes. Next to what his father didn’t know, though, that was as nothing.

The sooner he sailed for Athens, the better.

“Oimoi!” Sostratos said in dismay, and then switched from Greek to slow, halting, angry Aramaic: “My master, you are a thief.”

Himilkon the Phoenician looked aggrieved. “Your servant cannot imagine why you would say such a thing,” he replied in his own language, and then clutched his long robe with both hands, as if to rend the garment in dismay.

Sostratos went back to Greek: “Why? I’ll tell you why. You’ve been quietly buying up papyrus all winter long, that’s why, and the price you want for it is outrageous.”

“If you do not care for that price, buy somewhere else.” Himilkon’s Greek, though gutturally accented, was better than Sostratos’ Aramaic. In fact, he’d taught Sostratos what Aramaic he knew.

“I don’t seem to be able to buy anywhere else,” Sostratos said. “If I could, I would, believe me. But no one else has any, so I have to come to you.” He glowered at the merchant from Byblos. “You knew the Aphrodite would go to Athens this season.”

“You didn’t keep it a secret, most noble one,” Himilkon replied. “As soon as you came back from Phoenicia last fall, you started talking about how you planned to go to Athens and sell some of the goods you’d got. And even if you hadn’t, how smart would I have to be to figure out that you would want to go west instead of east this time?”

Every word of that was nothing but truth and common sense. None of it made Sostratos any happier. If anything, he got more upset, saying, “You have no right to hold us for ransom like a pirate.”

“For ransom? No, indeed.” Himilkon shook his head. “I do not want to kill you if you do not pay. I do not want to burn down your house. All I want to do is what any merchant wants: I want to make a profit.”

“You know Athens uses more papyrus than any other place in the world except maybe Alexandria-and they grow the stuff in Egypt,” Sostratos said. “You want me to pay you your ridiculous price for it so the Aphrodite can sell it in the Athenian agora.”

The Phoenician gave him a sly smile. “You can raise the price you charge for it, too.”

“Not that far,” Sostratos said. “We won’t be the only ones selling it, you know. If we have to ask twice as much as anybody else just to get our silver back, we won’t do a whole lot of business there.”

“It won’t be so bad,” Himilkon said. “Remember, most papyrus comes through Rhodes -and if it came through Rhodes lately, I bought it. You’ll have less competition than you think.”

“But papyrus is always a luxury item. People don’t have to have it,” Sostratos said.

“Of course. But that’s true of anything you’d carry on an akatos, wouldn’t you say?” Himilkon tugged on the gold hoop he wore in his left ear, as if settling it more comfortably. He scratched at his curly black beard. “I fear the reason you are most upset with me, O best one, is that 1 have the advantage in this dicker.”

Sostratos feared he was right. The Rhodian wasn’t about to admit it. “No, indeed,” he said. “We’ve made plenty of bargains where you had the advantage. Remember the peafowl a few years ago?”

“Oh, yes, I remember them very well,” Himilkon replied. “And when you sailed to Great Hellas with them, how much of a profit did you squeeze out of the Italiote Hellenes?”

“Peafowl were unique, though. Papyrus is anything but,” Sostratos insisted.

Himilkon’s only response was a shrug. “If you don’t care for the price I set, my master, you are welcome to sail for Athens without papyrus.”

“All right.” Sostratos got to his feet. He automatically ducked his head as he rose from his stool; Himilkon’s ramshackle harborside warehouse had shelves that stuck out at odd angles and a low ceiling. On the shelves lay packets and bales and jars of goods from all around the Inner Sea and from lands far to the east and north: the Phoenician dealt in many things besides papyrus. Sostratos, at the moment, didn’t care. He said, “Always a pleasure talking with you, O marvelous one. Farewell.”

He turned to go. Sometimes the best bargains were ones you didn’t make. He’d taken several steps toward the door before Himilkon, in a voice full of pain, called, “Wait.”

“Why?” Sostratos asked. “What more do we have to talk about?” He’d hoped the Phoenician would stop him, but he hadn’t counted on it. Sometimes the only way to keep a dicker alive was to show you weren’t afraid to kill it, too. Sometimes. Judging when… Judging when was what made a merchant.

“If you’re going to be… difficult, I suppose I can get by with less than three drakhmai, three oboloi for a roll of twenty sheets,” Himilkon said. “A little less, mind you.”

“I should hope so,” Sostratos said. “One drakhma, two oboloi is a more usual price-that’s only a bit more than a third of what you were trying to squeeze out of me.”

“That’s the price when everyone is bringing lots of papyrus into Athens,” Himilkon said. “Since most Egyptian shipping comes through Rhodes, and since I’ve been buying up the stock since last fall, it isn’t likely to be so cheap this season.”

“So you say now,” Sostratos said. “But all we need to worry about is one round ship from Alexandria sailing straight for Athens. Their main cargo is always grain, but their captains carry other things, too, to make extra on the side, and papyrus is something that always brings them a nice profit.”

“It could bring you a nice profit, too,” Himilkon said, doing his best to make the idea sound tempting.

Sostratos refused to show he was tempted. “It could,” he said pointedly, “if you gave me room to move on the price. Otherwise…” He tossed his head.

The Phoenician clapped both hands to his face in melodramatic dismay. “And you called me a thief! I suppose you expect me to lose all the profit I expected to make from getting the papyrus in the first place.”

“You won’t get any if you make it too expensive to be worth my while,” Sostratos said. “And you have to leave me room to push up the price and make my own profit in Athens. If I can’t charge a halfway decent price for it, nobody will buy any from me. I might as well not bring it if I can’t sell it.”

Himilkon said something pungent in Aramaic. Sostratos said something else, just as pungent, in the same language to remind Himilkon he understood. They yelled at each other in Greek. Himilkon edged his price down by a couple of oboloi. Sostratos laughed scornfully. The Phoenician, looking harassed, came down again.

That made Sostratos come up-by an obolos a roll. Himilkon bawled as if a branding iron were searing his flesh. Sostratos ignored the theatrics, which only made Himilkon more theatrical. “You want my wife and my children to starve!” he shouted.

“You want me to starve,” Sostratos retorted.

Himilkon came down again-and then again. He was discovering the papyrus he’d bought did him less good than he’d expected. If he didn’t sell it to Sostratos, to whom would he sell it? Rhodes boasted only two or three scribes, who among them wouldn’t use in five years what he’d accumulated. As long as Sostratos made it plain he would go to Athens without papyrus if the Phoenician didn’t meet his price, he had a good chance of getting it.

And he did. In the end, Himilkon sold him the writing material for one drakhma, four oboloi the roll: less than half of what he’d first proposed. Sostratos knew he would still have to hope papyrus was in short supply in Athens. That would let him bump up his selling price to the point where he made decent money. If it wasn’t…

If it’s not, he thought, the Aphrodite might as well be carrying Damonax’s olive oil, for all the profit we’ll show on papyrus. But then he tossed his head. Olive oil was heavy and bulky and took up lots of room. Papyrus wasn’t, and didn’t. And I’d sooner haggle with scribes and writers than with oil merchants any day.