Salamis

XVI

Sostratos watched the Tykhe leave the harbor and head back towards Egypt. Good news and bad: good that Ptolemaios wasn’t dead or loaded down with chains, bad that Rhodes was on its own.

One of the harborside regulars turned to him and said, “You were just down there, weren’t you? What’s it like?”

“It’s like …” Sostratos thought for a moment, then spread his hands in despair. “Egypt isn’t like anything. Alexandria wasn’t there at all when we were born, and now it’s bigger than Rhodes. Bigger than Athens or Syracuse, too.” Those were the biggest Greek cities he could think of. He went on, “And the rest of the country is as ancient as Alexandria is new. The Pyramids, the Sphinx, the temples …. They were all old a thousand years before Akhilleus fought Hektor on the plains outside of Troy.”

“I didn’t think anything could be older than that,” the man said.

“It’s true anyway. That’s why Egyptians laugh at Hellenes the way grown men laugh at children. We are children to them, children or just-sprouted weeds,” Sostratos said, remembering his Herodotos.

“Huh!” the other man said. He was unlikely ever to go to Egypt. Rowing or even being a crewman on a sailing ship would seem too much like work to him. He had plenty of opinions about things he’d never seen, though. “We may be weeds, but we’re weeds who tell the barbarians there what to do.”

“That’s …. Oh, never mind.” Sostratos knew he couldn’t explain it in a way that made sense to an ignorant, untraveled man. Ptolemaios and his nomarchs did tell the Egyptians what to do, at least to the extent of collecting the country’s wealth. But they did it as the Great Kings of Persia had before them: by acting as if they were Pharaohs in their own right. Whether they could actually change the way the Egyptians thought …. Maybe they were wiser not to try. What would they spawn but rebellion?

“You see?” the dockside lounger said triumphantly. He thought he’d won the argument Sostratos didn’t want to have. In the Apology, Sokrates talked about men who knew a lot about a little and thought that meant they knew a lot about a lot. This fellow was even worse. He didn’t know anything about anything, but thought he knew everything about everything. And how many more just like him were there? Myriads upon myriads.

Sostratos wanted to shove him into the sea. He walked away instead. The man might go to law against him. Or he might not be able to swim and drown. Arrogant stupidity wasn’t a capital crime. If it were, not many people would be left in the world.

On his way to nowhere in particular, Sostratos bought some sprats from a man who sold them off a tray. A few were still twitching, so he knew they were fresh. He took them to a tavern. For one obolos more, the man behind the counter plopped them into a kettle of hot olive oil. The sizzle and the smell made Sostratos’ mouth water.

He bought some wine to wash down the fried fish. It wasn’t a big midday meal, but often he went without any. The sprats were fine, crispy and delicious, the wine no better than it had to be. Sostratos shrugged. You didn’t go into a place like this for fine wine. A man snoring on his stool at a table by the wall, his cup on its side in front of him with flies humming around the wine that had spilled from it, showed why people did go in.

When Sostratos left, he headed back to the harbor. But he’d drunk enough wine for nature to assert itself. He could have just hiked up his chiton and eased himself against the nearest wall, as men often did, but found himself only a couple of doors away from a dyer’s shop. The man who ran it had rammed the pointed end of an amphora into the ground by his doorway. He used urine in his trade, and made it easy for men to give him some. Sostratos took care of what he needed to do right there.

As he let the front of his tunic drop back into place, he thought about one of the characters Theophrastos (under whom he’d studied in his brief spell in Athens) had described. A mark of the abominable man, Theophrastos said, was that he’d lift his chiton in the agora and wag his prong at women walking by.

Men who did such things thought they were hilarious. Sostratos had heard them laugh while they put themselves on display. The women they exposed themselves to didn’t usually think it was so funny. Sostratos agreed with his old mentor: men who did such things were abominable.

Before long, he found himself back at the docks again. He seemed to spend time there every day. Whenever a ship from some foreign place came in, he would try to find out whatever news the skipper and sailors were carrying. Menedemos had beaten him to the Tykhe, but Sostratos heard things more often than his cousin did.

Ptolemaios’ being safe was the most important news that had yet reached Rhodes from the sea-fight near Salamis. Menelaos and his soldiers would be going back to Egypt soon, presumably along with whatever sailors of Ptolemaios’ Demetrios’ men had fished from the sea.

And yes, Cyprus would belong to Demetrios and his formidable father. That had been plain from the moment the Aphrodite had to flee Demetrios’ triumphant fleet. It wasn’t good news for Rhodes, but Sostratos knew too well his polis couldn’t do anything about it.

But what else would Demetrios and Antigonos do with their victory? It was the hardest blow one of Alexander’s marshals (here, acting through his son) had dealt another since the great Macedonian conqueror died. Sostratos once more remembered what Alexander had said about who should take his empire while on his deathbed. Right this minute, Antigonos had good reason to claim he was the strongest would-be successor.

A fishing boat Sostratos didn’t recognize was tying up at a pier. He would have bet he knew every fishing boat that put out from the polis of Rhodes, though not every boat from the island of Rhodes’ smaller settlements.

Boats from the Anatolian mainland or from Cyprus might also visit here. Those from the mainland could be full of fishermen, or they could be full of spies: Antigonos ruled Asia Minor, after all. Sostratos realized the same also held true for Cyprus now that Demetrios had brought it under his father’s sway.

But even spies would have fish in their boat’s hold to disguise their real business. And even spies, however anxious they were to pick up local news, would also carry some from their home port. So Sostratos drifted over to the new-come boat.

As soon as he heard the fishermen talking, he knew they were Cypriots. Hardly anyone from anywhere else in the Hellenic world spoke that kind of Greek. He remembered thinking how listening to them made him feel as if he’d fallen back through time to Homer’s day when Ptolemaios’ ill-fated fleet anchored in the harbor at Paphos.

“In good sooth, a king is risen once more in the land,” one of the men in the boat was telling the Rhodians who’d already gathered on the pier by the boat.

“Nay, a pair of kings,” said another man, older than the first. Only a Cypriot was likely to come out with the dual form of a word like basileus, which came from an uncommon class of nouns. This fellow sounded as if he trotted it out every day. For all Sostratos knew, he did. The older man continued, “The Demetrios dispatched to his father a lackey, to tell him of the victories he’d won, on account of which the Antigonos was proclaimed king. And he forthwith sent his victorious son a matching diadem, so they may conjointly rule their realm.”

That was as much as Sostratos needed to hear. It was, in fact, what he’d been waiting to hear, that or something very much like it. As the Cypriot had said, there were kings in the land once again.

Sostratos suspected there would soon be more of them, too. If Antigonos and Demetrios wore crowns, how could Ptolemaios not match them? Off in the east, Seleukos would surely do the same; he already behaved in a nearly royal fashion. The lesser players in Europe, Lysimakhos and Kassandros, likely wouldn’t be far behind.

Full of such musings, Sostratos got almost to his house on instinct: he certainly didn’t pay much attention to where he was going. In fact, he nearly ran into Menedemos, who was coming down the street while he was going up.

“Good thing you weren’t driving a cart, my dear,” Menedemos said. “You would have run me down and killed me—and then, once you noticed you’d done it, you would have been surprised.” Sostratos stammered apologies. His cousin waved them aside. “Never mind that. What did you hear that made you forget the outside world?”

“You know me too well,” Sostratos said. “There’s a boat from Cyprus in the harbor. We can bow before King Antigonos and King Demetrios.”

“Can we, now?” Menedemos said. Sostratos dipped his head. Menedemos went on, “I only wish I were more surprised.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Sostratos said. “I wanted to tell my father the news first, but you’ve got it ahead of him.”

“I’ll go back to the house and tell my father.” Menedemos made a face. “I will unless you pretend you haven’t seen me after all. Then you or Uncle Lysistratos can do it. I’ll act properly amazed when he lets me know, I promise.”

“Whatever you want, of course. But are you quarreling with your father again?” Since Sostratos rarely quarreled with his father, he saw no reason for anyone else to do anything so foolish.

Menedemos looked at him—looked through him, really—with eyes so perfectly opaque, they might have been made from Egyptian glass. “If you’ll do me the favor, I’ll thank you for it. But past that …. Past that, my dear, it’s really no business of yours how I run my life.”

“I’ll do it,” Sostratos said, and not another word. Ears burning, he went into his own house to give his father the news.

As Menedemos had said he would, he artfully acted astonished when his father told him Antigonos and Demetrios were now crowned kings. The affairs of princes worried him because those princes cast hungry glances at his polis. If they hadn’t, he wouldn’t have given a fig for them.

The affairs of his own household counted a great deal more, as such affairs are apt to. That Baukis had come through childbirth safe and that the midwife had delivered her of a son (of his son?) delighted him. That he couldn’t speak to her in private for even a moment threatened to drive him mad.

Talking with her in private had always been a risky business. You never could tell when a slave might overhear whatever you were about to say that could least bear overhearing. It was no coincidence that slaves who snooped and slaves who accidentally heard things they shouldn’t were staples of comic drama. In comedy, they made the audience guffaw. In real life ….

In real life, Menedemos found himself even more frustrated than he had been before Baukis learned she was with child. Before, at least she’d walked through the whole house. She’d had some memorable squabbles with Sikon when the cook spent more on opson than she thought he should have.

Now, with Diodoros to look after, Baukis hardly left the women’s quarters at all. When she did, she always had a slave woman or two fluttering around here. They were even worse in the quarters, as Menedemos saw whenever he went in with his father. He couldn’t visit by himself, not in propriety.

Days were often hottest when the sun was sliding down the ecliptic toward the autumnal equinox. One of those days was hot enough to drive Baukis and Diodoros out of the rooms where they spent so much time and to the shady part of the courtyard.

“If we spend another minute up there, we’ll bake, and Sikon can pour melted cheese over us and serve us up for opson tonight,” she said.

“It’s hot, sure enough,” Menedemos agreed. He had to stick to commonplaces—a slave woman stood behind Baukis, fanning her mistress and the baby and now and then herself with a fan made from woven straw.

“This gives Diodoros something different to look at, too,” Baukis went on. She glanced at the herbs and flowers in the small garden at the center of the courtyard and clucked sadly. “This heat is killing most of the plants. The slaves don’t see to watering them the way I did.”

“Well, what can you expect from slaves?” Like Baukis, Menedemos spoke as if the woman with the fan weren’t there. Unless they were talking about something their animate property shouldn’t hear (what they felt for each other, for instance), they, like any Hellenes rich enough to own slaves, took them largely for granted.

Sure enough, Baukis answered, “I wish they weren’t so lazy.” This time, Menedemos did briefly wonder how energetic he’d be if he had to work for someone else all the time without ever getting paid. He didn’t worry about slavery as an institution; he worried about getting sold into it if Demetrios and Antigonos conquered Rhodes.

To keep from thinking about that, he eyed Diodoros. His half-brother or his son? He’d wonder for the rest of his life. Undeniably, the baby looked like him. But he also took after his father, so that proved nothing.

He noted the way the baby was studying the courtyard. “He seems more alert—no, that’s not right: more connected to the rest of the world—than he did the last time I saw him,” he remarked. Talking about Diodoros was safe.

And, of course, at the moment Baukis’ son was her favorite subject. She dipped her head. “He does!” she said. “Every day, he turns more and more into … into a person. I think he’ll be smart, like you.”

If I’m so smart, why did I fall in love with my stepmother? Menedemos knew that had no good answer, unless you thought Because Aphrodite willed you should was one. He was pious enough, in a conventional way, but he didn’t think that. As far as he could see, love like his was a kind of madness. If it struck you, you couldn’t hope to fight it. The most you could hope for was that it wouldn’t harm you too badly.

“What brains I have, I got from my father.” Menedemos would have said something else if the slave woman weren’t listening, but she was. He might be mad with love, but he wasn’t raving mad. He went on, “And it’s not as if you’re a fool. The way you manage the household …. A banker would be proud to do so well.”

“Sikon will tell you a different story,” Baukis said, her mouth twisting in annoyance.

“He’s a cook. Cooks always think they’re entitled to every obolos ever minted,” Menedemos said. “And he’s a good cook, so he thinks he gives extra value for what he spends. He’s a good enough cook, I sometimes think he’s right.”

“You would,” she said. Menedemos laughed, but she wasn’t joking, or not very much. And she had good reason not to be in a joking mood, for she asked, “Will Demetrios and Antigonos attack us? Your father seems to think so.”

“They’re the only ones who know for certain, but I’m afraid I think so, too,” Menedemos answered. “Why wouldn’t they? We’re rich, and the Ptolemaios can’t help us for a while. No one can. Whatever we do, we’ve got to do for ourselves.”

“What happens if … if a polis falls?”

“Nothing good.” Menedemos left it there. The best a woman could hope for was to be sold into slavery, and have to come to her master’s bed whenever he summoned her. If she was very lucky, she might get to raise Diodoros … as a slave himself. More likely, the soldiers who caught her would smash the baby’s head against a wall. If they’d already taken a lot of captives, they might not bother with one more to sell, just cut her throat after they’d had their fun with her.

Menedemos knew he’d die before he let any such thing happen to her. But if Demetrios’ soldiers got into Rhodes, death or slavery was all he had to look forward to himself.

The woman with the fan—they called her Lyke because she came from Lykia (and also because it was a joke of sorts: it meant “she-wolf”)—spoke up for the first time: “Being a slave is never good. How bad it is depends on who owns you.” She knew what happened when a city fell, all right, probably from experience.

Menedemos asked the question he couldn’t very well avoid: “How does the family measure up?”

She shrugged. “There’s always enough to eat. There’s a lot of work, but not a terrible lot of work most of the time, if you know what I mean. You and your father don’t treat slave women like we’re nothing but piggies with legs.” She brought out the Greek obscenity as matter-of-factly as if she were talking about the weather.

“Are things different other places?” Baukis, who got out less than Menedemos did, seemed more curious.

Lyke nodded, as someone born a barbarian would. “Oh, yes, Mistress! Some of the things you hear …,” She rolled her eyes.

“Where do you hear them?” Menedemos asked—that kind of thing interested him.

“Oh, you know, sir. When I’m getting water at the fountain two streets over, I’ll talk with some of the other women filling hydriai. I chat with slaves at the shops, too, or when I have time off for a festival.”

“All right,” he said. He didn’t know in detail how slaves lived their lives when their masters’ eyes weren’t on them, but what Lyke said sounded likely enough. It also sounded like the bits of business modern comic poets put in their plays. Either they drew from life or they were good at making things up.

Diodoros started to fuss. Baukis sighed. “He’s hungry again. He’s always hungry. Turn your back for a moment, Menedemos.” He obeyed. He wasn’t foolish enough to sneak a glance at what he shouldn’t see, not with Lyke there. He didn’t turn back till his father’s wife told him he could. By then, she’d arranged things so the baby’s head and her breast were decently covered.

His son or half-brother nursed noisily. “He’s really slurping it up there, isn’t he?” Menedemos said.

“He’s sucking in too much air,” Baukis said. “When I burp him, he’s liable to spit up.”

“Ah,” Menedemos said, as if in wisdom. Nursing babies was as much a mystery to him as the picture-writing the Egyptians used. More of a mystery, perhaps: he had a chance at figuring out what some of the pictures meant. He asked, “How do you make him not do that?”

“If I knew, I’d do it,” she said. He shut up.

As the baby slowed, Lyke said, “Let me get you a rag, Mistress. If he does spit up, it won’t get all over your chiton then. Or it may not, anyhow.”

“It may not is right” Baukis said. “But yes, go do that, please. Thanks for thinking of it.”

As Lyke came back with a raggedy scrap of wool, she remarked, “In some houses, they never say please or thank you to a slave. Some people think a slave is a brute beast like a sheep, or even a tool like a mallet or a chisel. Living in places like that must be hard.”

An uneasy silence followed. Menedemos would have told anyone he’d always believed in freedom and democracy: freedom for men who owned enough in the way of property, and courses chosen for the polis by the votes of an assembly of those property-owning men, who in their decrees called themselves the people of Rhodes.

Freedom for the people of Rhodes, whether the phrase meant those prosperous men who ran things—men like his father and uncle and cousin, men like himself—or the polis’ whole population, looked less likely to go on than it had a little while before. And of course it seemed sweeter when it also seemed more likely to be taken away.

Diodoros punctuated his uneasy thoughts with another one of those burps that seemed too loud and too deep for the baby producing them. And he didn’t just make noise. “You see?” Baukis exclaimed. “I knew he’d give back some of what he ate there.”

“You were right,” Menedemos said.

Lyke used the rag to wipe off the baby’s face—and Baukis’ shoulder, since the cloth hadn’t perfectly protected her. “I wonder if this is even worth rinsing out one more time,” she said. “It will smell like sour milk forever.”

“The baby can go into the cheese-making business,” Menedemos said—the rag was covered with what looked like curds. Lyke laughed. Baukis glared at him.

Then something noisy and unpleasant happened at Diodoros’ other end. Plenty of things to say about that would have occurred to Menedemos even if he hadn’t adored Aristophanes. The comic poet offered him more—and filthier—choices, though.

He opened his mouth, but then closed it again without saying anything. Sometimes whatever you came out with would only land you in more trouble. He wished he’d remembered that a little more often—or a lot more often—when talking to his father. But, while he loved the older man as a dutiful son should (when he wasn’t sick-jealous of him for lying with Baukis whenever he pleased, anyhow), he wasn’t in love with him. That made all the difference.

When he kept quiet, he saw something on Baukis’ face he’d never found there before—never aimed at him, at any rate. He had too-brief proof she wanted him the way he longed for her, and worried about him because of that. This was different. It was quiet gratitude mixed with equally quiet approval. It was the kind of look one adult was apt to give another.

Sostratos had talked about growing up as he neared thirty. Menedemos hadn’t felt like listening to him. Menedemos rarely felt like listening to anybody. Skippering the Aphrodite meant he didn’t have to listen to anybody very often. But, while he didn’t like listening, he didn’t forget what he heard. Sostratos had a point. His cousin often did, however little he cared to admit it.

If I do grow up, will I turn into my father? he wondered. Then he thought, If Diodoros or whatever other son I may have drives me as mad as I’ve driven him, who could blame me if I do?

He chuckled. “What’s funny?” Baukis asked.

“Nothing, really.” He didn’t care to tell that one to her—and to Lyke—even if he left Diodoros out of it. But he chuckled again.

Clouds rolled by overhead, traveling from northwest to southeast. Sostratos eyed them with mingled suspicion and relief: they were bigger and thicker and darker than the puffy little white ones that drifted across the sky at high summer. The rainy season wasn’t here yet, but he literally could see it coming. Like every other sailor ever born, he prided himself on reading the weather.

Before very long, the rain would come. The wind would blow up storms. Sailing would probably shut down for the winter, though fishing boats would keep going out. Sostratos looked north. The Anatolian mainland wasn’t far away at all. A bold man, an intrepid man—a man like, say, Demetrios son of Antigonos—might chance leading a fleet across that narrow stretch of sea and catching the Rhodians off guard.

He might, yes. But Sostratos didn’t think he would. The risk seemed larger than the reward he might gain from it.

Every day the peace held between Rhodes on the one hand and Demetrios and Antigonos on the other felt like a day won, almost a day stolen. The walls were in better shape now than they ever had been in the century-long history of the polis. They’d been raised, they’d been strengthened, all the brush had been cleared away from their bases, and the ditch outside them had been deepened and studded with pointed stakes. More of that kind of work could go on through the winter.

Men who’d never had to play the hoplite could go on training, too. Sostratos practiced in his cuirass and helmet these days. He was starting to get used to the extra weight and the way the helmet’s cheek pieces and nasal cut down his vision. He was getting used to the feel of a spearshaft and a sword—at least a wooden practice sword—in his hand, too.

Every once in a while, he would do something that made one of the Cretans who trained the locals look at him thoughtfully. His cousin had bragged about that kind of thing. He understood why, too. A couple of times, he got home with rag-tipped spear or oaken blade when the man he was working against didn’t think he could.

“Papai!” one of them exclaimed, opening and closing his hand to make sure it wasn’t broken after Sostratos rapped him smartly on the knuckles. “You dirty son of a mad dog, you think left-handed!”

“Thank you!” Sostratos said. The mercenary, who hadn’t meant it as praise, swore at him some more. Sostratos went on, “Won’t it help me stay alive if the foe doesn’t know ahead of time what I’m likely to do?”

“Not if I get my hands around your neck.” The Cretan stared down at his hand. “Bugger me! That’s swelling up like a puff adder just before it strikes.”

“Soaking it in cold water may help a bit.” Yes, Sostratos did fancy himself as at least something of a physician.

“Thanks a lot, Asklepios!” the mercenary jeered. Ears afire, Sostratos mumbled some kind of farewell and went off to shed his kit and scrape away the sweat and oil on his body. He knew he’d never practice with that particular soldier again. He wondered if he’d practice at all after this. Getting killed later seemed better than getting humiliated now.

That made no sense. The rational part of him understood as much. But the rational part of him was also coming to recognize that it didn’t rule all the time. Philosophers insisted that it should. Maybe it did for some of them. Sostratos wished it would for him. He couldn’t make it do any such thing, though, try as he would.

And, the older he got, the more he suspected it didn’t even for others who called themselves lovers of wisdom. Philosophers quarreled with one another no less than ordinary men did—they were just more eloquent about it.

They fell in love—and out of it—no less than ordinary men did, too. Even Sokrates, probably the wisest of them all, had stayed married to Xanthippe till the Athenians made him drink hemlock. She’d also cared for him in her own fashion. As he waited to take the poison, she’d wailed, “I don’t want you killed for something you didn’t even do!”

To which he’d replied, “Would you want me killed if I had done it?”

Neither Platon, Xenophon, nor anyone else had recorded her response to that. Sostratos imagined a comic playwright’s crack: something like, The only time a man ever got the last word!

He put on his chiton and left the gymnasion with his kit in his arms. That was the kind of thing Menedemos should come up with. Menedemos didn’t even pretend to be rational all the time.

As if thinking of his cousin conjured up the man himself, Sostratos ran into him before he got halfway home. “Hail!” Menedemos said. “What have you been up to?”

Sostratos hefted his corselet and helm. “What you’d expect—working out in the gymnasion, trying to learn how not to get killed.”

“How not to get killed? There’s a noble ambition! How did you do?”

Sostratos let out a horrible noise, one that would do for a death rattle, and made as if to slump to the ground. Straightening, he said, “Not too well, I’m afraid.”

His joke worked better than he dreamt it would. Menedemos laughed till tears ran down his face, laughed and laughed and had trouble stopping. At last, wiping his face with his forearm, he choked out, “Oh, my dear, you’ve gone and flattened me. You should tell stories in the taverns, the way some men who fancy themselves for their wits do. You’d run them all out of business, and make more money than you do on trading runs.”

“Did you bring home some poppy juice from Egypt?” Sostratos asked, less rhetorically than he’d intended. “You sound like a man who’s taken too much of it—you’re all full of hallucinations and phantasms.”

“I don’t think so,” his cousin said. “I’ve never laughed so hard for them as I did for you just now.”

Sostratos didn’t think tavern comics were funny, either—certainly not so funny as they thought they were. “Have you made some kind of special comparison lately?” he enquired.

Menedemos tossed his head. “Not me. I haven’t laughed much about anything lately. There doesn’t seem to be much to laugh at, for Rhodes or for the family. Or there didn’t, till you slew me just now.” He started giggling again.

“We made a fine profit coming back from Alexandria, even without selling Ptolemaios’ weapons to the polis,” Sostratos said. “As long as Rhodes does all right, the family should, too.”

Only a moment before, he’d wondered how to get Menedemos to quit laughing. Now he’d gone and done it, without even knowing just what he’d done. His cousin suddenly seemed as serious, even as somber, as if someone had jammed a stopper into the amphora that held his mirth. In a voice like winter, he replied, “Well, you don’t know everything there is to know, do you?”

“Plainly not, O best one,” Sostratos said, bewildered at the sudden mood swing. “How can I, though, if you won’t tell me anything?”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Menedemos said: such an obvious lie that Sostratos just looked at him. Even under his seafarer’s tan, Menedemos flushed. “There isn’t, curse it!” he insisted.

“There may not be anything you care to tell,” Sostratos said, “but that’s not the same thing, is it?”

Menedemos stalked away. Sostratos took a step after him, then stopped. He could—sometimes—tell when something wouldn’t do any good. This was one of those times.