Salamis

IV

Alexandria astonished Menedemos in every way he could think of. He’d been to considerable poleis before. His beloved Rhodes was one. Athens and Syracuse were bigger still. But Alexandria dwarfed them all. Alexandria might have been as big as all three of them put together.

“It’s not a polis. It’s too big to be a polis,” Menedemos said to Sostratos in the small palace room they’d been given to share. “It’s a—It’s a—” He broke off and threw his hands in the air. “I don’t even know what to call it.”

“It’s a megalopolis, a great city, and no, I don’t mean the polis in Arkadia,” Sostratos replied.

“Megalopolis.” Menedemos tasted the word, which he hadn’t heard before except as the name for that polis. He dipped his head. “Yes, that’s just what it is.”

Sostratos hadn’t finished. “The polis of Rhodes draws on the island of Rhodes for what it needs. Athens has Attica, Syracuse whatever chunk of Sicily it rules at any given time. Alexandria takes the wealth from all of Egypt, the way Babylon does in Mesopotamia. No wonder it can get bigger than any polis in Hellas or Great Hellas.”

“I suppose so,” Menedemos said. Egypt stretched south along the Nile for thousands of stadia—he had no idea how many thousands. “But Egypt is ancient. It’s the oldest country in the world, isn’t it?”

“I think so,” Sostratos said cautiously. “The Babylonians may give it an argument, but I think so.”

“But Alexandria’s so new!” Menedemos exclaimed. “Most of it doesn’t even seem finished. The palace here does, but this is the Ptolemaios’ home.” He lowered his voice to continue, “He may not be a king, but he lives like one, by the gods.”

“Think of all the wealth of Egypt,” Sostratos said again. “Now think of it concentrated not on one megalopolis but on one man.”

Menedemos tried to do that. He felt himself failing. To the Egyptians, Ptolemaios wouldn’t be a king if he put on a crown. He’d be a pharaoh, the next thing to a god. The whole country would belong to him, the whole country and all the myriads of people in it. Menedemos whistled softly.

By Sostratos’ wry expression, he’d already done some thinking along those lines. “Yes, the palace is very fine, and the temples. That’s what’s been finished,” he said. “The rest ….”

Alexandria had everything from homes that would have counted for palaces in Rhodes to shacks made out of whatever the builder could get his hands on. Sometimes one sat next to the other. Hellenes lived in one part of town, Egyptians in another, and Ioudaioi from Palestine in a third. Menedemos remembered from his trip to the Sacred Land two years before that the Ioudaioi claimed some kind of connection with Egypt. He couldn’t come up with the details. Have to ask Sostratos, he thought. Sostratos soaked up facts the way a rag soaked up water.

Before he could ask, his cousin said, “Even Alexander’s tomb is only half built.”

“He just got here, like everybody else,” Menedemos said. Sostratos chuckled, but Menedemos wasn’t joking. There’d been only a little fishing village on the site of Alexandria till Alexander ordered the city built here after taking Egypt from the Persians. All the swarms of inhabitants, including Ptolemaios himself, had settled here since then.

As for the mortal remains of Alexander himself, his corpse had been on the way from Babylon to Aigai in Macedonia when Ptolemaios’ soldiers seized it at swordpoint and carried it off to Egypt instead. Till very recently, it had lain in Memphis, south of the Delta. But Ptolemaios ordered it here, as if Alexander’s city needed to be adorned by what was left of him.

“The tomb will be impressive once it’s finished. It—” Sostratos broke off because someone knocked on the door. If the knocker had listened beforehand, he would have heard Menedemos’ cousin praising what the tomb would look like. That’s good, Menedemos thought.

Sostratos was closer to the door than he was. His cousin stepped over and unlatched it. A burly Hellene—he looked like a paid-off soldier—in a chiton of incongruously fine linen stood there. “I’m Demodamas, the general’s steward. The Ptolemaios will see the two of you,” he said. No, not quite a Hellene: by his Greek, he was a Macedonian.

“Let’s go,” Menedemos said. Sostratos stood aside, then followed him into the hallway. Demodamas led them through the palace’s twisting corridors till Menedemos longed for a skein of thread like the one Theseus had unrolled in King Minos’ Labyrinth.

The man stopped not at the entrance to an audience chamber but at a door like any other. He tapped at it with his forefinger. “Come in, come in,” someone on the other side said in impatient, Macedonian-accented Greek.

In they went. Ptolemaios and a young man—a secretary, Menedemos judged—sat behind a table strewn with sheets and rolls of papyrus. By their stances, the two bodyguards standing nearby had been bored to tears. Now, like watchdogs hearing strange footsteps, they perked up.

“Hail, sir,” Menedemos said.

“Hail,” Sostratos echoed.

“Hail, Rhodians,” Ptolemaios said. He was about sixty, stocky and graying. His eyes had pouches under them, but they were very shrewd. He went on, “I know we’ve met before, but for the life of me I can’t remember which of you is Sostratos and which Menedemos. If you’d dealt with as many people between then and now as I have, you wouldn’t remember, either.”

They straightened him out. Menedemos said, “You will have heard that we’ve brought news.”

“Oh, yes. If you were just interested in selling me wine and oil, you’d be dealing with my cooks,” Ptolemaios said. He’d had no trouble recalling the Aphrodite’s cargo. The secretary’s finger had an inky blot on it. So did Ptolemaios’. He kept track of as many details as he could.

Taking turns, Menedemos and Sostratos told him about Demetrios’ visit to Rhodes, and about the campaign Antigonos’ son was now mounting against his brother in Cyprus. The ruler of Egypt questioned them closely about the size of Demetrios’ army and navy.

“About fifteen thousand foot soldiers, I’ve heard, sir,” Menedemos said, “and four hundred horsemen.”

“More than a hundred ten triremes, and more than fifty heavier ships,” Sostratos added, “plus the freighters and such to support the army and the warships.”

“That’s … not a small force, if what you hear has anything to do with what’s true.” Ptolemaios clicked his tongue between his teeth. “It’s liable to be so, worse luck. Demetrios, Furies take him, doesn’t do things by halves.” He clicked his tongue again. “Menelaos holds Cyprus for me. You lads have met him, too, haven’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” Menedemos and Sostratos said, Menedemos half a beat ahead of his cousin. He had all he could do not to burst into applause. Ptolemaios really did note every detail.

Sostratos added, “It was the year after we met you, sir. We were trading in Phoenicia and Palestine. Rhodians want to be able to trade freely all over the world. That’s why we turned down Demetrios’ offer of alliance.”

“When a mouse allies with a cat, the mouse doesn’t give the orders. It takes them.” Ptolemaios’ voice was dry as Egypt away from the Nile.

“That’s why we want to stay free and independent, sir,” Sostratos said.

“Of course.” Ptolemaios’ tone remained dry as dry could be.

Menedemos remembered he’d started his career as a bodyguard of Alexander’s, and had been a capable general all through the Macedonian king’s whirlwind conquests. After Alexander died, Ptolemaios had held his own against the other squabbling Macedonian marshals. Not many men in the world had more power or more experience. Here, more than at their earlier meeting, Menedemos felt the weight of that power and experience.

Ptolemaios went on, “Rhodes thinks she can trust me—some—because I’m so far from her. If my land were just a long piss away, you’d be as nervous about me as you are about the Cyclops and his brat.” He spoke about Antigonos and Demetrios with easy familiarity, half scornful, half affectionate. He would have been through a lot with Antigonos even before the conquests began, and would have watched Demetrios grow from baby to warlord.

After a brief pause, Sostratos said, “Perhaps so, sir, but things are as they are, not as they might have been. We have to deal with what is.”

“Yes, I do remember you,” the ruler of Egypt said. “You were the one who wanted to write history. Have you started that?”

“To my shame, no,” Sostratos said, staring down at the floor mosaic: a hunting scene. “I keep looking for time, and life keeps getting in the way.”

“A pestilence on that!” Ptolemaios said. “If you really want to do something, you cursed well make time for it, and do everything else around the chunk you’ve carved out.”

“That’s … good advice, sir.” Sostratos still didn’t look up. Menedemos feared his cousin would be gloomy for days, wishing he were scribbling instead of selling things.

He asked Ptolemaios, “Do you have any idea, O best one, what you’ll do about the attack on Cyprus?”

“I hope Menelaos can hold his own. But even if you’ve doubled what Demetrios has, it’s plenty to be dangerous. If I need to lend my brother a hand, I will. Cyprus gives me eyes and ears and harbors near Anatolia. I want to hang on to it,” Ptolemaios said.

“I think that’s sensible, sir,” Sostratos said.

“Thank you so much. I’m glad you approve,” Ptolemaios rumbled. Sostratos blushed scarlet as the coals under a charcoal brazier. The audience ended a moment later.

Sostratos and Menedemos bought balls of mashed chickpeas fried in some oil that wasn’t olive and rounds of flatbread to wrap them in. They’d got out of Ptolemaios’ palace as soon as they could after the lord of Egypt dismissed them. Sostratos didn’t want to talk about the audience where he might be overheard. When Menedemos started to, Sostratos contrived to step on his toe. His cousin, luckily, got the message and kept quiet till they were out in the bustling crowds of the city.

“By the gods!” Sostratos said when he bit into his snack. “This is better than I thought it would be.”

“I was thinking the same thing,” Menedemos replied with his mouth full. “Not like what we eat back home, but good.”

“Frying improves anything,” Sostratos said wisely, licking his fingers.

“That’s true enough! Think how Demetrios would sizzle if you dropped him into a big tub of hot oil,” Menedemos said.

“Heh!” Sostratos dipped his head in agreement. “Maybe Menelaos can take care of that for us.”

“It would be nice. Then all we’d have to worry about would be Antigonos and his ordinary generals,” his cousin said. “Oh, and Ptolemaios, too.”

“Yes, and Ptolemaios, too.” Sostratos dipped his head again. “He’s no one’s fool. And he said it himself: the only thing that makes him less dangerous to us than old One-eye is that he’s farther away.”

“He and Antigonos will have known each other longer than we’ve been alive—almost as long as our fathers have,” Menedemos said slowly. “The other Macedonian warlords, too. It’s not just a war with them. It’s quarrels left over from the days when Philip was still king.”

“Macedonian feuds are like that, I’ve heard. Only now they aren’t squabbling with the clan a valley over. These wars stretch from Hellas all the way to India,” Sostratos said. “Remember how Ptolemaios talked about hunting tigers when we sold him that skin?”

“I hope he’ll remember that Rhodians gave him the news about Demetrios,” Menedemos said.

“He’ll remember. He remembers a lot. He remembered us, even if he didn’t know which of us was which,” Sostratos said. “Whether he’ll care …. That will depend on whether he thinks caring will bring him any advantage.”

“He has an eye for the main chance, all right,” Menedemos replied.

“I thought I just said that,” Sostratos remarked. His cousin stuck out his tongue at him. Ignoring it, he went on, “Look at how he grabbed Egypt after Alexander died. It’s small compared to what Antigonos and Seleukos hold, but it’s rich. The wealth here is concentrated, the way bees concentrate nectar to make it into honey.”

“The difference is, Antigonos and Seleukos want to grab everything and be Alexander,” Menedemos said. “Ptolemaios doesn’t care about that. He’s happy with a chunk, as long as it’s a good chunk.”

Sostratos stopped in the street and sent him a speculative stare. “You’d better watch yourself, my dear. If you aren’t careful, more people will realize you aren’t always the fool you seem.”

Menedemos stopped, too, to blow him a kiss. They both laughed—until a man behind them who was leading a donkey overloaded with sacks of barley or beans shouted in bad Greek for them to get out of his way. They did. The man—a sweating, sun-darkened Egyptian wearing only a linen skirt—and the poor, tired donkey plodded on.

Seeing the Egyptian’s shaved head glisten like that made Sostratos rub the back of his arm across his forehead. He was sweating, too. “It can be warm in spring back on Rhodes, but not like this, and not this early,” he said. “I wonder how bad it is here when full summer comes. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s worse than Palestine.”

“Neither would I,” Menedemos said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if some of those golden-haired, pink-skinned Macedonians fall over dead when it stays that hot for a couple of months, either. The Egyptians turn brown. We’d turn pretty brown if you left us under this sun for a year, too. But if you burn instead to baking ….” He tossed his head to show he wouldn’t want to do that.

“Ptolemaios is colored about the way we are,” Sostratos said thoughtfully—no, Menedemos was no fool, even if he sometimes enjoyed playing one. “But Alexander, they say, was very fair.”

“His mother was a Molossian,” Menedemos said. “They’re as pale as Illyrians or Thracians, never mind Macedonians.”

“I wonder if being so pink and going into all those hot places sped his end,” Sostratos said. “It couldn’t have helped.”

“I can’t begin to tell you. You’re the one who fancies himself a physician,” Menedemos replied. Sostratos’ hot cheeks had nothing to do with the weather. He did what he could for sailors on the Aphrodite who hurt themselves or fell sick. Like any real physician from Hippokrates on down, the most he could hope for was doing more good than harm.

He changed the subject: “I wonder where we can find a jeweler who’ll give us a proper price for our amber. I haven’t wanted to ask in the palace—”

“I should hope not!” Menedemos broke in. “Whoever you talked to would blab to the customs inspectors, and we’d have to pay them a cut on the amber’s value. The Ptolemaios doesn’t miss any chances when it comes to raking in silver.”

“Too right, he doesn’t,” Sostratos agreed ruefully. “We had to pay his duty on the wine and the oil. We couldn’t very well sneak those in.” He muttered to himself. “I ought to stick Damonax for all of the duty on the oil. That would teach him a thing or two.”

“Why don’t you? He deserves it,” Menedemos said.

“Don’t tempt me, my dear,” Sostratos said with real regret. “The trouble is, if he ever finds out, he won’t just make life miserable for me. He’ll take it out on my sister. Things that bring in your family always get complicated in a hurry.”

To his surprise, Menedemos winced as if someone had stuck a knife in his flank. Just for a moment, he looked as if he were about to weep. If Sostratos was any judge at all, his cousin needed a real effort of will to pull his face straight. “Well, O best one, you aren’t wrong,” he said at last.

When he didn’t go on from there, “Sostratos asked, “Is there anything you want to tell me? Is there anything you need to tell me?”

Menedemos tossed his head. “Not a thing,” he answered in a voice that sounded like a bright parody of his usual way of speaking. “Everyone has troubles. Everyone has worries. Everyone has family.”

“Your father was that bad before we set out?” Sostratos guessed.

“You have no idea!” Menedemos said. But the way he seized on the question made Sostratos guess he was using it to cover whatever really ate at him rather than to show it.

“You know I don’t spread gossip from Karia to Carthage,” Sostratos said.

“Yes, I do know that. You wouldn’t tell me your own name if I didn’t already know it. But let it go anyway,” Menedemos said in tones that brooked no argument.

Sostratos didn’t care for getting pushed away like that. But he could see that charging straight ahead like a ram trying to knock down a wall with its horns would only infuriate his cousin. A few years ago, he thought, I wouldn’t have noticed that. I would have plowed on, and Menedemos would have started screaming at me, and I would have had no idea why.

He wondered if he was growing up at last. Most people seemed to do it by the time they turned eighteen. He was more than ten years past that. Better late than never, he said to himself, and hoped it was true.

Menedemos said, “We’ll find out where the people who advise Ptolemaios live, the ones who help him run Egypt and fight his wars for him. They’re the men who can afford the best, and the men who sell it to them will have their shops close by.”

He was trying to get away from whatever private woe gnawed at him. Sostratos could see that. But what he said made good sense. Sure enough, he was less silly than he sometimes liked to pretend.

“That’s a fine plan!” Sostratos meant it and was acting—perhaps overacting—at the same time. Have to steer the akatos of conversation away from the rocks, he thought. “We’ll do it! It will give us the excuse for more sightseeing, anyhow.”

“As if you need an excuse,” Menedemos gibed. His eyes were grateful. He went on, “I know you. I know you too well, in fact. First chance you get, you’ll climb on a riverboat and go down the Nile to see the Sphinx and the whatever-you-call-’ems.”

“The Pyramids,” Sostratos supplied. “I’d like to. Wouldn’t you? We’re so close and they’re so grand. Nothing else like them anywhere, not in the whole world. Be a shame to go back to Rhodes without looking at them if we can.”

“And then you’ll go a little farther down the Nile, and a little farther yet, and then I’ll hear you’re living in a mud hut with an Egyptian girl and raising a flock of brown babies,” Menedemos said.

“If I ever live with a woman, I’ll want one I can talk to,” Sostratos said. “That will be hard enough if she speaks Greek.”

His cousin snorted. “Talking is for men. Women are for babies and for running your household.”

“If that were true, hetairai would go out of business,” Sostratos said.

“Hetairai are different. I thought you were talking about wives,” Menedemos said.

Sostratos didn’t see the distinction. “Hetairai or wives, they’re all women, aren’t they? If you have a wife you can talk to, you don’t need to go looking for a hetaira who’d never look at you if you didn’t give her silver or perfume or fancy jewelry.”

“You’d best be careful, my dear.” Menedemos eyed him the way he’d inspected a lizard in Palestine whose like he’d never seen in Hellas. “You tell that to someone who isn’t related to you and doesn’t know you’re a bit daft, he’ll think you’re a dangerous radical.”

“Well, let him.” Sostratos rather liked the idea. “If I tell it to women, by the gods, I bet it will draw them to me the way spilled wine draws ants.” He rubbed his chin. He rather liked that idea, too.

Most of the servants in Ptolemaios’ palace were Egyptians. Hellenes came to Egypt hoping to get rich and have slaves and servants working for them. They didn’t come to sweep other people’s floors or wash clothes or put fresh linen on beds. Menedemos understood that. If you were someone else’s subordinate, were you truly a free man?

He had no trouble coaxing one of the little brown women into bed one morning after Sostratos went out looking for jewelers and wine merchants. He spoke not a word of Egyptian, while she knew only a little Greek, but a charming manner and some kisses and the promise of a drakhma proved persuasive enough. More than persuasive enough, in fact; the eagerness with which she nodded her head convinced Menedemos he’d overpaid.

When he took off her chlamys, he found she was as nicely made as he’d hoped. When he took off his own tunic … she laughed in surprise and pointed at his phallos. “What wrong with it?” she asked. “I never did with Hellene before. All Hellenes like that?” She didn’t seem to care for the notion.

“There’s nothing wrong with it, and of course we’re all like that. How else would we be?” Menedemos said in some annoyance. He’d wanted a good time, not a girl who mocked him for how he was made. But then he remembered some of the stories Sostratos had brought back from the land of the Ioudaioi. “Wait! Do Egyptian men circumcise?” Her blank look said she didn’t follow. He tried again, with simpler words: “Do Egyptian men cut off their foreskins?” He used fingers to show what he meant, too.

She nodded so vigorously, it made her breasts bob. “Oh, yes. Men do. Not look—funny.”

“I don’t think I look funny. I think men with naked cockheads look funny,” Menedemos said with dignity. He wasn’t sure she followed him. She didn’t get off the bed and run out of the chamber, though, so he went on, “No matter what it looks like, it works the same way once it’s in there. Come on!”

Egyptians and Hellenes proved to differ even in their preferred postures. He would have bent her forward and gone in from behind. When she lay on her back and urged him atop her, though, he acquiesced. He wasn’t fussy, and he expected it would be fine any which way.

And it was. Of course, it was almost always fine for a man. His partner also seemed happy enough. After he got off her, she squatted over the chamber pot and let his seed dribble out of her. “No baby,” she said. “I hope no baby.”

Menedemos dipped his head. He didn’t want a little brownish bastard, either. “Did being the way I am make any difference?” he asked.

She shrugged. “Not much. Still funny-looking.”

“Is this funny-looking?” He gave her a Rhodian drakhma with the head of Helios the sun god on one side and his polis’ rose on the other.

She looked surprised and pleased. “I not even got to asking. You my first Hellene. All honest like you?”

“Don’t count on it, sweet one!” Menedemos exclaimed. She understood his tone if not the words. He asked, “How does it happen that I’m your first Hellene?”

Bad grammar and small vocabulary made her need to back and fill several times before he got the story. Her uncle was a baker in the palace, and had just got her a position here. Plainly, though, she hadn’t been a shy innocent in whatever Delta village she came from. She wasn’t a maiden, and she knew what to do in bed.

As she put her tunic back on, she asked, “You want again, another time? And your friend here?”

Menedemos chuckled. “Dear, you love us for our silver alone! But we aren’t the mines of Laureion in Attica.” That flew straight over her head. She opened the door, blew him a kiss, and was gone.

After Sostratos got back from his ramble through the overgrown city, he told Menedemos, “Well, I’ve found a couple of men who seem to have the money and the interest to buy some of the amber, anyway.”

“Euge!” Menedemos said, miming applause.

“And how was your morning?” Sostratos’ tongue didn’t really drip venom, but he enjoyed acting as if it did.

“Pretty good. Better than pretty good, in fact. She wasn’t used to a sausage still in the skin, but that didn’t keep her from enjoying it.”

Sostratos stared at him. “A sausage still in the—? What are you going on about now?”

Menedemos told him exactly what he was going on about. He added, “She asked about you, too.”

“Did she?” his cousin said. “Well, a drakhma’s not a terrible price. I don’t know how you feel about sharing a woman, though. Come to that, I don’t know how I feel about it, either. We’ve never tried that before.”

“She’s only an Egyptian. It’s not as though either one of us will fall in love with her or anything, She won’t fall for us, either. She’s as mercenary as one of those Cretans who sells his sling to whoever pays him most.”

“I’ll have a look at her, I suppose. If I like what I see, I’ll try her,” Sostratos said. “Then she can laugh at my prong, too, so you won’t feel all alone. What’s her name, anyhow?”

“Her—?” Menedemos’ mouth fell open. He thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. “By the gods, I’m an idiot! I never asked her!”

“That will make her easier for me to find, won’t it? I’ll shout, ‘Hey you!’ and she’ll come running.” Sostratos clicked his tongue between his teeth. “How can you screw somebody if you don’t even know who she is?”

“My pole did the talking, my pole and her piggy,” Menedemos said. Sostratos made that tongue-clicking noise again. They eyed each other in perfect mutual incomprehension.

In Greek letters, the palace girl’s name was Seseset, or something close to that. It had a couple of the sneezing consonants Aramaic also used but Greek didn’t. She gave herself to Sostratos as readily—maybe as greedily—as she did to Menedemos. Now that she knew about foreskins, she seemed to take them in stride.

Sostratos also soon discovered his cousin was right. Seseset gave what she gave cheerfully enough, but she cared little for either Hellene beyond the silver they paid her. She was honest about it, at least. Sostratos preferred that to drama. A lot of things he enjoyed watching in a play at the theater were less enjoyable in real life.

So when he got the urge and he had a drakhma he didn’t mind parting with, he found Seseset and slaked his lust. Sometimes he thought she enjoyed it; others, her attitude toward him put him in mind of his when he petted a friendly dog. The creature was there. It was amusing for a moment. Past that, it wasn’t worth getting excited about.

He could have had exactly what Seseset gave him, and clever conversation with it, for much more money from any of the hetairai who’d flocked to Alexandria. A city full of rich men naturally attracted women who wanted some small share of riches for themselves.

Sostratos had no interest in visiting the fancy women. For one thing, he was stingy; he didn’t always care to part with even a single drakhma. For another, he was shy. Holding up his end of the conversation with a hetaira might have strained him. So Seseset suited him fine.

It was funny, in a way. As he’d told Menedemos, he hoped for a wife with whom he’d be able to share all his thoughts. Once he got to know herSeseset, he wouldn’t—he might not—be shy around her. And she wouldn’t have the hard, bright, bitter edge of so many professionally witty women.

Meanwhile …. Meanwhile, business went on. Finding wine merchants was much easier than coming up with jewelers who’d pay the price he wanted for his amber; neither of his leads the morning Menedemos first bedded Seseset came to anything. The wine merchants didn’t always want to buy, either.

A plump fellow named Dromeus peered closely at an amphora a sweating sailor had lugged to his shop. “Everything seems to be in good order, my dear fellow,” he said in Greek that declared he came from Athens. “The jar has the proper shape for Thasian vintages. The stamps on the neck are as they should be. Your first price isn’t too outrageous, if the wine matches the container it comes in and I may be able to talk you down some. But, you see”—he spread his hands in regret—“I don’t know you.”

“By the dog, sir, you know the Ptolemaios, don’t you?” Sostratos usually spoke an Attic-flavored Greek himself. When he got annoyed, as now, more of Rhodes’ native dialect came now.

“I have met him, yes—I’ve had that privilege,” Dromeus answered warily. “Why?”

“Suppose you ask him whether my cousin and I would pour swill into a Thasian amphora and pitch up the stopper again,” Sostratos growled. “He’s bought from us. He knows honest men when he meets them.”

Dromeus’ face fell: a good impersonation of well-bread dismay. “I assure you, my friend, I meant no such thing. I have no doubt your integrity is above reproach.”

“Then you’ll buy, of course,” Sostratos said. The Alexandrian wine dealer stood mute. Sostratos had expected no more, or he would have got angry. Wearily, he said, “My cousin and I have a room in the palace. You can send someone there to find out if that’s true and if we really have dealt with the Ptolemaios. Once you satisfy yourself, you can send a messenger back to me, and I’ll dicker with you. But I promise my price will be ten drakhmai a jar higher because of the time you’ll make me waste. That’s the way of the world, you know.”

Dromeus lost his air of gentility. He said something Aristophanes would have been proud of. Sostratos made himself remember it so he could tell it to Menedemos, who adored the Athenian comic poet.

To the wine merchant, he replied, “I love you, too, my dear.”

Dromeus glared. “All right. All right. It’s Thasian, and you’re an honest shark—excuse me, an honest man. If we don’t go through the rigmarole, you’ll let me have it for an honest price, not a ridiculous one, yes?”

“It wouldn’t be ridiculous,” Sostratos said steadily—now he had his fish on the hook. “And I’m sure you’ll make a nice profit off the wine no matter what you pay me. Alexandria is swimming in the cheap stuff, but it’s a long way from where the good vintages grow.”

Dromeus still glared, but in a different way now. “Why couldn’t you be another stupid oaf who doesn’t know what the daimon he’s doing?”

“You say the sweetest things,” Sostratos murmured, though the extremely backhanded compliment did warm him. “I’ve been doing this for a while know. I try to do it as well as I can.”

“Faugh!” Dromeus made a disgusted noise. “For a while!” He had a double chin. His hair was retreating at the temples and starting to go gray. “Your mother hasn’t even licked you dry yet.”

They started the dicker on that cheery note. Sostratos got the price he wanted, and a few more drakhmai for the amphora besides. He left Dromeus’ shop well pleased with himself. The rower who’d lugged the jar dozed outside in what little shade he could find. Sostratos gave him a drakhma for his hard labor. Grinning, the fellow headed for a tavern that sold cheap stuff.