Owl to Athens

by H. N. Turteltaub

Menedemos stood there dumbfounded, wondering how to tell him he was speaking gibberish. Sostratos undertook the job: “I’m very sorry, O best one, and I do not mean to offend you, but I cannot follow what you say.” He made his own speech as Attic as he could: that was the dialect people who learned Greek were most likely to follow, and to use.

  After an incomprehensible Macedonian oath, the soldier tried again. This time, he managed intelligible Greek, asking, “What ship be ye here? Where be ye from? What might ye carry?” Menedemos told him. He followed Doric Greek about as well as Sostratos’ almost-Attic, and asked another question: “Whither be ye bound?”

  “Athens.” Sostratos spoke before Menedemos could. By the way his tongue caressed the city’s name, he longed for it as Menedemos might have longed for one of the women who lived there.

  “Athens, eh?” The Macedonian dipped his head, smiling a little, and said something more in his native speech. He turned and marched down the pier, his rawhide boots thudding on the sun-baked, bird-splashed planks.

  “What was that last bit?” Menedemos asked Sostratos.

  “It sounded like, ‘Maybe I’ll see you there,’ “ his cousin answered.

  “It sounded like that to me, too, but that’s not likely, is it?” Menedemos said. “He’s Antigonos’ man, and Athens belongs to Kas-sandros.”

  “They don’t love each other,” Sostratos agreed.

  “We probably heard it wrong,” Menedemos said. “I’d almost rather listen to a Thracian than a Macedonian. At least Thracian’s a real foreign language, and you know ahead of time it won’t make any sense to you. When you hear Macedonians talking, you pick up a word now and then, and you hear other bits that sound like they ought to make sense, but then you listen a little longer and you realize you don’t know what in Tartaros they’re talking about.”

  “Usually it’s something like, ‘Surrender right now. Give me your silver,’ “ Sostratos said. “Macedonians aren’t very complicated people.”

  As unobtrusively as he could, Menedemos kicked him in the ankle, saying, “You’re pretty simple yourself, to scoff at them where the Lesbians might hear you and blab. We want to do business here, not get in trouble.”

  “You’re right, my dear. I’m sorry. I’ll be more careful.” Sostratos was much more ready than most Hellenes to apologize when in the wrong. That made Menedemos have a hard time staying angry at him, but also roused faint contempt. Did his cousin have no self-respect?

  Diokles asked, “Are you young gentlemen going to an inn tonight, or will you sleep aboard ship?”

  “Good question.” Menedemos turned to Sostratos. “How about it? Do you feel like a bed tonight, with maybe a slave girl in it to show us what women in Lesbos are famous for?”

  “We’d probably get better lodgings at the house of the Rhodian proxenos here.” Sostratos eyed the setting sun. “Too late to send anybody to his house this evening. Tomorrow would do better for that, and so I’d just as soon sleep here tonight.”

  After a moment’s thought, Menedemos dipped his head. “You make good sense,” he said. “All things considered, you usually do.”

  “Thanks—I think,” Sostratos said. “I am fairly good at being right. One of the things I’ve found, though, is that it’s much less useful than people think.”

  “That’s a what-do-you-call-it—a paradox,” Menedemos said. “What’s wrong with being right?”

  “For one thing, a good many questions aren’t important, so whether you’re right or not really doesn’t matter very much,” Sostratos said seriously. “For another, being right annoys people a lot of the time. They think you think you’re better than they are, when all you truly think is that you’re more accurate.”

  Menedemos had watched Sostratos look down his nose at him and at other people too many times to be altogether convinced by that. Saying so, though, would have sparked a quarrel. Instead, he got himself a couple of barley rolls, some olives, and some dried fish. “Why don’t you pour us some wine?” he said. “This won’t be much of a supper, but it’ll keep us going.”

  His cousin got out their cups. “We’ll eat better at the proxenos’ house than we would at an inn,” he said. “The only thing innkeepers know how to do is to fry whatever you bring them in hot oil.” Sostratos dipped wine from an amphora of the rough red the crew drank, then diluted it with water from another jar.

  “You’re bound to be right about that,” Menedemos said as Sostratos gave him his cup. “I’ve had some ghastly suppers in inns.”

  “Who hasn’t? Only men who never travel,” Sostratos said. “And this is another one of those places where, even if I am right, so what?” He took a sip of wine, then fixed a supper for himself. “You see? My being right didn’t even get you to bring out any food for me, though I poured your wine.”

  “Well, now you’ve embarrassed me,” Menedemos said, which was true; he knew he should have taken sitos and opson for Sostratos as well as himself. “I’m just lazy and useless, that’s all.” He hung his head.

  “If you were on the stage, they’d throw cucumbers and squishy apples at you, the way you overact,” Sostratos said. Menedemos snorted, though Sostratos was probably right again.

  When Sostratos woke up on the Aphrodite’s poop deck, he needed a moment to remember in which city’s harbor the ship lay. Kos? Samos? Khios? No, this was Mytilene, on Lesbos. The wind blew from the north, and carried the city stink of dung and smoke and sweat and garbage from the part of the polis on Lesbos proper straight into the harbor. When Sostratos was inside a city, he stopped noticing the smell after a while. Going out to sea, though, reminded him of it whenever he came back to port.

  He sat up, rubbing his eyes. The eastern sky, the sky above the Anatolian mainland, was gray with advancing dawn. Menedemos still snored beside him. That seldom happened; more often than not, Menedemos woke before him. And Diokles still slept sitting up on a rower’s bench, leaning against the planks of the ship’s side. Sostratos rubbed his eyes again, wondering whether to believe them—he couldn’t remember the last time he’d got up ahead of the keleustes.

  He got to his feet and walked, naked, to the rail to ease himself. Even one man moving about gave the merchant galley a small but perceptible motion, enough to rouse both Menedemos and Diokles. “Hail,” Menedemos said. “Not such a sleepyhead as usual, eh?”

  “Oh, go howl!” Sostratos said. “Sleeping later than you do doesn’t make me a lazy wretch.”

  “No, eh? Since when?” Menedemos got out from under his himation. He too didn’t bother with clothes while sleeping: he used his wadded-up chiton for a cushion. He came over and stood beside Sostratos.

  Diokles stood up and stretched. Sostratos said, “I still think you’d be more comfortable if you lay down when you slept.”

  The oarmaster tossed his head. “That may be fine for other people, but not for me. I got used to sleeping sitting up when I pulled an oar, and nothing else has felt right since. I have no quarrel with what anybody else does, and I don’t see why anyone else should have a quarrel with what I do.”

  “I have no quarrel with it,” Sostratos said. “It just seems strange.”

  Menedemos grinned impishly. “And when you have a girl, Diokles, do you sit up and put her on your lap?”

  “Sometimes,” Diokles replied, unruffled. “It’s as good that way as any other, don’t you think?”

  “It’s pretty good any which way.” Menedemos turned to Sostratos. “Now that would be something useful for philosophers to do, my dear: figure out which way it’s best, I mean.”

  “It’s as Pindaros says—custom is king of all,” Sostratos answered. “Besides, what one man likes most, another likes least. So who can say what best is?”

  “If you go to a brothel, the girls charge you most for riding you like a racehorse,” Diokles said. “They must think that’s the best.”

  “Not necessarily,” Sostratos said. “They might charge more because they have to do the most work that way. If they just bend fo
rward, the man behind them is thrusting home with his spear, and they don’t need to do much at all.”

  Menedemos laughed. “Well, this is an interesting way to start the morning. More fun than breakfast, I will say.”

  From gray, the eastern sky went to pink, and then to gold. The sailors who’d spent the night on the Aphrodite instead of going into Mytilene to drink and wench got up one by one. Before long, they were arguing about the best way to do it. They got no answer that would have satisfied a scholar at the Lykeion, but they had fun, too.

  After a barley roll dipped in olive oil and a cup of watered wine, Sostratos said, “Shall we find the agora and see what we can learn about wine merchants and truffle sellers?”

  “Sounds good to me.” Menedemos tilted his head back and emptied his cup. He wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “Let’s go.”

  They walked up the gangplank and down the quay. As they passed a longshoreman, Sostratos asked him where the market square was. The Mytilenean might have been stricken with an advanced case of idiocy. He scratched his head, pulled at his lower lip, frowned, and generally gave the impression of a man who had a hard time remembering his own name, let alone anything harder. Sostratos didn’t need to have read Hippokrates to know how to cure that malady. As he had with the other longshoreman, he gave the man an obolos. Sure enough, silver proved the proper drug. Intelligence blossomed on the Mytilenean’s face. He pointed north into the part of the polis on Lesbos and gave quick, confident directions, finishing, “You can’t miss it.”

  “I hope not,” Sostratos muttered as they crossed the bridge.

  “Up this street here, did he say?” Menedemos asked.

  “That’s right,” Sostratos answered. He could see the grid of the city in his head, and see which way they should go. He’d needed years to realize most people couldn’t do that.

  The wind blew strongly out of the north. Menedemos said, “A good thing we’re not coming up to Lesbos today. We wouldn’t get anywhere fast.”

  “No, we wouldn’t.” Sostratos stopped and rubbed at his eyes: the breeze had blown a speck of dust into them. More dust swirled past. “Here’s a town where the Hippodamian grid isn’t everything you wish it were,” he said, rubbing again. “They shouldn’t have made the streets all run north-south and east-west. The north wind just races down these long, straight avenues.”

  “If you’re going to have a grid—” Menedemos began.

  Sostratos tossed his head. “No, no. If they’d rotated it through half a right angle, then it would be fine; the wind would be blocked. The way things are, though, it’s . . . unpleasant.”

  “It sure is.” Now his cousin paused to rub at his face and get some grit out of his eye. “Miserable wind. I’m glad we don’t live here all year around.”

  “I wouldn’t want to live anywhere but Rhodes,” Sostratos said, counting street corners so he’d know when to turn.

  “Not even Athens?” Menedemos asked slyly.

  Sostratos had to think about that. He had to think so hard, he almost lost track of the corners. At last, though, he tossed his head. “No, my dear, not even Athens. It’s a wonderful place to study, and the theater is the finest in the world, but it’s not what it was in the time of Perikles and Sokrates and Platon. The people have lost too many wars, and they know it. They still call themselves free and autonomous, the way so many poleis do these days, but it’s nothing a Rhodian would recognize as freedom. And what they call democracy ...” He tossed his head again. “Demetrios of Phaleron runs things for Kassandros, and there’s a Macedonian garrison to make sure nothing unfortunate happens.”

  “And if anyone says anything Demetrios doesn’t like, he disappears?” Menedemos asked.

  “Sometimes—not always, I admit,” Sostratos replied. “Demetrios studied philosophy himself, and he makes a mild tyrant—a tolerable tyrant, if you don’t mind the contradiction. Things could be worse there. But they could be a lot better, too. And we turn . . . here, I think. This must be the temple to Hera that fellow in the harbor was talking about.” He swung to the left.

  “I’d say so,” Menedemos agreed, and followed him. He pointed down the long, straight street. “And I’d say that’s the agora ahead.”

  “Looks like it. Sounds like it, too.” Sostratos couldn’t help smiling. All over Hellas, market squares were the same, even if they looked different. The agora was the beating heart of a polis, not just the place where men bought and sold things but also where they gathered to gossip and trade news. “Sidon and Jerusalem weren’t like this.”

  “I don’t know about Jerusalem—I wasn’t there—but Sidon certainly wasn’t, and not just because I didn’t speak the language,” Menedemos said. “The Phoenicians didn’t care about gathering and talking things over the way we do.”

  “Neither did the Ioudaioi.” Sostratos ran his fingers through his hair and flicked at his beard to get rid of any crumbs that might have clung there. “But now we’re among Hellenes.”

  “You bet we are.” Menedemos threw back his shoulders and strutted into the agora as if all the Mytileneans—none of whom had ever seen him before—should have known exactly who he was. Hurrying along behind him, Sostratos couldn’t help laughing softly. His cousin always made a procession, even if it was a procession of one. This will be a procession of two, Sostratos thought, and also put his best foot forward.

  And people did look up from their buying and selling and arguing when the two Rhodians walked into the market square. “Hail, friends!” Menedemos said loudly, his Doric accent helping him stand out when most other men spoke sibilant, oddly stressed Aiolic. “We’re off the Aphrodite, the akatos from Rhodes that came in yesterday. We’re bound for Athens, and we’re looking for fine wine and truffles and whatever else we can find that the rich Athenians might like.”

  Half a dozen hands shot up. “Here, come see what I’ve got,” merchants called. As Sostratos and Menedemos made their way through the crowd towards a wineseller’s stall, a fellow whose main stock in trade seemed to be linen goods thrust something at them and said, “What do you think of this?”

  “A rock?” Sostratos said. At the same time, Menedemos said, “A chunk of wood?”

  That made them both stop and take a closer look. Sostratos took the chunk—it was a little smaller than a man’s fist—from the linen-seller and hefted it. “It is stone,” he said. “But you’re right, Menedemos—it looks like wood.”

  Chuckling, Menedemos said, “Well, that gryphon’s skull we found a couple of years ago was bone that seemed turned to stone. Maybe this is what it ate.”

  Sostratos didn’t laugh now. He dipped his head. “Maybe it is.” He turned to the Mytilenean who’d shown it to them. “This came from the western part of your island, isn’t that so?”

  “Why, yes, best one,” the local said in surprise. “But how did you know that?”

  “Theophrastos, with whom I studied in Athens, comes from Lesbos. He talks about this wood turned to stone, though I’ve never seen it before. He’s even written a book called On Petrifaction.”

  “By the dog!” Menedemos said. “I’ve heard of books about some odd things, but that may be the strangest one yet.”

  “Would you like to buy this chunk of, ah, petrified wood?” the linen-seller asked. “Five drakhmai doesn’t seem like much, does it?”

  “For a rock?” Sostratos said. “You’re joking, O marvelous one.” Thinking of the gryphon’s skull pained him, as it always did. But it wasn’t the sort of pain a rock that looked like—or perhaps was—a chunk of wood could assuage.

  Sensing as much, the Mytilenean looked disappointed. “The way you were throwing those big words around, I figured you’d think five drakhmai was cheap.”

  “Well, friend, you’d better try some new figuring,” Sostratos said. “I might buy it if you name me a halfway reasonable price. On the other hand, I might not, too. A lump of woody rock isn’t something you have to have unless you’re planning on bashing in a rascally linen-
seller’s brains.”

  “Ha!” Menedemos said. “I like that.”

  By the way the local chuckled, he thought it was funny, too. “You’re a clever fellow, Athenian. What do you say to three drakhmai, then?”

  “I say two things,” Sostratos answered. “The first is, I’m no Athenian.”

  “You talk like one,” the linen-seller said.

  “I studied there, but I’m from Rhodes.” Sostratos was more pleased than not that his accent could be taken for Attic. He wasn’t pleased enough to pay three drakhmai. “The other thing I say is, farewell.” He and Menedemos started on their way.

  “Wait!” the linen-seller said. “What would you pay?”

  “I might give you three oboloi, if I happened to feel generous,” Sostratos said. “I certainly wouldn’t give you any more than that.”

  “Three oboloi!” The Mytilenean looked as if he’d just taken a big swig of vinegar, thinking it wine. Sullenly, he thrust the lump of wood that was also a lump of stone toward Sostratos. “Take it, then, if you want it. Have a good sime.”

  Sostratos wondered if he ought to take it at any price. But it left him too curious to walk away. He gave the linen-seller three little silver coins and took the wood made stone from him. The Mytilenean looked much less dour with money in his hands. “What will you do with that?” Menedemos asked as they went through the agora.

  “I don’t know. I’ll probably take it back to Rhodes and keep it as a curiosity,” Sostratos answered. “Not much point showing it off in Athens—as I said, Theophrastos and the other natural philosophers already know about this kind of thing.” He plucked at his beard, considering. “That means I’ll put the three oboloi on my own personal account, not the firm’s.”

  “I wasn’t worrying about that,” Menedemos said. “Nobody’ll get excited about half a drakhma.”

  “Oh, I know. But it’s only fair,” Sostratos said. “If you bent a woman forward for three oboloi, you wouldn’t charge that to the firm. You’d better not, anyhow.”

  “I might, if I didn’t have somebody like you watching me,” Menedemos said.