Owls to Athens

by Harry Turtledove

  Owls to Athens:

  H.

  H. is a pen name of

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this novel are either fictitious or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright 2004 by

  The ‘Hellenic Traders’ Series:

  Over the Wine Dark Sea

  The Gryphon’s Skull

  The Sacred Land

  Owls to Athens

  Every book of mine is for .

  This time I’m saying it up front.

  A NOTE ON WEIGHTS, MEASURES, AND MONEY

  I have, as best I could, used in this novel the weights, measures, and coinages my characters would have used and encountered in their journey. Here are some approximate equivalents (precise values would have varied from city to city, further complicating things):

  1 digit = 3/4 inch

  4 digits = 1 palm

  6 palms = 1 cubit

  1 cubit = 1 1/2 feet

  1 plethron = 100 feet

  1 stadion = 600 feet

  12 khalkoi = 1 obolos

  6 oboloi = 1 drakhma

  100 drakhmai = 1 mina

  (about 1 pound of silver)

  60 minai = 1 talent

  As noted, these are all approximate. As a measure of how widely they could vary, the talent in Athens was about 57 pounds, while that of Aigina, less than thirty miles away, was about 83 pounds.

  Map

  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 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 the Great had set.

  His cousin dipped his head in agreement. Though 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 . 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 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 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 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 ,” 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 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 ran off with .”

  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, , 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 ,” 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 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—t
o be able to pursue the love of wisdom their whole lives long. He wasn’t. He’d had to come back to 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 ’ 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 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.