They might also tell him the wine’s flavor didn’t match its aroma— but Menedemos hadn’t said anything about that. Kleokritos said, “I will ask. And, of course, I will ask my principal if he wants to add to his cellars. If he declines”—Demetrios of Phaleron’s man shrugged— “then I wish you good fortune selling your wine to someone else.” He let out a dry chuckle. “I doubt you will have too much trouble disposing of it.”
“Good wine generally does find a home,” Sostratos agreed.
Kleokritos chuckled. “In any town with a Macedonian garrison, good wine—or even bad wine—has to work hard not to find a home.” He started back toward the ramp that led down into the main part of Athens. Over his shoulder, he added, “I’ll see you day after tomorrow, best ones. Hail.”
“Hail,” Sostratos and Menedemos said together. Once Kleokritos was out of earshot, Menedemos went on, “He’ll buy wine, too. I don’t know about day after tomorrow, but he will.” He sounded confident as could be.
“Yes, I think so,” Sostratos replied. “He’s plainly eager for fancy food and drink—he may want some truffles, too. If his cook can do a kandaulos like Myrsos’, think how fine it would be with truffles flavoring the broth.”
“Makes my mouth water,” Menedemos said. “Part of me hopes we don’t sell them all. If we bring some home to Sikon and your cook, we can enjoy them ourselves.”
Sostratos thought about teasing him over putting personal pleasure before profit. He couldn’t, not in good conscience, not when he felt the same way himself. He said, “I wish I could see Demetrios having a use for beeswax.”
“Are you worrying about that already?” Menedemos asked. A little sheepishly, Sostratos dipped his head. His cousin made a face at him. “Don’t be foolish. You haven’t even started talking to sculptors yet. There’s bound to be some vain Athenian or swaggering Macedonian who thinks this polis can’t live without a bronze statue of him, and that’s what beeswax is for.”
“I know, but I can’t help fretting,” Sostratos said.
Menedemos laughed. “Really, my dear? I never would have guessed. You’re probably fussing about the balm from Engedi, too, even though the next physician you talk to will be your first.”
With such dignity as he could muster, Sostratos replied, “I don’t have to admit that, and I don’t intend to, either.”
“You just did, I think,” Menedemos said, and laughed harder than ever. He went on, “You haven’t seen any scribes, either, but I’d bet you’re worrying about our papyrus and ink.”
“No. That not,” Sostratos said. “I can always sell papyrus in Athens. This polis uses more of it than any other three in Hellas, and that includes Rhodes and Alexandria. I am a little worried about the price I’ll have to charge because Himilkon gouged me—outsmarted me, really, but gouged me, too. But I will be able to sell it, and the ink will naturally go with it.”
They strolled out through the Propylaia and started down the ramp. Kleokritos was already near the bottom. He didn’t need to slow down to sightsee; he could come up here whenever he liked. Menedemos looked back toward the Parthenon. “If anyone were ever to sack this place ...”
“Bite your tongue!” Sostratos exclaimed. “Even the Macedonians think Pheidias’ image of Athena’s worth more as art than it would be as booty, and they’re the greediest men in the world. If they leave it alone, anyone would—I hope.”
“Well, so do I,” Menedemos said. “What’s that phrase your pet historian used—’a possession for all time’? It suits the statue, too.”
Sostratos tried to imagine the austere Thoukydides as his—or anyone else’s—pet. He felt himself failing. Wanting to get in a jab of his own, he said, “I’m sure you aim to be the one who sells our rose perfume to all the hetairai of Athens.”
“Somebody’s got to do it,” Menedemos said cheerfully. “They pay well.”
“Make sure you get it in silver, not in something I can’t enter in the ledgers,” Sostratos said.
His cousin leered. “Enter, indeed!” Sostratos winced. He’d left himself open for that, and Menedemos had wasted no time taking advantage of it. “I know the difference between owls and piggies, best one,” Menedemos added. “If I get any of the other, it’ll be along with the drakhmai, not instead of them.”
“All right. Knowing you, though, I did think I ought to make sure,” Sostratos said. Maybe he wasn’t being fair; Menedemos did separate business and pleasure . . . most of the time. Shading his eyes, Sostratos peered southwest. “You can see all the way down to the sea from here. If my eyes were good enough, I could pick out the Aphrodite among all the other ships tied up in Peiraieus.”
“A hawk couldn’t do that, not from here,” Menedemos said.
“And even if it could, it wouldn’t care,” Sostratos agreed. “But we ought to be able to make our sight keener.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. I wish I did. Cupping a hand behind your ear makes you hear better. Cupping both hands in front of your mouth makes your voice louder. We ought to be able to do something to help our eyes.”
“We ought to be able to do all sorts of things we can’t,” Menedemos said. “I’d like to be able to get it up ten times a day, for instance.”
“If you could, you’d never do anything else,” Sostratos said.
“Who’d want to do anything else if he could do that instead?”
“You are a shameless wretch,” Sostratos said. Menedemos grinned and dipped his head. After an exasperated snort (and how many exasperated snorts had Menedemos forced from him?), Sostratos went on, “The arts let us do things we could never do without them. We can span rivers with bridges. We can sail the seas. We can make temples like the Parthenon. Why shouldn’t we be able to stretch our sight?”
“Because we don’t know how,” Menedemos answered. Sostratos had built a beautiful, flawlessly logical argument—but one that broke to pieces like a cheap pot when Menedemos dropped a hard, sharp-cornered fact on it. “We ought to be able to fly, too. Birds can. Bats can, and butterflies. Why not people?”
“Ikaros and Daidalos did, if you believe the myth,” Sostratos said.
Menedemos was more inclined than Sostratos to take myths and legends seriously, but not this one. “It’s only a wish, not a truth, and you know it as well as I do,” he said. “Every so often, some poor fool who thinks it’s the truth makes himself a set of wings and goes up onto a roof or a cliff and jumps off. If he’s lucky, he breaks his ankle. If he’s not, he breaks his stupid neck or smashes himself flat as a flapjack. Am I right or am I wrong?”
“Oh, you’re right, best one, no doubt about it—for now.” Sostratos fell back on the only argument he could: “But we may learn things we don’t know now. The alphabet lets memory reach further than it could before. Iron was plainly a new thing in Homer’s day—he calls it ‘difficultly wrought.’ Because it’s both hard and cheap, we can do things with it we couldn’t with bronze alone. Maybe some artisan will figure out how to stretch our sight or make us fly, too.”
“Well, maybe,” Menedemos said. “I’m not going to hold my breath, though.” He made a little hop from the end of the ramp onto the dirt of the southeastern corner of the agora. “I am going to head back to Protomakhos’.”
“You’re hoping he’s not there,” Sostratos said in dismay.
His cousin tossed his head. “Not in broad daylight. The slaves would notice, and they’d likely blab. Tonight, though . . . We’ll have to see what he does.” He hurried away. As Sostratos followed, he wondered whether clouting Menedemos over the head with the lekythos he carried would knock any sense into him. Off the evidence he had, probably not. Too bad, he thought. How I wish it would.
Menedemos bowed to Kleokritos. “Here is the oil, most noble one,” he said, pointing to the lekythoi lined up in Protomakhos’ courtyard.
“Ten rows of seven jars, plus one. May Demetrios and his friends enjoy them.”
“That’s a fine-looking phalanx,” Demetrio
s of Phaleron’s man said with a smile. He gestured to a couple of the men who followed him. Most of them looked to be laborers hired for the day to carry the jars of oil. These two were different: both were better dressed and brighter looking than their comrades. They carried nice-sized leather sacks. More of Demetrios’ retainers, Menedemos judged. Kleokritos went on, “They have your silver for you.”
“Good,” Menedemos said.
“As soon as I make sure it’s the proper amount, you are more than welcome to the oil,” Sostratos added.
Kleokritos’ smile vanished. “You’re not going to count out six thousand drakhmai!” he exclaimed. “We’d be here all day. You don’t think I’d cheat you?”
“Of course not, O best one,” Sostratos said suavely. Menedemos knew his cousin was lying. Kleokritos likely knew it, too. But Sostratos gave him no excuse to protest, continuing, “You have every right to count the jars of oil—and to open and taste them, too, if that seems good to you. And I don’t need to count so many coins. Protomakhos, may I borrow your scale?”
“Certainly,” the Rhodian proxenos replied. At his order, a slave brought out a huge balance. Another, grunting, carried a stone weight. “One talent,” Protomakhos said. “Being in the stonecutting business, I find such large weights useful. This one balances perfectly against the standard talent the officials in charge of weights and measures keep in the Tholos. If you want to go over there, I’m sure the metronomoi will show you that.”
“Never mind,” Kleokritos said sourly, to the obvious relief of the slave carrying the weight. “Set it on one pan of the balance, and I’ll set the silver on the other.”
The slave put the weight on the pan. The men with Kleokritos who had the money set their sacks on the other pan. The scales did not balance. Kleokritos turned a dull red. He took a stout leather wallet from his felt and started feeding coins from it onto the scale: a drakhma, a tetradrakhm—four times as heavy—a didrakhm, another fat tetradrakhm. Altogether, he had to load on more than fifty drakhmai before the weight finally rose.
“There!” he snarled. “Are you happy now?”
“Certainly, most noble one,” Menedemos said. “I know it must have been an accident.” This time, he was the one doing the lying. He didn’t want to embarrass Demetrios of Phaleron’s man any more than he had to. What a coincidence, though, he thought, that Kleokritos happened to have enough money with him to make good the error in case we challenged him. Without the scales, he and Sostratos never would have noticed the payment’s being light by less than one part in a hundred, but half a mina of silver was a tidy sum of money by itself. “Still, we do want things to be right, don’t we?”
“Right,” Kleokritos said. That wasn’t agreement. It was anger coming out in one word. Demetrios’ man said not a word about wine, Lesbian or Byblian. He barked at the Athenians he’d hired. They hurried to pick up the lekythoi and left Protomakhos’ courtyard not so much to escape it as to get away from Kleokritos.
“You boys have more nerve than I would,” Protomakhos said once Kleokritos was gone, too. “I wouldn’t risk offending Demetrios of Phaleron.”
“I like that.” Sostratos’ voice cracked in indignation. “His man tries to cheat us, but we’re the ones who have to worry about offending him. Where’s the justice in that?”
“He’s not talking about justice, my dear. He’s talking about power,” Menedemos said. “In a polis like this, they come from different places. You ought to know that—you lived here for a while.”
“It’s good to see one of you understands, anyhow,” the proxenos said. “Walk soft. If you get in trouble with Demetrios, I won’t be able to do much for you.”
“We’ll be careful,” Menedemos said, thinking, He doesn’t know about Xenokleia, or he wouldn’t want to warn me. He knew which upstairs window looked out from her bedroom. He carefully didn’t glance that way. No point making Protomakhos suspicious when he wasn’t already. Sostratos’ gaze held irony. Menedemos pretended not to notice.
“You’ll probably get away with this without anyone saying a word,” Protomakhos said.
“Because we’re right?” Sostratos asked.
“No—I already told you that’s got nothing to do with it,” Protomakhos answered. “But you’re Rhodians. Ptolemaios doesn’t want to offend Rhodes, Kassandros doesn’t want to offend Ptolemaios, and Demetrios of Phaleron won’t do anything to offend Kassandros. If you came from Samos or Mytilene or some other place Antigonos holds, you’d be wise to get out of Athens before Kleokritos and Demetrios could take their revenge, for they would.”
“Power again,” Sostratos murmured. Protomakhos dipped his head. Menedemos eyed Sostratos with a mix of respect and pity. His cousin could learn, and learn quickly. But he had to reason everything out, one step at a time. He seldom used his heart or his belly to gauge how things worked. It had to be his mind or nothing.
“Tomorrow,” Menedemos said, “tomorrow I’ll take a couple of jars of perfume into the agora and I’ll start shouting about how wonderful it is. Some of the better hetairai are bound to have slaves out shopping for them. Once a slave girl gets a sniff, she’ll take word back to her mistress. Then I’ll see if I can do business with her.”
The Rhodian proxenos laughed. “What sort of business do you aim to do?” He gestured lewdly.
“Don’t you start, if you please,” Menedemos said. “Sostratos was giving me a hard time about taking it out in trade, too.”
“I don’t want you giving the hetairai a hard time,” Sostratos said, “at least not in exchange for the firm’s merchandise. If you’re going to be firm, do it on your own time and pay for it.”
Protomakhos winced, though he was the one who’d started the puns. I won’t have to pay for it if I do it with a wife and not a hetaira, Menedemos thought. But, with Xenokleia the wife in question, that was much better left unspoken.
Turning to Sostratos, Protomakhos asked, “And what will you be doing while your cousin’s out having a good time?”
“I’ve still got truffles to sell, and I’ve got the Byblian and Lesbian,” Sostratos answered. “I think the first thing to do is try to sell the wine to some of Kassandros’ Macedonian officers. Everybody knows how thirsty Macedonians are, and everybody knows how much money they’ve got, too.”
The proxenos chuckled. “That’s a good combination, all right. I wish you both good fortune, and you”—he pointed to Menedemos— “can take that any way you please.”
“I know I can sell perfume,” Menedemos said. “Whether I get to do any buying ...” He shrugged. “I’ll find out.”
“You two won’t need the scales any more, will you?” As Protomakhos had a moment before, he used the dual number in referring to Menedemos and Sostratos. That grammatical form was common in Homer’s Greek, much less so in modern Attic. By using it, Protomakhos implied the Rhodians were a natural pair. Menedemos’ eyes flicked toward Sostratos. Sostratos was looking his way, too. Both of them, evidently, were trying to decide whether they wanted to be part of such a pair.
Distracted, Menedemos had to make himself remember the question. “No, O best one. We do thank you for the use of them, though.”
“I ought to charge you the extra you got from Kleokritos as commission.” Protomakhos smiled to show he didn’t mean that seriously.
“Take it,” Menedemos said at once. “You’ve shown us all sorts of kindnesses. The least we can do is pay you back a little.” Sostratos looked wounded, but set his face to rights so quickly that Menedemos didn’t think the proxenos noticed. Menedemos knew his cousin had less simple generosity than he did himself: one more thing that made Sostratos a good toikharkhos.
Protomakhos, meanwhile, tossed his head. “No, no. That’s kind of you, but I couldn’t possibly. I’m here to help you Rhodians, not to take your money.”
Menedemos didn’t insist. That might have offended the proxenos. He resolved to do something nice for Protomakhos before leaving Athens. After all, his wife has done something n
ice for me.
Now Menedemos let his eyes slide across the windows of the upper story. He didn’t linger at the one belonging to Xenokleia’s bedchamber. He knew better than to do anything so foolish. He hoped Xenokleia knew how to keep her mouth shut—and how to keep her demeanor from giving anything away, too. Life would get more difficult if she didn’t. He tried not to contemplate how much more difficult it might get. Sostratos was also better than he at brooding over things that might go wrong.
No disaster had struck by the time the two Rhodians set out the next morning. “Have fun in the agora,” Sostratos told Menedemos.
“People would talk if I did it there,” Menedemos replied. Sostratos spluttered and choked, spraying watered wine. Protomakhos laughed out loud.
When Sostratos could speak again, he said, “You’re trying to sell to hetairai, and I to Macedonian officers. I may make more money, but you’ll have more fun.”
“You never can tell,” Protomakhos said. “Some of those Macedonians are as wide-arsed as any Athenian effeminate.”
“I’m sorry, best one,” Sostratos said. “No matter what a Macedonian officer’s idea of fun may be, no Macedonian officer is mine.”
Menedemos made his way to the agora through morning twilight. He didn’t have a stall, of course, or even a tray slung around his neck to hold his goods. He did have lots of little jars of perfume in a leather sack, a brash manner, and a loud voice—and he got there early enough to stake out a spot by the Street of the Panathenaia, where lots of people would surely pass by.
The sun touched the buildings of the akropolis—and, to the north, the top of the hill called Lykabettos. That one was sharp and conical and useless as a fortress, or for anything else Menedemos could see. For that matter, the akropolis itself couldn’t come close to sheltering all the people of Athens, not any more. In the old days, he supposed it might have.
Owls to Athens Page 22
