“Thanks,” Sostratos answered sourly. The horrible noise spoiled his delight in what would have been a pleasant walk.
Mount Hymettos lay about thirty stadia southeast of Athens: an hour’s journey. With the donkey being obstinate and loud, it seemed three times as long to Sostratos. He hardly noticed the fine, warm morning, the neat vineyards, the olive groves with fruit steadily ripening, the watered garden plots full of every sort of vegetable.
As the road began to climb, the donkey complained more and more. Finally even Sostratos, a patient man, had had enough. He picked up a stout branch that had lallen from an olive tree, broke off a few twigs, and whacked the branch into the palm of his hand. The donkey was far from young. It must have seen that gesture before, for it suddenly fell silent. Sostratos smiled. He kept on carrying the stick. The donkey kept on being quiet.
By what Iphikrates had said, Erasinides lived about halfway up the mountain, not far from the marble quarries that were Hymettos’ other claim to fame. Sostratos looked for a Herm cut from red stone at a crossroads, and let out a sigh of relief when he spotted the pillar with Hermes’ face and genitals carved on it. “Up this road to the left,” he told the donkey. It didn’t like going up, but the threat of the stick kept it from making a big fuss.
Faint in the distance, the sound of picks clanging on stone came to the Rhodian’s ears. Someone shouted. Sostratos couldn’t make out the words, but recognized the tone; that was a boss giving workers orders. Some things didn’t change no matter where you were, or in what trade. Even in Ioudaia, where the very language was different, people in charge sounded just as peremptory, just as impatient, as they did in Hellas.
Brush and scrub lined the track—it hardly deserved the name of road any more. Every now and then, it opened out to show a farm. The farther away from the main road out of Athens Sostratos got, the smaller and meaner the farms seemed. The Rhodian wondered how many generations of men had worked them. As many as there are, he thought, no fewer.
Bees buzzed. At first, Sostratos hardly noticed. When he did, he grinned: he took them as a sign he’d come to the right place. He also wondered what nectar they found to sip in this sun-blasted summer, when most of the fields and meadows were yellow and dry. Something, he supposed, or the bees wouldn’t have been out at all.
Another shabby little farm, this one with only a tumbledown ruin of a barn. Just a couple of stadia to go to Erasinides’ place—if I’m on the right track. I think I am. Zeus, I hope I am. And then Sostratos forgot about bees, about honey, about Erasinides—about everything except the hound baying like a wolf as it loped toward him. It wasn’t much smaller than a wolf, either, and no tamer.
The donkey let out a squealing bray that Sostratos forgave. It jerked the lead rope out of his hand and started to run. The dog, though, paid no attention to it. The dog wanted Sostratos. Maybe it thought he was coming to rob the farm. Or maybe it simply craved the taste of human flesh. He wouldn’t have been surprised, not with those great yellow teeth and that wide, red, slavering mouth.
If he ran like the donkey, the hound would pull him down from behind. Only his certainty of that kept him from turning and fleeing. Instead, he set himself, hefting the stick he’d picked up to beat the donkey. One chance, he told himself. That’s all I get.
Baying, the dog sprang at him. He swung with all his might—and caught it right on the end of the nose. Those fearsome, deep-throated howls changed as if by magic to yips of agony.
“Here, you polluted monster!” Sostratos shouted. “See how you like it!” He walloped the hound again, this time in the ribs.
Now yelping, the dog ran from Sostratos faster than it had run toward him. Now furious, he ran after it. When he saw he wasn’t going to catch it, he bent down, picked up a rock, and threw it. It caught the dog in the rump and brought forth another shrill howl of pain.
“Here now! What do you think you’re doing?” A farmer came out of the house, brandishing a staff.
“Driving away your gods-detested hound.” Sostratos picked up his stick again. He was angry enough to be ready for a fight if the other man wanted one. “That’s what you get for letting the monster run loose. If it comes at me again on my way back to Athens, I’ll kill it.”
Plenty of men were fiercer than he. But he was larger than most, and only half the age of the farmer, whose scraggly hair and beard were white. The man shook a fist at him, but then retreated into his dwelling. The dog peered out from the ruins of the barn. It didn’t seem to want to have anything more to do with the Rhodian, That suited him down to the ground.
He went back after the donkey, which had moved faster without his guidance than it ever had with it. It didn’t seem to think him a hero for driving off the dog. Instead, it might have blamed him for bringing it near the hound in the first place. On he went, up the western slope of Mount Hymettos,
“Is this the farm of Erasinides son of Hippomakhos?” he called to a man chopping weeds with a mattock.
The farmer jerked his thumb up the road. “Next farm uphill, stranger, on the left-hand side of the track.”
“Thanks.” Sostratos plodded on. So, unhappily, did the donkey. Erasinides’ farm was noticeably greener than the ones he’d been passing. He soon saw why; a spring bubbled out of a cleft in the rocks a few cubits from the farmhouse. Channels led the water here and there.
Sostratos knelt by the stream to wash his head and hands, take a drink, and water the donkey. As he got to his feet, drops dripping from his beard, a stocky, middle-aged man came out of the barn and said, “Hail, friend. Do something for you?”
“Are you Erasinides?” Sostratos asked. The farmer dipped his head. Sostratos gave his own name and said, “The physician Iphikrates tells me he buys his honey from you. I’d like to do the same.”
“Iphikrates is a good man. He doesn’t think he knows it all, the way some physicians do,” Erasinides said. “Where are you from, friend, to speak such an . .. interesting Greek? Sounds like the Doric bits you hear in tragedy.”
“I’m from Rhodes,” Sostratos answered. He knew his accent had been heavily influenced by Attic. He wondered what Erasinides would make of the way Menedemos spoke. “Do you have honey for sale?”
“Oh, yes.” But the Athenian seemed in no hurry to haggle. “Nine ships from Rhodes, under Tlepolemos,” he murmured: not quite quoting the Iliad’s Catalogue of Ships, but showing he knew it. “Did Rhodians speak oddly then, too, do you suppose?”
“I don’t know, best one,” Sostratos answered. Erasinides, plainly, wanted to chat before getting down to business. Rustics often did. “We think our accent the usual one, you know, and everybody else’s strange.”
“Is that a fact?” Erasinides’ laugh showed that, if it was a fact, it was an amusing one. “Must come of being a long ways off from Athens, I expect.”
With Athens’ present prominence, he had a point. But he was the sort who would have said the same thing had he lived up in Thessalia, which had its own backwoods way of speech. Sostratos said, “Custom is king of all”—Pindaros’ poetic truth quoted by Herodotos. Bees buzzed around a patch of clover next to Erasinides’ barn. Pointing that way, Sostratos asked, “Do you gather your honey from wild bees, or do you keep your own hives?”
“Oh, I have my own,” Erasinides replied. “Collecting wild honey’s like trying to build a house out of driftwood—you’ll come up with some, but never enough to suit you.”
“Do you get stung when you take the honeycombs?” Sostratos asked.
The farmer dipped his head. “Now and again. I wear a petasos with the thinnest veiling I can get, to keep ‘em off my face. Past that”—he shrugged—”I pick the stings out, and I go about my business. They don’t much bother me. Some folk aren’t so lucky. I had a neighbor, a fellow named Ameinokles, who’d wheeze and gasp and have trouble breathing whenever he got stung.”
“You had a neighbor?” Sostratos said.
“That’s right.” Erasinides dipped his head again. “It hap
pened once too often, poor fellow. His throat closed up and he... strangled to death, you might say.”
Sostratos wondered what Iphikrates could have done about that. Nothing, all too likely. As Erasinides had said, the physician didn’t try to hide his own ignorance. Sostratos said, “Do you put the honey in jars all the same size?”
“Oh, yes. I didn’t used to, but it’s better for business when I do. I buy lekythoi from a potter I know. I can get em cheap—he makes lots of oil flasks, because people always need ‘em, either to hold olive oil at home or—the fancy glazed ones—for funeral offerings. I don’t buy those, on account of they cost more.”
“How much for a jar?” Sostratos asked.
“Twelve drakhmai.”
That wasn’t far from what the Rhodian had expected. Over an hour or so, pausing for politics and women and bees and wine and mean dogs and whatever else came to mind, he haggled Erasinides down to eight drakhmai the lekythos. He paid in shiny Athenian owls; the farmer made it plain he had no use for perfume or balsam or anything else the Aphrodite had brought to Athens. Erasinides helped him pack the lekythoi into the baskets on the donkey’s back, and gave him straw to stuff between them to keep them from breaking.
“Thank you kindly,” the farmer said as he left. “You Rhodians seem a goodly folk, even if you do talk funny.”
On the way past the farm with the fearsome hound, Sostratos gripped his stick tightly. The dog didn’t bother him. He kept going, down off the mountain and back toward the whirl that was Athens.
“Wait a minute,” Menedemos said. “Isn’t Demetrios already married?”
The man who’d given him the news, a sausage-seller named Kleon, dipped his head. “That’s right,” he said. “He married Phila a long time ago—Antipatros’ daughter, you know, the one who’d been married to Krateros before.” He had an engagingly ugly face, which he now twisted into an engagingly lewd leer. “But she’s a lot older than Demetrios, and Antigonos had to talk him into marrying her for the sake of her blood and her connections. This time, maybe he wants to have some fun.”
All through the Athenian agora, people were buzzing with the news. “He certainly does like to have his fun,” Menedemos said. “That little call he paid to have fun with what’s-her-name—Kratesipolis— almost cost him his neck.” By the dog! he thought. I sound like Sostratos. Demetrios is too wild even for me. Who could have imagined that? He went on, “So who is this new woman? Eurydike, you said her name was?”
“That’s right, my dear,” Kleon answered. “Her blood’s as blue as the sky. She’s descended from Miltiades, the hero of Marathon. She used to be married to Ophelis, the King of Kyrene west of Egypt, but she came back to Athens after he died.”
“Phila, Kratesipolis, and now Eurydike,” Menedemos said musingly. “Demetrios must like widows.”
“Well, they already know how.” Kleon leered again. “You don’t have to teach ‘em, the way you do with maidens. Besides, it’s not like Demetrios is going to be faithful to this one, any more than he has to any of the others.”
“No, I suppose not,” Menedemos said. “He sure hasn’t up to now.” He remembered the pretty girl he’d glimpsed at Demetrios’ house. Demetrios could do anything he wanted. Menedemos sighed. That sounded marvelous.
Kleon said, “I just wonder if he’s going to be cheap about it, or if he’ll throw a feast and sacrifice animals and give away meat and wine.” Like most of the Athenians Menedemos had met, he kept his eye on the main chance. As now: he thrust his tray at Menedemos, asking, “You going to buy something, or are you just going to stand around and gab?”
“Here,” Menedemos handed him an obolos. Kleon gave back a sausage link. It was so full of garlic and fennel, Menedemos needed a couple of bites to be sure it was made from pork. If the meat wasn’t so fresh as it might have been, the spices kept him from noticing.
“Sausages!” Kleon shouted after sticking the coin in his mouth. “Get your sausages! Demetrios gives his to Eurydike, but I’ve got sausages for everybody!”
Menedemos snorted. No wonder Aristophanes had written a sausage-seller into his Knights. The only thing redeeming Kleon’s vulgarity was that he seemed as unaware of it as a dog licking its privates. He went on crying his wares and making crude cracks about Demetrios’ wedding. A good many Athenians laughed, too, and several of them bought his wares.
Holding up a little jar of perfume, Menedemos called, “Fine scent from Rhodes! Eat Kleon’s sausages and don’t stink afterwards!” Kleon shot him an obscene gesture. With a laugh, he returned it.
The Rhodian soon went back to his usual sales pitch. The other made a good joke, but wasn’t likely to draw anybody who could afford the perfume. Too bad, he thought.
He kept on calling. A couple of women and one man stopped and asked him how much he wanted for the perfume. When he told them, they beat hasty retreats, as did most would-be customers. The man proved abusive. Menedemos gave at least as good as he got, as he had with Kleon,
A man selling wine by the cup strolled through the agora. On a warm day like this, he did a brisk business; Menedemos waved to him and spent another obolos. The wine was a long way from the best the Rhodian had ever drunk, but he’d expected nothing better. No one sold Ariousian or Thasian or Lesbian for an obolos. This cooled him and quenched his thirst, which was all he’d had in mind.
Another woman came up to him. She wasn’t far from his own age, and wasn’t bad-looking; slim, dark-haired, bright-eyed, with fine white teeth. He smiled and said, “Hail, my dear. How are you today?”
“Well, thank you,” she answered. Her Greek, though fluent, had an accent that proclaimed it wasn’t her native tongue. Menedemos’ hopes soared—that probably meant she was a slave, perhaps the slave of someone prosperous. She asked, “For how much are you selling your perfume?” When he told her, she didn’t flinch. All she said was, “Can you come with me to my mistress’ house?”
“That depends,” Menedemos said. “Who is your mistress, and can she afford to buy?”
“She can afford to buy,” the slave woman said gravely. “Her name is Melite, and she is not the least renowned hetaira in Athens.”
“I’m sure she’s the honey of the city,” Menedemos said. The slave began to nod agreement—again proving herself not a Hellene by birth—but then made a face at him. He gave back an impudent grin; the hetaira’s name sounded like the word for honey.
“Will you come?” Melite’s slave asked again.
“I’d love to,” Menedemos answered. The woman sent him a sharp look. He stared back, as innocently as if the remark couldn’t have been taken more than one way. After a moment, she shrugged and started out of the agora. Scooping up the perfume jars on the hard-packed ground by his feet, Menedemos followed.
Melite’s house was nothing special on the outside, but Hellenes, no matter how prosperous, didn’t make a habit of displaying what they had. The more they showed off, the likelier someone was to try to take away what they’d worked so hard to get. The man who opened the door for the slave and Menedemos wasn’t so ferocious-looking as the Kelt who served Menedemos’ earlier customer, but the Rhodian wouldn’t have cared to quarrel with him: his broad shoulders and thick arms said he could take care of himself in a brawl, and his flat nose said he’d been in a few in his time. He and the slave woman exchanged a few words in a language that wasn’t Greek. The way he looked at her told Menedemos not to bother her in his sight.
The woman went upstairs. Even in a house Melite owned, she lived in the women’s quarters. She came downstairs with the slave, veiled as if she were altogether respectable. But, just for an instant, the breeze blew the veiling aside. Menedemos exclaimed in surprise: “Oê! You were at Demetrios’ when my cousin and I came to supper.”
“That’s right.” Melite dipped her head. “You didn’t see me for long, then or now.”
“No, I didn’t.” Menedemos smiled his most charming smile. “But I remembered you. You’re worth remembering.”
&n
bsp; “I thank you for saying so.” To Menedemos’ disappointment, the hetaira sounded more amused than impressed. She went on, “I hope you will not be angry when I tell you one of the things I have seen is that men—especially young men—will say almost anything if they think it will give them a better chance to take a woman to bed.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Menedemos answered, deadpan. The slave woman snorted. Her mistress laughed out loud. With a bow to Melite, Menedemos continued, “My dear, one of the things you will also have seen is that telling the truth often works best. I was telling the truth when I said I recognized you.”
“So you were.” Melite didn’t give him another glimpse of her face. She used the veil as a hoplite used a shield, interposing it between his eyes and her features, leaving him guessing about what she was thinking. He believed her voice still held amusement when she said, “Whether you recognized me or not, though, you need to understand I am not looking for a new . . . friend. I have as many as I care to.”
“I’m sure you do, if you can count Demetrios among them.” Menedemos spoke as if her warning bothered him not in the least. That too was how the game was played. No matter how he spoke, though, he couldn’t help remembering that when Sostratos sold Koan silk to a hetaira in Miletos a couple of years before, she’d paid him silver and given him herself. Menedemos didn’t care to think his bookish cousin could outdo him with women. He didn’t care to think it, but here it might be true.
Melite said, “Demetrios plays with women the way a child plays with soldiers carved from wood. Because he is who he is, he can do that. But no woman would put up with it from an ordinary man.”
Menedemos drew himself up to his full height, which was considerably less than Demetrios’ godlike stature. “If you were to know me, you would find I am no ordinary man, either.”
“Oh? Would you also give me golden bracelets and necklaces and rubies and emeralds for a single night, the way Demetrios did?” Melite asked.
Owls to Athens Page 33
