Of Merchants & Heros

by Paul Waters

  ‘For Lucius, yes. But you have no reason to be ashamed. Nor does Menexenos. Every person with a shred of taste knows the truth, that he would not concern himself with an uncouth sot like that. Lucius thinks he is free, because he takes what he wants. But now he has found something he cannot take – not for money, nor persuasion, nor threats. I doubt he has ever experienced such a thing before.’

  I sat forward and pressed my knuckles to my eyes. ‘I should go away. Menexenos is disgusted at me. I know it. You did not hear what Lucius said.’

  ‘It does not matter. Anyway, the boxing-master gave me a good enough report, and, believe me, I have heard worse . . . But why are you so troubled? Is it that it is a lie, or that it is true?’

  I jerked my head up. ‘It is a lie of course! How can you think otherwise?’

  She smiled. ‘Menexenos has beauty enough to draw husbands from their wives. There is many a young hetaira who would be only too pleased to entertain him, if only he would have her.’ She raised her cup and glanced at me over the rim, adding, ‘And many a youth too, I daresay, though you would know more about that than I.’

  ‘Oh no, Pasithea!’ I cried. ‘You do not understand. It is not like that. It is true that I have seen him, and he has been kind enough to show me something of Tarentum, and made me feel at home. But there is no more than that.’

  She sat back, regarding me.

  ‘You fear your desires,’ she said eventually.

  I knew I was blushing. My ears were burning. I wanted to hide my face. But I owed her more than that, so I looked back at her. ‘I have seen what desire does to a man,’ I said.

  ‘If you despise the glutton, do you therefore turn away from food? No, Marcus, you do not. And nor can you banish desire: it is part of your very soul. So you must learn to know it, and master it, and let your reason guide it. There are many good things that the young have, but always they lack one thing . . .’

  She paused, until I said, ‘What thing?’

  ‘The god says, “Know yourself”.’

  ‘Easy to say,’ I answered frowning. ‘But hard to do.’

  ‘I did not say it was easy. But it is necessary. Come now, Marcus.

  The truth is written all over you. There is something in our souls that knows when it has found what it seeks. You know it, but you will not acknowledge it. Must you let it slip away?’ She raised her hand and continued, ‘But I shall say no more, or you will be cross with me.

  One thing though. I am old; I have seen a great deal of life, and if there is one thing I know it is this: never allow yourself to forget how to love. That most of all.’

  I looked down at my feet, wondering what sight she possessed that allowed her to see so much of me. I thought of her trade. ‘Do you love, Pasithea?’ I said.

  I looked up, and her blue-painted laughing eyes met mine.

  ‘Oh, yes, my dear,’ she answered. ‘Always.’

  The day of Poseidon’s festival came. I watched the games with Menexenos and Eumastas. Lucius was nowhere to be seen.

  The boys’ torch-race was held at twilight in the sanctuary below the temple. It went without a fault, and the crowds cheered.

  Afterwards, a group of friends came up with the trainer, congratulating Menexenos and taking him off to celebrate. ‘Come, Marcus,’ he said smiling. But I declined; for earlier, looking at me across the torchlit crowd, I had seen a face I knew. It was Myrtilla.

  I had not seen her since the night at Titus’s, when Lucius had set upon her. Now, amid the flaring torches and laughing crowds and the heat of the night, I do not know what drew me; but when the others had led Menexenos away I edged off through the crowd, pausing here and there to watch the prancing sword-swallowers; the jugglers with their flying torches; the knife-dancers; the bare-chested glistening acrobats with their oiled bound-up hair. And by the time I came upon her, I might almost have supposed it was by accident.

  ‘Hello, Marcus,’ she said. ‘I wondered when we would meet again.’

  There are some things we know, even before they happen.

  Perhaps some god guides us, or perhaps we see more than our conscious minds tell. But I knew, from that moment, what was to come.

  We drank some wine at a stall, and watched a dark-skinned Sicilian as he danced a leaping jig to the accompaniment of pan- pipes and a tambourine. Later, without words, we took ourselves off from the crowd, to a quiet garden behind the sanctuary, a place of shadowy trees filtering blue moonlight.

  There were others there, on the benches in the alcoves, or seated on the lawns, lovers from the festival, quietly talking, looking up at the stars.

  Presently Myrtilla said, ‘My house is not far.’

  We climbed the narrow street, our hands touching. Higher up the hill, the warm summer air was heavy with the smell of pines, and all about us the cicadas called into the night.

  Her bedchamber looked out over the steep hillside behind.

  Incense glowed in a fretted bronze censer, and a little shaded lamp burned beside it.

  There was pleasure in our lovemaking, I will not deny it. But when the moment came, all I could think of was the girl in Epeiros, and the Libyan with his probing, bloodstained hand.

  Afterwards, silent and naked beside her, I stared up at the black shapes of the rafters, feeling solitude envelop me. I had asked Mars the Avenger to single me out, to grant what my angry heart burned for. Be careful what you pray for; that was what Priscus had said.

  The words came to me now, calling through the silence. Was this, too, part of it? The gods, in their wisdom, deny men foresight. What destiny in its closed hand held for me I could not tell. But I understood now what I had sought this night. I had sought an escape from myself; I had sought to be like other men, who tumble a girl and wake up next day with a wine-sore head, and think to themselves, ‘This is life; I am content.’

  Know yourself says the god. I had chosen my own hard purpose.

  There was no place for tears. Fear touched me. And emptiness. And then, for some reason I could not fathom, I thought of Menexenos.

  Next morning, returning home with the dawn, I saw Eumastas buying vegetables in the market. He was speaking to the stallholder, his face stern and intent; and beside him waited a slave, holding a basket.

  I remembered Menexenos had once told me how, since the family had fallen on hard times, these chores were something Eumastas took upon himself, to spare his father. With this in mind, I moved on discreetly under the far colonnade, intending to pass by unseen.

  The market was still quiet. Just then the slave happened to glance round and recognizing me, he raised his hand in greeting.

  At this Eumastas turned, and thereafter there was no avoiding him without rudeness.

  ‘Hello, Marcus,’ he said, a little awkwardly, when I came up. He paused, frowning, and glanced about at the stalls and early shoppers.

  I made some comment about the morning, and after that a silence fell between us. I was about to excuse myself and leave him, when to the slave he said, ‘Take these home, will you.’ And then, turning back to me, ‘Come, Marcus, let us walk a while. There is something I want to say.’

  In all the time I had known him, he had never been anything less than civil. But nor had he gone out of his way to spend time with me when Menexenos was not around. I wondered what he wanted.

  The slave went off with his basket. We left the marketplace and set off up the steep path that led up to the citadel. Near the top Eumastas paused, at the place where the terrace looks out across the bay.

  He was never one for words, but he had not spoken all the way up the path. When he reached the terrace he turned, leaning against the low wall. He narrowed his eyes against the morning light, studying my face.

  I looked back at him. My head was hurting. I had drunk too much wine the night before.

  ‘Is something wrong, Eumastas?’ I asked.

  He paused before he answered. Then he said, ‘You do not know Menexenos as I do.’

  ‘You are his
oldest friend. Everyone knows that.’

  ‘Yes, I am.’ He turned and frowned out across the wide sweep of the bay. Low sunlight glittered in a shining path over the water.

  ‘People are drawn to him,’ he went on after a moment. ‘Not all of them good. It makes him wary.’

  So this is it, I thought. I had wondered when Lucius would become too much for our friendship to bear. ‘Truly, Eumastas, I am sorry about what happened with Lucius. It fills me with shame when I think of it. I should have spoken to you before, but—’

  He looked at me oddly, making me break off. ‘Lucius?’ he said.

  ‘But isn’t that what this is about?’

  He frowned deeply.

  ‘Menexenos is my friend, Marcus,’ he said, with the air of one beginning again, ‘and I will not let any man hurt him. Do not suppose, just because he does not make a show of his feelings, that he does not feel.’

  I had not slept much that night. My mind was slow, and I could not grasp what he was trying to tell me. I thought to myself: They are lovers then, as I first supposed; and he is trying to warn me off. I thought of Lucius and his ill-bred pestering. I would rather die than have Eumastas think the same of me. I said, ‘You need not fear, Eumastas. I will never do anything to come between you.’

  I thought this would have been enough. But instead he frowned even more deeply. The sun flashed in his brown eyes, like fire in brushwood, and he made an impatient gesture with his arm. ‘What are you talking about?’ he cried.

  I was feeling awkward enough as it was. Now I was beginning to feel foolish. I said, ‘Are you not lovers then?’

  ‘We, lovers?’ He laughed – a rare thing in Eumastas.

  But then, seeing in my face that I was serious, he stopped. ‘Oh, I love him well enough. More than I love any man except my father.

  But no, we are not lovers. Did you suppose it?’

  ‘Yes.’

  He shook his head. ‘Then you are wrong. Perhaps I have known him too long; or perhaps, as I fear, it is just that I am not capable of the love of men.’

  For a moment we looked at each other without speaking. I said, ‘Then what is this about, if not Lucius or you?’

  He tossed his head. ‘You Romans! I like you, Marcus; but your people are not my people, and I cannot understand you as I should a Greek. Do you truly not know, then?’

  I looked at him with a mixture of surprise and understanding. My mind began to clear. Pasithea’s words came back to me.

  ‘It may be,’ continued Eumastas, shaking his head, ‘as is said, that you Romans have no feeling for these matters. Or is it just that you care only for girls?’

  I looked down, and scuffed my toe in the dust to hide my confusion. Up on the citadel, the priest of the temple was ringing the morning bell, a gentle ping, ping, ping, like the sound of the goat- clappers on the hillside at Praeneste. I thought of Myrtilla, and the girl in Epeiros; and then I thought of the touch of Menexenos’s skin when he drew against me at the palaistra.

  Looking up I said, ‘No, it is not that.’

  I could feel my colour rising. I had never spoken of such things before.

  Know yourself, said the god. Yet this I did not know. Or, perhaps, I had known it for ever. I thought of my ugly scarred leg, and all my imperfection. What he was telling me seemed hardly possible. I shook my head. ‘But surely Menexenos has— Is there no one in Athens, then?’

  ‘That is what everyone thinks – that there must be someone somewhere. But there is not.’ He shrugged. ‘It is not that he does not wish it otherwise. I think he believes that what he seeks is not to be found. He is in love with honour, Marcus; and a thing beyond honour, which he sees, but I cannot explain. When I ask him, he tells me it is the light behind the sun, whatever that is . . . But whatever it is, I know he had rather have no one than choose a base lover.’

  There was a long silence. I think he felt as embarrassed as I.

  Eventually I said, ‘I did not know – I never guessed that—’ I broke off, and stared out at the bay.

  ‘I thought you were toying with his feelings,’ he said. ‘It made me angry.’

  I shook my head. ‘No. Never that.’ And then, looking at his face, ‘I would never do that.’

  ‘In that case,’ he said, ‘I hope you will forgive me.’

  ‘There is nothing to forgive. Nor can I conceive of being his friend and not yours.’

  He nodded. I think I even saw the hint of a blush on the sides of his broad neck.

  ‘Then let us make it so,’ he said, in the formal way he had.

  And he took my right hand, like a man sealing a bond.

  SIX

  IN LATE SUMMER, BEFORE the first gales of autumn began, Pasithea sailed for Greece.

  Menexenos and I saw her off from the quayside. To my surprise, the two of them had become firm friends. I had wondered, at first, whether they would get on at all, for they were, it had seemed to me, creatures from different worlds, breathing different air. Only afterwards did it come to me that this was not quite true. They were both, in their different ways, above convention. They saw things with their own eyes, not the eyes of others; and what they found in each other, they liked.

  As for me and Menexenos, to the onlooker, it might have seemed that nothing had changed, and that was how we both wished it. I know what my stepfather would have asked, if he had known. I made sure he did not; not out of shame, but to protect what was beautiful from his clumsy hands.

  Any man’s kiss was strange to me. For the rest, I began to realize he was as hesitant as I.

  He said, one day, bringing up his hand and drawing my forehead to his, so that our skin touched, ‘There will be a time. We will know.’

  He explained he wanted our love to be a love of the soul, because, in the end, there was no other.

  I thought of Lucius, and I understood.

  There was a change within me, like spring after winter. It showed itself in small things. For the first time, music spoke to me, echoing the deep harmony of the world. At the palaistra, my diskos-throw flew true, and I came to understand what Menexenos had tried to teach me from the start, that it was my heart that made the disk fly, not the muscles in my arm and shoulder. Even, at times, my stepfather seemed to have some buried good in him.

  But though I walked in light, Mars the Avenger stayed at my shoulder. It was not long before I heard Dikaiarchos’s name again.

  With my work at the harbour, I had come to know the port- master, and the sea captains who regularly put in. One day I would hear that Dikaiarchos was in Krete, leading the pirates there; another, that he was terrorizing the islands of the Kyklades, stealing the crops and burning the cities; and on another that he was harrying the Rhodian traders, or on the coast of Asia.

  There were those who said he was no more than a clever thief, exploiting the lack of authority in the Aegean Sea. But Titus, to whom I took these reports, disagreed. ‘They believe what they want to believe; they have their eyes on Africa still. But we shall soon see what he is about.’

  I was often up at the praetor’s residence, now that Lucius was not there. Titus had said one day, shortly after his outburst at the palaistra, ‘He has gone away. He has business in Rome to attend to.’

  He said no more than that, and I did not ask.

  The captains and the crews at the harbour were hard men. Each voyage, they knew, might be their last; and perhaps it was because they walked in step with death that they loved life as they did, or perhaps they were the kind of men who would have loved life anyway. When I got to know them they told me their tales – for all seafaring men are full of wonders to tell. I felt a kinship with them.

  They had a nobility of their own, not like the criminals my stepfather had hired to manage the farm-estates, who were greedy and vicious and bitter, even though they lived like kings among their wretched slaves.

  One of my friends at the harbour was a young Greek by the name of Theramon, from Italian Heraklea. His father had been a potter there,
and his father before him. But Theramon wanted to go to sea, and against his father’s wish he had done so.

  He had begun with nothing, but had found investors in Tarentum who believed in him enough to finance a ship and make him captain.

  His ship had a red sail with the first letter of his name picked out in white. He was proud of it, and of what he had made for himself.

  Shortly before Pasithea left for Greece, I had seen him off on a voyage to Mytilene, carrying a cargo of purple-dyed Tarentine wool.

  Afterwards he was sailing on to Pergamon, on a commission my stepfather had given him. I did not know the details; Caecilius, unusually, had dealt with Theramon himself.

  That voyage, he was carrying passengers too: a father and mother, and two small fair-haired girls who grinned and waved to me as the ship put out to sea, loving the adventure, oblivious of fear.

  Their smiling faces stirred my memory, but I put the dark thought from my mind. I grinned back at them, and waved till they were lost from view. Only afterwards, when Theramon’s ship had vanished through the narrows that led from the harbour to the open sea, did I allow myself to frown. My life was full of such sudden remembrances, though mostly they came at night, or in my dreams.

  But on my way home, I made sure to pause at the shrine of Poseidon, and offered a pinch of incense.

  About a month later, I was standing on the quayside, tallying a cargo of wine-filled amphoras bound for Rome, when one of the stevedores tapped me on the shoulder and with a grin said, ‘Look, there’s old Caecilius.’

  I looked. He seldom came down to the port, considering it beneath his dignity. He was standing at the end of the quay, beside a newly arrived merchantman, remonstrating with the captain.

  I set down the wax tablet I was holding and went to him, supposing he had come looking for me.

  ‘There you are!’ he cried, turning his back on the man he was talking to. ‘What, by the dog, is all this about Theramon? Did you not think to come and tell me?’

  I looked from him to the captain behind him. His name was Phylakos. He sailed the run from Kos and Rhodes to the Greek cities in Italy. We got on well, but he was not a man to be spoken down to, which my stepfather was a master of, and now he gave Caecilius a prod in the back and said, ‘The youth does not know yet; that is why he hasn’t told you.’ And then, meeting my eye, ‘I was going to come when I was done with the harbour-master. I heard it in Rhodes, from a man just in from Khios . . .’