“And who’d keep an eye on the ship if I did?” Diokles asked. “If your cousin were here, if Aristeidas were here, even, that’d be different. But the way things are, I think I’d better stick around when you’re away.”
Menedemos clapped him on the back. “You’re the best keleustes I’ve ever known. You ought to have a ship of your own. I’m sorry things haven’t broken the way they might have for you.”
With a shrug, Diokles said, “One of these days, maybe. I’ve had the same thought. I’d like to be a captain. I won’t say any different. But things could be a lot worse, too. If I hadn’t been lucky, I’d still be pulling an oar somewhere.” He held out his hands, palms up, to show the thick rower’s calluses they still bore.
In a way, Menedemos admired the oarmaster’s patience and willingness to make the best of things. In another way . . . He tossed his head. When he was unhappy about how life treated him, everybody around him knew he was unhappy. Sometimes that only succeeded in annoying everybody. More often, though (he thought it was more often, anyhow), letting people know what he wanted and that he wouldn’t be satisfied till he got it helped him get it. He wondered whether he ought to tell Diokles as much. After a moment, he tossed his head. He doubted Diokles was one who could profit from the advice.
Later that day, he put several books in a wicker basket with a lid, which he took care to fasten down securely. Then he made his way through Sidon’s narrow, brawling streets—canyons, they seemed to him, on account of the tall buildings to either side—looking for the barracks housing the Macedonians and Hellenes of the garrison.
He got lost. He’d known he would. He’d got lost before, in plenty of towns. It didn’t usually worry him. Here, it did. Most places, if he got lost, he could ask for directions. Here, people stared at him as if he was speaking a foreign language when he asked, “Do you speak Greek?”—and so, to them, he was. He couldn’t even steer by the sun. In Sidon, the tall buildings mostly kept him from seeing it.
He was beginning to wonder if he’d ever manage to find his way to the barracks or back to the harbor when he ran into a Macedonian. That was literally what he did—the fellow was coming out of an armorer’s shop, a stout mace in hand, when Menedemos bumped him. “I’m sorry. Please excuse me,” Menedemos said automatically, in Greek.
“It’s all right. No harm done,” the fellow answered. He certainly stood out from the locals. His skin was ruddy rather than olive, his face freckled, his eyes green, and his hair halfway between brown and blond. His nose was short and blunt—and leaned to the right, the result of a long-ago encounter with something hard and blunt.
“Oh, gods be praised! Someone I can understand!” Menedemos said.
Now the Macedonian laughed. “Hellenes don’t always say that about the likes of me. When I start talking the way I did back home on the farm, I ...” He drifted into Macedonian dialect, which, sure enough, Menedemos couldn’t follow.
He waved that aside. “Doesn’t matter, O best one. You can speak Greek if you want to, but these Phoenicians don’t come close. Can you tell me where your barracks are?”
“I’ll do better than that. I’m on my way back, and I’ll take you there,” the Macedonian said. “I’m Philippos son of Iolaos.” He waited for Menedemos to give his own name, his father’s name, and his birthplace, then asked, “Why do you want to find the barracks, Rhodian?”
Menedemos held up the basket. “I’m a merchant, and I’ve got things to sell in here.”
“Things? What kind of things?”
“Books,” Menedemos answered.
“Books?” Philippos echoed in surprise. Menedemos dipped his head. “Who’d want to buy a book?” the Macedonian asked him.
“Can you read and write?” Menedemos asked in return.
“Not me.” Philippos spoke with a certain stubborn pride Menedemos had heard before. “Letters are just a bunch of scratches and squiggles, far as I’m concerned.”
Even in Rhodes, far more men would have answered that way than not. Menedemos said, “Well, in that case, you wouldn’t know what I was talking about even if I explained, so I’m not going to waste my time. I might as well try explaining music to a deaf man. But a lot of men who have got their letters do enjoy reading.”
“I’ve heard that, but to the crows with me if I know whether to believe it or not,” Philippos said. “Tell you what, pal—we’re almost to the barracks. Bet you a drakhma you don’t sell any of your silly scribbles.”
“Done!” Menedemos said, and he clasped hands with the Macedonian to seal the wager.
They rounded a corner. Like so many buildings in cramped Sidon, the barracks towered five stories into the air. Sentries in Hellenic armor stood guard outside the entrance. Soldiers and hucksters went in and out. Menedemos heard the sweet, rising and falling cadences of Greek and those of Macedonian, which sounded the same at a distance but, to his ear, didn’t resolve into meaning when he drew closer.
Philippos said, “I’m going to stand right here beside you, friend. By the gods, I won’t jog your elbow. But if you can sell books, you’re going to do it where I can see you.”
“That’s fair,” Menedemos agreed. He planted himself a couple of cubits in front of the sentries and launched into the Iliad: “ ‘Rage!—Sing, goddess, of Akhilleus’. . . .’ “ He wasn’t a rhapsode, one of the traveling men who’d memorized the whole poem (or, sometimes, the Odyssey) and made their living by going from polis to polis and reciting in the agora for a few khalkoi here, an obolos there. But he knew the first book well, and he was livelier than most rhapsodes; they’d repeated the epics endless times and squeezed all the juice from them. Menedemos was really fond of the poet, and that showed as hexameter after hexameter flowed from him.
A soldier going into the barracks stopped to listen. A moment later, so did another one. Somebody stuck his head out a third-story window to hear Menedemos. After a bit, the fellow pulled it back in again. He came downstairs to hear better. By the time a quarter of an hour passed, Menedemos had drawn a fair crowd. Two or three soldiers had even tossed coins at his feet. He didn’t bother to pick them up, but kept on reciting.
“You’re not selling books,” Philippos said. “You’re doing the poem yourself.”
“Shut up,” Menedemos hissed. “You told me you wouldn’t queer my pitch.” The Macedonian subsided.
Menedemos went on with the Iliad:
“ ‘Thus he spoke. Peleus’ son grew troubled, his spirit
Pondering, divided in his shaggy breast,
Whether to draw his keen sword from beside his thigh,
Break up the assembled men, and slay the son of Atreus,
Or to contain his anger and curb his spirit.’ “
He stopped. “Here, go on!” one of the soldiers exclaimed. “You’re just getting into the good stuff.” A couple of other men dipped their heads.
But Menedemos tossed his. “I’m no rhapsode, not really. I’m just a man who loves his Homer, the same as you’re men who love your Homer. And why not? How many of you learned to read and write from the Iliad and the Odyssey}”
Several soldiers raised their hands. Philippos the Macedonian let out a low, admiring whistle. “Crows take you, Rhodian—I think you’re going to cost me money.”
“Hush,” Menedemos told him, and went on with his sales pitch: “Don’t you want the poet always with you, so you can enjoy his words whenever you please? The divine Alexander did: he took a complete Iliad, all twenty-four books, with him when he went on campaign in the east. That’s what people say, anyhow.”
“It’s the truth,” one of the soldiers, an older man, said. “I saw his Iliad with my own eyes, I did. He wanted to be as great a hero as Akhilleus. Me, I’d say he did the job, too.”
“I wouldn’t want to argue with you, my friend,” Menedemos said. “Of course, a complete Iliad’s an expensive proposition. What I’ve got here, though”—he hefted the basket—”are copies of some of the best books in the Iliad and in the Odyssey
, too, so you can read about the anger of Akhilleus or his fight with Hektor or about Odysseus and the way he tricked Polyphemos the Cyclops, as often as you like. The finest scribes in Rhodes wrote ‘em out; you can be sure you’ve got the words just as Homer sang them all those years ago.”
He knew he was stretching things. He wasn’t sure himself any more just what Homer had sung. And Rhodes had so few scribes that speaking of them in the plural necessarily lumped in just about all of them. But he didn’t intend to mention to the soldiers the hopeless, hapless drunk Sos-tratos had dealt with. They didn’t need to know such things—and, after all, poor Polykles hadn’t copied any of these books. Besides, though Rhodes had only a handful of scribes, it surely boasted more than any other cities except Athens and Ptolemaios’ bumptious upstart of a capital, Alexandria.
“How much do you want for one of your books?” asked the soldier who’d seen Alexander’s Iliad.
Menedemos smiled his smoothest smile. “Twenty drakhmai,” he replied.
“That’s bloody robbery, buddy, that’s what that is,” another man squawked. By his accent, he sprang from Athens. “Where I come from, five drakhmai’s a fair price for a book.”
“But you’re not where you come from, are you?” Menedemos said, still smoothly. “I had to get these books copied in Rhodes, then dodge pirates all the way from there to here to bring them to Sidon. If you want a book here, I don’t think you’ll go to a Phoenician scribe to get one written out. The Phoenicians’ letters don’t even run the same way ours do; they read from right to left.” If his cousin hadn’t complained about that, he never would have known it, but he happily used it as part of his argument. “Besides,” he added, “what else would you rather spend your silver on?”
“Wine,” said the mercenary from Athens. “Pussy.”
“You drink wine, and an hour later you piss it out. You lay a woman, and a day later your spear stands stiff again,” Menedemos said. “But a book’s different. A book is a possession for all time.” He’d heard that phrase from Sostratos, too; he supposed Sostratos had got it from one of the historians he liked so much.
A couple of the men who’d listened to him looked thoughtful. The Athenian said, “That’s still an awful lot of money.”
Dickering started there. Not even the Athenian had the gall to offer only five drakhmai. The soldiers started at ten. Menedemos tossed his head—not derisively, but with the air of a man who didn’t intend to sell for that price. One of them went up to twelve with no more prodding than that. Menedemos had to fight to keep a smile off his face. It wasn’t supposed to be so easy. He didn’t have to come down very far at all: only to seventeen drakhmai, three oboloi for each book.
“You’ll sell for that?” the Athenian asked, to nail it down. With the air of a man making a great concession, Menedemos dipped his head. Eight or nine soldiers hurried into the barracks. Even before they came back, Philippos son of Iolaos handed Menedemos a drakhma. “Well, Rhodian, you taught me a lesson,” he said.
“Oh? What lesson is that?” Menedemos asked. “My cousin collects them.”
“Don’t bet against a man who knows his own business. Especially don’t push the bet yourself, like a gods-detested fool.”
“Ah.” Menedemos considered. “I think Sostratos already knows that one. I hope he does, anyhow.”
Sostratos had never wanted to be a leader of men. In the generation following Alexander the Great, when every fisherman dreamt of becoming an admiral and every dekarkhos imagined he would use the ten men he commanded to conquer a kingdom full of barbarians and set a crown on his head, that made the Rhodian something of a prodigy. Of course, hardly any of the men with big dreams would fulfill them. Sostratos, with no ambitions along those lines, found himself in a role he didn’t want to play.
“Trust me to get too much of what I don’t want,” he muttered from atop his mule. He didn’t like the animal, either.
“What’s that?” Aristeidas asked.
“Nothing,” Sostratos said, embarrassed at being overheard. He liked Aristeidas and got on fine with him aboard the Aphrodite, not least because he hardly ever had to give him orders there. Here on dry land, though, almost everything he said took on the nature of a command.
The mule’s and donkey’s hooves and the feet of the sailors accompanying him raised dust from the road. The sun blazed down, the weather warmer than it would have been in Hellas at the same season of the year. Sostratos was glad for the broad-brimmed traveler’s hat he wore in place of his helmet. Without it, he thought his brains might have cooked.
Apart from the heat, though, the countryside could easily have been inhabited by Hellenes. The grain fields lay quiet. They would be planted in the fall, when the rains came, for harvesting at the beginning of spring. Olive groves, with their silver-green leaves and gnarled, twisted tree trunks, looked much the same as they would have on Rhodes or in Attica. So did the vineyards. Even the sharp silhouettes of mountains on the horizon could have come straight from a land where Hellenes dwelt.
But the farmers tending the olive trees and grapevines stared at the men from the Aphrodite. Like the Sidonians, the men in the interior wore robes that reached down to their ankles. Most of them just draped a cloth over their heads to hold the sun at bay. The Hellenes’ tunics, which left their arms bare and didn’t reach their knees, marked them as strangers. Even Sostratos’ hat seemed out of place.
Teleutas didn’t want to bother with his chiton. “Why can’t I shed it and go naked?” he said. “This weather’s too stinking hot for clothes.”
“These people pitch fits if you run around bare, and it’s their country,” Sostratos said. “So no.”
“It’s not their country—it’s Antigonos’ country now,” Teleutas said. “Do you think old One-Eye cares a fart whether I wear my chiton or not?”
Sostratos wondered why he’d let Teleutas talk his way into coming along on this journey. Here they were, only a day out of Sidon, and the sailor was already starting to whine and fuss. Sostratos said, “What I think is, Antigonos is back in Anatolia, keeping an eye on Ptolemaios. The Phoenicians, though, the Phoenicians are here. They don’t like people going naked. I don’t want them throwing rocks at us or whatever else they decide to do.”
“How do you know they’d do that?” Teleutas demanded. “How do you—
“I don’t know they’d do that,” Sostratos said. “What I do know, O marvelous one, is that you’re about a digit’s breadth away from going back to Sidon and explaining to my cousin that I couldn’t use you here after all. If you’re going to come along, you’ll do what I tell you, the same as you do what Menedemos tells you when we’re at sea. Have you got that?” He was breathing hard by the time he finished. He didn’t like launching into a tirade like that. He’d hoped he wouldn’t have to. And maybe I wouldn‘t, he thought resentfully, if I’d picked somebody besides Teleutas.
But he had picked Teleutas, and so he was stuck with him. The sailor looked resentful, too. He plainly had not the faintest notion why Sostratos had come down on him so hard. Had he understood such things, he wouldn’t have annoyed Sostratos in the first place. Now, glaring, he said what he had to say: “All right. All right. I’ll keep my chiton on. Are you happy?”
“Delighted,” Sostratos answered. Aristeidas snickered. Even Moskhion smiled, and he was hardly a man to notice subtleties. But Teleutas just went on glaring. Either he couldn’t recognize sarcasm when he heard it or he was more comprehensively armored against it than anyone Sostratos had ever met.
Aristeidas pointed and asked, “What’s that up ahead?”
As usual, he’d seen something before anyone else did. After riding on for a little way, Sostratos said, “I think it’s a little roadside shrine, like a Herm at a crossroads back in Hellas.”
The sandstone stele stood about half as tall as a man. It had the image of a god, now much weathered, carved in low relief on each of its four sides. There had been letters beneath the god’s images, but they were
too worn to make out, at least for someone as little familiar with Phoenician writing as Sostratos.
A couple of bundles of dried flowers and a loaf of bread, now half eaten by animals, lay by the base of the stele. “Let’s leave some bread of our own,” Moskhion said. “We ought to get the gods here on our side, if we can.”
Sostratos doubted an offering would do anything of the sort, but he didn’t suppose it could hurt. If it made Moskhion and the other sailors feel better, it might even do some good. “Go ahead,” he told the former sponge diver.
Moskhion took a barley roll from a leather sack on the pack donkey’s back. He set it by the old loaf. “I don’t know what prayers you’re used to,” he told the god whose image adorned the stele, “but I hope you’ll look kindly on the Hellenes passing through your land.” He bobbed his head up and down. “Uh, thank you.”
It wasn’t the worst prayer Sostratos had heard. “May it be so,” he added. “Shall we press on now?”
No one said no. Before long, a Phoenician leading a donkey came up the road toward the Hellenes. He stared at them. Plainly, he’d seldom seen men who looked like them or dressed like them. But they were four to his one, so he kept to himself whatever opinions he might have had.
“Peace be unto you,” Sostratos said in Aramaic—the phrase most often used as a greeting or farewell in that language.
The Phoenician blinked. He must not have expected a foreigner to use his tongue. “And to you also peace,” he replied. “What manner of men are you?”
“We are Hellenes,” Sostratos said. That was what it meant, anyway; as always in Aramaic, the literal meaning was, We are lonians. “Who are you, my master? What does your beast carry? Maybe we can trade.”
“Hellenes!” The Phoenician’s dark eyebrows rose. “I have seen soldiers who called themselves by that name, but never traders till now. I thought all Hellenes were soldiers and robbers. It does my heart good to learn I am wrong.” That told Sostratos more than he might have wanted to hear about the way his countrymen behaved hereabouts. The Phoenician bowed and went on, “Your servant is Bodashtart son of Tabnit. And you, sir?”
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