‘Honey bee, Banugul is the last woman on earth that you want as a mother-in-law. All she wants is to make her son King of Kings.’ Philokles stopped to get a pebble out of his sandal. ‘Need I remind you that they are with Antigonus? Banugul is no doubt busy scheming.’
‘And yet you saved her, Master Philokles.’ Suddenly the bouncing gait was gone, and she eyed him appraisingly.
‘We saved her, my dear. And I did it, as did you, because the gods told us. Yes?’ Philokles raised an eyebrow.
‘I remember,’ she said.
When Philokles was in the mood to teach Satyrus lessons, he liked to say that the Greeks were used to colonization and cleruchy, rapid settlement and rapid building. Athens had dropped forts everywhere when she was queen of the seas, and Miletus had spread colonies the way a profligate spreads bastards. Greeks could move to a place, build a temple or two, run up some houses with the regularity of a marching camp, and before the architect could say ‘Parian Marble’, there was a new city. Or so the Spartan said.
But Alexandria represented city-founding on an unprecedented scale, as if someone had desired to create a new Athens or a new Corinth. Some said that it was the will of the God-King Alexander, and others that it was the solid administration of Ptolemy and the fifteen thousand talents of silver he drew from the treasury of Aegypt every year. Philosophers – and there was no shortage of them – gathered in the agora, or in the shade of the new library, so far just a pile of materials and some gardens – and debated the virtues and vices of mixing religions and races, of trade, of kingship.
But a new city lacks traditions and in their absence often creates new habits. In Athens or Corinth, men from the highest classes never drank in wine shops. They worked from their homes, held business meetings in their homes, threw parties, wild or decorous, in their homes. Virtue and vice were practised in the confines of the home. Satyrus had experienced it, had visited Athens repeatedly until Demetrios of Phaleron became the de-facto tyrant of Athens and Kineas’s son was one of the casualties of his regime. In Athens, where Satyrus owned a house, he might give a party – or he might go to a party. But if he were seen to buy wine or flute girls for his own use alone, he would be mocked. And the thought of going to a wine shop would be enough to label him a thetes, a low-class free man, and not a gentleman.
Philokles theorized that in Athens, the will of the people in the assembly – even under a tyrant – had the effect of minimizing private display of wealth. If you showed that you had too much, the people would vote that you should give an expensive entertainment or maintain a trireme or something equally ruinous.
Alexandria had a king, not an assembly, despite the fact that Ptolemy had not yet assumed the title or the formal honours of a king. The thousand richest men in the city competed to demonstrate the extent of their wealth and the beauty of their lives. Many competed in an old, Athenian way – by raising monuments, even by maintaining a trireme for the service of King Ptolemy. Uncle Leon was one of these. He maintained a squadron. His money had laid the foundation of the Temple of Poseidon. He was always in the public service.
Other men, however, used their money in different ways – to keep beautiful mistresses, to give lavish parties on a scale unknown in Athens, to dress in silks brought overland from Serica, a hundred thousand stades, or in the finest wools from Bactria, dyed in the most elaborate colours from Tyre and Asia.
Philokles despised all this display and often spoke against it, and he said that the outcome was places like Cimon’s, because if men had clothes worth twenty talents of silver, they needed a place to wear them – and that the kind of man who spent twenty talents on a chiton was not the kind of man to maintain the perfection of his body in the gymnasium or the perfection of his mind in the agora.
Philokles said that in Sparta or Athens – two cities often presented as contrasts, but Satyrus’s Spartan tutor said they had more in common with each other than either had with Alexandria – a man went to the gymnasium and to the agora to show that his body was ready to serve the state in war, and his mind ready to serve the state in peace. Satyrus loved it when Philokles spoke in such a fashion, and he could quote the Spartan at length, and he often thought about his words when he walked.
Even when he walked to Cimon’s.
Cimon’s stood among a row of hastily built private houses backing on the sea. The low bluff on which they were built allowed the owners to catch the sea breeze after the rest of the city had lost it, and the houses had been built in the first flush of the city’s wealth, back in the decade after the founding.
But fashions change. When Ptolemy began building the royal palace complex, the western end of the city became unfashionable, the home of warehouses and workers. A few wealthy Macedonians hung on, but most moved, if only to be close to the seat of power. Many of them had never finished their houses, and few of them had ever been landscaped or had gardens planted, so that the neighbourhood appeared ruinous, as if a conquering army had swept through, stealing mulberry bushes.
But Cimon’s was an island of green. The first owner had gardened himself, importing plants from the interior of Africa and from all over the sea. When he died and Cimon the public slave purchased his property, Cimon had purchased the gardeners with the land. Inside, the former owner had arranged for expert painters to render scenes from the Iliad and Odyssey, from Alexander’s conquests, and from the tales of the gods in brilliant gesso work, so that a bored patron might feel as if he watched the siege of Troy – or, in some rooms, the rape of Helen.
Satyrus understood the philosophical reasons why Cimon’s was bad for him and bad for the city, but he loved the place – the quiet green alcoves, the hard-edged mirth of the pornai and the flute girls, the acrobats and the broiled tuna and the art, the gossip and the fights.
‘What can I get the hero of the hour?’ asked Thrassylus, the former slave who acted as the steward of the house. You could always gauge your status in a heartbeat with Thrassylus, and the oiled Phrygian seemed to know every nuance of gossip from every quarter. ‘Ptolemy clasped your hand? And sacrificing for your uncle? What splendid piety, young master. Wine?’ A Spartan cup was put in Satyrus’s hand – other cups went to Abraham, Xeno and Theo – and wine was poured from a silver pitcher while they all sat in the entrance hall. Two children, a boy and a girl – twins, he could see – washed his feet.
‘Aren’t they adorable?’ Thrassylus said. ‘I bought them today.’
The girl washed his hands. She had a serious expression on her face and her tongue showed between her teeth. ‘Yes,’ Satyrus said, with his usual unease about slaves.
‘Kline?’ Thrassylus asked, referring to the long couches on which well-off Greeks reclined to eat and drink. ‘I have the whole of the seaward garden open, young master.’
Satyrus nodded, and his party was escorted past the two main rooms, where dozens of young men, and a few past youth, cavorted with each other and with the house’s numerous offerings.
‘May we have Phiale, Thrassylus?’ Satyrus asked. Phiale was a genuine hetaira, a free woman who sometimes acted as an escort and sometimes as a hostess. In addition to her beauty – a particular, square-jawed beauty that was not the typical fare among hetairai – she played the kithara and sang, often composing mocking songs to tease her clients.
Phiale had consented a year before to deprive Satyrus of his virginity. Satyrus suspected that his uncle had paid her for the service, as she was very choosy about her clients, and ever since she had treated him with warmth and a certain reserve – as if she was a distant cousin, he had joked to Abraham.
‘I will see if she is at leisure,’ Thrassylus said with a bow. ‘She is with us this afternoon.’