“For which I thank you.” The Rhodian proxenos raised his cup in salute. “And on account of which I say, drink up!”
Menedemos was happy enough to pour down the rest of his wine. No matter what Sostratos said about him, he wasn’t a man who usually started out the day drinking hard. If he had been, he would have worried more about it. As things were, he knew he could get away with it once in a while.
And Sostratos also drained his cup. He said, “Maybe some more wine going down will ease the headache I have from what I drank last night. By Dionysos, you drink more wine with Macedonians than you can hope to sell them. It feels like that, anyhow.” He held his head in both hands.
“They’re paying our prices,” Menedemos said. His cousin- gingerly-dipped his head. Menedemos went on, “And you’ve sold them some truffles, too. You can’t eat those faster than they buy them.”
“I wish I could, for they’re better than food has any business being,” Sostratos said. “But I am glad I’ve made the sale. Demetrios of Phaleron does seem to be annoyed enough at us not to want to buy any more of what we’ve got.”
“I told you that would happen,” Protomakhos said.
“It’s not Demetrios,” Menedemos said. “He probably wouldn’t know our names if you gave him over to a Persian torturer. It’s that polluted Kleokritos-he’s paying us back by not paying us anymore.”
“Many goodbyes to him!” Sostratos said. “A man who thinks he’s been cheated because we caught him cheating us… I’m just as happy not to deal with a man like that.”
“No one has challenged Kleokritos in a long time,” Protomakhos said. “He’s not used to it. Demetrios of Phaleron has held Athens for Kassandros for ten years now. We’ve spoken of this-he hasn’t been so harsh as he might-but he might, and no one wants to find out if he would. I admire your courage for standing up to his man.”
“That didn’t even occur to me,” Sostratos said. “I just wanted things to be right. Too many cheats running around loose. We fall foul of these petty chiselers every trading run, it seems. They try to gouge us out of a few drakhmai here and a few drakhmai there, and then when we catch them at it they seem surprised-no, not surprised, angry-we’re making a fuss. But if anybody tried to do them out of half an obolos, they’d scream bloody murder.”
Menedemos rose from his stool and set a hand on his cousin’s shoulder. “Well, my dear, we spoiled Kleokritos’ fun, and we’re unloading the things he might have bought on the Macedonians. I’d say that’s a good revenge.”
“Good enough,” Sostratos agreed. “But I’d be happier if we didn’t need to take revenge on him.”
“I’m going back to the storeroom and get myself some more perfume,” Menedemos said. “Then to the agora. No drunken Macedonians have been buying what I peddle.”
“You haven’t brought back any lewd tales for us,” Protomakhos said. “Not much luck with the hetairai?”
With a shrug, Menedemos answered, “Well, best one, there’s luck, and then again there’s luck. I’ve sold a lot of perfume, and sold it at good prices. But I’ve dealt with the women through their slaves, and I haven’t lain with any of them. Who knows, though? I may yet.”
He hurried off to get the perfume. Behind him, Sostratos’ voice floated out of the andron: “If Menedemos sees a pile of horse turds, he’s sure he’ll find a team hitched to a chariot around the next corner, just waiting for him to hop on and ride.”
Protomakhos laughed. Menedemos started to turn around and shout at Sostratos for talking about him behind his back. But then he checked himself. What his cousin had said wasn’t an insult, and was true. Menedemos always did hope for the best. Why not? Some people expected the worst, to shield themselves from disappointment. As far as Menedemos was concerned, that wasn’t living; it was only existing and waiting to die. He wanted to go through life aiming higher than that.
A slave barred Protomakhos’ front door after he left. By now, he knew the way to the agora well enough not to need to look up at the great frowning bulk of the akropolis to get his bearings. Turn here, turn there, don’t go down the street with the baker’s shop at the corner because it’s a dead end and you’ll only have to turn around, pick up a rock before you come by the shoemaker’s place so you can fling it at his polluted hound if the beast runs up snarling again.
The sun was already shining on the agora by the time Menedemos got there. He’d put on his petasos. The wide-brimmed hat would help keep Helios from cooking his brains inside his skull. That wasn’t why he grumbled. Showing up later than he had been doing meant other hucksters had already staked claims to the choicest spots.
Well, no help for it. He found a place not far from the Painted Stoa, on the north side of the agora. “Fine perfume from Rhodes!” he called, holding up a jar. “Sweet rose perfume from Rhodes, the island of roses!”
Even as he made his sales pitch, though, his eyes kept going to the paintings and other memorials in the shadows under the covered colonnade. No one but people who couldn’t afford it seemed interested in his perfume. About halfway through the morning, curiosity got the better of him. It’s like the Parthenon, he told himself. Not much point coming to Athens if I don’t see this.
Most famous of the paintings on wooden panels was the one of the battle of Marathon by Polygnotos. There were the Athenians (and the Boiotians from Plataia) driving back the Persians toward their ships, which were manned by bearded, long-robed Phoenicians. Other panels showed Athenians fighting Spartans; Theseus and more Athenians fighting the bare-breasted Amazons in ancient days; and the Akhaioi just after the fall of Troy, with the Trojan women, Kassandra among them, captive before Aias. Shields preserved against time and verdigris by a coat of pitch hung between the panels-they came from the Spartan citizens who’d surrendered on the island of Sphakteria when the Peloponnesian War had been going well for Athens.
After seeing what there was to see, Menedemos bought a little fried octopus and a cup of wine. Then he went back to crying the virtues of Rhodian perfume. He didn’t sell any all that day. Somehow, though, he cared much less than he’d thought he would. Seeing the Painted Stoa had given him a profit of a different sort.
Sostratos winced when he left Athens by the people’s gate and headed east toward the base of Mount Lykabettos, Up till now, he’d never gone back to visit a lover after leaving. Returning to the Lykeion, though, felt exactly like that. He’d spent the happiest days of his young life there. Then he’d had to go. Now he was coming back, yes, but he wasn’t the same person as he had been when he reckoned the place the center of his life. Herakleitos had had it right. You couldn’t step into the same river twice. The river wasn’t the same the second time, and you weren’t the same, either.
As they had for at least three centuries, youths learning the use of arms and armor paraded on the flat land of the Lykeion, between the olive groves. Some of them, probably, were young men who’d received their panoplies in the theater at the Dionysia now recently past. A drill-master’s voice pursued the epheboi: “Left!… Left!,.. No, you clumsy fool, that’s not your left!… Left!” Sostratos smiled. Those same irate shouts had been part of the background while he studied here.
After a moment, his smile faded. Would the Athenian phalanx ever amount to anything again? Or would Athens be nothing more than a counter Kassandros and the rest of the Macedonians shoved back and forth across their gaming board? Things weren’t as they had been a hundred years before, when this polis came close to becoming the lord of Hellas-and when Macedonia was full of backwoods bumpkins who battled among themselves and were hardly ever seen in Hellas proper.
Macedonia, of course, remained full of backwoods bumpkins who battled among themselves. Now, though, they did it over almost the entire reach of the civilized world, from Hellas east all the way to Persia and beyond. Sostratos dimly remembered having a similar thought at one symposion or another. Was this an improvement? He formed that question intending the answer to be, certainly not. But if the Macedonians weren’t battling among themselves, wouldn’t Hellenes be doing it in their place? From everything the Rhodian knew of his people’s history that seemed altogether too likely.