“That drakhma has two sides,” Sostratos went on. “If Demetrios besieges Rhodes—which the gods prevent!—he may just try to starve us into submission. How much room will we have for men who eat up our food but don’t want to help us defend ourselves?”
Himilkon pulled a sour face. “There is that, yes. Would the citizens truly be hard-hearted enough to cast aliens out of the polis so the slave dealers who follow any army can seize them?”
“If it comes to a choice between that and falling prey to slavers themselves, they’re liable to,” Sostratos answered. “That’s what will happen to us, and to our wives and children, if Rhodes falls. Maybe you should go to the gymnasion and learn what you can.”
“I am not a Hellene. I do not care to show the world my naked body,” Himilkon said with dignity, setting one hand on his paunch.
“We try to have bodies worth looking at. We don’t always manage, but we do try,” Sostratos said. “You could wear a chiton while you train, I suppose.”
“Maybe. Unlike you folk, I think it’s indecent for other people to watch my pecker flapping when I run or dodge.”
“How do you feel about taking a spear in the belly because you didn’t know which way to dodge?”
The Phoenician didn’t answer that. Instead, he picked up his pace so he could get to the pier faster. The Corinthian merchant skipper might haggle about how much he wanted for his block of marble, but he wouldn’t ask such inconvenient questions.
Sostratos didn’t push him, either. When he was younger, he would have. Now … I don’t know that the Assembly would throw aliens out of the polis, he told himself. And Himilkon is a free man, even if he isn’t a Hellene. He’ll have to choose for himself.
Himilkon kept walking fast. At the moment, he seemed eager to be rid of Sostratos. The Rhodian peeled off and let him finish the trip to the harbor by himself. Sostratos paused in a tavern to buy himself a cup of wine. As he drank it—unwatered, as if he were a Macedonian or a barbarian—he thought about Sokrates, whom the Athenians had executed almost a century earlier.
Only people who studied philosophy read Platon’s accounts of Sokrates’ teaching and his defense against the charges the Athenians threw at him. Naturally, people who cared enough about philosophy to read those dialogues and the Apology sympathized with Sokrates.
For the first time, Sokrates wondered what living in a polis with Sokrates roaming the agora would have been like. How many people enjoyed the company of a man who went around asking those inconvenient questions all the time? One or two from Sostratos had been plenty to make Himilkon want to get away as fast as he could.
Sokrates had called himself a gadfly. What did you do, though, when a gadfly bit you again and again? Either you went mad with pain and irritation or you tried to squash it. Suddenly, Sostratos understood from the inside out what the grandfathers and great-grandfathers of today’s Athenians had been up against.
He went to the gymnasion the next morning to start exercising again. He was intrigued to find Himilkon there before him; and Hyssaldomos, the Phoenician’s Karian slave and right-hand man; and Attinos as well. The merchant and the slave still wore their chitons. The Egyptian, who’d rowed as naked as any of the Hellenes on the Aphrodite, stripped off in the gymnasion, too.
With an oarsman’s powerful arms, a flat belly, and strong legs, he had a body fit to be seen. He had most of a body fit to be seen, anyhow. A Hellene shouted at him: “Hey! What’s the matter with your prong?”
Like Ioudaioi, Egyptian men had their foreskins cut off when they were babies. To Hellenes, that seemed a mutilation. As Pindar said, though, custom was king of all. Attinos thought he was the normal one. “Nothing wrong with my prick, you cistern-arsed son of an ugly dog,” he answered. “You want I should stick it up that fat prokton of yours?”
“You can’t talk to me like that!” the Hellene shouted. “I’ll murder you!” He charged the Egyptian, arms flailing.
People said that if you hit a barbarian in the stomach, he’d cover it up, so then you could punch him in the nose. People who said that had never seen Attinos. He ducked under the Hellene’s wild punches, tripped him, jumped on him, and began hitting him in the face again and again.
“How you like my prick now, you hyena turd?” he said, and landed yet another punch.
Sostratos grabbed his shoulder. “Enough! Enough, by the gods! If you kill him, you’ll get in trouble with the law and you’ll have a blood feud with his whole family.”
“All right,” Attinos said, agreeably enough. As he got to his feet, he rubbed his bruised knuckles against the outsides of his thighs.
The Hellene was much slower rising, and none too steady on his pins when at last he did. He already had a mouse under his left eye and a bruise on one cheek. His nose leaned to the right; blood ran from both nostrils. He had a cut lip, too. When he spat, he spat out more blood and a couple of broken teeth.
“By the gods, I’ll sue you for everything you’ll ever have, you stinking barbarian!” he said, his voice mushy from the pounding his mouth had taken—and maybe because he still wasn’t thinking any too straight, either.
“Futter your mother,” Attinos replied, direct as usual.
“You’re a fool if you go to law,” Sostratos told the Hellene. “You insulted him first, and you tried to hit him first, too. Plenty of witnesses here will say so.”
The man spat out more blood. “What are you doing, taking a barbarian’s part against a Hellene?”
“What were you doing, picking a fight with someone who came to the gymnasion to exercise so he’d do a better job fighting for Rhodes if it comes to that?” Sostratos returned. “We need all the help we can find, and you want to laugh at somebody’s prong? To the crows with you!”
When the other Hellene looked around, he saw no sympathy on the faces of nearby men. As he staggered away, someone held out a bowl of water. He dipped some up with both hands to wash off his battered face. When he saw how much blood he was rinsing off, he cursed some more.
Himilkon stared at Attinos as if he’d just grown a second head. “I should sack the man who guards my warehouse and pay you to do that!”
“Whatever you want, boss,” the Egyptian said.
He proved less than expert with sword and spear, though. That plainly came from lack of practice, but it eased Sostratos’ mind. He’d wondered whether he’d brought a new Herakles back to Rhodes.
He doggedly went through his own exercises. No one would ever mistake him for a demigod returned to earth. All he hoped for was a better chance to stay alive if war came to his island and his polis.
Sostratos was scraping off the oil with which he’d rubbed himself when a man hurried in saying, “Menelaos has surrendered his army—twelve thousand foot soldiers and twelve hundred horsemen—and Salamis to Demetrios.”
That saddened Sostratos without surprising him. Someone else beat him to the question he most wanted to ask: “What will Demetrios do with Ptolemaios’ brother?”
“He’s already set him free without any ransom. Same with the soldiers,” replied the fellow with the news.
Sostratos whistled softly. Demetrios had acted very generously indeed, far more so than Hellenes and Macedonians usually did. As if reading his mind, the man who’d asked the question said, “He’s asking for trouble.”
“Maybe, but maybe not,” the informant said. “I heard he’s keeping the soldiers’ armor. He’s sending something like twelve hundred panoplies to Athens.”
That impressed most of the men in the gymnasion, but not Sostratos. He’d seen how wealthy Egypt was. Most places would have trouble replacing an army’s worth of armor. All Ptolemaios had to do was give the order and set the smiths in villages and towns up and down the Nile to work.