Just before I boarded my ship, however, he showed that he had not made the journey solely in quest of geographical lore. Hesitantly, he said:
"Old boy, I don't like to press you when you have just suffered a financial shipwreck. But you did promise to nodes-write publication of some of my writings if I got you that captaincy—"
"Have you the writings with you?"
"I have brought the main one, my History of Europe."
'Then give me the manuscript and I'll arrange to have it copied in Kyzikos."
"Hermes attend you, Eudoxos! If more men of means west like you ..." And he began to weep.
When he pulled himself together, he handed me a sack full of book rolls, comprising the only manuscript of this work. Then he embraced me affectionately, and I boarded the ship with a bag of Ptolemaic silver from Ananias to get me home. Luckily, no disaster befell the precious manuscript, and in due course it was published as I had promised.
When I reentered my home in Kyzikos, Astra looked at me as if I were a ghost. Then she gave a little shriek.
"Eudoxos! Darling!" she cried, and threw herself into my arms.
"I thought you dead," she said. "Then I didn't know you with another of those horrible beards. For Hera's sake, shave it off! It makes you look old enough to be my grandfather, and it's like kissing an ilex bush."
We had gone through this routine several times before, when I had returned bewhiskered from a voyage. "Now, dear one," I protested, "is that the way to greet a man who's been gone a year, who has escaped a score-of deaths by a hairbreadth, and who has had all the profits of his voyage snatched from him by a greedy king? To carp at his beard? But to please you, the beard shall go. Here's a little something for you."
I pulled out a cheap silver bracelet, explaining: "I brought you some fine things from India, but Physkon got his fat paws on them, and I was lucky to get away with my head on my shoulders. I bought this in Tyre. I left Egypt with just enough money to get me home, and if I had spent more I should have starved. Where's Theon?"
"Out playing. Tell Gnouros to go fetch him."
Gnouros duly recovered my son. Then he made the rounds of my kinsmen, who came running. My middle brother wanted to give a feast at his house that evening, but I said:
'Tomorrow, please. I have an engagement tonight"
They hung around all afternoon, while I told them of the main events of my voyage. They in turn gave me bad news of the firm. One of our ships had been wrecked two months before on the Karian coast. The crew had survived, but the natives had stolen all the cargo.
Astra and I talked late that night. Next morning, when I awoke, I performed my husbandly duties like a lusty young man. I wondered if things had not changed permanently for the better.
But as Herakleitos says, one cannot step twice into the same stream. As the days passed and I settled into the routine of the business, my marital relations soon sank back into their former frustrating state. I became moody. I spent hours pacing the shore, throwing stones at sea birds, shouting snatches from Euripides, defying the gods, and weeping.
During the rest of the season, I voyaged to Peiraieus, Delos, Rhodes, and Pantikapaion, to sniff out cargoes and to renew my contacts in those parts. Everywhere the word had gotten around of my Indian voyage. I was plied with free food and drink by other traders and shipmen, eager to learn what I could tell them. I held many a symposium spellbound with my tales of India.
For obvious reasons, however, I was not eager to start a stampede of voyages thither. Hence I stressed the tigers, the serpents, the deadly diseases, and the difficulties of dealing with India's peculiar people. I said nothing of the six-month seasonal wind, which furnished the key to direct voyages. News of the meteorological phenomenon, I thought, would leak out from Alexandria soon enough.
When shipping closed down for the winter, I oversaw the building of a new ship in my father-in-law Zoilos' shipyard, to take the place of the one lost off Knidos. Many an hour I spent at the slip, exposed to the cold winds and whirling snow out of Scythia, in furious argument with Zoilos over details of construction, until one would have expected us to come to Wows. Each time, when it was over, we sought refuge from the weather in a tavern, where we got tipsy and roared old songs.
One day in spring, after our new Ainetê had been launched and shipping had started up again, I was at home reckoning my accounts. Gnouros announced a visitor.
"Is sailor," he said.
I went to the door, stared, and cried: "By the! Hippalos!"
"The same," he said with that old satyrlike grin. It was no wonder that it had taken us an instant to recognize each other. The last time he had seen me, I had worn a full, graying beard, which I had now taken off to please Astra. On the other hand, he, who had been clean-shaven throughout our Indian voyage, now flaunted a beard as red as his hair, he wore a sailor's little round cap.
"Come on in," I said after a slight hesitation.
I knew that Hippalos was a slippery character. I had left Egypt full of rancor towards him. Had I met him then, I should have had at him with my stick. But in the ensuing year my anger had died. He was always amusing company, and I was curious to hear what had befallen him.
"Get out a jug of that good Samian," I told Gnouros. I recounted my tale, and Hippalos told his. He apologized handsomely for his shortcomings.
"I'm truly sorry that I put the blame on you in the confession, old boy," he said. "But if I hadn't they'd have tortured me until I named somebody plausible anyway, and yours was the only plausible name I could think of."
"How did Physkon's men find out about your pearls in the first place?" said I, watching him narrowly.
"They saw me treating all my friends and reasoned: Here's Hippalos, who is always broke and cadging drinks, throwing his money around. He must have some clever scheme to cheat the king in mind."
"I heard that you boasted at that party that you did, in fact, have such a scheme."
"By the Dog of Egypt, that's absolutely untrue! I never said a word. They just looked at the feast I had ordered and drew their own conclusions."
"What happened after you were arrested?"
"The Sister sent an officer to get me out of jail. She told him to send me as far from Egypt as possible, so he put me on a grain ship for Rome.
"There I picked up a living in various ways—teaching Greek, for instance—but after a few months I got tired of Rome. It's a beastly, squalid sort of place. The ruling class are a haughty, stuffy lot, and the proletariat are a lot of thugs. Some upper-class Romans claim to be enthusiasts for Greek culture, but it hasn't had much effect. Besides, the Romans have some very odd laws ..."
He paused, then went on without telling me which of these laws he had fallen foul of: "I shipped out to Massilia. I almost sold the Massiliot council a fine scheme for reorganizing their defense, but some envious detractor slandered me to them, and I had to leave. I shipped as a deck hand on a ship of Eldagon of Gades. Do you know that firm?"
"No," I said. "We never get Spanish ships here. Is that what you're doing now?"
"Yes. I've tried to find work worthier of my talents at some of the ports we've stopped at, but without success."
"And you're still sailing for this Gaditanian? How can that be? I've never seen a Spanish ship east of Athens. What in Zeus's name would bring such a craft to Kyzikos?"
"Oh, my ship is not here; it's at Naxos. The Roman governor at Gades insists on real Parian marble for his new palace. So we came east in silver, cinnabar, and salt fish and are returning in Parian marble, Athenian pots, and oriental carpets from Miletos. But our stupid captain ran into a pier at Naxos, and it'll take at least a month to repair us. So rather than idle around Naxos, I've worked my passage hither on a local craft, owned by Agathon and Pelias of Miletos."