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.”