“Why doesn’t her husband keep her happy?” Menedemos asked. “Then she wouldn’t have to play the whore.” Am I saying that? he wondered. How many wives have I lured away from their husbands’ beds? He didn’t know, not exactly. Maybe Sostratos could have given him a precise number; he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn his cousin had been keeping a tally. But the difference here was simplicity itself: he didn’t want the innkeeper’s wife. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been pursued by a woman who interested him less.
“Why?” Zimrida echoed. “You have seen her, is it not so? Having seen her, you can answer the question for yourself. And I will tell you one thing more, my master. Two doors down from the inn lives a potter with a friendly, pretty young wife. She is even friendlier than he thinks.”
“Is she?” Menedemos said. Zimrida son of Luli nodded. Menedemos’ opinion was that she would have to be friendly to the point of madness to find Sedek-yathon attractive, but women had peculiar taste.
“Good day,” Zimrida told him. “I will be here tomorrow with the silver, and with slaves and donkeys to take away the olive oil.” Down the pier he went.
“Not bad, skipper,” Diokles said when the Sidonian was out of earshot. “Not bad at all, tell you the truth.”
“No,” Menedemos agreed. “This is better than I hoped for. We really are rid of Damonax’s oil. I feel so glad to be out from under it, too-as if Sisyphos didn’t have to roll his stone up the hill anymore.”
“I believe that,” the oarmaster said. “Now the only worry is, will he really pay us what he said he would?”
“Did you see all the gold he was wearing?” Menedemos said. “He can afford it; I’m sure of that. And he wasn’t putting on the dog to try to impress us, the way a cheat would. His robe was fine wool, and it was well worn, too. He hadn’t just borrowed it to make himself look richer than he was.”
“Oh, no. That’s not what I meant. You’re right-I’m sure he can afford to pay. But will he try to stiff us some kind of way? You never can tell with barbarians… or with Hellenes, either, come to that.”
“I only wish I could say you were wrong,” Menedemos told him. “Well, we’ll find out.”
Diokles pointed toward the base of the pier. “Now who’s this fellow coming our way, and what’s he going to want? Besides our money, I mean?”
“He’s selling something-something to eat, I bet. Look at that big, flat basket he’s carrying. You see hucksters with that kind of basket all the time back in Hellas,” Menedemos said. “There, they’d have fried fish on it, or songbirds, or most likely fruit. What do you want to bet he’s got raisins or plums or figs or something like that?”
They had to wait a little while to find out. The peddler stopped at every ship tied up along the quay. He called out the name of whatever he was selling in Aramaic, which did Menedemos no good at all. Seeing Hellenes aboard the akatos, though, the fellow switched to Greek: “Dates! Fresh dates!”
“Dates?” Menedemos echoed, and the Phoenician nodded. “Fresh dates?” The peddler nodded again, and invitingly held out the basket.
“Well, well,” Diokles said. “Isn’t that interesting?”
“It certainly is,” Menedemos said. “Sostratos would be fascinated. I wonder if he’s seen any.” A few date palms grew in Rhodes; Menedemos had seen them on the islands of the Kyklades, too, and had heard they were also found on Crete. But no date palm anywhere in Hellas gave forth fruit; the climate wasn’t warm enough to let the trees come to full maturity. All the dates that reached the land of the Hellenes from Phoenicia and Egypt were sun-dried like raisins or, often, figs.
“You want?” the peddler asked.
“Yes, I want,” Menedemos answered. To Diokles, he went on, “We wouldn’t be able to take ‘em back to Rhodes; they won’t keep for us any more than they do for anybody else. But they’re still something to talk about.”
“Sounds good to me, skipper,” the keleustes answered. “I’m always game for something new.”
An obolos bought a handful for each of them. Menedemos exclaimed in delight at the sweet taste of his. He’d had dried dates often enough. They cost more than figs, but that didn’t always stop Sikon from keeping them in the house. Menedemos tossed his head. It hadn’t always stopped Sikon from keeping them in the house. With Baukis quarreling over every obolos-no, every khalkos-who could say whether the cook still dared buy them?
Menedemos sighed. He’d mostly been too busy to think about his father’s second wife since sailing out of Rhodes. That was one of the reasons, and not the least, he was so glad when winter ended and good weather returned. Brooding about Baukis could only lead to misery, and to trouble.
To try to get her out of his mind, he asked the huckster, “Do you also sell dried dates?”
The Phoenician didn’t speak a lot of Greek. Menedemos had to repeat himself and point to the sun before the fellow got the idea. When he did, he nodded again. “Sell sometimes,” he answered. His expression was scornful, though. “Dried dates for servants, for slaves. Fresh dates proper food, good food.”
“Did he say what I think he did?” Diokles asked after the huckster went on to the next pier. “Back in Hellas, we eat for a treat what’s slave food here? I like our kind of dates. But for honey, you can’t find anything much sweeter. Don’t know that I’ll want ‘em any more, though.”
“Can’t be helped,” Menedemos said. “Like I said, fresh dates won’t keep on a voyage back to Hellas, any more than fresh grapes would.”
“Well, maybe not,” the oarmaster said. “But it still galls me that the Phoenicians send us their leavings and keep the best for themselves. There was that miserable fellow with his cheap basket, and he’s selling something nobody in Hellas can have. It doesn’t seem right.”
“Maybe it doesn’t, but I don’t know what to do about it, either,” Menedemos answered. “Fresh is fresh, in figs as in pretty boys, and it won’t keep in either one. Boys sprout hair and figs sprout mold, and there’s nothing anybody can do to it.”
“There ought to be,” Diokles insisted.
Menedemos laughed. This was almost the sort of argument he and Sostratos would have all the time. The difference was, Sostratos knew enough in the way of logic to keep the discussion moving in one direction. Diokles didn’t, and neither did Menedemos himself. When hashing things out with his cousin, it hadn’t mattered. Now it did, and he felt the lack.
He wondered how Sostratos was doing among barbarians who not only didn’t have much in the way of logic, but who’d probably never even heard of it. “Poor wretch,” Menedemos muttered; if anything could be calculated to drive Sostratos mad, it was people who couldn’t think straight.
Sostratos sat in ithran’s inn, snacking on fresh dates and on chickpeas fried in cumin-flavored oil and drinking wine. The wine wasn’t particularly good, but it was strong; like the Phoenicians, the Ioudaioi drank it unmixed. This was only his second cup, but his head had already started to spin.
Aristeidas and Moskhion had taken some of their pay and gone to visit a brothel. Teleutas would take his turn when one of them got back. The sailors from the Aphrodite seemed to have decided Menedemos would kill them if they left Sostratos alone for even a minute. He’d tried to convince them that that was nonsense. They’d paid no attention to his elegant logic.
Ithran’s wife was a handsome woman named Zilpah. She came up to Sostratos and Teleutas with a pitcher. “More wine, my masters?” she-asked in Aramaic; she spoke no Greek.
“Yes, please,” Sostratos replied in the same language. When she poured his cup full, Teleutas also held out his and got it filled again. The idea of drinking neat wine all the time didn’t bother him-on the contrary.
His eyes followed Zilpah as she walked away. “What a slut she is, to come and talk with us without even trying to cover her face.”