'For which our gratitude is immense,' Gylippus said dryly. 'But, that being the case, the common scum have switched their intriguing to Rome itself.'
'Passing a few bribes in the Senate, are they?' I said, looking around for yet another refill. 'No harm in that. The Senate's full of men who'll promise to send out an army, slaughter the lot of you and put the beggars in power. They'll just pocket the money and do nothing. It's done all the time.'
'A few years ago,' said a landowner named Aristander, 'your Julius Caesar was here and the Populars made much of him, entertained him lavishly.'
'They did the same last year when Pompey was here,' said Dionysus.
This, for me, cast a pall over the convivial gathering. I had hoped that here, at last, I could be free of those two names. 'They'll have accomplished nothing with Pompey,' I said. 'He's far too conservative to take the popular side in anything. Caesar is famous for his popular sympathies at home, despite his patrician birth, but that's no more than practical politics. He's been elected one of next year's consuls. Once he's back in Rome after his time as a proconsul, he'll forget it was the mob that put him in power.'
Needless to say, I knew little about Caesar at that time.
'I fear that our Populars believe otherwise,' said Cleomenes, the harbormaster. 'They're agitating for the right to put some of their own on the city council. They claim it's so that the common people will have representation, but we know that they intend to betray our ancient independence and sell Rhodes to the highest bidder.'
'And who might that be?' I asked. 'Mithridates is gone. Egypt amounts to nothing. Pompey destroyed the pirates. Parthia has no ships, and therefore no use for an island. Only Rome is left, and we just conquer what we want.'
'Very true,' Gylippus acknowledged. 'But baseborn traitors practice treachery out of pure habit.'
'Maybe,' I said. 'But I suppose they can't be blamed for sucking up to Pompey. Everybody does, these days.'
'Speaking of outsized persons,' said Dionysus, 'have you visited our Colossus, Senator?'
'I thought it toppled ages ago,' I said.
'So it did, during an earthquake almost two hundred years ago. It stood only fifty-six years.' He sighed for the loss of the island's most famous attraction. 'But even the shattered fragments are a wonder. The head alone is larger by far than most other sculptures.'
'I must have a look at it,' I murmured, not terribly excited. My stay in Egypt had likewise inured me to huge monuments. With all its immense pyramids, temples and statues, there were places in Egypt where you could stand in one spot and just glancing around see more masonry and statuary than was possessed by the rest of the world combined. The prospect of a heap of scrap bronze failed to stir my interest.
Nonetheless, a day or two later, my steps led me to the spacious plaza where once the towering statue of Helios stood in splendor. Hermes accompanied me as usual, packing along a satchel that held my bath items, some snacks I'd purchased at a market, and a skin of decent local wine, all basic supplies for a day of idling and sightseeing.
'Are those feet up there?' Hermes exclaimed, gawking.
'I believe so.' The pedestal, itself as large as a good-sized temple, was still tolerably intact. Atop it stood a pair of bronze feet the size of triremes, the nail of the smallest toe larger than a legionary's shield. Having beheld this odd spectacle, it took a few moments to realize that the green hillocks strewn all over the plaza were actually the rest of the statue.
The torso was almost shapeless, collapsed from its own weight, but the lesser members were quite recognizable once the eye and mind adjusted to their size and whimsical juxtapositions. Here the extended finger of a vast hand pointed portentously toward the shop of an oil merchant. There, a well-shaped knee seemed to grow from the crook of an elbow. The long points of the god's solar crown had once been highly polished, their gleam visible to ships far out at sea. Now, the laundry of local housewives dried on lines stretched between them.
Abruptly, the quiet of the day was shattered by an unearthly howl. I imagined that Cerberus might make such a noise to greet a particularly distinguished visitor to the underworld. Then, on second thought, it occurred to me that Cerberus would howl with three voices. Whatever, it was a most impressive noise.
'It's a ghost!' Hermes cried. He had picked up a good many local superstitions during our stay in Egypt.
'They shun daylight,' I told him. 'Come along. I think it came from the god's laundry rack.'
'Are you sure about this?' he asked, taking a surreptitious pull at the wineskin.
'No, but this is the closest thing to excitement that's happened since we got here.'
The head of Helios, bigger than my house in the Subura, lay tilted so that the right cheek and jaw lay against the pavement, the spikes of the crown on that side bent at odd angles. The sound, which had diminished to a series of low moans, seemed to emanate from the neck.
We found a woman standing before the cavernous opening, hands clasped to her mouth, a basket of damp tunics forgotten at her feet. It had been her scream, echoing about within the god's cranium, that had made the unearthly sound.
'I knew it had to be something like that,' Hermes muttered.
Next to the basket, a small, brown dog was placidly lapping from a dark pool. Flies buzzed busily around the dog's head. A crowd gathered rapidly, attracted by the singular shriek.
'What's happened?' I asked the woman. Wordlessly, she pointed into the god's hollow head. Hermes and I stepped inside. A dark trickle led from the pool within. Holes and cracks in the bronze skin admitted a dim light, enough to see that a body lay about five paces within, head toward the opening, which was now crowded with gawkers. Hermes crouched by the corpse.
'Looks like someone smashed this one's head in,' he reported. 'Blood and brains all over.'
Outside, a wail went up, from the men as well as the women. 'Murder! Murder!' and so forth.
Hermes looked up in annoyance. 'What's all the fuss about? It's just a body.'
'Perhaps this is an uncommon occurrence here,' I hazarded. In Rome, the corpse of a murder victim scarcely rated a glance from passersby. I'd known less uproar to be raised over a murdered praetor than these Greeks were showing for someone whose identity they couldn't yet know.
Careful not to touch the body, I took a fold of the man's tunic between thumb and fingers and rubbed it back and forth. 'First-class material,' I commented.
'He's wearing a silk diadem with spangles on it,' Hermes reported. Then, a moment later: 'The spangles are real gold, not gilded tin.' Trust the little thief to discern that in the dimness, by touch alone.
I went to the neck opening and beckoned toward a broom-wielding municipal slave. 'Go to the home of Dionysus, president of the city council. Inform him that someone of importance has been murdered.' The man dashed off and I summoned another. 'Get a priest qualified to purify the body. I want a look at him in the light.'
I was just a visitor, but I was accustomed to taking charge in situations like this and no one else seemed to know what to do. I turned to an idler. 'Is there such a thing as a city watch here?' Unlike Rome, many Greek cities have police forces.
He shrugged. 'Only at night. They're usually down by the docks, where the sailors stay.'
Dionysus arrived shortly, bustling up with a few other town notables in tow. A very sizable crowd had gathered by this time, of all ages, sexes and conditions. There was much babbling, the gist of it being that extraordinary bad luck had to be in the offing, what with a murder taking place inside the head of the island's tutelary deity. I was wondering about that myself. But then, if the locals used his crown to support clotheslines, he couldn't be all that sacrosanct.