People. History. A bad joke.
She remembers reading that on April 14, 1730, Captain William Gates and a party of Iroquois guides beached their canoes about three hundred yards north of where she stands. Gates was the first white man to set foot in what would become Millbridge fifty years later. The Indians were here long before all that, of course, but even they were latecomers compared to the fossils embedded in the rocks all around her.
The rush of water makes Emma dizzy, but she stares deeply into it anyway. Gradually, her eyes adjust to the glare, and then, through the sparkling green and blue camouflage of the water, she sees the mottled surface of a white limestone streambed. She feels a light, cool spray on her face. She inhales the drops and thinks of her father sawing those huge blocks and breathing the stone mist.
Marble is a kind of living thing.
She understands this completely now.
She doesn’t move, not a muscle, still as stone.
Death at Delphi
by Marianne Wilski Strong
The innkeeper was a Thessalian by the name of Tedar, and not so fond of us Athenians. The inn was slightly seedy, but Tedar gave us one of the better rooms. It was not my good Athenian coins that made him generous, nor my identity. When I announced that I was Kleides of Athens, I heard whispers of “Sophist” go round the tavern room. My fame as a treatise writer, a companion and sometimes friendly rival of Socrates, and the man whom Pericles of Athens called upon to investigate murders that threatened our proud city had obviously spread to Mount Parnassus and Delphi. But fame, which we Greeks strive for, proved of little interest to this burly innkeeper.
However, once he cast his eye on my mistress Selkine’s slender, tall body, the room was ours. Not that Selkine wasn’t wearing her full chiton, a lovely white flowing tunic with a red hem, and her cloak, but even with all that, she is as graceful as the goddess Artemis, that is, if you believe in the gods. These days, many of us do not, or at least, we are skeptical. Perhaps, as some Athenians claim, we Sophists with our ideas of moral relativity and ethics based on humans and the city rather than divine truths have corrupted our youth. It does worry me.
But in the inn on this sunny spring day at the sanctuary of Apollo at Delphi, it was Selkine who worried me. She had insisted on coming to consult the oracle. She refused to say what her question was to be, but I feared that she was considering marrying her wealthy lover. He had once given her a pair of gold earrings of delicate beadwork. She had worn them for a while, then put them aside. Lately, she’d started to wear them again. She was thirty-two now, myself forty-one, and I began to detect that she wanted marriage and children. I, of course, was still hopelessly in love with the beautiful and intelligent Aspasia, Pericles’ mistress and mother of his two sons. Still, Selkine was beautiful, and I did not want to lose her. So I was facing a dilemma. Marry her or lose her. Would marriage limit my life? Not my political life, certainly. No Athenian man limited his political life for family life. But I often found myself in dangerous situations, investigating homicides. Would Selkine be able to handle that? Would she object once we had children? I didn’t know. Or, perhaps, I was more worried about how much of a burden a wife and children would be to me.
It was all of these questions, and a strong dose of vanity no doubt, that clouded my usual keen observations and made me miss the undercurrent of hostility that lurked in the whispers in the tavern when Selkine and I arrived.
I didn’t miss the lust in the innkeeper’s eyes, though, or the interest several men showed in Selkine. They all knew that aristocratic Athenian women stayed close to home and that only a high class hetaera, which Selkine’s earrings, expensive linen chiton, and lustrous dark curls over her shoulders announced her to be, would have traveled openly. I could see the men calculating just how much Selkine might charge for her favors. Most of them quickly realized that she could well afford to pick and choose her lovers. So they lost interest, though they may well have wondered why she had chosen me.
One man with short, badly cut hair and a rough, brown wool wrap from some backward island, no doubt, stared at me and then at Selkine. Selkine stared back, her large, luminous brown eyes defiant. The man lowered his eyes, poured wine from a jug into his cup, diluted it with water, took a gulp and gagged. He stared at his wine cup, put it down, rose, and went upstairs. An unpleasant fellow, I thought, but he would apparently keep to himself and not bother his fellow guests at the inn. But two or three other men still had the same glint in their eyes that I must have had over fifteen years ago when I’d first seen Selkine in the port of Piraeus, just below Athens. I vowed to myself to stay close to Selkine.
The innkeeper asked if we had a cart to be taken care of. We did not. We had left Athens in a cart, my own wealth being well enough to afford one, especially since my half brother’s merchant ships had substantially increased the family wealth, but at the split in the Delphi road up from Athens, a wheel had broken. I was all for getting it repaired or replaced by a local farmer, but Selkine wouldn’t hear of it. She can be superstitious. It worried her that the wheel had broken just at the gorge where, legend has it, Oedipus killed his father. Good Sophist that I am, I informed Selkine that the incident, like most things, could be seen in at least two ways: an omen of danger or a harbinger of truth and understanding. After all, Oedipus had been warned by the oracle that he would kill his father and marry his mother. He had just not had the sense to look into his character to understand his violent nature. I, of course, had the sense to examine all, including myself, carefully. Selkine scoffed and said something about my not knowing where my best interests lie. So we paid a passing traveler to go in his cart. I sulked for about an hour afterward, remembering that my half brother and his wife had hurled the same accusation at me.
I informed the innkeeper that we did not have a cart, but that we would be happy if he knew of someone from whom we could rent or buy one.
He said he knew of no one. I saw that the effect of Selkine’s beauty had its limits. The innkeepers around Delphi could always ferret out a cart from a local farmer, who, having had a bad harvest or having no need of his carts, was willing to lend one for Athenian coins.
“I could get you a cart.”
I turned to the man who sat on a bench by the far wall of the room. His accent, his short hair, new leather sandals, and heavy linen tunic marked him clearly as Athenian, and wealthy at that. But I didn’t need my powers of observation to know that. I recognized him.
“Mides,” I said. “You must have some vital question for the oracle here to be away from your olive groves and fields in plowing season.”
Mides laughed. “I have olive groves here at Delphi as well. In any event, I want to ask the oracle how to keep my sons away from the influence of you Sophists. You do seem to have a powerful pull on the youth of Athens. What is your secret?”
“Words,” I said. “We use them to get young men thinking. It can be habit forming.”
“Ah. And habits once formed are difficult to break, are they not?”
“Indeed,” I said, wondering what was on Mides’ mind.
“So if one learns as a youth,” he said, rising and coming over to us, “to think that laws and morals and the very gods themselves are relative to a culture, and the common man knows as much as anyone else, then it would be hard to think otherwise, the habit of thinking that way being ingrained. Correct?”