“All right, my dear. Fine. If you want me to spell it out for you, I will, alpha-beta-gamma.” Sostratos let out an angry exhalation of his own. “ ‘Owls to Athens’ means taking something someplace where they don’t need it. Athens doesn’t need owls, because she already stamps them on her coins. And Athens doesn’t need imported olive oil, because Attica already makes more of it than any other district in Hellas. Athens imports grain so she can grow more olives. You know that, too. You know it, but you don’t want to think about it. What a lover of wisdom that makes you.”
“My family needs the silver the oil would bring,” Damonax said. “It’s very fine oil-you know that.”
“I also know I haven’t a chance of selling it in Athens, no matter how fine it is. They’re glutted with what they make themselves,” Sostratos snapped. “And I know it’s not a proper cargo for a merchant galley anyhow-not enough profit even if it does sell.” He held up a hand. “Don’t tell me about last season, either. Yes, we made money, but we would have made more with other cargo we couldn’t carry because of your big, bulky amphorai full of oil.”
“What am I supposed to do, then?” Damonax demanded.
“What we’ve been telling you all along: put it in a round ship, where the crew is small and the overhead is low. Sell it someplace where they don’t grow so much on their own-Kos, maybe, or Khios, or the cities up along the Thracian coast where the weather’s cooler and they don’t always get good crops.”
His brother-in-law pooched out his lower lip and looked sullen. “You have no family feeling whatsoever.”
“On the contrary.” Sostratos tossed his head. “My first loyalty is to my father. My next loyalty is to Uncle Philodemos and Menedemos. If the only way I can help you is by hurting them-and, incidentally, myself-what would you have me do?”
“Go to the crows,” Damonax said.
Sostratos got to his feet. “Good day,” he said, and strode out of the andron.
Erinna knew something was wrong. “Where are you going?” she called to Sostratos as he stalked across the courtyard.
“Home.” He pushed past a startled slave and out the front door to Damonax’s house. Menedemos, no doubt, would have slammed it in his wake. Instead, Sostratos closed it as quietly as he could. As far as he was concerned, Damonax was the one in the wrong, and he wanted to do nothing to put himself there with his brother-in-law-or his sister. That didn’t keep him from seething as he stormed away. Oh, no. On the contrary.
Menedemos spent as much time as he could outside his father’s house. For one thing, that kept him and Philodemos from locking horns. For another, it eliminated temptation, or at least the chance to do anything about temptation. And, for a third, he was a man who liked crowds and noise and excitement. Going to the agora was a lot more fun than sitting around watching flowers begin to bloom.
Potters and woodcarvers and leatherworkers cried their wares from stalls that had sometimes been in their families for generations. Jewelers showed off brass bracelets that gleamed like gold, beadwork necklaces, and silver rings. Farmers in from the countryside offered up grain and olive oil, olives in brine and vinegar, cabbages and lettuces, beets and mushrooms, eggs from ducks and hens. A dentist reached into a man’s mouth with iron forceps to pull a rotted tooth while a crowd gathered round to watch and point and call advice. Hearing the victim groan, Menedemos thanked the gods his own teeth were sound.
A mountebank strolled through the crowd, juggling a stream of cups and balls and knives. Every so often, someone would throw him an obolos. He caught the little silver coins without losing control of everything he kept in the air. A grotesquely overmuscled strong man lifted a fellow of ordinary size over his head and tossed him about as if he weighed nothing at all. An artist of sorts perched on a stool in front of a patch of smooth-raked sand. For an obolos, he would use a long stylus to sketch a man’s portrait in the sand. Menedemos watched him work. His strokes were quick and sure; he caught a man’s essence with a minimum of wasted motion. Each portrait remained to be admired till the next customer gave him some silver.
“Here.” Menedemos took an obolos out of his mouth and handed it to the artist. “Do me.”
“Certainly, O best one.” After popping the coin into his own mouth, the man smoothed the sand once more. The fellow whose portrait had been there muttered under his breath; his picture hadn’t lasted long. A few lines delineated Menedemos’ sharp chin, his straight nose and strong cheekbones, the eyebrows that were almost too bushy, and the hairline that had retreated perhaps a digit’s width at each temple. After a couple of minutes, the sketch artist looked up. “Here you are, my friend: you.”
“Looks like me,” agreed Menedemos, who had often seen his image in a mirror of polished bronze. A poor man from the countryside, though, might have no true idea what he looked like till this fellow showed him.
As Menedemos turned away, someone just coming up peered at his portrait and said, “There’s a good-looking fellow.” He preened. Even though he was no longer a youth for suitors to pursue, he never got tired of praise.
Not far away, half a dozen men were arguing about what this year’s campaigning season would likely bring in the wars among Alexander ’s marshals. “Mark my words, someone will triumph over all the rest,” a gray-haired man declared.
“I don’t know about that,” a younger fellow said. “As soon as one of those polluted Macedonians looks like he’s getting on top, the others gang up on him and pull him back down again. That sort of thing can go on for a long time.”
Menedemos walked over to join them, saying, “It’s already gone on for a long time. Alexander ’s been dead-what?-sixteen years now.”
The men who were talking shifted a little to give him room. If a man couldn’t hash things out with his fellow citizens in the agora, he couldn’t do it anywhere. A stocky fellow of about Menedemos’ age whose scars said he’d fought as a mercenary dipped his head. “That’s right,” he said. “Sixteen years, and we’ve still got Antigonos and Ptolemaios and Lysimakhos and Kassandros in the field against each other.” He sounded cheerful-as long as the marshals brawled, mercenaries would never lack for work.
“And Seleukos,” somebody else said. “Don’t forget Seleukos, way off in the east. Antigonos tried to squash him a couple of years ago, but he couldn’t do it.”
“You’re right,” Menedemos said. “He’s like a reveler who hears a symposion and invites himself in. I think the other four will have to keep an eye on him now that he’s inside the andron, or he’ll walk off with the furniture.”
“Anybody old One-Eye can’t beat is someone to keep an eye on, sure enough,” said the man who looked like a mercenary.
“ Alexander showed the world one man could lead the Hellenes- and the Macedonians, too,” the gray-haired fellow said. “Now that he’s proved it can be done, the marshals will keep banging away till only one’s left standing, the way pankratiasts do at the Olympic Games.”
“They’ll try-that’s certain enough,” Menedemos said. “But they don’t fight the way pankratiasts do. It’s not one against one. They make treaties with one another-they make ‘em, and then they break ‘em. For one man to win, he’d have to defeat all the others at once, and nobody’s managed it yet.”
“Which probably means it can’t be done,” said the younger man who’d first disagreed with the older one. “Don’t you see that, Xenomenes?”
“No.” The man with gray hair tossed his head. “Fifty years ago, you would have told me nobody could ever rule all the Hellenes. Then Philip of Macedon went and did it, and Alexander held on to them afterwards. So I don’t see why the same shouldn’t hold true here.”
That produced a thoughtful silence. Menedemos wondered what Sostratos would have had to say about it; his cousin was fond of such arguments, too. But he stubbornly stuck to his own view: “Maybe it can happen, but that doesn’t mean it’s likely to.”