“I suppose so,” Menedemos said. Egypt stretched south along the Nile for thousands of stadia—he had no idea how many thousands. “But Egypt is ancient. It’s the oldest country in the world, isn’t it?”
“I think so,” Sostratos said cautiously. “The Babylonians may give it an argument, but I think so.”
“But Alexandria’s so new!” Menedemos exclaimed. “Most of it doesn’t even seem finished. The palace here does, but this is the Ptolemaios’ home.” He lowered his voice to continue, “He may not be a king, but he lives like one, by the gods.”
“Think of all the wealth of Egypt,” Sostratos said again. “Now think of it concentrated not on one megalopolis but on one man.”
Menedemos tried to do that. He felt himself failing. To the Egyptians, Ptolemaios wouldn’t be a king if he put on a crown. He’d be a pharaoh, the next thing to a god. The whole country would belong to him, the whole country and all the myriads of people in it. Menedemos whistled softly.
By Sostratos’ wry expression, he’d already done some thinking along those lines. “Yes, the palace is very fine, and the temples. That’s what’s been finished,” he said. “The rest ….”
Alexandria had everything from homes that would have counted for palaces in Rhodes to shacks made out of whatever the builder could get his hands on. Sometimes one sat next to the other. Hellenes lived in one part of town, Egyptians in another, and Ioudaioi from Palestine in a third. Menedemos remembered from his trip to the Sacred Land two years before that the Ioudaioi claimed some kind of connection with Egypt. He couldn’t come up with the details. Have to ask Sostratos, he thought. Sostratos soaked up facts the way a rag soaked up water.
Before he could ask, his cousin said, “Even Alexander’s tomb is only half built.”
“He just got here, like everybody else,” Menedemos said. Sostratos chuckled, but Menedemos wasn’t joking. There’d been only a little fishing village on the site of Alexandria till Alexander ordered the city built here after taking Egypt from the Persians. All the swarms of inhabitants, including Ptolemaios himself, had settled here since then.
As for the mortal remains of Alexander himself, his corpse had been on the way from Babylon to Aigai in Macedonia when Ptolemaios’ soldiers seized it at swordpoint and carried it off to Egypt instead. Till very recently, it had lain in Memphis, south of the Delta. But Ptolemaios ordered it here, as if Alexander’s city needed to be adorned by what was left of him.
“The tomb will be impressive once it’s finished. It—” Sostratos broke off because someone knocked on the door. If the knocker had listened beforehand, he would have heard Menedemos’ cousin praising what the tomb would look like. That’s good, Menedemos thought.
Sostratos was closer to the door than he was. His cousin stepped over and unlatched it. A burly Hellene—he looked like a paid-off soldier—in a chiton of incongruously fine linen stood there. “I’m Demodamas, the general’s steward. The Ptolemaios will see the two of you,” he said. No, not quite a Hellene: by his Greek, he was a Macedonian.
“Let’s go,” Menedemos said. Sostratos stood aside, then followed him into the hallway. Demodamas led them through the palace’s twisting corridors till Menedemos longed for a skein of thread like the one Theseus had unrolled in King Minos’ Labyrinth.
The man stopped not at the entrance to an audience chamber but at a door like any other. He tapped at it with his forefinger. “Come in, come in,” someone on the other side said in impatient, Macedonian-accented Greek.
In they went. Ptolemaios and a young man—a secretary, Menedemos judged—sat behind a table strewn with sheets and rolls of papyrus. By their stances, the two bodyguards standing nearby had been bored to tears. Now, like watchdogs hearing strange footsteps, they perked up.
“Hail, sir,” Menedemos said.
“Hail,” Sostratos echoed.
“Hail, Rhodians,” Ptolemaios said. He was about sixty, stocky and graying. His eyes had pouches under them, but they were very shrewd. He went on, “I know we’ve met before, but for the life of me I can’t remember which of you is Sostratos and which Menedemos. If you’d dealt with as many people between then and now as I have, you wouldn’t remember, either.”
They straightened him out. Menedemos said, “You will have heard that we’ve brought news.”
“Oh, yes. If you were just interested in selling me wine and oil, you’d be dealing with my cooks,” Ptolemaios said. He’d had no trouble recalling the Aphrodite’s cargo. The secretary’s finger had an inky blot on it. So did Ptolemaios’. He kept track of as many details as he could.
Taking turns, Menedemos and Sostratos told him about Demetrios’ visit to Rhodes, and about the campaign Antigonos’ son was now mounting against his brother in Cyprus. The ruler of Egypt questioned them closely about the size of Demetrios’ army and navy.
“About fifteen thousand foot soldiers, I’ve heard, sir,” Menedemos said, “and four hundred horsemen.”
“More than a hundred ten triremes, and more than fifty heavier ships,” Sostratos added, “plus the freighters and such to support the army and the warships.”
“That’s … not a small force, if what you hear has anything to do with what’s true.” Ptolemaios clicked his tongue between his teeth. “It’s liable to be so, worse luck. Demetrios, Furies take him, doesn’t do things by halves.” He clicked his tongue again. “Menelaos holds Cyprus for me. You lads have met him, too, haven’t you?”
“Yes, sir,” Menedemos and Sostratos said, Menedemos half a beat ahead of his cousin. He had all he could do not to burst into applause. Ptolemaios really did note every detail.
Sostratos added, “It was the year after we met you, sir. We were trading in Phoenicia and Palestine. Rhodians want to be able to trade freely all over the world. That’s why we turned down Demetrios’ offer of alliance.”
“When a mouse allies with a cat, the mouse doesn’t give the orders. It takes them.” Ptolemaios’ voice was dry as Egypt away from the Nile.
“That’s why we want to stay free and independent, sir,” Sostratos said.
“Of course.” Ptolemaios’ tone remained dry as dry could be.
Menedemos remembered he’d started his career as a bodyguard of Alexander’s, and had been a capable general all through the Macedonian king’s whirlwind conquests. After Alexander died, Ptolemaios had held his own against the other squabbling Macedonian marshals. Not many men in the world had more power or more experience. Here, more than at their earlier meeting, Menedemos felt the weight of that power and experience.
Ptolemaios went on, “Rhodes thinks she can trust me—some—because I’m so far from her. If my land were just a long piss away, you’d be as nervous about me as you are about the Cyclops and his brat.” He spoke about Antigonos and Demetrios with easy familiarity, half scornful, half affectionate. He would have been through a lot with Antigonos even before the conquests began, and would have watched Demetrios grow from baby to warlord.
After a brief pause, Sostratos said, “Perhaps so, sir, but things are as they are, not as they might have been. We have to deal with what is.”
“Yes, I do remember you,” the ruler of Egypt said. “You were the one who wanted to write history. Have you started that?”
“To my shame, no,” Sostratos said, staring down at the floor mosaic: a hunting scene. “I keep looking for time, and life keeps getting in the way.”
“A pestilence on that!” Ptolemaios said. “If you really want to do something, you cursed well make time for it, and do everything else around the chunk you’ve carved out.”
“That’s … good advice, sir.” Sostratos still didn’t look up. Menedemos feared his cousin would be gloomy for days, wishing he were scribbling instead of selling things.