The Sacred Land

“It’s not the same at a brothel, and you know it,” Menedemos said. “The girls there have to give you what you ask for, whether they want to or not-and mostly they don’t. But there’s nothing randier than a wife who’s done without for too long, and you know it’s more fun when the woman enjoys herself, too,”

“I’d have more fun going to Engedi alone,” Sostratos answered.

“Till the first arrow got you in the ribs, you would.”

“That’s the chance you take in your games, too. You ask me to give up something, but you won’t do the same. Where’s the justice in that?”

“By Zeus, I’m the captain,” Menedemos said.

“But you’re not Zeus yourself, even if you swear by him, and you’re not a tyrant, either,” Sostratos replied. “Have we got a bargain, or haven’t we? Maybe I’ll just stay along the coast myself, and to the crows with getting the best price for the balsam at Engedi.”

“What? That’s mutiny!” Menedemos squawked. “We set off to the east to buy balsam. You learned that horrible language they speak so we could buy balsam. And now you say you won’t go where they have it?”

“Not with a squad of clumping, gallumphing sailors, not unless you give me something in return,” Sostratos said. “That’s not mutiny, my dear-that’s haggling. Are you saying you can’t keep away from other men’s wives till I get back from Engedi? What kind of weakling are you, if that’s so?”

“Oh, all right!” Menedemos kicked at the ground, sending a pebble spi

Sostratos did. Then he said, “That’s a good oath. But why did you use a feminine participle there?-’these things fulfilling,’ I mean.”

His cousin gri

Laughing, Sostratos dipped his head. “It could hardly fit better, my dear. Shall we finish that wine now?” They did and gave the cup back to the ski

By the time they’d gone through the market square, Sostratos had got a lot of practice saying, “No thank you, not today,” and other such phrases in Aramaic. The Phoenicians--and the Hellenes-in the agora were slaveringly eager to sell to the Rhodians. Sostratos could easily have spent every obolos he had. Whether he could sell what he bought for enough to turn a profit was a different question, though he had a hard time convincing the merchants at Salamis of that.

He also discovered that Damonax’s olive oil was going to be even harder to move than he’d feared. Whenever he mentioned it to a trader, whether a Hellene or a Phoenician, the fellow would roll his eyes and say something like, “We make plenty at home.”

Wearily, Sostratos would offer a protest: “But this is the finest oil, from the very first picking, from the very first pressing. The gods couldn’t make better oil than this.”

“Let it be as you say, my master,” a Phoenician told him. “Let everything be just as you say. I will pay a premium for fine oil, certainly. But I will not pay a big premium, because the difference between the finest oil and an ordinary oil is so much less than the difference between the finest wine and an ordinary wine. It is there. You will find a few people who seek it out. But you will find only a few. My heart is full of grief to have to tell you this, my master, but it is so.”

Sostratos would have been more irate had he not heard variations on the theme from merchants along the southern coast of Anatolia. He went on his way, wondering if urging his father to let Damonax marry into the family had been such a good idea after all.

“What are we going to do with that oil?” Menedemos said morosely after he’d translated.

“Burn it in lamps, for all I care,” Sostratos answered. “Rub it all over yourself. If my brother-in-law were here, I’d give him an enema with it, as much as he could hold.”

Menedemos let out a startled laugh, “And I thought I was the one who liked Aristophanes.”

“I won’t say anything about Aristophanes one way or the other,” Sostratos told him. “What I will say is, I don’t much like my brother-in-law right now.”

“We could have carried quite a few things we’d have had an easier time selling,” Menedemos agreed. “We’d probably have made more money from them, too.”

“I know. I know.” Sostratos had been thinking about that even before Damonax’s slaves stowed amphora after amphora of olive oil aboard the Aphrodite . “At least we have some room for other cargo. He wanted us to fill her to the gunwales, remember. I did manage to talk my father out of letting him get away with that.”

“A good thing, too,” Menedemos said. “Otherwise, we’d have come home from our trading run without having sold anything. That’d be a first. And I’ll tell you something else, too: one way or another, my father would manage to blame me for everything that went wrong.”

He often complained about his father. Sostratos had never had any particular trouble with Uncle Philodemos, but he wasn’t Philodemos’ son, either. And, from everything he’d seen, Menedemos had cause for his complaints, too. “What is it between the two of you, anyhow?” Sostratos asked. “Whatever it is, can’t you find some way to cure it?”

“I don’t know. I doubt it.” Menedemos sounded surprisingly bleak. He also sounded as if he was lying, or at least not telling all of the truth.

Sostratos thought about calling him on it. Menedemos had frozen up a couple of times before when Sostratos asked him questions like that. It was as if he knew the answer but didn’t want to air it to anyone, perhaps even-perhaps especially-to himself. What could it be? Sostratos’ ever-lively curiosity sniffed at that like a Molossian hound sniffing for the scent of a hare, but found nothing.

That being so, changing the subject looked like a good idea. Sostratos said, “The king of Salamis and all these little Cypriot kings have to pay tribute to Ptolemaios nowadays. I wonder how they like it.”

“Not much, unless I miss my guess, and I don’t think I do,” Menedemos answered. Sostratos dipped his head in agreement. His cousin went on in musing tones: “I wonder why towns full of Hellenes here on Cyprus have kings, where most poleis back in Hellas itself and over in Great Hellas are democracies or oligarchies or what have you.”

“There’s Sparta,” Sostratos said.

“I said most poleis. I didn’t say all poleis. And Macedonia isn’t a polls, but it’s got a king, too.”

“At the moment, it hasn’t got a king, which is why all the marshals are hitting one another over the head with anything they can lay their hands on,” Sostratos pointed out. He thought for a little while. “That’s an interesting question, you know.”

“Give me an interesting answer, then,” Menedemos said.

“Hmm. One thing Cyprus and Macedonia have in common is that they’re right at the edge of the Hellenic world. Old-fashioned things stick around in places like this. Listen to the dialect the Cypriots use. And Macedonian’s even worse.”

“I should say so,” Menedemos agreed. “I’m not even sure it’s properly Greek at all. But tell me, then, O best one: are kings old-fashioned? What about Alexander?”

“Certainly not,” Sostratos said, as if he were responding to a question from Sokrates in a Platonic dialogue. In those dialogues, though, Sokrates got all the best lines. Here, Sostratos had some hope of having some himself. He went on. “But even if Alexander was something special, kingship isn’t. It is archaic in most of Hellas. Sparta’s the most conservative polls around. Add that to kings hanging on in backwoods places like this and Macedonia, and to other evidence-”