The Sacred Land

A soldier going into the barracks stopped to listen. A moment later, so did another one. Somebody stuck his head out a third-story window to hear Menedemos. After a bit, the fellow pulled it back in again. He came downstairs to hear better. By the time a quarter of an hour passed, Menedemos had drawn a fair crowd. Two or three soldiers had even tossed coins at his feet. He didn’t bother to pick them up, but kept on reciting.

“You’re not selling books,” Philippos said. “You’re doing the poem yourself.”

“Shut up,” Menedemos hissed. “You told me you wouldn’t queer my pitch.” The Macedonian subsided.

Menedemos went on with the Iliad:

“ ‘Thus he spoke. Peleus’ son grew troubled, his spirit

Pondering, divided in his shaggy breast,

Whether to draw his keen sword from beside his thigh,

Break up the assembled men, and slay the son of Atreus,

Or to contain his anger and curb his spirit.’ “

He stopped. “Here, go on!” one of the soldiers exclaimed. “You’re just getting into the good stuff.” A couple of other men dipped their heads.

But Menedemos tossed his. “I’m no rhapsode, not really. I’m just a man who loves his Homer, the same as you’re men who love your Homer. And why not? How many of you learned to read and write from the Iliad and the Odyssey}”

Several soldiers raised their hands. Philippos the Macedonian let out a low, admiring whistle. “Crows take you, Rhodian-I think you’re going to cost me money.”

“Hush,” Menedemos told him, and went on with his sales pitch: “Don’t you want the poet always with you, so you can enjoy his words whenever you please? The divine Alexander did: he took a complete Iliad, all twenty-four books, with him when he went on campaign in the east. That’s what people say, anyhow.”

“It’s the truth,” one of the soldiers, an older man, said. “I saw his Iliad with my own eyes, I did. He wanted to be as great a hero as Akhilleus. Me, I’d say he did the job, too.”

“I wouldn’t want to argue with you, my friend,” Menedemos said. “Of course, a complete Iliad’s an expensive proposition. What I’ve got here, though”-he hefted the basket-”are copies of some of the best books in the Iliad and in the Odyssey, too, so you can read about the anger of Akhilleus or his fight with Hektor or about Odysseus and the way he tricked Polyphemos the Cyclops, as often as you like. The finest scribes in Rhodes wrote ‘em out; you can be sure you’ve got the words just as Homer sang them all those years ago.”

He knew he was stretching things. He wasn’t sure himself any more just what Homer had sung. And Rhodes had so few scribes that speaking of them in the plural necessarily lumped in just about all of them. But he didn’t intend to mention to the soldiers the hopeless, hapless drunk Sos-tratos had dealt with. They didn’t need to know such things-and, after all, poor Polykles hadn’t copied any of these books. Besides, though Rhodes had only a handful of scribes, it surely boasted more than any other cities except Athens and Ptolemaios’ bumptious upstart of a capital, Alexandria.

“How much do you want for one of your books?” asked the soldier who’d seen Alexander ’s Iliad.

Menedemos smiled his smoothest smile. “Twenty drakhmai,” he replied.

“That’s bloody robbery, buddy, that’s what that is,” another man squawked. By his accent, he sprang from Athens. “Where I come from, five drakhmai’s a fair price for a book.”

“But you’re not where you come from, are you?” Menedemos said, still smoothly. “I had to get these books copied in Rhodes, then dodge pirates all the way from there to here to bring them to Sidon. If you want a book here, I don’t think you’ll go to a Phoenician scribe to get one written out. The Phoenicians’ letters don’t even run the same way ours do; they read from right to left.” If his cousin hadn’t complained about that, he never would have known it, but he happily used it as part of his argument. “Besides,” he added, “what else would you rather spend your silver on?”

“Wine,” said the mercenary from Athens. “Pussy.”

“You drink wine, and an hour later you piss it out. You lay a woman, and a day later your spear stands stiff again,” Menedemos said. “But a book’s different. A book is a possession for all time.” He’d heard that phrase from Sostratos, too; he supposed Sostratos had got it from one of the historians he liked so much.

A couple of the men who’d listened to him looked thoughtful. The Athenian said, “That’s still an awful lot of money.”

Dickering started there. Not even the Athenian had the gall to offer only five drakhmai. The soldiers started at ten. Menedemos tossed his head-not derisively, but with the air of a man who didn’t intend to sell for that price. One of them went up to twelve with no more prodding than that. Menedemos had to fight to keep a smile off his face. It wasn’t supposed to be so easy. He didn’t have to come down very far at all: only to seventeen drakhmai, three oboloi for each book.

“You’ll sell for that?” the Athenian asked, to nail it down. With the air of a man making a great concession, Menedemos dipped his head. Eight or nine soldiers hurried into the barracks. Even before they came back, Philippos son of Iolaos handed Menedemos a drakhma. “Well, Rhodian, you taught me a lesson,” he said.

“Oh? What lesson is that?” Menedemos asked. “My cousin collects them.”

“Don’t bet against a man who knows his own business. Especially don’t push the bet yourself, like a gods-detested fool.”

“Ah.” Menedemos considered. “I think Sostratos already knows that one. I hope he does, anyhow.”

Sostratos had never wanted to be a leader of men. In the generation following Alexander the Great, when every fisherman dreamt of becoming an admiral and every dekarkhos imagined he would use the ten men he commanded to conquer a kingdom full of barbarians and set a crown on his head, that made the Rhodian something of a prodigy. Of course, hardly any of the men with big dreams would fulfill them. Sostratos, with no ambitions along those lines, found himself in a role he didn’t want to play.

“Trust me to get too much of what I don’t want,” he muttered from atop his mule. He didn’t like the animal, either.

“What’s that?” Aristeidas asked.

“Nothing,” Sostratos said, embarrassed at being overheard. He liked Aristeidas and got on fine with him aboard the Aphrodite , not least because he hardly ever had to give him orders there. Here on dry land, though, almost everything he said took on the nature of a command.

The mule’s and donkey’s hooves and the feet of the sailors accompanying him raised dust from the road. The sun blazed down, the weather warmer than it would have been in Hellas at the same season of the year. Sostratos was glad for the broad-brimmed traveler’s hat he wore in place of his helmet. Without it, he thought his brains might have cooked.

Apart from the heat, though, the countryside could easily have been inhabited by Hellenes. The grain fields lay quiet. They would be planted in the fall, when the rains came, for harvesting at the begi

But the farmers tending the olive trees and grapevines stared at the men from the Aphrodite . Like the Sidonians, the men in the interior wore robes that reached down to their ankles. Most of them just draped a cloth over their heads to hold the sun at bay. The Hellenes’ tunics, which left their arms bare and didn’t reach their knees, marked them as strangers. Even Sostratos’ hat seemed out of place.