“I’ll go barefoot.”
Uche’s eyes widened in shock.
“I went barefoot most of my childhood,” Gorgo assured her, “and I go barefoot at home all the time. I’ll be fine.”
As they crossed the kitchen courtyard, Gorgo saw Prokles sitting on a bench sharpening his sword. She greeted him, asking, “Didn’t you want to go to the gymnasium?”
“Why? To watch a bunch of lecherous old men ogle the white-skinned little boys of their neighbors? I’ve got more important things to do with my time!” Gorgo did not ask what, but simply bade him good day and followed Uche into the street.
Aristides’ house stood in a narrow, unpaved alley lined by high walls. No windows opened onto the street, not even where the second story of a house crushed up against the wall to the street. Only the painted doorways, roof tiles, and trees that peered over the walls suggested that these were the homes of the affluent.
Uche led at an easy, long-legged pace, used to walking long distances, but Gorgo had little trouble keeping up. “What is it you want to see?” Uche asked as they approached a broader, paved thoroughfare that appeared to be an important artery of the city.
“The agora, for a start, and the bouleuterion, the library …”
Uche nodded and started to the left, admonishing Gorgo, who seemed inclined to walk in the middle of the street: “Keep to the side. Horsemen and charioteers would rather trample a slave than slow down!”
Gorgo dutifully moved to the gutter, although this was littered with refuse and made for unpleasant walking. In fact, she was so busy looking where to put her feet that she hardly had eyes for the changing character of the city around her. Gradually the purely residential buildings gave way to structures with commercial and public functions. A fountain house was followed by a little square crowded with fruit and nut vendors. An old woman was milking a goat at a street corner and selling the fresh milk to passers-by in a chipped pottery cup. Here and there schoolboys trailed along behind household slaves with the unenviable task of bringing their reluctant charges to their lessons. Gorgo was distracted by a pouting boy who was arguing in a loud voice with an elderly slave about how he “would not go there, ever again!” The slave tried to reason in an exasperated whine, “But, young master, your father wants you to….”
The next thing she knew, she almost tripped over a basket containing a whimpering infant.
Gasping, she pulled up and looked around, bewildered. The infant was very tiny, not more than a few days old, with a red face and clenched fists. “Good heavens! Where’s the mother?” Gorgo asked, horrified.
Uche was already several paces ahead of her and looked back, surprised. “The mother? Who knows?”
“But how could any woman leave such a tiny baby just lying around?” Gorgo asked, outraged, still expecting to see a woman buying something or gossiping near by.
“The mother has nothing to say about it,” Uche told her with a shrug. “The father or master will have left it there.”
Gorgo stared at Uche, speechless, but a chill ran down her spine. Meanwhile, Uche returned the two steps and looked down at the infant squirming in the shabby basket. She noticed the lack of clothes, the misshapen basket with broken edges, and shrugged. “Probably just a slave girl’s. Or a poor man’s child.”
“Just left here?” Gorgo asked, still unwilling to accept this. “On a public street? In broad daylight? As if there were nothing shameful about it?”
“What’s shameful?” Uche asked. “If they don’t want it, they’ll kill it one way or another. This way, there is at least a chance someone else will take it. Not likely, though,” she added realistically, “since it’s a girl. Sometimes exposed boys find new parents, since a man without a son will sometimes adopt an orphan. But who wants the burden of another girl?”
“Burden?” Gorgo asked. Had she been a burden to her father? Was Agiatis a burden? “We need women as much as we need men!” Gorgo answered indignantly.
Uche shrugged again. “But daughters require dowries, and who wants the cost and trouble of raising a slave baby for four or five years before it can be any use? It’s cheaper to buy slave girls already old enough to work.”
“But where do the girls in the markets come from, if no one bothers to nurture baby girls?” Gorgo wanted to know, noting with a degree of embarrassment her complete ignorance of how slave markets worked; Sparta didn’t have any.
“Oh, they’re mostly captured, like I was,” Uche answered, continuing down the street and drawing Gorgo away from the discarded infant.
Gorgo looked back uneasily over her shoulder. The infant had been perfectly healthy….
Uche distracted her, explaining matter-of-factly, “I was out collecting cattle dung for the fire when some youths from the neighboring tribe saw me. I tried to run away, but I was very little and they were already half grown. They caught me and took me back to their village. Their elders kept me in a cage until the next slave trader came, and he bought me from them for, I think, a whole cow,” Uche added educationally to the obviously ignorant visitor. “Lots of tribes in Africa make extra money that way, by selling off their extra children or the children they capture.” She had Gorgo’s attention again. Gorgo stared at her and asked, “What happened next?”
Uche shrugged. “I was sold down the Nile―just like Taiwo.”
The two Africans had evidently been talking quite a bit, Gorgo noted, mentally amused by the thought that Eukoline’s locking up the slaves at night was probably quite futile.
“I was bought by a carpet maker because I was so small my hands were good for making knots, but he was very poor,” Uche explained. “We had hardly anything to eat and I was supposed to sleep on the naked floor―though I would try to climb on the carpets. He chased me off if he caught me, but I was very good at waking up just before he came, and he rarely caught me.” She smiled at the memory.
“How old were you?”
Uche shrugged. “Four or five. Maybe six or seven. I had not yet learned to tell the seasons. I remember the first time the Nile flooded; I thought it was the end of the world. I was very frightened, and the Egyptians laughed at me.”
“How did you come to Athens?”
Uche shrugged. “My master was very poor, and he couldn’t afford to keep me. One day he took me down to the market and sold me.”
“There must be a slave market here in Athens, isn’t there?”
“Of course. It’s just over there.” Uche pointed to the left and bent her long-fingered hand back to indicate around the corner. “Do you want to go?”
Gorgo hesitated. She wasn’t sure she wanted to see this, but at the same time she felt a certain curiosity. She had come out to see Athens, and this was evidently very much a part of Athens. There were more slaves in Athens than helots in Sparta, since most helots lived on the land. Leonidas claimed there were as many as a hundred thousand slaves in Athens. Certainly they dominated the streets. Gorgo nodded assent to Uche.
They came to a square surrounded on all sides by stoas. The slaves huddled in the shade of the stoas, grouped by trader. Most sat on the floor, although some lounged against the walls or pillars, or stretched out as if to sleep. Some of the men were chained together, but females outnumbered men by two to one, and what immediately struck Gorgo was that most were children. After thinking about it, however, she supposed that slaves either grew old with one master or changed hands directly without going via market. A man who no longer needed a tutor for his sons recommended him to a friend with younger sons; a young man who tired of his concubine sold her to a fellow who had expressed interest ….
A large, noisy crowd of men bunched before one particular trader, Gorgo noted. “What’s that all about?” she asked.
Uche shrugged, then turned to ask the trader nearest her.
“They’re selling an Athenian girl,” came the surprising answer.
“What?” Gorgo thought she had misheard the man.
The man shrugged. “When she was mar
ried, her husband found she was not a virgin, so he returned her and her dowry to her father.”
Gorgo stared at the man, still not comprehending. “Why didn’t her father find out who had dishonored her and make him marry her?”
“Oh! She claims her uncle slept with her.” The trader related this as if it were obviously a stupid lie, concluding, “What else could her father do but conclude she was a hopeless slut and invoke the law?”
“What law?”
“Where are you from?” the trader asked back, frowning and looking at Gorgo more closely than was comfortable.
“She’s just come from Lacedaemon,” Uche told the trader, adding hastily as she pulled Gorgo away, “I’ll explain everything.”
Gorgo went willingly, gladly moving into the shadows to avoid the man’s piercing look. Uche explained in a low voice, “An Athenian citizen can sell his daughter into slavery if she allows herself to be seduced.”
“Allows herself to be seduced?” Gorgo echoed, staring at Uche in disbelief. From what Gorgo had seen, Athenian girls almost never set foot outside the women’s quarters of their own houses, let alone out of the house―and then, only surrounded by their male relatives. The man’s words about the girl blaming her uncle rang in her ears, and it sounded completely plausible to Gorgo. Who else but a male relative would have had a chance to seduce one of Athens’ shy fawns? Or was there a side of Athenian society she had not yet seen? Gorgo looked again toward the crowd, trying to get a glimpse of the object of curiosity.
Uche hissed at her and signaled with her elegant hand, “This way.” She led Gorgo behind the slaves of other merchants and around the back of the stoa, until they were very close to the trader with the Athenian girl. She had been made to stand on an upturned crate, so that she was raised enough above the other human wares to make her more visible. She was at most thirteen or fourteen. Frail and white, like most girls of the rich, she stood with her head bent so far forward that her chin almost touched her chest. Her shoulders curved inward in evident shame and humiliation. Her hair had been cut short like a slave’s, crudely with rough scissors that left tufts at odd places and bleeding cuts in others. Her knees were trembling so violently beneath her skirts that her skirts shivered.
Gorgo couldn’t bear to look at her. She turned and stormed away, stepping over other slaves and attracting momentary attention from the crowd. Someone called something at her, but she kept her head down and did not stop until she was a block away.
Uche caught up with her. “What’s the matter, mistress?”
“That little girl! She doesn’t deserve to be treated like that!”
“But she wasn’t a virgin when she married,” Uche insisted.
“And whose fault was that? Anyone can see that that timid little thing was the victim! Why, she couldn’t have been more than ten or eleven when some man―very likely her own uncle―raped her! How could her own father not see that? How could he take his brother’s side? Leo would kill any man―especially his brother!―who laid a hand on Agiatis, and my father would have done the same for me. It’s that girl’s uncle who deserves punishment!”
“But he’s a man. Men are never to blame for anything. Women are the cause of all evil in the world,” Uche answered.
“You can’t believe that!” Gorgo challenged.
Uche shrugged. “That’s what they say here. It’s written down in their books, and they say it in the plays, too. Didn’t you go to the play? I’ve seen one or two. Athenians say women are worse than poisonous snakes.” Then she flashed a mischievous smile at Gorgo and added, “But Taiwo says that is not what they think in Egypt―or Lacedaemon.”
“It is most certainly not what we think in Lacedaemon. In Sparta, a man who violates a child―male or female―can be castrated or killed!” Gorgo answered. “Is there nothing nice in Athens? Nothing beautiful? Nothing uplifting?”
“You’ve been to the acropolis?”
“Yes. It is beautiful, but it’s up there!” she pointed. “It is as if the Gods themselves have fled the filth, chaos, and moral perversion of Athens in order to float above it all.”
“The potters!” Uche suggested. “I’ll take you there!” Enthusiastically she plunged down the street, and Gorgo had to hurry to catch up. “I know an old slave,” Uche told Gorgo eagerly, “who can paint so well you know exactly what and who it is! His name is Menekles. He’s the overseer of a whole shop! But first we’ll go to the agora, like you wanted.”
Athens’ famous commercial center, the agora, was undoubtedly impressive. Even the smaller of the two stoas was as large as Sparta’s great Canopy where the Assembly met, and the other was two stories tall, something Gorgo had never seen before. It was also striking that the agora was dominated by two large temples, rather than several smaller temples as in Sparta. As Gorgo was starting to comprehend, the Athenians were very devoted to the Olympians, but at the cost of neglecting lesser deities. Particularly confusing to a daughter of the Eurotas was the fact that the temples here, in the heart of Athens’ commercial district, were dedicated to Hephaestus and Ares, respectively. Gorgo could not understand why Ares, a violent, destructive God, should have a temple in the commercial heart of a city.
The other odd thing about the Athenian agora was that it was filled with men. Not men engaged in trade, but men simply standing around talking. Here and there, men appeared to be holding forth at great length about one topic or another, from ethics to cosmetics, while other men stood around listening. Other groups were more chaotic, with many men talking at once. From what Gorgo heard as they passed by, the men were talking about law and lawsuits, about taxes and tolls, but also about plays and actors and the best way to spend silver….
The two “slave” women attracted frowns and even hissing as they wound their way past the clusters of men. Their looks and remarks made Uche uncomfortable and anxious to hurry away, but Gorgo ignored the animosity, immune to it because she returned the sentiments whole-heartedly. All these men just standing around talking struck the Spartan queen as vain. Had these men nothing better to do? From the fine cloth and elaborate embroidery on their chitons, not to mention the sturdy shoes or boots on their feet, it was evident that most of these men were affluent. The poor were no doubt laboring in their workshops, but here the elite loitered in idle conversation. They appeared more interested in impressing their fellows with their clothes and their words than in resolving any particular issue. A bunch of chatterboxes, Gorgo concluded with contempt.
On the far side of the agora, Uche led her down a side street lined by jewelers’ shops. Gorgo would have liked to stop and look more closely, particularly at some of the gold filigree work and glass beads, but the shopkeepers shooed them away. “Don’t block the view for customers!” one ordered sharply, while another advised them not to fill their “empty heads” with things meant for their “betters.”
Uche giggled and looked sidelong at Gorgo. “If he knew―”
“Hush!”
The potters’ quarter was near the eastern gate. The clay was brought in on heavy wagons from the surrounding countryside. The wagons lined the main road in from the east, and a maze of factories stretched away from the road like a rabbit warren. The low dividing walls of the different shops did not block the view of men working at their wheels, with baskets of clay and amphorae of water set up on either side of them. Customers liked to watch a lump of clay being coaxed into a krater or a kylix by the shimmering hands of the potters. The less experienced potters, usually still young boys, rolled the coils that were used to conceal the joints of composite vases, and specialists, often older men, created handles and covers in the shapes of snakes, bulls, lions, horses, and humans.
Smaller potteries sold raw wares to painters, who added decoration in their own shops before firing, but the larger establishments had potters, painters, kilns, and sales rooms all under one roof. It was to one of these larger factories that Uche took Gorgo.
In the outer yard a wagon was being loaded with sa
wdust-filled crates into which the finished products, individually wrapped, were carefully placed. Display shelves crowded the kiln itself, and wood stacked to feed the kiln created a barrier between the shop and the workroom. Uche squeezed past the display tables and stepped over some logs that had fallen off the end of the woodpile to reach the open-air factory. Here long tables flanked by benches clogged the courtyard.
“Uche! What brings you here?” a jovial voice called out from the far side of the yard, and a moment later a grotesque figure emerged, hobbling toward them on uneven legs. Gorgo was reminded instantly of Hephaestus himself. The man had a hunchback, which shocked Gorgo, but Uche smiled broadly and introduced him. “This is Menekles, a great artist!”
“And Uche is my muse!” the potter answered, patting Uche affectionately, while looking at Gorgo with curious, almost suspicious eyes.
“Menekles, this is the Spartan queen, Gorgo!” Uche introduced her guest before Gorgo could stop her. “She wanted to see Athens. That’s why she is disguised as a slave.”
Menekles looked at her again, and his expression was more amused than shocked. He nodded. “Spartan queens have always been curious. Why else would Helen have run off with a nonentity like Paris? Then again, maybe she had her eye on Hektor, eh?” He laughed at his own joke, and then bowed his head to Gorgo and asked, “How may I be of service to you today, my lady?”
“Uche has praised your wares.”
He smiled at Uche and beckoned to Gorgo. “Judge for yourself.”
Despite Uche’s praise, Gorgo was impressed by the creativity, grace, and realism that this master―though unfree―artisan commanded. The pottery of Lacedaemon suddenly seemed pedestrian and uninspired, although until this moment Gorgo had loyally liked it. Yet this Athenian craftsman offered no conventional images of sphinx and hawks, of the Dioskouroi and Herakles, nor simple patterns that repeated themselves. All his works recreated lifelike scenes in which motion and emotion were captured. Two boxers stood off against one another in the bowl of a kylix, and determined runners circled a large, fat jug. On another kylix a hunter returned holding the legs of a frail-legged doe in his hands, her delicate head hanging down his back while his hounds danced about him with upright tails. Gorgo was particularly fascinated by pottery showing workmen at their daily tasks: a carpenter sanding, a smith at his anvil, even a sculptor in his workshop. Menekles tried to interest her in his “women’s wares”: the amphora with a wedding scene in which a youthful groom led his heavily shrouded bride away from her mother, a woman weaving, even a woman playing a lyre. Gorgo disliked the way all these women stood or sat with their heads bowed―just like the girl being sold in the market after being raped by her own uncle―and turned pointedly away from these images. She moved to the part of the shop with the larger, more official pieces.
A Heroic King Page 43