The New Achilles

by Christian Cameron

  ‘Wouldn’t they, though?’ Philopoemen lay back and looked at the ceiling. ‘What if I told you that I think most of the men who vote at the Achaean Assembly are unworthy of their citizenship. Rich fucks who pretend to read philosophy and talk a lot about food.’

  Their host came in. He embraced Kleostratos like a long-lost brother, kicked off his sandals and sat with Philopoemen.

  ‘He’s a dangerous radical,’ Nicanor said. ‘Don’t listen to him.’ He grinned. ‘Wine, anyone?’

  His wife, Penelope, sat down. It wasn’t unheard of for a woman to join men; rare in Arkadia, but common in Athens. Alexanor understood immediately from her presence that Nicanor was also a radical.

  ‘He’s contending that most of the men who exercise the franchise of Achaea don’t deserve it,’ Penelope said.

  ‘Military service,’ Kleostratos said. Just the two words.

  Penelope nodded.

  Philopoemen shook his head. ‘War is not so important. And what of good men, brilliant men, with club feet or misshapen hands or what have you?’

  Kleostratos smiled quietly. Nicanor made a face.

  ‘But of course, Kleostratos reminds us that in Thrake, such men would be strangled at birth anyway.’ He nodded. ‘Thus solving the problem of the franchise.’

  ‘Women,’ Kleostratos said.

  ‘Surely you aren’t suggesting that women be included in the citizenship?’ Alexanor asked.

  Penelope glanced at him.

  ‘Among the Getae and the Sakje, the women fight, and participate in councils,’ Philopoemen said.

  Nicanor laughed. ‘I’d better pour some wine, or your priest is going to run into the street and report us to the garrison as madmen.’

  Alexanor shook his head. ‘I had no idea you were such a … progressive,’ he said to Philopoemen. He had a thought of Phila rising in an assembly to speak. It wasn’t so outlandish; she knew more about politics than any woman he’d ever spoken to. He grinned. ‘You are a radical, after all.’

  ‘My stepfathers wandered Greece killing tyrants,’ Philopoemen said. ‘Do you understand now why Aratos fears me?’

  The next morning, Alexanor rose early to go to the Temple of Apollo. He had penned a long report on papyrus the night before, a little bleary from wine, and he gave it directly to the high priest.

  ‘You are on your way to your posting on Crete, yes?’ the priest asked.

  ‘Yes, Hierophant.’

  The high priest frowned. ‘I mistrust this intrusion of Macedonian politics into our order. It is bad enough to have a Macedonian garrison here.’

  Alexanor bowed. ‘Hierophant, I am a Rhodian – I am no friend of Macedon. Nonetheless, the needs of the Order are being served. Chiron ordered me to this task.’

  The priest nodded. ‘You are too young for your office. You know that?’

  Alexanor bridled, but then, after a moment, calmed himself and forced some humility.

  ‘Yes,’ he admitted.

  ‘Good. Go with the god, my son. Here – we are about to make the morning sacrifice. Come and join us.’

  In Corinth, none of the priests were Pythagoreans, and the sacrifices were animals. After the meat had been distributed to the poor, Alexanor changed into his street clothes and walked about the agora. He made purchases and used a public letter-writer to send a note to his father on Rhodes.

  He found himself looking at a table of swords; most of them were simple, cross-hilted xiphoi, but there were two longer swords, the curved bladed kopis favoured by mercenaries.

  Philopoemen appeared out of the crowd.

  ‘Fancy meeting you here,’ he said.

  ‘I thought that I might buy a sword,’ he said. ‘I broke my father’s. And I can’t bring myself to use the sword I took from Nabis.’ He shrugged. ‘Who knows where it’s been?’

  The slave keeping the stall was utterly uninterested.

  Philopoemen drew one of the xiphoi. ‘Nice. Look at the blade – folded steel. Good work. A little chip at the point – not a major flaw.’ He drew another. ‘Inferior. There, that’s what I thought. All iron. I could bend it with my hands.’

  ‘I was thinking of a kopis.’

  ‘Too long,’ Philopoemen said. ‘Cavalry fights get to be wrestling matches, like a fight in a phalanx.’ He smiled at his friend. ‘Do you know how to use a sword? Of course you do,’ he answered himself.

  ‘Oh, I’ve held one or two.’ Alexanor liked the patterns in the folded steel. ‘How much for this one?’

  The slave stood up. ‘One hundred drachmae,’ he said.

  ‘I could buy a ship for that,’ Alexanor said.

  He put the sword back on the table and turned away.

  ‘It’s not a bad price,’ Philopoemen said. ‘It’s probably from Amphipolis or one of the Thracian cities. They make the best swords – so does Macedon, now.’

  ‘Too rich for me,’ Alexanor said. ‘How was your morning?’

  ‘I found our ship,’ Philopoemen said. ‘I was on the wrong beach. It’s on the Corinthian side, at Lechaeum.’

  ‘Surely that’s no use to us – we’re for Athens.’

  Alexanor was watching a group of soldiers come into the agora. They shoved a slave and then a freedman from their path. They were obviously drunk.

  A priest of the Temple of Poseidon approached them. He was in his formal robes, and Poseidon was the patron of the agora; Alexanor guessed the man was the archon of the market.

  ‘You’d be surprised,’ Philopoemen said. ‘It will be ready to sail in four hours.’

  ‘But we have to wait for it to go all the way around the Peloponnese.’

  The priest was ordering the soldiers from the market. Alexanor was not surprised; in most cities, the agora was for citizens only.

  ‘It is such a pleasure to know something you don’t know,’ Philopoemen said. ‘Watch out!’

  His last exclamation was the result of one of the soldiers knocking the priest to the ground.

  People scattered.

  ‘Fucking sheep,’ roared one of the soldiers.

  ‘Baaa!’ called another.

  Philopoemen didn’t move, and Alexanor stood next to him. As almost everyone else in the market ran, or hid behind bales of merchandise, this had the effect of leaving them facing the soldiers.

  ‘Run away, little sheep,’ said the Macedonian dekarch. His breath stank of cheap wine.

  ‘You should probably go back to your barracks and sober up,’ Philopoemen said, reasonably.

  ‘Oh, oh! A scary citizen of the League of Sheep! Fuck off home, before we all decide to piss on you, little sheep.’ The man’s tone was derisive.

  Philopoemen sighed. ‘I told you I’d get wounded,’ he said to Alexanor.

  ‘I think we can take them without getting hurt,’ Alexanor said, loudly enough to be heard. ‘They’re drunk.’

  Philopoemen turned and gave him a warm smile.

  ‘I knew I liked you,’ he said.

  Then, without preamble, he stepped forward, caught a soldier’s arm, and broke it, throwing the man into a garlic seller’s cart.

  The Macedonian soldiers were surprised, to say the least. But even as Philopoemen grappled the second man, the third and fourth men were drawing swords.

  Philopoemen rotated his man into the swordsmen. Alexanor passed between them like smoke, took a sword hand, and kicked his opponent in the head while holding his wrist. The wrist broke with an audible snap, and the man roared in pain and then screamed as the shattered socket continued to rotate. Alexanor threw his man so that he collided with Philopoemen’s victim.

  The fourth man cut at Philopoemen, drawing a line of blood down his right arm. The Achaean’s head snapped back, and then he flowed forward into the tempo of the passing blade, and his left hand found the man’s elbow as his powerful right took his shoulder. Philopoemen’s left hand pushed ruthlessly, raising and rolling the other man’s sword arm and shoulder, over and down, until the man was face down in the street and screaming.
r />   Alexanor took all four swords from their prone owners.

  Philopoemen gave him an odd look. He released the last of the soldiers. The man stayed down.

  ‘Let’s just walk away,’ Philopoemen said.

  Two of their opponents were screaming and moaning by turns. Alexanor was already trying to set the wounded man’s wrist.

  In one of the town’s watchtowers, an alarm trumpet was blaring. The Macedonian dekarch was screaming obscenities and trying to rise. He had a knife, and he went after Alexanor, and Alexanor snap-kicked him as he passed.

  ‘I’ve seen you box,’ Philopoemen said. ‘I had no idea you were such a lion.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve never been much of a boxer,’ the physician said. ‘The Temple of Asklepios teaches a different pankration.’

  ‘So I see.’

  People were emerging from covered stalls and houses; there were a hundred men crowded on the portico of the Temple of Poseidon. Alexanor hurried to the priest, who lay on his side, his robes soiled by the mud.

  The man was holding his head. Alexanor spoke to him quietly while Philopoemen watched the crowd and the distant tower.

  ‘It won’t be healthy for us to stay around,’ he said.

  Alexanor was raising the priest to his feet. The man muttered something.

  Philopoemen retrieved the priest’s staff and put it in his hand. The man smiled at him; his face was stiff, and he was having trouble focusing his eyes.

  ‘We need to go,’ Philopoemen said. ‘Right now.’

  ‘I should help these men,’ Alexanor said, pointing at the injured Macedonians.

  ‘No,’ Philopoemen said, and started away. ‘That would be stupid.’

  Alexanor looked at the priest, nodded, and followed Philopoemen, who began to walk briskly across the agora towards the Temple of Aphrodite. A dozen young women were peering out from the pillars.

  ‘Don’t run. Look busy. Imagine you have an appointment,’ Philopoemen said.

  Alexanor glanced over his shoulder.

  ‘Don’t look back,’ Philopoemen said.

  ‘You make a practice of fleeing the authorities?’ the Rhodian asked.

  ‘My stepfathers certainly did. Tyranny and foreign garrisons go together like bread and opson.’

  Philopoemen trotted up the steps of the Temple of Aphrodite like a man in a hurry. Alexanor followed him.

  In among the columns, dozens of young men and women were gathered in groups, and a line of temple servants stood just inside the pronaos with clubs.

  ‘Temple prostitutes,’ the Achaean said.

  ‘I know,’ Alexanor returned. ‘I’ve visited before.’

  Philopoemen turned and Alexanor smiled. ‘I’m a disappointment, I can tell.’

  The Achaean shrugged. ‘No. I erred in thinking you more of a … Stoic.’

  ‘A Stoic?’ Alexanor was admiring a young woman in a gauzy himation and little else. ‘I thought all that nonsense was refuted by the Academy?’

  ‘No. We are not stopping, brother – you needn’t flash your eyes at that young woman. We need to get to the beach and get under sail.’

  ‘I’ll be happy to help get your mast up, love,’ said a dark-eyed beauty. ‘And I can take you places no ship will take you.’

  Alexanor was delighted to see the Achaean blush.

  ‘Another time,’ Alexanor said, ‘But you can help us get our ship together.’

  The blonde woman laughed. ‘How so?’

  ‘A ship needs oars,’ Alexanor said. ‘And so does a sailor.’

  The women laughed. ‘We have a whole temple of oars,’ the raven-haired woman said, and Alexanor walked along the naos.

  ‘Don’t tell me you are a prude, brother?’ Alexanor said, leading the way down the steps on the far side of the temple. The magnificent structure now stood between them and pursuit.

  ‘I’m not interested in paying to rut with some woman forced into sexual slavery,’ Philopoemen said. ‘It’s rape.’

  ‘It is not! And who forced them?’

  ‘You said yourself – the Cretans, the Aegyptians, all the pirates. I heard you say it.’

  ‘But temple prostitutes are sacred …’

  ‘Really? Or are they just more of the same?’ Philopoemen was looking behind him.

  Alexanor frowned, and the two men hurried on, down the long hill to the gate on the Saronic Gulf side of the city proper. But as soon as the gate came into view, they could see that it was packed with Macedonian soldiers.

  ‘I know another way out, through the tanneries,’ Philopoemen said.

  ‘Right behind you,’ Alexanor said.

  The two men turned east, into ever narrower streets, until they were passing open sheds that stank worse than a two-day-old battlefield. There were tanning sheds on both sides of the narrow street, and it was clear from the smell that the workers pissed into the little gutter that ran down the middle, and so did every cat in the city.

  ‘This way,’ Philopoemen said.

  The two walked into one of the sheds, where a hundred slaves were treading dog manure into the skins of cattle and sheep.

  ‘By the gods,’ Alexanor said, holding his hand to his nose. ‘Hygeia herself could not clean this place.’

  ‘Imagine if one of these slaves has a cut on his foot,’ Philopoemen said.

  ‘The infections …’ Alexanor shook his head.

  They came out from under the shed, crossed a dirty stream that smelt of blood and scrambled up the other side.

  ‘Follow the little path,’ Philopoemen said.

  ‘How do you know this?’ Alexanor said.

  ‘I told you, I grew up with rabble-rousers and revolutionaries. I know how to get out of Corinth.’

  ‘You are a Stoic?’ Alexanor asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Philopoemen said.

  ‘I thought you people just waited around for fate to decide. I thought you just accepted what happens.’

  They followed the path up and over a mountain of cow dung. The path had beaten the dung into a hard trail, and even polished it. They came down the other side to rows of low houses, some of crumbling mud-brick, some neatly painted in whitewash or garish colours. The smell was still terrible.

  ‘This is the poorest section of Corinth,’ Philopoemen said. ‘And there’s the Diolkos, the ship road across the Isthmus. That’s our ship on it.’

  Directly below them, a dozen stades away, a ship was being hauled across the Isthmus. A small freighter, it had reached almost the top of the grade, and the slaves were reversing the ropes to let the ship run down the far side.

  ‘I’ve never seen anything like that,’ Alexanor said.

  He realised that he had heard of it; someone on Rhodes had mentioned it, or bragged about sending his ships across. It was different to see it in action.

  ‘It’s over three hundred years old,’ Philopoemen said. ‘Come on, before someone sees us.’

  The two men walked purposefully down the slope toward the tanners’ gate. There were guards, but they stayed inside their tower, as they were hated by the lower-class population. Only the colour of their cloaks were visible on the wall. Philopoemen, with his gold seal ring and red chiton, stood out like a pearl in a bowl of barley.

  ‘You stand out,’ Alexanor said.

  ‘At least I’m not carrying four stolen weapons,’ Philopoemen said. ‘We need to be rid of the swords.’

  ‘I was going to keep one.’

  ‘A death sentence if you are caught. Maybe not, as you are a priest, but it could be made very bad.’

  ‘Shall I throw them in the ditch back there?’

  ‘Never waste a weapon, brother. Come over here. Give them to me.’

  Philopoemen paused at a cross-street shrine and asked directions of a small boy, and then led the way to a wine shop with sagging walls and a pair of unpainted wooden benches outside. He went in and emerged soon after with a skin of wine, from which he took a drink and then offered the skin to his friend.

  ‘Not bad!’ Alexanor sa
id, surprised.

  He was watching two cats fight over the head of a very small fish. Philopoemen now had a long, dirty chlamys over his scarlet chiton.

  ‘There’s good wine to be found here, if you know where to look,’ Philopoemen said. ‘And I found good homes for the swords.’

  ‘They won’t be found?’

  ‘It would take the whole garrison to search the lower town, and there’d be trouble. Let’s get going.’

  They went back towards the gate. The soldiers were still up on the wall and were watching the temple area. There was a signal burning high up the Acrocorinth to the west.

  They went through the gate.

  ‘Halt!’ called a voice above. ‘You with the dark hair. State your business.’

  Alexanor looked up and saw an opening in the arch above him.

  ‘Got work!’ shouted Philopoemen in a Corinthian dialect.

  ‘Halt, I say,’ said the Macedonian.

  ‘Fuck off,’ snapped Philopoemen. ‘I got work, an’ I got to go!’

  He kept walking.

  Alexanor felt as if a sword blade was being pressed between his shoulders, but there were no further shouts, and they walked out of the lower gates into the slum at the foot of the tanners’ quarter.

  ‘No local would ever stop,’ Philopoemen said. ‘There’s no garrison at ground level, so it’s foolish to wait for them to come and get you, right?’

  They walked out past the slum of temporary shelters, some no more than two or three thin hides held on a few poles, and then they were walking down through fields.

  ‘There’s our ship,’ Philopoemen said.

  He pointed to the ship, now well along its journey from the Gulf of Corinth to the Saronic Gulf.

  ‘Is it a road?’ Alexanor asked.

  ‘Come and see,’ Philopoemen said, and they climbed the shoulder of the ridge.

  Alexanor was stunned by what he found.

  Cut stones had been laid, one after another, and neat grooves cut into them.

  ‘So the wheels …’

  ‘Fit the grooves, yes. They can’t pop out, so that all the slaves have to do is pull. It isn’t cheap, but it’s fast – two hours to get a ship across the Isthmus. Three hours for a trireme. When I was very young I used to follow them.’ He pointed to the axles. ‘Three sets for a small ship like this, up to six for a military trireme.’