‘Your father can afford the best pankration tutor in the city,’ Satyrus said.
Theodorus shook his head. ‘No – Theron is yours. Besides, if I ask my father, he’ll want to watch.’ He shook his head. ‘It’s hard to explain.’
‘Sure,’ Xenophon said. ‘I’ve got your back, Theo.’
Theodorus glowed. ‘Listen – if you teach me all this hero stuff, I’ll see to it that you drink and fuck like a gentleman. Deal?’
Xenophon looked at Satyrus, who shrugged and nodded. It was quite a fair deal – Xenophon was excellent in all the warrior skills, a better spearman than Satyrus and already being watched for the Olympic Games as a boxer.
‘Deal,’ Xenophon said. ‘Do I get control of your diet, too?’
Melitta sat in the shade of the old town’s largest acacia tree. The priestess was a little younger than the tree, but not much.
‘Hathor does not need the worship of a Greek girl,’ she said.
Melitta bowed silently, her hands clasped. ‘I come seeking only wisdom,’ she said.
The priestess nodded and glanced at Philokles, who sat quietly, wrapped in just a chlamys. Egyptian women coming to pray for love or for children glanced at him. The nudity of Greek men never failed to amaze the natives of the oldest land. One young matron, probably younger than Melitta, tittered to her friend and stared at the Spartan, but she got no reaction from him.
Instead, he sighed and opened a purse. Reaching inside, he took out a number of silver coins and offered them to the priestess.
‘Of course, in return for proper respect, Hathor will teach all who come before her,’ the priestess said. ‘Are you a virgin?’
Melitta flicked a glance at her tutor. ‘No,’ she said.
‘Good,’ the priestess said. She smiled. ‘Greeks can be such prudes.’
Philokles coloured slightly.
When they had taken their leave, Philokles fetched his staff from where he had placed it against the temple wall and glared at her. ‘You are not a virgin?’ he asked.
She shrugged. ‘No woman can go to Hathor a virgin,’ she said. ‘My servants told me as much.’
‘So you went and lay with a slave boy? You could be pregnant. You will never marry.’ Philokles was biting his words, swaying slightly as he walked – drunk, and now angry. ‘You dishonour-’
‘Oh, Philokles,’ Melitta said. ‘For the love of all the gods, be quiet. When have I had the chance to get a man in my bed? Really? I lied. How will that old priestess ever know, do you think? Will she put a finger between my legs? Eh?’
‘Don’t be gross,’ Philokles said. His relief was obvious.
‘I am not a Greek girl! I am a Sakje, even here in the desert, and I will lie with whoever I please, and neither you nor my brother will gainsay me!’ She was going to go on about what age her mother had first copulated, but she held her tongue. Philokles was dangerous when drunk.
‘How many priests will I have to pay off so that you can explore divinity, child?’ Philokles asked.
‘Wasn’t it you who proposed that I should explore all the religions of the Delta?’ she asked. Her cork-soled sandals were getting to be too small. Everything was too small – her chitons risked scandal and her legs were too long and she was so obviously a girl that it took a major conspiracy of her uncle Diodorus and her uncle Coenus and her brother to get her time to ride in private, which was unfair. She visited temples because it was a pastime allowed to women, and it let her be out on the street, walking, in the heat and the sun and the flies. Today they had walked twenty stades to reach the old temple of Hathor, and now they would walk twenty stades back to the new city.
‘Don’t be cross, Philokles,’ she said.
He walked along next to her, trailing fumes of wine and garlic.
‘It’s boring! I have a brain! I have a body! I’d give anything to be a boy and spend an afternoon at Cimon’s drinking wine, hearing the news and getting my precious dick sucked.’
‘Melitta!’ Philokles snapped.
‘It’s not fair! Satyrus gets everything.’ She walked along more quickly, snuffling away a tear.
She could hear the thump of his staff as it hit the road behind her.
‘You were given too much liberty when you were young,’ Philokles said.
‘Donkey piss! And to think that I tell other girls that you are the smartest man in Alexandria! Donkey piss, Philokles. Let me go back to the sea of grass! Sakje doesn’t even have a word for virgin. But they have twenty words for smoking hemp, which you have forbidden me.’ She had the bit in her teeth.
Philokles stared straight ahead. ‘Only slaves smoke hemp. It is unseemly. ’
‘Slaves drink lots of wine, too.’ She stood and faced him in the road, and a two-wheeled donkey cart laden with rice from the Delta side of the port bumped past her, just missing her outflung elbow. ‘Let me have your wineskin. I’ll drink as much as you – no more.’
Philokles shook his head. ‘We have had this discussion before. And you are drawing a great many stares.’
Melitta blew out a great breath. ‘Men,’ she said to the hundreds of passers-by. Then she turned and walked on.
‘Are you calm enough for some news?’ Philokles asked some time later.
‘Yes,’ she said, her good humour restored by the sight of a troop of Aegyptian acrobats performing by a beer-house.
‘Your uncle Leon will be back today,’ he said.
‘Kallista told me as much when I awoke,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to do better than that.’
Philokles smiled. ‘That girl has – sources of information.’
‘She can get blood from a stone, and no mistake,’ Melitta said with great satisfaction.
‘Your uncle ran up the coast to the Euxine to see how the ground lies,’ Philokles said. ‘We hear that Heron is losing his grip on Pantecapaeum – and Ataelus has made great strides in the east.’ He grinned at his charge. ‘Ataelus has spent years harrying the Sauromatae and raiding Heron. If there is any resistance to Heron’s usurpation, it’s because Ataelus keeps it alive. We all owe Ataelus.’ He was silent, and then he said, ‘And Leon will be bringing Amastris back from Heraklea.’
‘Oh!’ She clapped her hands together. ‘Will she still be in love with my brother?’
Philokles appeared stung. ‘Amastris of Heraklea is in love with your brother?’
Melitta looked stricken. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t have mentioned it. Wait! That means we’re going back!’ Melitta said, and clapped her hands together. ‘No more Alexandria? Back to Tanais?’
Philokles looked around. ‘This is not to be shouted on a public thoroughfare, girl – but I won’t have you make a mistake that can warp your life because you don’t know what’s in the wind. Leon and Diodorus and I – we see a time coming when it would be worth trying.’
Melitta clapped her hands together again, stepped in and kissed the Spartan. ‘I knew you were the best. I must have armour!’ She pointed at her breasts. ‘My old corslet won’t even cover my chest.’
‘I can’t imagine how hard it must be to fight with those things,’ Philokles said, waving vaguely at her chest. ‘But you do it well enough.’ Philokles still gave her lessons in private, as did her brother. Theron had reverted to the Greek code – that no girl needed to know pankration.
‘I wish that someone would attack us,’ Melitta said, looking around. ‘A beautiful girl like me, and an old man like you – why don’t these people see us as easy meat?’
Philokles rolled his eyes.
Melitta continued, ‘A pity about Olympias and her assassins?’ She grinned. ‘They would have attacked us!’
Philokles shook his head. ‘She lost us in the desert. And now she’s dead.’
‘Good riddance,’ Melitta said with a shake of her head. ‘She’s one we didn’t need to use the oath against. Or perhaps I should say that Artemis got her before I could.’
‘Olympias had so many enemies that the gods needed no tool to bring her
down.’ Philokles shrugged. ‘Already nostalgic for the brave old days of age twelve and a half?’ he asked.
‘I used to do things,’ she said, in reply. ‘Now I just lie around watching my breasts grow.’
Philokles relented. ‘Listen, honey bee. When your uncle Leon is home, you’ll hear. But if Antigonus makes his summer campaign in Macedon, we’ll hire two thousand infantry and sail for Tanais.’
Melitta stepped up close to him, and her eyes bored into his although he was a head taller. ‘Promise me by all the gods that I’m going,’ she said.
Philokles met her gaze without flinching. ‘You are going,’ he said.
She threw her arms around him in the middle of the road. Heads turned. Philokles blushed.
‘May I tell Satyrus?’ she asked.
‘Best to wait. Leon will be home tonight.’ Philokles started to walk again. ‘I don’t like all the company your brother keeps.’
Melitta was quick to spring to her brother’s defence. ‘Who? You can’t object to Xenophon?’
‘Never in life, my dear. No, nor Abraham, for all that his father is a zealot. But Theodorus’s father would sell his mother for gain or social prestige, and that Dionysius-’ Philokles bit off his words.
Melitta had a different use for Dionysius, who, for all of his effete airs, had a beautiful body that he seldom hid and a wicked sense of humour. ‘Dionysius wrote a poem about my breasts,’ Melitta said.
Philokles quickened his pace. ‘I know. So does every man in the city.’
Melitta stuck her tongue out. ‘So? They’re right here. Everyone can see them. Why not read a poem about them?’ She bounced along, almost skipping, despite forty stades of walking. ‘What about that beautiful boy – Herakles?’ Just saying the name gave her a little tingle. ‘If my brother can have Amastris, perhaps I can have Herakles.’
‘Honey bee, Banugul is the last woman on earth that you want as a mother-in-law. All she wants is to make her son King of Kings.’ Philokles stopped to get a pebble out of his sandal. ‘Need I remind you that they are with Antigonus? Banugul is no doubt busy scheming.’
‘And yet you saved her, Master Philokles.’ Suddenly the bouncing gait was gone, and she eyed him appraisingly.
‘We saved her, my dear. And I did it, as did you, because the gods told us. Yes?’ Philokles raised an eyebrow.
‘I remember,’ she said.
When Philokles was in the mood to teach Satyrus lessons, he liked to say that the Greeks were used to colonization and cleruchy, rapid settlement and rapid building. Athens had dropped forts everywhere when she was queen of the seas, and Miletus had spread colonies the way a profligate spreads bastards. Greeks could move to a place, build a temple or two, run up some houses with the regularity of a marching camp, and before the architect could say ‘Parian Marble’, there was a new city. Or so the Spartan said.
But Alexandria represented city-founding on an unprecedented scale, as if someone had desired to create a new Athens or a new Corinth. Some said that it was the will of the God-King Alexander, and others that it was the solid administration of Ptolemy and the fifteen thousand talents of silver he drew from the treasury of Aegypt every year. Philosophers – and there was no shortage of them – gathered in the agora, or in the shade of the new library, so far just a pile of materials and some gardens – and debated the virtues and vices of mixing religions and races, of trade, of kingship.
But a new city lacks traditions and in their absence often creates new habits. In Athens or Corinth, men from the highest classes never drank in wine shops. They worked from their homes, held business meetings in their homes, threw parties, wild or decorous, in their homes. Virtue and vice were practised in the confines of the home. Satyrus had experienced it, had visited Athens repeatedly until Demetrios of Phaleron became the de-facto tyrant of Athens and Kineas’s son was one of the casualties of his regime. In Athens, where Satyrus owned a house, he might give a party – or he might go to a party. But if he were seen to buy wine or flute girls for his own use alone, he would be mocked. And the thought of going to a wine shop would be enough to label him a thetes, a low-class free man, and not a gentleman.
Philokles theorized that in Athens, the will of the people in the assembly – even under a tyrant – had the effect of minimizing private display of wealth. If you showed that you had too much, the people would vote that you should give an expensive entertainment or maintain a trireme or something equally ruinous.
Alexandria had a king, not an assembly, despite the fact that Ptolemy had not yet assumed the title or the formal honours of a king. The thousand richest men in the city competed to demonstrate the extent of their wealth and the beauty of their lives. Many competed in an old, Athenian way – by raising monuments, even by maintaining a trireme for the service of King Ptolemy. Uncle Leon was one of these. He maintained a squadron. His money had laid the foundation of the Temple of Poseidon. He was always in the public service.
Other men, however, used their money in different ways – to keep beautiful mistresses, to give lavish parties on a scale unknown in Athens, to dress in silks brought overland from Serica, a hundred thousand stades, or in the finest wools from Bactria, dyed in the most elaborate colours from Tyre and Asia.
Philokles despised all this display and often spoke against it, and he said that the outcome was places like Cimon’s, because if men had clothes worth twenty talents of silver, they needed a place to wear them – and that the kind of man who spent twenty talents on a chiton was not the kind of man to maintain the perfection of his body in the gymnasium or the perfection of his mind in the agora.
Philokles said that in Sparta or Athens – two cities often presented as contrasts, but Satyrus’s Spartan tutor said they had more in common with each other than either had with Alexandria – a man went to the gymnasium and to the agora to show that his body was ready to serve the state in war, and his mind ready to serve the state in peace. Satyrus loved it when Philokles spoke in such a fashion, and he could quote the Spartan at length, and he often thought about his words when he walked.
Even when he walked to Cimon’s.
Cimon’s stood among a row of hastily built private houses backing on the sea. The low bluff on which they were built allowed the owners to catch the sea breeze after the rest of the city had lost it, and the houses had been built in the first flush of the city’s wealth, back in the decade after the founding.
But fashions change. When Ptolemy began building the royal palace complex, the western end of the city became unfashionable, the home of warehouses and workers. A few wealthy Macedonians hung on, but most moved, if only to be close to the seat of power. Many of them had never finished their houses, and few of them had ever been landscaped or had gardens planted, so that the neighbourhood appeared ruinous, as if a conquering army had swept through, stealing mulberry bushes.
But Cimon’s was an island of green. The first owner had gardened himself, importing plants from the interior of Africa and from all over the sea. When he died and Cimon the public slave purchased his property, Cimon had purchased the gardeners with the land. Inside, the former owner had arranged for expert painters to render scenes from the Iliad and Odyssey, from Alexander’s conquests, and from the tales of the gods in brilliant gesso work, so that a bored patron might feel as if he watched the siege of Troy – or, in some rooms, the rape of Helen.
Satyrus understood the philosophical reasons why Cimon’s was bad for him and bad for the city, but he loved the place – the quiet green alcoves, the hard-edged mirth of the pornai and the flute girls, the acrobats and the broiled tuna and the art, the gossip and the fights.
‘What can I get the hero of the hour?’ asked Thrassylus, the former slave who acted as the steward of the house. You could always gauge your status in a heartbeat with Thrassylus, and the oiled Phrygian seemed to know every nuance of gossip from every quarter. ‘Ptolemy clasped your hand? And sacrificing for your uncle? What splendid piety, young master. Wine?’ A Spartan cup
was put in Satyrus’s hand – other cups went to Abraham, Xeno and Theo – and wine was poured from a silver pitcher while they all sat in the entrance hall. Two children, a boy and a girl – twins, he could see – washed his feet.
‘Aren’t they adorable?’ Thrassylus said. ‘I bought them today.’
The girl washed his hands. She had a serious expression on her face and her tongue showed between her teeth. ‘Yes,’ Satyrus said, with his usual unease about slaves.
‘Kline?’ Thrassylus asked, referring to the long couches on which well-off Greeks reclined to eat and drink. ‘I have the whole of the seaward garden open, young master.’
Satyrus nodded, and his party was escorted past the two main rooms, where dozens of young men, and a few past youth, cavorted with each other and with the house’s numerous offerings.
‘May we have Phiale, Thrassylus?’ Satyrus asked. Phiale was a genuine hetaira, a free woman who sometimes acted as an escort and sometimes as a hostess. In addition to her beauty – a particular, square-jawed beauty that was not the typical fare among hetairai – she played the kithara and sang, often composing mocking songs to tease her clients.
Phiale had consented a year before to deprive Satyrus of his virginity. Satyrus suspected that his uncle had paid her for the service, as she was very choosy about her clients, and ever since she had treated him with warmth and a certain reserve – as if she was a distant cousin, he had joked to Abraham.
‘I will see if she is at leisure,’ Thrassylus said with a bow. ‘She is with us this afternoon.’
Abraham laughed. ‘She’s a little over our heads, don’t you think?’ he asked.
Xeno beamed. He liked Phiale, and she didn’t make him uncomfortable the way the pornai and the flute girls did, an aspect of his friend that Satyrus understood perfectly.
Theo, on the other hand, pouted. ‘I want a flute girl to play my flute,’ he said. ‘Phiale drives them all away.’
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