I gave them a list of supplies.
“Oh, and I’ll need a metal smith. Someone working on the project full time until it’s operating.”
“Ok. Tros will find you someone once we get back to Athens.”
Tros nodded. “I know a guy. He can make anything. Works in either copper or bronze. Iron too, I think.”
“And we’ll need a place to work. Preferably away from the city. We’ll need some pretty large fires and there is a small danger of explosion.”
Megakreon grumbled. “You’ll ruin me! Ok. I’ll rent you a small farm outside the city. I warn you, I’ll have you flayed if you are playing me for a fool!”
I smiled at him and saluted them both with the wineskin. “I know you will.” And I took a deep drink.
We went to eat.
Melite ran up to me as soon as she saw me. “What happened? Are you alright? I was so worried!”
I gave her a big kiss without thinking “He’s going to back us! We leave tomorrow!”
“We’re going to Athens?”
My heart fell. We weren’t going anywhere. I was leaving her. And Eleni and Cilo and Gelo.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can and I’ll free you and Eleni and Cilo. I promise.”
She looked at me with the eyes of someone who had lived her whole life without hope. “Ok. I know you will.”
“No, I promise! As soon as I can!”
She put on a small smile and kissed my cheek. “It’s ok if you don’t. Just don’t forget about me. Ok?”
I held her hand as we ate our dinner and told my last story on the farm, a version of ‘The Maltese Falcon’ that I had been working on for a while. It gave me a chance to fix something that’s always bothered me about that story.
There’s a part in the story (at least in the movie version) where Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) has the Maltese Falcon hidden and is daring The Fat Man (Sidney Greenstreets) to shoot him, knowing that he can’t if he wants to know the location of the Falcon. Bogart says to Greenstreets something like “Your threats are no good. See?. None of it’s any good if it hasn’t got the threat of death behind it.”
But these slaves and I know differently. We know that strong men, brave men, loyal men, break at the mere sound of the whip. The threat of death can seem like a relief. It’s the threat of pain, the threat of a life even worse than this one, thats the real leverage.
Tros wanted me to sleep that night in the overseer’s house, but I couldn’t bear the idea of being in the same room with these men. I knew they were like me, just trying to make the best life for themselves that they could, but I couldn’t forgive them. A successful slave is an abomination, even though I would have been like them if I had been given the chance. I would use the whip a thousand times on someone else rather than have it used on me once, but I couldn’t forgive the ones who wielded the whips, for the same reason.
So, I slept in the dormitory. The men all knew I was going away and they looked at me with an odd combination of envy and pity. All slaves know that every place is better than this place. The hours shorter, the work lighter, the food better. Unless it’s worse.
In the morning we said our goodbyes to Eleni and Cilo and Gelo. Melite was nowhere to be seen and I guess it was just as well.
Part Two: The Great God Einstein
Chapter 13
The brain is the center of thought, emotions and perception. It is a semi-differentiated organ with certain parts more or less dedicated to providing certain services. For example there is a visual processing center and a separate auditory processing center and a separate speech processing center, but there is also some degree of plasticity.
Book of Questionable Facts – 1625
They had come out in a cart, drawn by an actual horse, who actually drew the cart without complaint, so we made it back to Athens with plenty of daylight left.
Koré was grudgingly happy to see me and she made up a bed for me in the same small room where I had slept before. Isodemos was ungrudgingly happy to see me and apologized again for his (imagined) betrayal. We were a happy family again!
That night Megakreon invited Tros and me to eat with him in the large room where he usually ate. On a wax tablet we made lists of purchases and planned our project. In the morning, I slept late for the first time in months, while Tros was off in the city buying supplies, renting a small farm and hiring a bronze smith. He returned late in the day and we met again with Megakreon.
“Ok. I’ve hired a smith and have most of the supplies coming. Robert, we’ll leave tomorrow to look at a couple of farms that are available and might meet your needs.”
Megakreon looked over the list of purchases and groaned.
So, the next day Tros and I were on the road together again. This time the mood was decidedly more upbeat. As we walked (Malthake stayed home), we talked the same kinds of fantasy talk as Melite and I. What we would do once we were free. In some ways we thought small. All we really wanted was to be free and with the ones we loved. In other ways we thought big. All we really wanted was to be free with the ones we loved.
We rented the second farm that we looked at. It was well suited for our needs. The farm buildings were well back from the road, so nobody passing by would see anything strange, it had a largish storage building and a separate forge area. It also had a large wood pile that we could use for fuel before cutting our own.
And because the buildings were in kind of poor repair and it didn’t have any large farmable fields it was relatively cheap. We were spending Megakreon’s money, true, but since our deal counted only profits towards our freedom, I wanted to operate as cheaply as possible.
We returned to the city, met up with our metal smith, collected our supplies, ordered others for delivery and hitched Malthake to the cart. In 6 days we were on the farm working.
I instructed our smith that I needed a large copper vat, big enough for a man to stand in, with a removable conical top and the top needed two holes, one directly on top, like an upside-down funnel, and the other, larger, and near the rim. He had never seen a screw before so I showed him the basic idea (drawing crudely in the dirt, and then, when that failed to convey the concept, making a crude wooden example. Once he had the idea he produced a workable screw. He couldn’t, however, make a nut. There was no way to make the interior threads. So we made the screws pointed and used chunks of wood as nuts.
The screws were used to connect the removable top to the bottom of the vat. We used some cloth soaked in some kind of sticky pitch-like goo (ok – I’m not really sure what pitch is – but it’s black (pitch black) and sticky, and so was this stuff), and we had a basically air-tight seal.
While the smith, Fotis, was building the vat, Tros and I received supplies and prepared our marketing plan. They didn’t seem to have much of an idea about how to market things. Even an experienced merchant like Megakreon seemed to do everything by personal contact and without much thought for marketing or branding or anything similar. I also didn’t know much, but I’d been to subject of a lifetime of marketing manipulation and so I had at least some ideas.
The vat took longer than I had hoped, but in about 20 days he had the whole thing ready, vat, top, screws and the long tube I’d asked him to fit into the hole at the very top. This part of the project took so long because he had to make everything by hand. We had been able to buy some fairly good size sheets of hammered copper, but all the connections, rivets, welds, tubes, screws, etc he had to make alone in a laborious process.
At least 5 times a day Fotis asked me what he was building and each time I just smiled at him and told him it was a surprise. I’d begun smiling with my teeth again and he was always taken a little aback.
The night after we first filled the vat with water and found no leaks we celebrated. We’d received a shipment of wine a few days earlier and we got good and drunk.
The next day we were all hung-over, but the work continued. Fotis asked me if we would be needing help after the vat was done. I’d planned on sending him ba
ck to the city, but he told me that his master gave him 1 part in 5 of the money he earned and he needed the work. I hadn’t known he was a slave too! And, of course, he was saving to buy his freedom. So, of course, I told him to stay and help.
Finally everything was ready. We stoked a big fire in the forge and placed the vat over the flames. We filled the vat and seated the top and fitted the top tube, I put a pitch soaked cloth in the second hole to seal it and we screwed down the top.
It took us more than 10 days to finally get it right, making the tube shorter and longer and messing with different adjustments to the heat. I tested each result by touching a sample with a burning stick. Finally one day I was rewarded by a flickering blue flame!
We had a product! Of course, to celebrate we got drunk. But not on wine. We got drunk on the world’s first brandy!
I’d built a still and distilled some of the horrible ancient wine into a passable brandy (surprising really, since everything I knew about distilling I’d learned from Snuffy Smith)! Not only was this the world’s first brandy, it was going to be the last for a long time.
We had giant clay jars filled with fermenting grain and we were going to be producing vodka for the foreseeable future.
A neutral spirit like vodka is soooo useful! Of course, you can drink it. It never goes bad (although it will evaporate). It can be used as a smokeless lamp fuel and (this is how I got the idea when Melite cut her hand) it can be used as an antiseptic to clean wounds and sterilize things like bandages.
We were going to be marketing our vodka for many different uses and we were going to corner or create many different markets. In short we were going to be rich! And free!
And free!
As I explained all this to Fotis in a drunken slur his eyes got wide and his mouth hung open.
“How do you know all this? You are like Prometheus! What god sent you this revelation?”
“All this knowledge was delivered to me by the great god Jack Daniels!”
“Where is his temple? I want to make an offering!”
“Fotis my friend, you are sitting in the main temple of the great god and I, myself, am his high priest!”
I was just joking, of course, but Fotis took it seriously. I thought about setting him straight, but I didn’t want him talking to anybody about the work he’d done and he seemed like a true believer, so I just kept letting him believe. I told him that the god was pleased with his work, but that he needed to keep the god’s magic process a secret. I always expected him to catch on, that it was all bullshit, but he never did.
It’s not that he was stupid, or even gullible.
He had seen a completely new and marvelous thing emerge from something old and familiar in a time when new things didn’t really exist. Everything in his life was exactly the same as it had been for his parents and grandparents and back as far as they could remember. There were political changes (I had read the history of the Persian war), but not much in the way of technological changes.
And here he was, using his old skills to make something completely new and different and useful! So, when I told him that supernatural powers were involved, it seemed to him just like a natural explanation.
Tros and I took a few jars of our Robert Daniels brand brandy into Athens to Megakreon. By way of demonstrating our product we got drunk. As we sat around in the mellow afterglow of our belly full of brandy, I took out an oil lamp we had bought in the agora and demonstrated how it could be used as a smokeless lamp fuel. It didn’t give off much light, but neither did the oil lamps they used.
He was impressed. And drunk. As were we all. He immediately authorized the money we needed to move into full operation.
Tros stayed in the city the next day to buy our supplies and I returned to the farm to help Fotis process the first of the fermented grain. We had to make some adjustments to the still but we soon had a nice clear 80 or 90 proof vodka in production.
Tros returned with a cart full of copper sheets and Fotis started work on a second still. Soon wagons full of grain (mostly barley, but some wheat that had gone bad) and clay storage jars and other supplies started arriving.
We worked in shifts tending the still, checking the fermentation jars and filling jars and skins with distilled vodka.
In a short time we had enough vodka ready to begin sales. I asked Megakreon to arrange a drinking party (a symposium) at the house of an influential friend of his. His friend Phidias was a sculptor who had worked on the recently completed Parthenon and Acropolis projects. He was famous in Athens and his approval would give us valuable market cache. It was like a celebrity endorsement.
Megakreon agreed to provide the “wine” for the party. I advised Megakreon to provide a variety of fruit juices to mix with the vodka.
The party was a huge hit! The experience of mixing delicious fresh fruit juices with vodka instead of the horrid wine they usually drank was all they could talk about. And as they drank more and got drunker they enjoyed it more. As the night progressed, I advised Megakreon to make the drinks lighter. We didn’t want anyone to get drunk to the point of being sick. I’d turned Megakreon into the world’s first bartender!
The next week he hosted 2 more parties and then a couple of weeks later once interest had grown, we rented a table in the agora and opened for sales. We priced our vodka at a price about 15 times an equivalent amount of wine and sold out in a day.
I returned to the farm, not only with supplies to make more vodka, but with specially made clay jars that had our brand mark.
I also brought 2 helpers. Fotis soon initiated them into the cult of the great god Jack Daniels and they were true believers in short order. I began to see the value of this religion. I wanted to keep control of the market, at least until I had enough money to free myself and my friends and by initiating all our workers into the cult we could maintain security on the processes.
We were selling a jar of about a gallon size for 13 drachmas. Each jar cost us about 1.5 drachmas to make so we had a gross profit of about 11.5 drachmas. Other costs ate up about 1 drachma, leaving us with a net profit of about 10 drachmas. Megakreon had invested about 4500 drachmas in the operation, so we needed to sell about 1100 jars to reach the point where I would be free with enough money to free Eleni, Cilo and Melite. We could produce about 150 jars a month with our current production, so in something like 8 months we should all be free!
As production ramped up to capacity, we were all feeling stress. Our operation was bare bones and everyone had to work as hard as possible. We needed support staff. Someone to do all the non-production things. Keep the schedules, ensure that orders were received and shipments went out on time, basic operations.
Next time I was in the city I talked to Megakreon.
“We need to bring in some more help.”
“Why? I’ve seen the operation. It looks like you’ve got all the people you need to operate the apparatus.”
“We have barely enough to run the 2 stills and manage the process.”
“Barely enough is enough. I’m trying to make some money.”
“We need someone for other things. Support operations. Someone to keep us on schedule, make sure there is always fermented grain to distill, that we have enough jars, hundreds of things that we don’t have time to do. And I know just the right person, or persons actually.”
“He threw up his hands in frustration. “Who? And how much is it going to cost me?”
“They’re slaves on Cleon’s farm.”
“No! I’m running a business! Not collecting all your slave friends!”
I looked at him as hard as I could. “I’m running a business. You are already seeing money flowing in. I’m telling you we need these people. I need people I can trust. When you are the richest man in Athens will you really miss the cost of a few farm slaves?”
He sighed “Ok, I’ll see what I can do. Who are they?”
“Two women, Eleni and Melite and Tros’ daughter Cilo.”
He started to prot
est, then said. “Ok. Megakreon understands family. I’ll talk to Cleon. But I’m going to take the cost out of your share!”
And so it was that one morning I found Melite standing over me as I slept, a bowl of gruel in her hands. It was the same horrible gruel that we had been eating (made out of the same barley we used for the vodka), but it tasted better when she made it.
Megakreon was there too. He told me that Melite was still owned by Cleon, but he was renting her and also that Cleon refused to rent or sell Eleni and, of course, Cilo would stay with her mother.
At first, I was surprised that Cleon wouldn’t sell or rent Eleni, but then I remembered about her and Belos and it made sense. Cleon would rather keep Belos, his main overseer, happy than earn a few obols.
As soon as Megakreon left us, Melite threw herself into my arms and kissed me. I pushed her back. “I want you to know that I brought you here to work because I trust you and know you’ll do a good job. You don’t have to make any kind of trade with me. I don’t want you to feel obligated to any kind of relationship with me.”
She punched me lightly in the chest. “Shut up, stupid” and she kissed me again and I didn’t say anything more but just kissed her and held her and enjoyed the feeling of contact and warmth and normalcy.
But all too soon it was time to work. Melite quickly set about her job and within a short time we all recognized her as the boss. She kept us on schedule, keep the stills working and ensured that we had everything we needed to produce at peak capacity.
Melite and I curtained off a little corner of the sleeping space for ourselves and we settled into a happy routine. We worked hard, but because we had a goal and were making progress, it was happy work. It was a happy time.
Things were harder for Tros. He couldn’t understand why Cleon wouldn’t let Eleni and Cilo go. He didn’t know what I knew and it just didn’t make sense. He suspected Megakreon of simply not asking for them, just to save money. I tried to convince him that Megakreon had done his best, but I could feel the tension growing between them. And also between Tros and me.
A New York Lawyer in the Court of Pericles Page 9