by Corby, Gary
The Panathenaic Way continued along the northern edge of the agora, then down the eastern side. I came to the temple of Hephaestion, which is surrounded by statues of heroes and gods, and then finally to the marketplace, the perfect opportunity to stop for a cup of wine, to sit in the shade of one of the stoas where men liked to congregate, and to watch the crowds as they haggled. I bought the cheapest vintage I could find and walked away with it in a clay cup. I sipped the wine and stood back to watch the chaos that is the agora of Athens.
Any man who wished to sell his wares that day had paid a permit fee to the state official who oversaw such things, then set up his stall. Each stall was a rickety affair, with a crate at each end and a plank across for a bench. The stalls had to be put up with a minimum of fuss at first light, and come down when it was too dark to trade any longer.
Many of the stalls were manned—if that’s the word—by women: the wives of the men who had rented them. The fishwives sold the catch, and swore loudly as they did. Their fish-smelling husbands had already worked a full day and now had to tend their boats and mend their nets back at the port at Piraeus before they could sleep. Likewise the farmers’ wives had walked into town with their husbands, in the dim dawn light, to sell the farm’s vegetables. The men erected stalls for their women to work from, and then returned to tend the farms. So too for the pottery and the bronze ware: the women of the family traded while the potters potted. In Athens, every business was a family business. I reflected that this was true for me as well. My fiancée Diotima had been my work partner from the moment we met, and that wouldn’t change after we married.
The children of the traders ran in and out among the legs of the shoppers. Sometimes a child might run into a leg, and then an irritated shopper might give the child a whack about the head, but for the most part the men and women in the agora were tolerant of the children at their feet. And no wonder, because these children were our future. In Athens—in all of Hellas—to survive to adulthood was a minor miracle. There were too many diseases, too many infections, too many ways for a child to die.
There’d been an explosion of babies after the Persian Wars. I’d been one of them. Soldiers who’d fought throughout the duration came home to their wives, and ten months later the midwives had more work than they could handle. It was a good thing, too, because the loss of life had been fearful. Athens desperately needed to renew her citizens. Athenians prayed to Hestia, the goddess of the hearth, that not too many of the children would die before they grew.
I returned home to find my fiancée and my mother together in our courtyard. Diotima stood on a statue plinth—my father being a sculptor, we had plenty of spares—with her arms stretched out to both sides. She was a woman of extraordinary beauty, two years my younger, with long, dark tresses that lay curled that moment over her shoulders. My mother, Phaenarete, held a measuring stick to her side and frowned in concentration.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
My mother, with several sewing needles in her mouth, mumbled, “Measuring her for the wedding dress, of course.”
“You want a new dress for your wedding?” I said to my intended. “Don’t you already have enough dresses?”
Both of them gave me scathing looks. My mother continued with her measurements.
“How did the meeting with Pericles go?” Diotima asked, quite deliberately changing the subject.
“Interesting,” I said. “I have more work.” I told her the tale of the strange skull. Diotima listened and didn’t move a muscle, which was most unlike her, but she probably didn’t want a needle stuck in her while my mother fussed about. When I came to the dead girl and the missing one, my mother gasped and almost choked on the needles. After she’d spat them out, she said, “That’s awful!”
I’d known Mother would be displeased. Phaenarete was a midwife and had strong views about children.
But Diotima’s reaction astonished me. She staggered backward. She almost fell off the plinth, but managed to step off at the last moment. There were several dining couches in our courtyard. Diotima collapsed onto the nearest and put a hand to her head.
“Diotima, what’s wrong?” I said. “Are you all right?”
“Nico, they killed these girls at the sanctuary at Brauron?”
“Yes. Why? Have you heard of it?”
“Of course I’ve heard of it,” she snapped at me, but I could hear the tears forming. “I spent a year there. Nico, I used to be one of those girls. That was my school.”
At that moment the house slave walked in to tell me there was a man at the door, demanding to see me. He couldn’t have sounded unhappier if he’d been announcing a plague victim. The house slaves had never reconciled themselves to my chosen trade.
“Something about a dead man,” the slave said, and jerked his thumb at the front door. “He says he wants to confess to murder.”
“MY NAME IS Glaucon. I’ve come about the death of Hippias,” the visitor said.
We spoke in the andron, the room at the front of every house reserved for men to talk business. I’d directed the slave to take Glaucon there.
Glaucon was an older man, perhaps fifty. Well, that was no surprise. Fifty was the minimum age for anyone who might have information about a death that had happened thirty years ago.
“How did you hear about me?” I asked.
“Word is passing among all the veterans of Marathon. They say the body of Hippias has been found.”
“That’s supposed to be a secret. Only Pericles and the archons and their assistants know.”
“Oh, word gets around,” he said vaguely.
“I see.” I guessed the assistants to the archons had been talking.
“I’ve come to confess,” Glaucon said. “I killed Hippias.”
I blinked and waited for the punch line, but then I realized he wasn’t joking.
Glaucon said, “When I heard you were on the case, I realized there was no hope of hiding my crime. My best chance was to throw myself on the mercy of the Athenian people.”
I rubbed my hands and tried not to look too gleeful. This was going to be my fastest case yet. Pericles would be amazed. But still, I had to make sure. There was one vital point.
I asked, “What of the girls, the dead one and the missing one? Is she still alive? Where is she?”
Glaucon looked at me with an odd expression. He said, “What girls?”
It was my turn to be perplexed. “You don’t know?”
“I’d appreciate it if you could announce my guilt as soon as possible,” Glaucon said. “Could they schedule my trial for this month, do you think?”
The door slammed open. There stood a complete stranger, an older man with gray hair, who if his straight back and wide shoulders were anything to go by was in good shape. The house slave stood obscured behind him, jumping to see over the intruder’s shoulder. Our slave was beside himself with anxiety. “He pushed his way in, master! I couldn’t stop him. I’m sorry—”
“What has this mountebank been telling you?” the stranger demanded, glaring at Glaucon.
“Who are you?” I said.
“My name is Hegestratus. I’m a candidate for the post of city treasurer in the next election.”
“So?”
“So Glaucon is running, too.”
“I fail to see the relevance,” I told him. “Glaucon has this moment confessed to the murder of Hippias, the last tyrant of Athens.”
“That’s utter bull droppings,” snapped Hegestratus.
“How do you know?” I challenged him.
“Because I killed Hippias. I’ve come to confess.”
AS THE DAY progressed, a small queue of men lined up outside our door, all waiting to confess to the murder of Hippias. They had one thing in common: every one of them was a candidate in the coming elections. Every one of them wanted to enhance his chances by being known as the killer of the most hated man in the city’s history. There wasn’t the slightest danger to the men in confessing. No jury
in Athens would convict them.
There were so many I had to enlist Diotima to take notes.
“It’s ridiculous,” I groaned. “Why are we doing this?”
“Because everyone wants to know the name of the man who killed Hippias,” Diotima said. “So they can congratulate him.”
“We’ll have to work out who really killed Hippias, and then announce the lucky winner.”
“That will be tricky, since it probably happened thirty years ago, and we don’t even know how he died,” Diotima pointed out. “The skull’s nice, but a body would help, even if it’s only a skeleton.”
“Yes, it would.” I’d taken the remains with me, Pericles not having any use for an extra skull. I set it on the table, and Diotima and I had stared at it in fascination. The one thing we knew for sure was that the victim hadn’t been knocked on the head: the bone was all in place.
“How many confessions does that make?” I asked Diotima.
Diotima ran her finger down the list and frowned. “Thirty-six,” she said.
“It must have been a crowded murder scene.”
“Very,” Diotima agreed. “Especially since four of them claim to have decapitated Hippias with their swords. Ten knifed him in the chest, eight used spears, and most of the rest strangled him. I wonder if that was before or after the first four had cut off his head?”
There was nothing we could do about it now. We heard a banging on the door, huge resounding thumps. I’d recognize that ham-fisted knocking anywhere: it was Pythax, Diotima’s stepfather, and with him would be Diotima’s mother, Euterpe.
Diotima and I looked at each other in despair. We were scheduled to marry at the next full moon; our fathers had signed the agreement. Now our parents were about to meet, all four together, for the first time.
CHAPTER TWO
I LIKED THE IDEA of being married, I just didn’t like the idea of getting married.
Getting married meant a ceremony. I disliked ceremonies at the best of times. But worse than that, planning our wedding required my family to talk to Diotima’s family, and that was a disaster of such epic proportions as to make the Trojan War look like a mild disagreement.
“A small, private affair, with close friends attending,” my mother, Phaenarete, said.
“I was thinking more along the lines of all the best families in Athens,” said Euterpe, the mother of my bride. Euterpe was a former high-class courtesan and desperate to establish herself in respectable society.
“I’m afraid that’s impossible,” said my mother. She’d been quietly respectable all her life. “We couldn’t possibly find room for that many people.”
What she left unsaid was that we couldn’t possibly afford to feed them either.
“We gotta have my guardsmen there,” said Pythax.
“You want to invite slaves to a citizen wedding?” said my father, Sophroniscus, utterly aghast.
“They’re my buddies,” Pythax growled. “They’d be insulted if I didn’t.” Pythax was a new-made citizen, who through his enormous merit had risen from being a slave himself to command of the Scythian Guard of Athens, the men who enforce the peace. Pythax had a foot on each side of the social divide: not comfortable in his new milieu, but no longer at home in his old.
“I forbid it!” said Sophroniscus, his face purple.
“Who’s paying for this?” Pythax demanded.
“We both are,” Sophroniscus replied.
It was part of the wedding contract. Each of our fathers thought the other was the richer. They both thought they’d gotten a good deal in the marriage contract. Little did they know they were each as poor as the other, and Diotima and I weren’t about to tell them. It meant both our fathers were constantly thinking of reasons why the other should pay for things.
“Pythax, dear husband,” said Euterpe. “We couldn’t possibly have your friends at the ceremony. Think what the good families would say.”
“My friends aren’t good enough for you?” Pythax said to his wife.
All four parents fell to arguing.
Diotima and I stood to the side, listening to this disaster in the making. “They can’t agree on one single thing,” Diotima whispered to me.
“No.”
Diotima looked close to tears. This was her wedding day they were destroying. I caught her hand and led her from the house. Even when we stood outside the house, we could still hear the raised voices. So we walked away.
Diotima and I sat, disconsolate, on a low wall at the end of the street. Beside us was a herm, a bust of the god Hermes with an erect phallus carved into its base. The city was dotted with herms; they were meant to bring good luck to those who passed, but I doubted they could do much with difficult parents.
“This is going to be the worst wedding ever,” Diotima said. I’d heard men condemned to death sound more cheerful.
I put an arm around her. “No it won’t. The worst wedding ever was the one we performed for ourselves, when we were stuck in that prison.”
Diotima looked up at me. “There’s not a day goes by that I don’t look back on what we did in that prison as the happiest moment of my life. No, that was my true wedding.”
“We thought we were about to die,” I pointed out.
“Irrelevant.”
I didn’t recall thinking so at the time, but I wasn’t about to argue.
Some small boys had been sidling up to the herm beside us, obviously wondering how they could vandalize it without us noticing. I picked up a handful of pebbles and threw them at the junior criminals. “Go away.”
They scattered.
“That was cruel, Nico.”
“Nah. There’s another herm on the corner they’re running toward. They can vandalize that one. But they won’t be able to break off its phallus.”
“Why not?”
“I did it myself, when I was their age. No one ever fixed it.”
A woman walked up the street. She stopped outside our house, hesitated for a moment, then knocked on the door. She looked up and down the street, then started to walk away. At that instant the house slave opened the door. The slave and the woman talked. The slave shook his head.
I said, “That’s odd. I wonder who she is?”
“Who?” Diotima had been watching the boys run down the street.
“That woman just knocked on our door, but then she walked away.”
Then I remembered that Pericles had sent a priestess to tell me more about the mysterious skull. This must be she. In the excitement of Glaucon coming to confess, I’d forgotten all about it, forgotten even to tell Diotima.
Diotima looked, and looked again, and then her jaw dropped.
The lady came our way. She stopped in front of us.
“Hello, Diotima,” she said. “You’ve grown since I saw you last.”
“You know this lady?” I said to Diotima.
With the muffled voices of our parents arguing in the background, which surely the lady could hear but was too polite to mention, Diotima said, in slightly strangled tones, “Nico, I’d like you to meet Doris. She was my teacher.”
“I AM THE priestess Doris, from the Temple of Artemis in the deme of Brauron,” she said to me.
The priestess Doris was a lady of late middle age. Her hair was gray, held back with a simple clasp of silver that was designed for practicality rather than display. The chiton she wore was of heavy linen and the oldest style; it covered her from shoulders to ankles, respectable and unpretentious. Her sandals were heavy-duty and very dusty, as well they might be since that same day she had walked to Athens.
It was obvious from her carriage, her gentle accent, and the manner of her speech that here was a well-born lady of a certain age; everything about her was simple and composed. I found myself liking Doris, and I was deeply intrigued that she had known Diotima long before I had.
We had escorted Doris to the town house that had once belonged to Diotima’s birth father, and which Diotima had inherited a year ago. At the town house
we had privacy. The alternative was to take Doris to my home, where our parents continued their long, loud argument over the wedding plans.
Diotima was an heiress. Technically, once we were married, the town house would become mine to manage on her behalf. In practice, I didn’t know if we could afford the upkeep. Although Diotima was coming to me with property, there was no income to speak of at all; we would have to rely on my earnings as an agent—those would be the earnings Pericles hadn’t paid—and the upkeep on a city house is expensive. Besides which, the pressure on us to move in with my parents was enormous. That was the tradition for newlyweds.
Diotima’s town house was empty but for three slaves to maintain it. The chief of these was Achilles, a dapper little man with crippled ankles, whence his slave name.
I had promised Achilles his freedom if Diotima survived our first assignment, an adventure in which he’d had some minor involvement, but Diotima had preempted me by herself offering to free him. Achilles had refused; a slave doesn’t have to accept freedom if he doesn’t want it. Achilles had explained with these words: “I’m an old man, Mistress Diotima,” he’d said. “I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if you freed me now. Please don’t send me away.”
What he’d not said, in his slave’s pride, but which Diotima had divined at once, was that a free man can starve, while a slave will be cared for so long as the family has food to put on the table. It’s a sacred obligation. So Diotima had sworn an oath to Achilles, that she would care for him to the end of his days and never sell him, and Achilles in his gratitude had become her devoted servant.