The Seven Wonders: A Novel of the Ancient World

by Steven Saylor

  Seeing Antipater’s behavior at the Olympiad, I realized that, though I had known him most of my life, in some ways my old teacher was still a mystery to me.

  When all the punching, poking, bone crunching, arm bending, and general mayhem was finally over, Protophanes emerged victorious in the pankration. His face was bloody, one eye was swollen shut, and his whole body was covered with scrapes and bruises, but his grin was brighter than ever as he accepted his victor’s wreath—his second of the Games, for not only did he win the pankration, but the wrestling competition as well, a feat that thrilled Antipater.

  “Hercules was the first to win both wrestling and pankration,” he gushed, “and in all the hundreds of years since then, only three others have done the same. Now Protophanes is the fourth. His fame shall outlast us all!”

  “Even the fame of Antipater of Sidon, Teacher?”

  Antipater sighed. “What is the achievement of a mere poet, compared to that of an Olympic victor?”

  To his credit, Protophanes was gracious in victory. After the closing ceremonies, and the procession in which the victors were showered with leaves, he sought me out in the crowd.

  “Gordianus! What did you think of the Games?”

  “Grueling,” I said.

  “Indeed! But to those of us who win, it’s worth all the effort.”

  “I’m sure. But may I be candid? The so-called spirit of the Games eludes me. Such a fuss is made about the ideals of sportsmanship, discipline, piety, and fair play, yet the contests themselves seem to me sweaty, hectic, brutish, and violent. What’s touted as a gathering in honor of sport simmers just beneath the surface with politics and intrigue; we even witnessed a murder! And the unspoken tension between Greek pride and Roman hegemony casts a shadow over everything. It makes me wonder about the times we live in, and the customs men live by—‘O tempora! O mores!’ as my father says in our native Latin.”

  Protophanes looked at me blankly. Somewhere along the way I had lost him.

  “I suppose you’ll be off to the victors’ banquet now,” said Antipater, sighing at the thought of all the winners gathered in one place.

  “Yes, and what a feast it’s going to be! But before I go, I wanted to settle a debt.”

  “A debt?” I said.

  “To you, Gordianus. If they’d blamed me for the Cynic’s death, I’d never have been allowed to take the oath. You took care of that! The city fathers of Magnesia have promised to be very generous to me—doubly generous, since I’ll be taking home not one but two Olympic wreaths.” He held forth a leather pouch. “This is all the money I brought with me, but I won’t be needing it now—rich men will be fighting each other to provide my lodging and to pay for my dinners all the way home. So I want you to have it.”

  He pressed the money bag into my hands. It felt quite heavy.

  “But I couldn’t—”

  “Don’t be modest, Gordianus. Cynicism gets a man nowhere in this life—and neither does modesty. But if you take my advice, you’ll donate whatever portion you can afford to the Temple of Zeus. It’s Zeus who makes all things possible. Zeus gave me victory, and I have no doubt it was Zeus who opened your eyes to the truth about the Cynic’s death. Now I must be off. Safe journeys to you! If you should ever get to Magnesia, look me up.”

  “What a fellow!” whispered Antipater, watching him depart. “And what a windfall for you, Gordianus. You should heed his advice, and donate every drachma to Zeus.”

  I frowned. “A good part of it, perhaps, but not every drachma, surely.”

  “But what would you spend it on? I’ve seen you in the market. You care nothing for all the trinkets and souvenirs for sale.”

  “I did see a couple of desirable items,” I said, remembering the blond and brunette who had sauntered by on our first day, as tall as Amazons and wearing chitons no more substantial than a spider’s web. I wondered if they were still in Olympia.

  V

  Interlude in Corinth:

  THE WITCH’S CURSE

  On our journey to see the Seven Wonders, Antipater and I saw much else along the way. As a poet, and a Greek, Antipater wished to pay homage to his great predecessors, so we stopped at Lesbos to visit the tomb of Sappho, and at Ios to see where Homer was buried. (Had we wished to see where Homer was born, we would have had to stop at almost every island in the Aegean Sea, since so many claimed that honor.)

  We saw many remarkable places and things. None could match the Seven Wonders, though some came close. The Parthenon in Athens was certainly a marvel, as was the statue it housed, the chryselephantine Athena by Phidias; but, having seen the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, and Phidias’s statue of Zeus at Olympia, I understood why those were on the list instead.

  We stopped at the island of Delos to see the Keratonian Altar, which some claim should be counted among the Wonders. The name of the altar comes from the Greek kerata, “horns,” because it is made entirely of antlers ingeniously fitted together without any sort of binding by Apollo himself, who used the horns of deer slain by his sister Artemis. To be sure, the altar was an astonishing sight, but the visit was not pleasant. Under Roman rule, Delos had become one of the largest slave markets in the world, a place of misery and foul odors. Men came to Delos to purchase humans by the thousands, not to marvel at Apollo’s altar.

  Of the many sites we visited other than the Seven Wonders, one stands out especially in my memory: the ruins of Corinth.

  After seeing the Games at Olympia, we hired a driver and a mule-drawn wagon and headed east on the road that crosses the Peloponnesus, that vast peninsula that would be an island were it not for the slender strip of earth that connects it to the mainland. The road was a winding one, skirting mountains and passing through clefts in the rugged landscape. At last, toward the end of a long day of travel, Antipater told me that we were drawing near to the isthmus.

  “At its narrowest, the isthmus is less than four miles wide,” he said. “A young fellow like you, Gordianus, might easily walk from the Gulf of Corinth on the north to the Gulf of Aegina on the south and back again in a single day, with time for a leisurely lunch beside this road, which at the isthmus links the two parts of Greece.”

  “The route is certainly popular,” I said. Since leaving Olympia, we were constantly being passed by faster vehicles and travelers on horseback.

  “Yes,” said Antipater, “there’s always a great deal of coming and going between the cities of the mainland—Athens, Thebes, and the rest—and the cities of the Peloponnesus, like Sparta and Argos. But the traffic is especially heavy now, and particularly in the easterly direction, since the Games at Olympia have just ended and all the athletes and spectators who poured into the Peloponnesus from the mainland are now heading home again. To do so by land, this is the only route.”

  The winding road took a turn to the north, skirting a craggy peak to our left that erupted from the earth like a knuckle of sheer rock. As the road crested a hill, I suddenly saw the Gulf of Corinth straight ahead of us, and at the same time, far away to our right, I had my first glimpse of the Gulf of Aegina, a glimmer of silver beyond a long blue ridge.

  “With the two gulfs so close on either side, and this road the only route from west to east, I should think this would be an ideal location for a city,” I said.

  I was rather proud of this astute observation, and expected my old tutor to reward me with a smile. Instead, Antipater scowled. “Gordianus! Do you remember nothing of the geography I’ve taught you? Do you not realize where we are?”

  I was eighteen, and a man, but Antipater had a way of speaking that made me feel I was a boy again.

  He shook his head. “Fifty-four years ago, for the glory of Rome, Lucius Mummius utterly destroyed the city of Corinth and its people. And you, a Roman, don’t even know where Corinth was! Could you even find it on a map?”

  “Of course I could,” I protested. “If that’s the Gulf of Corinth, to the north … and this winding road will eventually take us down to the Isthmus of
Corinth, over that way … then…” I looked up at the craggy peak to our left. “Do you mean to say that’s Acrocorinth, the fortified mountain above the ancient city?” I squinted. “Now that I look, I do see the ruins of what might have been a line of walls up there. But that means the city must have been right over there, at the foot of that sheer cliff.”

  I finally saw what had been in plain sight but invisible to my inattentive gaze—a distant jumble of stones and mounds of earth that were all that remained of the once proud city of Corinth. I felt a stirring of curiosity, but the ruins were a considerable distance from the road, and the late summer day was drawing to a close. The cart and the mules cast long shadows on the tall, dry grass. Antipater leaned forward to speak to the driver.

  “Is there a place nearby where we can spend the night?”

  The driver turned his head and looked at Antipater as if he were a madman. “Here, so near the ruins? Of course not! The Romans won’t allow so much as a vegetable stand to be built within a mile of the ancient walls, much less an inn. Besides, this place is…”

  “Yes?” said Antipater. “Go on.”

  “Haunted!” The man lowered his voice to a gruff whisper. “This is as close as I care to come to it. I dread passing by here, every time I make this trip.”

  “Nevertheless, it’s my intention to have a closer look at the ruins,” said Antipater.

  The driver snapped the reins and urged the mules to go faster. “You’ll be doing so without me, then. I tell you what—up ahead there’s a road that branches off to the left. That will take us down to the waterfront, to the old port of Lechaeum. There’s a Roman garrison there. The soldiers maintain a few of the docks and warehouses, strictly for military use. There’s not much of a town, just a few shops and a brothel that caters to the soldiers, but there’s a small inn with a tavern. You and the young Roman can spend the night there.”

  “Where will you sleep?” I said.

  “A pile of straw in the stable will be good enough for me,” said the driver.

  “After a visit to the brothel, no doubt,” whispered Antipater.

  “And tomorrow morning,” the driver went on, “if you’re still bent on visiting the ruins, I’ll drop you off. You can have a look at the place in broad daylight, and then I’ll come back and fetch you before nightfall.”

  As the road tilted downward we saw the Gulf of Corinth before us, a broad sheet of gold lit by the westering sun. Eventually, the old port appeared as a silhouette of jumbled roofs against the shimmering water. As we drew nearer, the silhouette resolved into ramshackle structures. The inn was the first building we came to. It was a humble-looking place, but after a long day on the wagon I was glad to see it. No people were about. As the wagon came to a halt, a few dogs lying in the dusty street roused themselves and listlessly wagged their tails, looking worn out by the heat of the day but too hungry to miss an opportunity to beg. The driver shooed them away and went inside to make arrangements for us.

  I looked around, but there was not much to see. The place had a melancholy, deserted air. All the nearby buildings had fallen into disrepair. Walls had given way. Roofs had fallen in.

  “To think, Lechaeum was once one of the busiest ports in all Greece!” Antipater sighed. “The sister port on the other side of the isthmus is probably just as dilapidated.”

  “But if the location is so ideal, why do the Romans not rebuild the ports, and reap the profits?”

  “Ask the Roman Senate! It’s because they’re all so jealous of each other, I suspect. None of them is willing to give the authority to rebuild the port to another senator—they can’t stand to see a rival become rich off such a lucrative commission. So nothing is done.”

  “But the driver says there’s a Roman garrison.”

  “Yes, stationed here not to maintain the port but rather to keep anyone from using it! Because it dared to defy Rome, one of the world’s most beautiful cities was destroyed, and because the conquerors squabble among themselves, the ports of ancient Corinth are left to rot.”

  I had never heard Antipater express such vehement disdain for Rome. While I was growing up, he had done his best to teach me Greek and to instill in me an appreciation of Greek culture, but regarding recent history, particularly Rome’s conquest of Greece, he had always been circumspect.

  The driver returned with bad news: there was no room at the inn.

  “What! But this won’t do,” declared Antipater. “I shall talk to the innkeeper myself.” I helped him dismount from the cart and followed him inside.

  The innkeeper was not a local, but a discharged Roman centurion named Gnaeus who had served for years at the Roman garrison before retiring to run the little inn and tavern. He explained that another party had arrived ahead of us and taken all four rooms.

  “Every room? Who are these people?” said Antipater, speaking Latin in preference to the innkeeper’s uncouth Greek.

  “A group of Roman travelers, just come from Olympia. They say they want to stay here for a while and have a look at the old ruins up the hill. That’s them in the tavern, having some wine and a bite to eat.” The innkeeper nodded toward the adjoining room, from which I heard a murmur of conversation and occasional laughter.

  Antipater glared. “‘A look at the old ruins,’ you say? The city had a name, you know: Corinth. Now why don’t you go ask your other guests to double-up, and free a room for us?”

  The innkeeper scowled and muttered under his breath: “Crazy old Greek!”

  “What did you say?” asked Antipater.

  “Yes, repeat what you just said,” I demanded.

  The innkeeper took his first good look at me. His eyes settled on the iron ring on my right hand.

  “You’re a Roman?” he said.

  “Indeed I am.”

  “Hardly look old enough for that citizen’s ring.”

  “I’m eighteen.”

  He nodded. “Well, that’s different. What are you doing, traveling with this old Greek?”

  “Zoticus was my tutor when I was a boy,” I said. “Not that it’s any of your business.”

  “Exactly who stays under my roof is very much my business, young man,” said the innkeeper, with an edge in his voice that reminded me he had once been a Roman centurion, used to giving orders. “But I like your spirit. I tell you what, I’ll do what your Greek friend suggests, and have a word with the other guests. They seem like reasonable men. Maybe I can supply a room for you, after all.”

  He stepped into the tavern and returned a few moments later, accompanied by a big man with curly red hair and a bristling beard. We exchanged introductions. The Roman’s name was Titus Tullius.

  “Our host tells me you’re looking for a room,” he said. “And here I thought we were going to have the inn all to ourselves. I’m surprised anyone else even managed to find this place, it’s so out of the way. Just come from Olympia, have you?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “First time at the Games? Yes, for me, too. Quite a show, wasn’t it? Did you see the footraces? That fellow Eudamos made the competition eat dust. And the pankration? Protophanes walloped the competition!”

  “Will you give up one of the rooms or not?” said Antipater brusquely.

  “Steady on,” said Tullius. “It’s too early for bed, anyway. Join us in the tavern for a drink.”

  “I’m an old man, and I’m weary, and I need to lie down,” said Antipater.

  “Well, why didn’t you say so? Yes, by all means, take one of our rooms. We’ll manage. We were going to split up three to a room, but we can just as easily fit four to a room, I suppose.”

  “There are twelve of you?” I said. “Did you all attend the Games together?”

  “We certainly did. Now we’re seeing a few more sights here in the Peloponnesus before we sail back to Rome. I’m the one who insisted on visiting the ruins of Corinth. The rest thought that would be a bore, but I assured them it will be well worth it.”

  “That’s our intention, as w
ell,” I said. I turned toward Antipater, but he was already heading up the stairs. The innkeeper followed after him with a ring of jangling keys in his fist.

  Tullius smiled. “It’ll be just us Romans in the tavern, then. There’s my group, plus a few off-duty soldiers from the garrison. Come, Gordianus, join us.”

  I did so gladly, thinking a cup or two of wine would do much to soothe my travel-stiff limbs.

  Tullius’s party consisted entirely of men. I was the youngest in the room, though some of the soldiers were not much older. A single serving woman moved among them. She was neither young nor pretty, and by her gruff manner I judged her to be a freeborn local woman, not a slave.

  “Ismene!” called Tullius. “Bring a cup for my young friend.”

  She gave him a sour look, but fetched a wooden cup and pressed it into my hand, then filled it from her pitcher. “Let’s hope this handsome fellow has better manners than the rest of you louts,” she said. She gave me a warm smile, then glowered at the others.

  “I do believe Ismene is smitten with you, Gordianus!” Tullius laughed.

  “Finally, a man to tempt Ismene!” said one of the soldiers, flashing a broad grin. He had a neck like a bull’s and the first touches of silver in his brassy blond hair. In every drunken group, there is someone louder than the rest; he fit the role.

  “Don’t tease her, Marcus,” said the soldier next to him, who looked frail in comparison. The frown lines around his mouth betrayed an anxious disposition.

  “Why not, Lucius? Are you afraid of Ismene? Or perhaps you’re a bit in love with the old battle-axe?” Marcus laughed uproariously.

  The conversation settled down, and the chief topic was Olympia. The soldiers envied the travelers for having witnessed the games. Since I had seen some events that others had missed, I found myself joining in the conversation and thoroughly enjoying it. At this point in my journey with Antipater, I was beginning to feel a bit homesick. It felt good to be in a room where everyone was speaking Latin. When the conversation turned from Olympia to Rome—the soldiers were eager for news—I felt quite at home, a Roman among Romans.