Killer of Men (16 page)

The satrap shook his head and rolled over on his couch. I thought that his trousers looked ridiculous. Greek men – even Ionians – display their legs to show how hard they exercise. A man in trousers looked like some sort of effeminate clown, but otherwise, I thought him the best figure of a warrior I had ever seen. I understood why Archilogos was so eager to impress him.

He held out his hand for wine. I cut off another house slave and filled it for him, and he flashed me a smile. ‘It is not Miltiades who really worries me,’ he admitted. ‘It is your windbag, Aristagoras of Miletus. My spies tell me he is to speak to the assembly in Athens.’

Hipponax yawned. ‘Ephesus can defeat Athens without help from any of the other cities, if it comes to that,’ he said.

Artaphernes shook his head. ‘Don’t be too sure,’ he said. ‘Their power is growing. Their confidence is growing. I do not want the westerners involved, if there is to be trouble in the islands.’

There was more of the same – indeed, an old man’s memory being what it is, I’m not sure that I even have what they said in the right order. But Hipponax and Euthalia took the parts I have given them. They were supportive, loyal subjects of the Great King.

As the companion to Archilogos, I was excused a great many duties in the house, but I was smart enough to know that it was by willingness to work and not by arrogance that I would gain the alliance of the other slaves and the steward. So I put my master to bed and then returned to the andron to help tidy up. It wasn’t bad work – there was plenty of wine going around among the slaves, and as long as we didn’t chip the ceramics or dent the metalware, Master didn’t seem to care much what we did. I took tray after tray down to the kitchens, and then I helped the girls wash the cups in hot water, which was what Cook liked to see.

My young master had a sister I hadn’t met yet, named Briseis after Achilles’ ‘companion’. People choose the oddest names for children, eh, honey? Greece is full of Cassandras – what kind of name is that for a girl? Anyway, her companion was Penelope, the same as my sister, and I met her that night. Penelope was just my age, had red hair like Miltiades and was of the same mind as me – to do some extra work and be seen as a help. So we washed cups and drank wine together, and we talked of our lives. She wasn’t born a slave, either. Her father sold her when her family lost their farm. He still came and saw her, though.

I listened, as well as talking. It was a new experience for me, and she commented on it. Emboldened, I tried to kiss her, and I put a hand on her breast, but she slapped my ear hard enough to make me see the stars. Then she flashed me a smile.

‘No,’ she said. And slipped away.

I liked her. I even liked the slap, and I’ll jump ahead of my story to say that I started to make excuses to see her. The house was big, but it wasn’t that big – it’s just that while Mistress came and went from the women’s quarters as she wished, we men weren’t allowed there.

I went to bed late and with much to think about.

And in the morning, we went for our lessons to the great Temple of Artemis. It was my first time inside the precinct. I climbed the steps with a certain awe, because they were so high and so much of the precinct was stone. In Boeotia, we put down a couple of courses of stone to raise the building clear of the damp, and then we build the rest in mud brick. But the Ephesian temple was all stone, with marble steps and marble pediments and lintels, and painted statues of Artemis and Nemesis – and Heracles. I think I spoke aloud in wonder to see my ancestor so nobly arrayed in a foreign land, wearing a helmet like a lion’s head and holding a club. I touched the statue for luck.

When we reached the top we passed beneath the magnificent portico, into the blinding sunlight of the courtyard, which was paved in pale golden stone. Gold and bronze statues caught the light reflected by the brightly coloured marbles.

Archilogos didn’t give it so much as a glance. ‘Don’t gawp like a peasant,’ he said. ‘Come!’

He marched me to the steps of the great temple itself. There were dozens of young men there and in the cool space under the columns. Most sat around tutors, but the biggest crowd gathered around a white-haired man who was so thin that his bones threatened to burst from his skin. He wore a chlamys without a chiton, like the young men, but he had an ugly, bony body – except that his muscles stood out like a Boeotian farmer’s. He seemed very old to me.

He watched us come, although there were a dozen boys around him on the steps.

‘You are late,’ he said to my new master.

Archilogos smiled. ‘Pardon, master,’ he said. ‘I should not have waited so long to dip my toe.’

This comment made the other boys giggle. I had no idea why.

The teacher glared at him. ‘If you understood what I said,’ he commented, ‘you would know how foolish that last sally sounded. Why do I teach the young?’

‘We pay well?’ another wag said.

Boys began to laugh, but he old man had a stick and it smacked into the jokester’s shins before he could move.

‘I neither accept pay nor do I ask for it,’ the teacher said. ‘Who are you, boy?’

That last was directed at me. I was not the only companion present. ‘I belong to Archilogos,’ I said meekly.

He grunted. ‘Not in my class, boy. Here, you are your own man. Your own mind. For me to mould as I see fit.’ He coughed into his hand. ‘What do you know? Anything?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Nothing.’

He smiled. ‘You have a nice combination of humility and arrogance, young man. Sit down right here. We are talking about the
logos
. Do you know of the logos, young man?’

‘No, teacher,’ I answered.

And so I met Heraclitus, my true master, the teacher of my soul. But for him, I would be nothing but a hollow vessel filled with rage and blood.

At the time, I was enraptured to find another thinker like the priest of Hephaestus from Thebes. This one was even deeper, I thought, and I sat in the shade, my back against a warm marble pillar, and let him fill me with wisdom.

In fact, much of it sounded like gibberish, and it was up to every boy to take what he could from the well, or so Heraclitus told us. On that first day, though, he turned to me, of all those boys. ‘So – you know nothing. Are you a hollow vessel? May I fill you?’

I remember nodding and blushing, because other boys giggled and too late I saw the double entendre.

‘Bah,’ Heraclitus said, and his stick struck a shin. The owner squeaked. ‘Sex is for animals, boy. Talking about sex is for miserable ephebes.’ He prodded me with the bronze-shot tip of his staff. ‘So? Ready to learn?’

‘Yes, master,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘Here is all the wisdom I have, boy. There is a formula, a binding and a loosing, a single, coherent thought that makes the universe as it is, and we who sit on these steps call it the logos.’ He prodded me again. ‘Understand?’

I looked at him. His eyes were dark and full of mischief, like a boy’s. ‘No,’ I admitted.

‘Brilliant!’ Heraclitus laughed. ‘You may yet be a sage, boy.’ He looked around and then back at me. ‘Have you heard the phrase “common sense”?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ I answered.

‘Is it, in fact, common?’

I laughed. ‘No,’ I said.

‘Superb!’ the old man said. ‘By all the gods, you are the pupil I’ve dreamed about.’ He leaned close and poked me with his stick again. ‘Which has the truer understanding, lad? Your ears and nose, or your soul?’

I looked around, but all the boys were watching me. ‘What’s a soul?’ I asked. I had heard the word, but seldom as something that could sense.

He stopped poking me. He turned to Archilogos. ‘Young Logos,’ he said, and suddenly I knew where my young master had got his name, ‘how much did your father pay for this slave?’

Archilogos raised his hands. ‘No idea, master. But not much.’

Heraclitus laughed. ‘Now I know that wisdom can, indeed, be purchased.’ He turned back to me and the stick pushed into my ribs. ‘Listen, boy,’ he said, ‘the soul is the truest form of you. It can sense the logos in the same way it can sense when another man lies, if you allow it.’

I considered this. ‘What does it sense? If my eyes sense light and my ears sense noise, what does my soul sense?’

Heraclitus stepped back. ‘Excellent question.’ He walked away a few steps and came back. ‘Work on it, and you will be a philosopher. Now we will examine some mathematics. What’s your name, boy?’

‘I am Doru,’ I said.

‘The spear that cuts to the truth, I see. Very well. On the feast of Artemis, have prepared an oration on what the soul senses, and how. You may present it to the other boys.’ Then he turned away. ‘Now. This is a triangle.’

That was our first encounter.

He was always a challenge. If you said nothing, he would hit you. If you spoke up, he would sometimes praise and sometimes deride and always force you to compose an oration to defend your views. I came to know that most classes began with one poor boy or another rising like a politician in the assembly to deliver a quavering oration in defence of some indefensible subject.

I liked the mathematics. I came from a family of craftsmen, and I already knew how to make a triangle with a compass, how to divide it exactly in two parts, and a hundred other tricks that any draughtsman needs to know to copy figures or even just to make a nice circle on a cup.

I lacked the language to be comfortable – they were Ionians and they spoke a different dialect – but from the first, Heraclitus put me at ease. When I sat on the steps of the Temple of Artemis, I was the equal of every other boy. That made me love the lessons more than anything.

But I soon learned the language, and I drank in the ideas and words of rhetoric and philosophy the way a thirsty man drinks water. I learned to stand properly and to speak from low in the chest so that other men could hear me. I learned some tricks with words – phrases that would draw a laugh, and other phrases that were serious. I learned that the repetition of any line from Homer would make men take an argument more seriously.

We learned to sing from another teacher and to play the lyre. Calchas had played the instrument well and I was determined to emulate him. You may judge the results yourself when I play some Sappho later.

It was a game, but a great game. A complex game – as was the game of how to craft an argument.

Heraclitus was severe on the difference between disputation and assertion. You know it, young man? They teach that in Halicarnassus, do they? Hmm. Honey, it is like this. When I say that the moon is made of cheese, that is an assertion. If I say it louder, does that make it more true? If I quote Homer that the moon is made of cheese, does that make it more true? What if I threaten to beat you if you don’t agree – does that make it true?

No. All mere assertion. Yes?

But, if I bring you a piece of cheese – better, if I
take you to the moon and show you it is cheese
– then I have offered proof. If I cannot prove it, perhaps I can offer theories as to why it must be cheese, offering testimonies from other men who have been to the moon, or scientific evidence based on experiment – you see? And you can offer me the same sort of evidence to prove that the moon is, in fact, not made of cheese at all.

If you laugh so hard, you will certainly spoil your looks. Hah! That was an assertion! There’s no proof whatsoever that laughter hurts your looks.

Where was I? I must have been speaking of Heraclitus. Yes. He made us learn the difference, and if you rose to speak and he was displeased, that ash staff with the bronze ferrule would whistle through the air and crack you in the side or prod you in the ribs. Very conducive to learning in the young.

Weeks passed. It was a glorious time. I was learning things every day, I was exercised like a healthy young animal, I was in something like love for the first time with Penelope, and Archilogos was a fine companion in every way. We read together, ran together, fought with staves, wrestled, boxed and disputed.

Artaphernes stayed with us for all that summer and autumn while he kept watch over his tyrants and his lords. He was building half a dozen triremes to the latest design down in the harbour, and we would run all the way there to watch the ships, and then run back – twenty stades or so.

I haven’t mentioned that Hipponax’s household ran on the profits from his ships, not his poetry. Indeed, everyone called him ‘The Poet’, and we still sing his songs in this house, but he was a captain and an investor, running cargoes all the way to Phoenicia and Africa when the mood was on him, and buying and selling other men’s cargoes, too. Archilogos and I went on short trips – once across the water to Mytilene, a pretty town on Lesbos, and once to Troy to walk the mound and camp where the Greeks had camped – a perfect trip in early autumn when the sea is the friend of every man and dolphins dance by the bow of your ship. It was odd, looking across the water at the Chersonese – where Miltiades held sway. If I swam the Hellespont, I’d have been able to get home. Later, we went on longer voyages – to Syracuse and the Spartan colony at Taras in southern Italy. But we went far south, along the coast of Africa – not along the Greek coast, where I would have been close to home.

I didn’t want to go home. Home had Mater and poverty and death. I was in Ephesus with lovely people, a friend, a teacher and a woman. How deaf I must have been to the wing-beats of the furies!

Later we made the run to Lesbos many times. Hipponax owned property in Eresus, where Sappho came from, and we would beach our ship there under the great rock, or inside the mole that the old people built before the siege of Troy, and Hipponax would climb to the citadel and pay his respects to Sappho’s daughter, who was very old, but still kept her school. Briseis had gone to that school for three years, and had all Sappho’s nine books by heart.

They had a warehouse in Methymna, too, another city of Lesbos and a rival to Eresus and Mytilene. Lesbos is the richest of the islands, honey. We have a house in Eresus, though you’ve never been there.

I fell in love with the sea. Archilogos did, too. He knew that someday he would be a captain – in war and peace – and he stood with the helmsman, learning the ropes, and so did I. We made these trips in the first year, and then there were others. It was part of our studies, and never the worst part, either. But I will return to the sea. Where horses merely annoyed me, the sea charmed, terrified, roused me – like a man’s first sight of a woman taking off her clothes for
him
. I never lost that arousal. Still have it.