All the same… He sighed again. All the same, he wished he could have gone right on studying in Athens. Some men were lucky enough- and rich enough-to be able to pursue the love of wisdom their whole lives long. He wasn’t. He’d had to come back to Rhodes to help his family and make his own way in the world. Though five years had passed since that sorry day, he still felt as if he’d torn his heart out and left it behind when he sailed away from Peiraieus.

Most of him still longed to return. The rest… For the rest, it was too late. He’d quoted Herakleitos the day before at Uncle Philodemos ’ house. The Ionian philosopher had surely been right: you couldn’t step into the same river twice. When you went back in, it wasn’t the same river any more.

And I’m not the same any more, either, Sostratos thought. Knowledge for its own sake did still matter to him. It mattered very much; he hoped it would for the rest of his life. One day, he wanted to write a history of his times to rival those of Herodotos and Thoukydides. But he was more practical, more hard-headed, than the weeping, gangling young man who’d so unwillingly come back to Rhodes when Lysistratos summoned him. He’d been dealing with trade goods and money these past few years, and they’d inevitably left their mark on the way his mind worked.

He said, “Do you know, Father, there’s a bit of me that dreads going back to Athens? I never would have imagined that.”

“I can see why,” Lysistratos answered. “If you’re very much in love with a hetaira when you’re a young man, do you really want to see her again twenty years later? Do you want to find out she’s got fat and gone gray and lost a front tooth? Wouldn’t you rather recall the beauty you knew once upon a time?”

“That’s it,” Sostratos agreed. “That’s exactly it. How can Athens live up to the way I remember her?”

“She probably won’t,” his father said. “But it isn’t the city’s fault. Cities don’t usually change that much, not in a few years. People are the ones who change.”

“Yes, I was thinking the same thing.” Sostratos didn’t think the changes he’d seen in himself were necessarily for the better, but saw no point in mentioning that to Lysistratos. He feared his father wouldn’t have agreed with him.

A sparrow fluttered down into the courtyard. Sostratos tossed it a scrap of bread. The little bird hopped over, cocked its head to one side as it examined the morsel, and then pecked at it. Satisfied, it snapped it up and flew away.

“You should have put some wine out for it, too,” Lysistratos said, amusement in his voice.

“Put some wine out for what?” Sostratos’ mother asked as she came out into the courtyard.

“Oh, good day, Timokrate,” Lysistratos said. “Sostratos gave a sparrow some crumbs for breakfast, and I was saying it should have had wine, too.”

“It probably wouldn’t have been able to fly straight if it had,” Timokrate said. She was in her early forties, gray beginning to streak her brown hair. Smiling at Sostratos, she said, “You always did like to feed the birds.”

“Well, why not, Mother?”

“No reason at all,” she said, walking toward the kitchen. “It’s just funny how you haven’t changed much through the years.”

“Oh.” That made Sostratos scratch his head. Here he’d been thinking he was a different man from the one who’d left Athens, and his mother still saw him as the same little boy who’d played in this courtyard back when Alexander the Great was alive. Which of them was right?

Timokrate came out with bread and wine, too. Smiling at her son and her husband, she took her breakfast back upstairs to eat in the women’s quarters. Erinna, Sostratos’ younger sister, had always chafed under the restrictions Hellenic custom placed on respectable women. She wanted to be out and doing things, not shut away inside a house. His mother seemed perfectly content to stay indoors most of the time. People are different, Sostratos thought with profound unoriginality.

Erinna had lived with her second husband, Damonax, for the past year (her first had died after they’d been married only three years). She wouldn’t be going out of his house for a while, anyhow; their little boy, Polydoros, was just over a month old. Sostratos said, “I’m glad Erinna had a boy.”

“So am I.” Lysistratos dipped his head. “Both because it’s better to have a boy and because…” His voice trailed away.

Sostratos finished the thought: “Because Damonax might have exposed it if it were a girl.”

“Yes.” His father dipped his head again. “Whether or not to rear a baby is a husband’s privilege.”

“I know. But Erinna would have been very unhappy if Damonax had decided not to raise it,” Sostratos said. When his sister came back to live at the family home after losing her first husband, she’d fretted that she would never remarry and never have the chance to bear children. To have a child and then lose it at a husband’s whim… That would have been cruelly hard.

“On the whole, your brother-in-law seems a pretty reasonable fellow,” Lysistratos said.

“On the whole, yes,” Sostratos said. “When it comes to olive oil, no. How many times do we have to tell him we’re not going to fill the Aphrodite to the gunwales with the stuff and haul it to Athens? I thought you and Uncle Philodemos had made him understand why we can’t do it.”

“Oh, we did,” his father answered. “But he can’t be reasonable-or what we think of as reasonable-about that. He’s got his own family’s interests to worry about, too, you know. They still aren’t all the way out of debt, and olive oil is what they’ve got to sell. And so…” He sighed and shrugged.

“It’s good oil. I’ve never said it’s not good oil. But it’s not the right cargo for a merchant galley, not with the overhead costs we’ve got because of all the rowers we need.” Sostratos sighed, too. “I almost wish we hadn’t done so well with it last sailing season. Then Damonax could really see why we don’t want anything more to do with it.”

“Especially not going to Athens,” Lysistratos said.

“Especially not going to Athens,” Sostratos agreed. “I can’t imagine a worse place in the world to try to bring in olive oil. They stopped growing grain there a couple of hundred years ago, by the gods, so they could plant more olive trees. They export oil; they don’t import it. Zeus on Olympos, Father, at the Panathenaic Games they give the winners amphorai of olive oil-their own olive oil.”

“We both know that…” his father began.

“Damonax knows it, too,” Sostratos said. “He studied at the Lykeion in Athens before I got there. How can he help knowing it?”

Lysistratos let out a sad little chuckle. “Well, son, when someone marries into the family, you don’t just get the good. You get all the problems he brings with him, too. And Damonax and his family probably think of us as a bunch of stingy whoresons.”

Sostratos dipped his head. “That’s true. But there’s a difference- we’re right.” He knew he was being silly. So did his father. They both laughed. But it wasn’t as if he didn’t mean it, too.

Two days of bright sunshine in a row made Menedemos want to rush down to the Great Harbor to make sure the Aphrodite was fully laden and ready to put to sea. His father said, “You don’t want to go out too early, you know. Better to wait a few extra days than to get caught by the last big blow of winter.”

“But others will be setting sail now,” Menedemos protested. “I don’t want them to get the jump on me.”

“Some skippers always set sail sooner than they should,” Philodemos said. “A lot of the time, they end up paying for it.” Menedemos fumed. Watching him fume, his father smiled a thin smile and added, “I’m going down to the agora, to find out what the news is. I expect you to be here when I get back.”

“Why don’t you just hire a pedagogue to take me here and there, the way you did when I was seven years old?” Menedemos said bitterly. His father took no notice of that. He hadn’t really expected that Philodemos would. But the look of smug satisfaction on his father’s face when he left for the market square stung like sweat dripping onto a raw sore.