“Diokles would have sent word up into Athens if he’d run into real trouble,” Sostratos said. He was right again. He was also successfully distracted, which made Menedemos even happier.

Menedemos waved to the Aphrodite as he and Sostratos came up the pier toward the merchant galley. Someone aboard the akatos waved back. Squinting through the rain, Menedemos called, “That you, Diokles?”

“It’s me, all right,” the oarmaster answered. “I know the two of you well enough by your size next to each other.” Menedemos was most of a head shorter than Sostratos. Not caring to be reminded of it, he glowered at his cousin as if it were Sostratos’ fault. The oblivious Diokles went on, “Everything’s fine here, young sirs.”

“That’s good news,” Menedemos and Sostratos said together. Menedemos added, “Nobody got in trouble celebrating the festival?”

“Not so you’d notice,” Diokles replied. “Somebody-I forget who-lost a tooth in a tavern brawl. A few more men got black eyes and such, and we’ve been gobbling cabbage like you wouldn’t believe to fight our hangovers.”

“I’ve never found it does much good,” Menedemos said. “Well-watered wine the next morning works better.”

“We’ve done that, too,” Diokles said. Teleutas, who was-as often happened-lounging around not doing much, let out an indignant squawk. Diokles dipped his head. “Oh, yes-Teleutas says he had his pouch slit at a brothel. Only a couple of drakhmai lost, though, if he did. He’d just gone through most of his pay on wine before he got himself a woman.”

The sailor squawked again. “What do you mean, if? It happened just like I said.”

Diokles shrugged. “I wasn’t there.” Menedemos and Sostratos looked at each other. They shrugged in unison. Teleutas was a less than reliable witness. He’d proved as much many times over. Smiling slightly, Sostratos muttered something under his breath. Menedemos couldn’t make out what it was, but had a pretty good idea: amusement that an occasional thief should complain of theft.

“We’re going to take some of our goods up to the proxenos’ house in Athens proper,” Menedemos said. “That way, Sostratos and I can do business without running back here whenever we sell something.”

Sostratos ducked under the poop deck, emerging with the leather sacks that held beeswax, papyrus, embroidered cloth from the east, and the truffles they’d got in Mytilene. “These are all light,” he said. “I can take them myself.”

“I haven’t got a whole lot of sailors here, skipper,” Diokles said worriedly. “If you don’t want to be going back and forth all day, you’ll need to hire some of these harborside loungers and scroungers.”

“What do you think, Sostratos?” Menedemos asked. “You handle the silver.”

His cousin was a slow man with an obolos, one of the things that made him a good toikharkhos. He dipped his head now without the least hesitation. “Yes, we’d better do it,” he said. “The point of bringing things up into Athens is that we shouldn’t be going back and forth all the time. Pay them three oboloi each, four if they squawk-this isn’t an all-day job, or one that takes any skill.”

“Right,” Menedemos said. A drakhma-six oboloi-a day would keep a man fed and housed, though not in fancy style. The way prices kept rising nowadays, though, he wondered how much longer that would stay true. But there was a worry for another time. Now he cupped his hands in front of his mouth and shouted: “Hauling work! Half a day’s pay! Who wants to bring home some silver?”

Some of the layabouts wanted a drakhma even for a half day’s hauling work. One of them said, “You don’t know how expensive things are here, stranger. This is Athens, after all, not some little polis where nothing ever happens.”

“We’re from Rhodes,” Menedemos snapped. “We know what a drakhma’s worth, by the dog of Egypt-and when things happen in our polis, they happen because we choose them.” That got home to the toplofty Athenian. Menedemos went on, “If you won’t take four oboloi”-he’d quickly discovered he couldn’t get anyone to take three-”well, hail, friend. Will you or won’t you?”

“I will,” the fellow said, “but that doesn’t mean you’re not a cheapskate.”

Menedemos batted his eyes, as if he were a youth teasing a suitor. “You say the sweetest things, my dear,” he murmured-he’d had plenty of practice at that role in his younger days.

“Cistern-arsed effeminate,” the Athenian said under his breath, a sneer right out of Aristophanes. It wasn’t quite loud enough to make Menedemos notice it and run the man out. When they started back up towards Athens, he did set the fellow to hauling jars of wine on a carrying pole, the heaviest work he had.

“We’ve got quite a parade here,” Menedemos remarked as they started away from the waterfront. “All we need is some rattling chains and we could be taking slaves to the market.”

“I’m glad we’re not in that business-too risky,” Sostratos said. “Selling a barbarian every now and again is all right, I suppose, but you’re asking for trouble if you do it too often.”

“I’m not arguing,” Menedemos said. “I never wanted to be a slave trader, either. Oh, maybe once in a while, if the chance comes up, but I wouldn’t care to make a habit of it. People look down their noses at men who buy and sell other men. I do myself. I don’t quite know why-we couldn’t very well live the lives of free Hellenes if we didn’t have plenty of slaves to labor for us-but people do.”

“Most of the men who buy and sell slaves aren’t the sort the better classes care to deal with-except when they need a new serving woman or workman or what have you,” Sostratos said. “That’s part of it, I think. And the other part is, we all know what can happen to us if an enemy sacks our polis. Not all slaves are barbarians. Hellenes say they don’t enslave their fellow Hellenes, but it happens. Look what Alexander did to Thebes. Look what happened to the Athenians who went to Sicily during the Peloponnesian War.”

A middle-aged man carrying several lekythoi full of truffle-flavored olive oil looked up at that. “My great-grandfather went to Sicily to fight against Syracuse,” he said. “He never came home. I don’t think he was killed in battle, so he likely died in the mines. His wife was pregnant with my grandfather when he sailed away. They almost exposed the baby. If they had, I wouldn’t be here.”

Sostratos said, “Disasters happen more and more often these days, too. Generals are better at taking cities by storm than they used to be-we talked about that when we first came up between the Long Walls, remember, Menedemos? And the Macedonian marshals are always at war with one another, so poleis keep falling.”

Menedemos imagined Rhodes falling to the forces of Ptolemaios or Antigonos-most likely the latter, since his home polis got on well with the lord of Egypt. Would slave dealers swarm to the city, to batten on the disaster? Of course they would. They always did. Imagining misfortune befalling his polis was as much as he could do. He couldn’t envision himself enslaved.

No? he thought. You didn’t have any trouble those couple of times when pirates attacked the Aphrodite. You knew you were fighting for your life and for your freedom then.

Once they got into Athens again, they couldn’t move so fast. That was only partly because the winding streets were full of Athenians intent on their own business, though they were. But the real problem was the swarm of boys who had as much fun with the procession of men carrying trade goods as their parents had had with the Dionysiac procession not long before. In fact, the boys-some in chitons, others naked despite the chilly, rainy weather-had even more fun, for they could dart out and disrupt this parade.

“Here, you little wretch, stop that!” Menedemos’ hand smacked against the wet, bare backside of a boy of perhaps eight who’d almost tripped up two men carrying jars of expensive Byblian. Because the backside-and the hand-were wet, the swat sounded amazingly loud. The boy jumped and yelled and cursed Menedemos with a fluency some of the Aphrodite’s sailors couldn’t have matched. His own hand clapped to the afflicted part, he scurried away, agile as a lizard.