“I’m going back to the storeroom and get myself some more perfume,” Menedemos said. “Then to the agora. No drunken Macedonians have been buying what I peddle.”

“You haven’t brought back any lewd tales for us,” Protomakhos said. “Not much luck with the hetairai?”

With a shrug, Menedemos answered, “Well, best one, there’s luck, and then again there’s luck. I’ve sold a lot of perfume, and sold it at good prices. But I’ve dealt with the women through their slaves, and I haven’t lain with any of them. Who knows, though? I may yet.”

He hurried off to get the perfume. Behind him, Sostratos’ voice floated out of the andron: “If Menedemos sees a pile of horse turds, he’s sure he’ll find a team hitched to a chariot around the next corner, just waiting for him to hop on and ride.”

Protomakhos laughed. Menedemos started to turn around and shout at Sostratos for talking about him behind his back. But then he checked himself. What his cousin had said wasn’t an insult, and was true. Menedemos always did hope for the best. Why not? Some people expected the worst, to shield themselves from disappointment. As far as Menedemos was concerned, that wasn’t living; it was only existing and waiting to die. He wanted to go through life aiming higher than that.

A slave barred Protomakhos’ front door after he left. By now, he knew the way to the agora well enough not to need to look up at the great frowning bulk of the akropolis to get his bearings. Turn here, turn there, don’t go down the street with the baker’s shop at the corner because it’s a dead end and you’ll only have to turn around, pick up a rock before you come by the shoemaker’s place so you can fling it at his polluted hound if the beast runs up snarling again.

The sun was already shining on the agora by the time Menedemos got there. He’d put on his petasos. The wide-brimmed hat would help keep Helios from cooking his brains inside his skull. That wasn’t why he grumbled. Showing up later than he had been doing meant other hucksters had already staked claims to the choicest spots.

Well, no help for it. He found a place not far from the Painted Stoa, on the north side of the agora. “Fine perfume from Rhodes!” he called, holding up a jar. “Sweet rose perfume from Rhodes, the island of roses!”

Even as he made his sales pitch, though, his eyes kept going to the paintings and other memorials in the shadows under the covered colonnade. No one but people who couldn’t afford it seemed interested in his perfume. About halfway through the morning, curiosity got the better of him. It’s like the Parthenon, he told himself. Not much point coming to Athens if I don’t see this.

Most famous of the paintings on wooden panels was the one of the battle of Marathon by Polygnotos. There were the Athenians (and the Boiotians from Plataia) driving back the Persians toward their ships, which were manned by bearded, long-robed Phoenicians. Other panels showed Athenians fighting Spartans; Theseus and more Athenians fighting the bare-breasted Amazons in ancient days; and the Akhaioi just after the fall of Troy, with the Trojan women, Kassandra among them, captive before Aias. Shields preserved against time and verdigris by a coat of pitch hung between the panels-they came from the Spartan citizens who’d surrendered on the island of Sphakteria when the Peloponnesian War had been going well for Athens.

After seeing what there was to see, Menedemos bought a little fried octopus and a cup of wine. Then he went back to crying the virtues of Rhodian perfume. He didn’t sell any all that day. Somehow, though, he cared much less than he’d thought he would. Seeing the Painted Stoa had given him a profit of a different sort.

Sostratos winced when he left Athens by the people’s gate and headed east toward the base of Mount Lykabettos, Up till now, he’d never gone back to visit a lover after leaving. Returning to the Lykeion, though, felt exactly like that. He’d spent the happiest days of his young life there. Then he’d had to go. Now he was coming back, yes, but he wasn’t the same person as he had been when he reckoned the place the center of his life. Herakleitos had had it right. You couldn’t step into the same river twice. The river wasn’t the same the second time, and you weren’t the same, either.

As they had for at least three centuries, youths learning the use of arms and armor paraded on the flat land of the Lykeion, between the olive groves. Some of them, probably, were young men who’d received their panoplies in the theater at the Dionysia now recently past. A drill-master’s voice pursued the epheboi: “Left!… Left!,.. No, you clumsy fool, that’s not your left!… Left!” Sostratos smiled. Those same irate shouts had been part of the background while he studied here.

After a moment, his smile faded. Would the Athenian phalanx ever amount to anything again? Or would Athens be nothing more than a counter Kassandros and the rest of the Macedonians shoved back and forth across their gaming board? Things weren’t as they had been a hundred years before, when this polis came close to becoming the lord of Hellas-and when Macedonia was full of backwoods bumpkins who battled among themselves and were hardly ever seen in Hellas proper.

Macedonia, of course, remained full of backwoods bumpkins who battled among themselves. Now, though, they did it over almost the entire reach of the civilized world, from Hellas east all the way to Persia and beyond. Sostratos dimly remembered having a similar thought at one symposion or another. Was this an improvement? He formed that question intending the answer to be, certainly not. But if the Macedonians weren’t battling among themselves, wouldn’t Hellenes be doing it in their place? From everything the Rhodian knew of his people’s history that seemed altogether too likely.

He got a glimpse of other men walking about, too, those under and among the olive trees rather than out in the open. They weren’t marching under the direction of a drillmaster, either, obedient to a single will. They all traveled together, all searching-as free men should-for knowledge and truth.

“Peripatetics,” Sostratos murmured. That was what Aristoteles had called the men who studied with and under him, for they walked about-peripateo was the verb in Greek-discussing one philosophical topic or another. The name lived on under Theophrastos, Aristoteles’ nephew and successor.

Seeing the scholars, Sostratos suddenly wanted to turn and run back towards Athens, / studied here, he thought. I studied here, and now I’m coming back as a tradesman. The leather sack of papyrus he carried in his left hand all at once seemed to weigh fifty talents. They’ll recognize me. They’ll remember. Won’t they think of me as respectable women think of a widow who’s had to turn to whoring to keep food on the table for herself and her children?

He made himself keep walking toward the gray-branched, pale-leaved olive trees. Some of the Athenian epheboi would have a harder time going into battle than he did going forward now.

The man doing most of the talking there under the trees was a dapper fellow in a fine chiton with a himation elegantly draped over one shoulder. His hair and beard were white, his back still straight and his eyes still sharp and keen even though he had to be well up into his sixties. When Sostratos saw him, he almost fled again. Oh, by the gods, that’s Theophrastos himself! Too soon, too soon! I wasn’t ready yet.

Theophrastos was saying, “And speaking of the ridiculous, there is the phrase, ‘A big fish is a poor nobody.’ This is said to have first been used by the kitharist Stratonikos against Propis of Rhodes, who sang to the kithara. Propis was a large man, but one without much talent. It packs a lot of insult into a few words, for it says that Propis was large, was no good, was a nobody, and had no more voice than a fish.”