Plenty of men were fiercer than he. But he was larger than most, and only half the age of the farmer, whose scraggly hair and beard were white. The man shook a fist at him, but then retreated into his dwelling. The dog peered out from the ruins of the barn. It didn’t seem to want to have anything more to do with the Rhodian, That suited him down to the ground.

He went back after the donkey, which had moved faster without his guidance than it ever had with it. It didn’t seem to think him a hero for driving off the dog. Instead, it might have blamed him for bringing it near the hound in the first place. On he went, up the western slope of Mount Hymettos,

“Is this the farm of Erasinides son of Hippomakhos?” he called to a man chopping weeds with a mattock.

The farmer jerked his thumb up the road. “Next farm uphill, stranger, on the left-hand side of the track.”

“Thanks.” Sostratos plodded on. So, unhappily, did the donkey. Erasinides’ farm was noticeably greener than the ones he’d been passing. He soon saw why; a spring bubbled out of a cleft in the rocks a few cubits from the farmhouse. Channels led the water here and there.

Sostratos knelt by the stream to wash his head and hands, take a drink, and water the donkey. As he got to his feet, drops dripping from his beard, a stocky, middle-aged man came out of the barn and said, “Hail, friend. Do something for you?”

“Are you Erasinides?” Sostratos asked. The farmer dipped his head. Sostratos gave his own name and said, “The physician Iphikrates tells me he buys his honey from you. I’d like to do the same.”

“Iphikrates is a good man. He doesn’t think he knows it all, the way some physicians do,” Erasinides said. “Where are you from, friend, to speak such an… interesting Greek? Sounds like the Doric bits you hear in tragedy.”

“I’m from Rhodes,” Sostratos answered. He knew his accent had been heavily influenced by Attic. He wondered what Erasinides would make of the way Menedemos spoke. “Do you have honey for sale?”

“Oh, yes.” But the Athenian seemed in no hurry to haggle. “Nine ships from Rhodes, under Tlepolemos,” he murmured: not quite quoting the Iliad’s Catalogue of Ships, but showing he knew it. “Did Rhodians speak oddly then, too, do you suppose?”

“I don’t know, best one,” Sostratos answered. Erasinides, plainly, wanted to chat before getting down to business. Rustics often did. “We think our accent the usual one, you know, and everybody else’s strange.”

“Is that a fact?” Erasinides’ laugh showed that, if it was a fact, it was an amusing one. “Must come of being a long ways off from Athens, I expect.”

With Athens’ present prominence, he had a point. But he was the sort who would have said the same thing had he lived up in Thessalia, which had its own backwoods way of speech. Sostratos said, “Custom is king of all”-Pindaros’ poetic truth quoted by Herodotos. Bees buzzed around a patch of clover next to Erasinides’ barn. Pointing that way, Sostratos asked, “Do you gather your honey from wild bees, or do you keep your own hives?”

“Oh, I have my own,” Erasinides replied. “Collecting wild honey’s like trying to build a house out of driftwood-you’ll come up with some, but never enough to suit you.”

“Do you get stung when you take the honeycombs?” Sostratos asked.

The farmer dipped his head. “Now and again. I wear a petasos with the thinnest veiling I can get, to keep ‘em off my face. Past that”-he shrugged-”I pick the stings out, and I go about my business. They don’t much bother me. Some folk aren’t so lucky. I had a neighbor, a fellow named Ameinokles, who’d wheeze and gasp and have trouble breathing whenever he got stung.”

“You had a neighbor?” Sostratos said.

“That’s right.” Erasinides dipped his head again. “It happened once too often, poor fellow. His throat closed up and he… strangled to death, you might say.”

Sostratos wondered what Iphikrates could have done about that. Nothing, all too likely. As Erasinides had said, the physician didn’t try to hide his own ignorance. Sostratos said, “Do you put the honey in jars all the same size?”

“Oh, yes. I didn’t used to, but it’s better for business when I do. I buy lekythoi from a potter I know. I can get em cheap-he makes lots of oil flasks, because people always need ‘em, either to hold olive oil at home or-the fancy glazed ones-for funeral offerings. I don’t buy those, on account of they cost more.”

“How much for a jar?” Sostratos asked.

“Twelve drakhmai.”

That wasn’t far from what the Rhodian had expected. Over an hour or so, pausing for politics and women and bees and wine and mean dogs and whatever else came to mind, he haggled Erasinides down to eight drakhmai the lekythos. He paid in shiny Athenian owls; the farmer made it plain he had no use for perfume or balsam or anything else the Aphrodite had brought to Athens. Erasinides helped him pack the lekythoi into the baskets on the donkey’s back, and gave him straw to stuff between them to keep them from breaking.

“Thank you kindly,” the farmer said as he left. “You Rhodians seem a goodly folk, even if you do talk funny.”

On the way past the farm with the fearsome hound, Sostratos gripped his stick tightly. The dog didn’t bother him. He kept going, down off the mountain and back toward the whirl that was Athens.

“Wait a minute,” Menedemos said. “Isn’t Demetrios already married?”

The man who’d given him the news, a sausage-seller named Kleon, dipped his head. “That’s right,” he said. “He married Phila a long time ago-Antipatros’ daughter, you know, the one who’d been married to Krateros before.” He had an engagingly ugly face, which he now twisted into an engagingly lewd leer. “But she’s a lot older than Demetrios, and Antigonos had to talk him into marrying her for the sake of her blood and her connections. This time, maybe he wants to have some fun.”

All through the Athenian agora, people were buzzing with the news. “He certainly does like to have his fun,” Menedemos said. “That little call he paid to have fun with what’s-her-name-Kratesipolis- almost cost him his neck.” By the dog! he thought. I sound like Sostratos. Demetrios is too wild even for me. Who could have imagined that? He went on, “So who is this new woman? Eurydike, you said her name was?”

“That’s right, my dear,” Kleon answered. “Her blood’s as blue as the sky. She’s descended from Miltiades, the hero of Marathon. She used to be married to Ophelis, the King of Kyrene west of Egypt, but she came back to Athens after he died.”

“Phila, Kratesipolis, and now Eurydike,” Menedemos said musingly. “Demetrios must like widows.”

“Well, they already know how.” Kleon leered again. “You don’t have to teach ‘em, the way you do with maidens. Besides, it’s not like Demetrios is going to be faithful to this one, any more than he has to any of the others.”

“No, I suppose not,” Menedemos said. “He sure hasn’t up to now.” He remembered the pretty girl he’d glimpsed at Demetrios’ house. Demetrios could do anything he wanted. Menedemos sighed. That sounded marvelous.

Kleon said, “I just wonder if he’s going to be cheap about it, or if he’ll throw a feast and sacrifice animals and give away meat and wine.” Like most of the Athenians Menedemos had met, he kept his eye on the main chance. As now: he thrust his tray at Menedemos, asking, “You going to buy something, or are you just going to stand around and gab?”

“Here,” Menedemos handed him an obolos. Kleon gave back a sausage link. It was so full of garlic and fennel, Menedemos needed a couple of bites to be sure it was made from pork. If the meat wasn’t so fresh as it might have been, the spices kept him from noticing.

“Sausages!” Kleon shouted after sticking the coin in his mouth. “Get your sausages! Demetrios gives his to Eurydike, but I’ve got sausages for everybody!”