Of Merchants & Heros (20 page)

At Rome, he said, there had been something of a dilemma about what to do with him. He had gone to Tarentum with the rank of quaestor, and in the normal course of political advance, he could have expected an aedileship next. But then his uncle Caeso had died, and he had been made praetor, missing out the rank of aedile completely. It had seemed pointless and wrong to everyone to reward him now with an aedileship, which would in effect be a demotion. ‘So they have appointed me to a land commission, which will distribute land to Scipio’s veterans back from the war in Africa.

Oh, it is not so great in itself,’ he said, ‘but it will get me noticed, and I will get to know the veterans. They will be useful allies, when election time comes round.’

I congratulated him. I knew he hoped for a consulship one day, and the votes of these old soldiers would count. I asked if there was more news of Philip and Greece.

At this he looked serious. ‘Indeed there is; and it has caused quite a scandal at Rome.’

After Hannibal’s defeat at Zama, he explained, when the prisoners were being rounded up, four thousand Macedonian infantrymen had been found among the Carthaginian troops.

I looked at him in surprise.

He nodded. ‘Yes. Four thousand. No one thought Philip was truly neutral when he claimed it; but no one thought a Macedonian army would be fighting with our enemies.’

The Senate, he said, was furious, and their anger was heightened when Philip had sent envoys to Rome, arrogantly demanding the release of his men.

‘What did the Senate say?’ I asked.

‘They told them these men were enemies of Rome. If Philip now found them in chains he had only himself to blame.’

I whistled through my teeth.

‘What will the Senate do now?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ he said, and the impatience showed in his voice. ‘Still nothing. They will watch and wait. Perhaps, now, they will watch more carefully. But there are still too many who think the problem will go away if they ignore it for long enough.’

As we talked we had been climbing the wooded path that led past the old ashlar walls of Praeneste, and we emerged now onto a wide rocky ledge that looked out over the valley. It was the place where I often used to come as a boy, when I wanted to be alone. Below us, the land fell steeply away. The chill air smelled of pine and morning dew.

Titus walked to the edge and looked out at the distant snow- tipped peaks. He drew a deep breath, and after a pause mentioned the name of a man, and asked if I had heard of him.

I had not.

‘He is a senator; one of those who have been supporting me. But that is not important. He had a daughter once. He lost her four years ago – in Epeiros.’

I had been leaning against a pine trunk with my arms folded. But now I stood up straight and looked at him.

‘About a year ago,’ he went on, ‘one of our triremes captured a pirate ship, not far from Kerkyra. Most of the pirates were killed in the fighting. But not all. The survivors were questioned, and one of them admitted to being there on the day the girl died. You tried to save her . . . I never knew.’

I drew my breath and gazed out across the valley, remembering.

Far away, a flock of swans was moving across the sky, white against blue. The memories of the past came closing in upon me. I said, ‘I tried, but I could not save anyone at all. She died, and so did my father. But for me, they might have lived.’

I heard Titus shift and turn, and felt his eyes on me. Eventually I looked up. He said, ‘Is it for this that you pursue Dikaiarchos?’

I scuffed at the ground with my toe and shrugged. ‘In part.

Sometimes I think he has made me what I am. It is a kind of curse.’

His blue eyes were intent upon me, but how could I explain? It seemed to me that Dikaiarchos had burned himself into the very core of my being. Great hatred changes men, as does great love. I knew that now. Dikaiarchos dwelt within me. How could I tell that to any man? Eventually I said, ‘It is with the gods. I made a vow.’

He nodded at this, and for a short while he was silent. Then he said, ‘I think it’s time I told you why I have come.’

We resumed our walking, and he explained that since Philip’s Macedonian troops had been captured in Africa, he was more sure than ever that war would come. What he did not know was how, and where. ‘I shall be tied up with business in Italy for some time; I need someone in Greece, someone I can trust, to be my eyes and ears there. Your stepfather’s business would be a perfect cover. You can come and go without drawing suspicion, and you will be in the right place for—’ He paused, and swept his hand impatiently at the air, ‘— for whatever happens. Will you do it?’

I did not hesitate even for an instant. ‘You know I will.’

He laughed. ‘Yes. I knew. Well then, let us go and speak to your stepfather.’

Caecilius, when he heard, could talk of nothing else. To him, influence at Rome was all, and now I was clearly in favour at the highest level. Titus let him talk on for a while, and then reminded him of the need for discretion. He did not want it put about in Greece that I was his agent, not yet.

‘You can rely on it,’ Caecilius told him. ‘Discretion is why I have been so successful. Anyone can tell you.’

That spring, I sailed for the second time from Brundisium to Greece.

We put in at Kerkyra, and once again I walked the quayside – not, this time, as a destitute boy who had just lost his father, but as the well-dressed son of an important Roman merchant. We stayed just long enough to load a cargo of unmarked crates, and then put out southwards, bound for Patrai.

Before I left, Caecilius had said with a pointed look, ‘There is no need to concern yourself with the cargo for my friend Kritolaus; when you get to Patrai he will take care of things. I should have liked you to spend more time there. Never mind, though. Serving Titus is far more valuable to me.’ He tapped his nose in the irritating way he had. ‘Word at Rome is that Titus is a rising star; we must cling to him like a burdock seed.’

I believe he trotted out these words to me as much out of habit as anything, as a man might chant the words of a litany he does not understand.

Since the night in Tarentum when he had questioned me about Menexenos, certain things had changed between us. He had not once questioned me about Menexenos again. Nor did he refer to what had happened that night. But afterwards I noticed he grew more careful with me, lecturing me less, and ceasing to demand to know what I did with my time. I guessed that it had been long since anyone had stood up to him on any matter at all. I sensed, too, that he was glad to be rid of me.

I sailed via Patrai, delaying there for a month, long enough to maintain the pretence that I was travelling on my stepfather’s business. But soon the ship put in that was to take me east, and the journey to Athens passed without incident.

The harbour front at Piraeus was busy with all the usual port traffic – handcarts; mule-wagons; bare-chested stevedores working the cranes or passing bales, their rhythmic work-chants sounding across the water; shipping agents; passengers waiting beside their luggage; crewmen; soldiers; and all the traders and stallholders that served them. There were men of every race: olive-skinned Phoenicians; tawny Egyptians in their bright silks; chattering black Nubians with skin like polished ebony; Persians with their ringlet- beards and fine headgear; tall, muscled Kelts; and, of course, Greeks – rich, poor, slaves, freemen, dark, fair, bearded, clean-shaven, all calling and talking and moving about.

But amidst all this bustle, even from afar, I spied Menexenos, standing at the harbour entrance, apart from the crowd, under the tall cast-iron cresset, where the young boys stand fishing off the harbour wall. I waved, and our eyes met, and my heart surged with joy. His hair was a little longer. He was dressed in a short tunic, which showed the fine contours of his legs and arms. He looked like a god in repose.

The ship berthed. I leapt down, and we fell into a laughing embrace. And presently, when we were done with our greetings, he said, ‘Come, Father is waiting to meet you.’

We left Piraeus and took the road up to the city. It was a bright clear morning, early still, and full of promise. As we walked I could see, ahead in the distance, the high-city rising up like a great boulder cast by Titans into the plain, wooded on its lower slopes, with Athena’s temple on the top, and the other temples clustered round, brilliant in the slanting sunlight, a perfect jewel of blue and white and gold against a cobalt sky.

Menexenos’s house stood on the rising ground behind the agora, set back from the street behind a high whitewashed wall, in an enclosure planted with a great shading fig tree. A lean, grey-haired man emerged from within, and I knew straight away it was Kleinias, Menexenos’s father.

He had his son’s flint eyes, and the same look of calm intelligence; and though he must have been nearing sixty, yet he possessed an austere powerful beauty still, and a presence that needed no fine clothes to advertise itself. I think, then, for the first time, I understood what it was to be an aristocrat.

‘You are welcome, Marcus,’ he said, taking my hand in his own strong grip. He led me inside, to a pleasant sparsely decorated room where wine and sweet-cakes had been set out on a low table. He hoped, he said, that I had had a pleasant journey; he asked a little of Tarentum and Praeneste, and listened courteously while I answered, taking in every word and movement.

I shall not say that he put me at my ease. That was not what he was about. I wondered what he made of me, and realized, with something of an inner start, that not only was he aware of our love affair, but he approved it. It was not that I had anything to be ashamed of; but such things did not happen in Praeneste. Here, so it seemed, such things were as familiar, and as well regarded, as the few tasteful objects that adorned the room – a polished plate; a vase; a marquetry table.

He spoke in precise, clear Greek; not with affectation, but with the unconscious confidence of a man who knows his tools and uses them to their best. But I quickly sensed that light conversation did not come easily to him, and as soon as enough time had passed for good manners he said that he had some business to attend to, and hoped I would forgive him if he left us.

When he had gone, Menexenos rested his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘Well that is done. He can be rather stern at times.’

I smiled up at him. ‘He’s magnificent, like some perfect thing; like that vase in the corner there.’

He laughed. ‘Yes, well perfection isn’t always easy to live with.

But come, I’ll show you your room.’

Next day, after a breakfast of bread and cheese and watered wine, Kleinias bade us farewell, saying he was going to the family farm in the country, where he preferred to spend his time. ‘I tire,’ he said, ‘of the city’s noise and madness: each day a scandal and a crisis, which, by the time I return, will all be forgotten as if it never happened. But I daresay you two will prefer it here for a while. Well you are young.

But come out to the farm when you are ready.’

In the days that followed, Menexenos took me about the city, and I marvelled, as every man who goes there marvels. I had never seen so much marble and gold and fine statuary collected in one place.

And if one could ever tire of the painted temples, hidden shrines, monuments and sacred gardens, there were artisans and merchants for every trade – armourers, carpenters, jewellers, tailors; makers of caskets and vases and fine instruments; sellers of spice and wine and perfume; and more booksellers than I had ever seen before. We passed schools where boys learnt letters, geometry and music; we went up the Pnyx, where the Athenians meet in assembly; we climbed the steep pine-shrouded hill to the high-city and gazed at the image of the virgin goddess in her temple, a figure of ivory and gold as tall as the temple roof, with incense burning in censers around her and curling up to the rafters.

Emerging from here, we paused at the ramparts, and Menexenos pointed out a complex of red-roofed buildings beyond the city wall, in a grove of plane trees and cypresses, with a running-track beside.

‘That’s the Lykeion,’ he said. ‘I go training there when I’m not out at the farm . . . And out that way’ – placing his hand on my shoulder and turning me – ‘is the Akademy.’

I looked. This other place was further off, about a mile from the walls, in a suburb of smallholdings, set in a garden of tall trees beside a river. ‘Is that a gymnasion too?’ I asked.

‘Well, yes, though it’s better known now for its philosophers . . .

See there’ – pointing out a walled building beside it, half-obscured by tall trees – ‘that’s the school Plato founded. His tomb is there, in the gardens among the myrtles, and that building – the white one – is where he lived.’

He had been training, he said, for the pentathlon, having been chosen for the Panathenaic games, which would take place that summer. If it went well he might try for the Isthmia, as his father wanted. But that was still two years away. He had been working on his javelin-throw. He was confident with the stade-long sprint, and pleased with his diskos.

‘Well you were always good at that,’ I said.

He laughed. ‘Yes, it is my best.’

‘And the wrestling?’ I said.

He shrugged, and frowned up at Athena’s temple. Below the roof, in painted relief, was a scene of men in battle with centaurs – half man and half beast. For a moment his eyes dwelt on it.

After a short pause he said, ‘My grandfather won the crown in the pentathlon, and his father before him. It goes back beyond memory.

Father still has the prize-vases out at the farm.’

‘But no crown for your father? Did he not compete?’

He met my eye. ‘He did not win.’

I nodded, and thought of lean, austere, strict Kleinias. Defeat must have come hard to him. I said, ‘Things have changed since your grandfather’s time . . . the games have changed. We’ve both seen that.’

He made a gesture with his hand. ‘You are right, Marcus. But it is tradition, and we do it because of that, and because there is still an excellence to the games – something that touches the gods – however much ignorant men may forget it.’ He paused, frowning, and began toying with a pebble on the ledge. He grew conscious of it and set it aside. ‘Well I ought to tell you: I had a brother once, you see.’