Of Merchants & Heros Read online

  But these men did not come to play, or to be with their friends, or to improve themselves. They came for no other purpose than to gaze upon the naked youths.

  I had at first been taken aback by this. But in time I perceived that the young men, stripped for exercise, took no notice, and I began to understand that it was of no concern to them if others chose to look at their bodies. They were what they were, as God had made them, and that was that.

  Besides, there was something else I had begun to understand. Not all the onlookers were unwelcome. Some of the youths had lovers, and were pleased when they came to support them. But these men behaved with honour. Never before had I seen anyone there accost a youth in front of his friends and try to press a costly gift on him.

  Little wonder Menexenos had not wished to speak of it. It would be thought shameful, and people would suppose Lucius had been given encouragement.

  I had wondered, too, about Eumastas. I had seen how, when he watched his friend on the track, his stolid features would soften into a rugged beauty, and his dark eyes shine with tenderness. Whether they were lovers or not I could not tell. They were both well bred, with an aristocratic formality, and, whatever they felt for each other, such people did not make a show of their emotions in public.

  There was something else too, that lay behind all the rest. I can say it now.

  Like sunlight breaking through mist, my own clouded feelings had started to resolve. No one with eyes to see cannot be touched by beauty; and beauty changes us, like the purifying fire. I was drawn to Menexenos, with a need I only half understood, and it made me uneasy. He had a poise and confidence I lacked; he seemed self- contained, entire, perfect; like light, or the memory of childhood. I grew conscious of his expressions, his movements, his very smell.

  But what moved me most was what was deepest. Sometimes, when he thought no one was looking, I would see it in his face, like a cloud passing over water, a profound melancholy, kept in check, hidden from public view, that melted my heart and touched my soul.

  All my life, I had never thought of myself as handsome. I had been a slight boy when I was young; after my father’s death, when I had driven myself hard, I had broadened and gained muscle, and took on the appearance of a man. But there was always the darkness within. The sword-wound in my thigh, which Caecilius never ceased to remind me of, seemed to me a mark of all my imperfection. It confronted me every time I stripped, reminding me of my ugliness.

  I knew I was not like other men. I was alone. Not one day went by that I did not remember my vow to the god, and the murderous purpose I had given myself. At night, as I lay in my bed, I would whisper to the darkness, ‘Dikaiarchos, you cannot hide; I am coming for you.’ My promise of vengeance lay behind every waking moment, and haunted my dreams. It gave meaning to my solitude.

  My only respite from this was when I was with Menexenos. I glimpsed, in some inexplicable way I could not fully grasp, a light that led out of the pathless dark, a chink of sunlight beyond the cave.

  It made me yearn to be more than I was; but if anyone had asked me what, I could not have told him.

  Yet I sensed it as clearly as the day. And to see Lucius make a fool of himself troubled me deeply, not for his sake, but for my own.

  For I had an inkling that, but for my pride, and my sense of dignity, and my wanting Menexenos to respect me, I was capable of just the same. It sent a cold trail of fear down my spine, as when a man stares into an abyss. I yearned to be whole; I knew I was not. I yearned for Menexenos.

  All these thoughts I kept to myself. I had no words to express them, even had I dared.

  And thus matters stood, when, one day soon after, when Menexenos, Eumastas and I had gone swimming in the bay, he suggested I should train with them at the palaistra.

  The summer heat had recently come on. The hillsides were loud with the sound of cicadas. We were basking on a flat, warm rock beside the water, drying off in the afternoon sun. Menexenos, looking at my body, said, ‘You know, Marcus, you are no weakling, and yet I never see you train.’

  I told him, somewhat shyly, how I had worked on the land at home.

  ‘But what of athletics? Is there no gymnasion at Praeneste then?’

  I laughed out loud, thinking how shocked the simple townsfolk at home would be at such a thing. ‘No,’ I said. ‘There is nothing like that.’

  ‘Then why not come with me and Eumastas?’ he said. ‘We can do some diskos and javelin and perhaps some running too. But we can start with the diskos, eh Eumastas—? But Marcus, why are you frowning?’

  ‘But Menexenos,’ I cried, ‘I am a Roman!’

  ‘What of it? You are in Tarentum now; and, Roman or not, you are still a man.’

  I thought of what Caecilius would have to say if he knew, and smiled inwardly. ‘Then yes,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

  There is movement in the diskos-thrower which, when it is done at its best, combines purpose with grace, like the dance of a warrior, or the flight of an eagle. Menexenos was a master of it, so much so that other youths at the palaistra would pause and watch, and the trainer, if he was around, would lean on his staff and say to the younger boys, ‘Observe, and learn.’

  He was also a good teacher: calm and patient and exacting. When he taught me, as with everything else he did, his whole mind was on it. I wish I could have said the same for myself.

  He would stand close, turning my shoulders and guiding my left leg into position with his foot. ‘No, like this, just as I showed you,’ he would say, placing his hand over mine, and forming my fingers around the rim of the disk.

  Close up, he smelled of sweet male sweat, and pine and dust and oil; and where our flesh touched I could feel the heat of his body like the touch of fire.

  ‘Now swing your arm back, here, like this . . . You’re not concentrating, Marcus! Well, no matter. Let’s try again.’

  And we would try again.

  FIVE

  ‘HE IS A DANGEROUS PIRATE, raiding and plundering the cities of the Aegean, and Lucius says . . .’ Titus broke off. It took me a moment to realize.

  I had been looking out of the window into the garden as he talked, my eyes on the fronds of the pear tree; but my mind was elsewhere, ranging along the cliff paths on the wild coast of Epeiros.

  He had been talking about Dikaiarchos.

  He said, ‘You look as if you have seen some underworld spirit.’

  And that was how it felt. But I said, ‘Forgive me, Titus. I was remembering.’

  ‘Well,’ he went on, ‘he is playing a dangerous game. King Philip thinks we are too exhausted by war, and too afraid of another, to heed what he does. He is backing every pirate from here to Asia. And he is rearming, building another fleet, in secret. But one cannot spend money like that and not have it known.’

  ‘Yet surely,’ I said, pulling my mind together and forcing myself to concentrate once more on the conversation, ‘he would not dare cross to Italy. He knows what happened to Pyrrhus.’

  ‘Pyrrhus was defeated, but only by a whisker. It was a close thing then; and this time Scipio has taken the flower of our army to Africa.

  Philip knows that. What better time to strike?’

  Mimas, Titus’s Greek friend, who was there, said, ‘Would he be so brazen? Does he suppose the Greek cities here would back him?’

  Titus shrugged. ‘He may not care, if he is strong enough. The trouble is, no one can predict him. If he means us no harm, why is he being so careful to hide his intentions? Some say he is building this fleet to attack Antiochos in Asia. Philip, meanwhile, declares that he is Antiochos’s friend.’

  ‘He claims he is everybody’s friend, when it suits him,’ said Mimas.

  ‘Exactly. And if he is everybody’s friend, why does he need a fleet so urgently?’ He made a frustrated gesture. ‘And then there is Egypt —‘ That year King Ptolemy of Egypt had died. His son, also called Ptolemy, was still a child, and in the chaos of the succession there had been rebellion in Upper Egypt. ‘Perhaps,’ said T
itus, ‘he has his eyes on Egypt. If it fell into his hands, he would have Antiochos like this’ – he pressed his thumb and forefinger in a pincer – ‘and he would control the grain trade from Alexandria as well.’

  Mimas whistled through his teeth. ‘What do your friends in Rome say?’

  ‘They say do one thing at a time: let us deal with Hannibal first.’

  ‘Do you agree?’

  ‘Up to a point. But we must watch Philip. Whatever he is up to, it will not be to Rome’s benefit. He is waiting to see if we have the stomach to stand up to him.’

  My stepfather had asked me to find out what was afoot in Greece.

  Now, when I told him what I had heard, he was impatient with me, for it was not what he wanted to hear.

  ‘Oh, Titus is talking nonsense,’ he said, dismissing my words.

  ‘There is no threat from Philip.’

  Like many middle-aged men, he had ceased to challenge himself years ago. He had grown complacent in his views, and because he surrounded himself with men who dared not contradict him, he had come to believe he was right in everything. He saw only what he wanted to see, and just now he did not want anything to disrupt a trade deal he was working towards with his new contacts in Greece, importing silk from Kos and Syria, and glassware from Phoenicia.

  Lately, too, he had begun to collect valuables, having been told by one of his merchant friends that there would soon be money to be made in it, especially in Rome, where there was growing interest in such things. So he instructed his agents in the East to pick up what they could, from cities impoverished by war or want, and send them with his regular cargoes, without enquiring too deeply into their provenance. He would show them to me when they arrived, and indeed they were fine work. I recall a cup of banded sardonyx embossed in white, of a young man holding two horses; an embossed glass bowl from Egypt, with a tint of green, which looked like deep sea-water when the sun caught it; Adonis surrounded by hovering cupids, with the mourning Aphrodite beside him in a bower of flowers. This last – which struck me as voluptuous and overripe – he particularly liked, and kept for himself. The rest he put away, intending to sell them later.

  ‘There will be a rich trade in such things one day, mark my words,’ he told me, peering at his Aphrodite and touching her smooth marble body with his thick fingers.

  During that summer, I had begun to reflect on many things I had hitherto taken for granted. I asked myself how a man perceives good, and how he works out for himself what makes one thing, or one man, worse or better than another.

  In part, this had come from my conversations with Menexenos, who seemed able to discern, by looking, what was genuine and what was fake. It was not a thing he made much of. But now and then he would pass some comment that would make me look again at a statue, or a sculpture, or a painting, and see some new depth to it.

  I wondered where he found such knowledge. It was more than a skill. It seemed to me he saw such things as part of some living whole, and could judge them and how they fitted.

  In such small ways as this, over the past weeks, Menexenos had come to fill my thoughts. One day, during this time, Caecilius had complained, ‘What has happened to you lately? You never concentrate on what matters. You grow less like me every day.’ It had made me aware that I was changing.

  When I was a boy at home, on days when the sky was clear and cloudless, and as blue as cornflower or a stone of sapphire, I used to go climbing on the mountainside, high up, to the crags where the ash trees clung to the rock and even the nimble goats trod carefully. The climb was hard, and would leave me panting. But then I would turn and stand between earth and sky, looking out to where the river glittered like a thread of silver in the valley far below. And at that moment the world was changed, and my petty cares would fall away, and I would know the effort of the climb had been worthwhile.

  So it was with my young soul. In dwelling upon the good things I saw in Menexenos, it seemed I had grown more aware of everything, and of myself in particular. It was hard, just as the climb up the hillside had been hard, because most times it was my own failings that I saw more clearly. But if ever I wondered if it was worth it, I needed only to look at Caecilius. He had been right. Like a ship departing the shore, the distance between us was growing. I was changing; he was not – or not in the same way.

  Sometimes, now, there would be not one girl creeping out of the house in the early morning, but two; and not always the same two either. On one such day, appearing at mid-morning with a great purple bite on his neck, and dark shadows under his eyes, he marched into the workroom and declared crossly, ‘You have been out too much of late.’

  He was always in a bad mood after these night-time sessions.

  That day, I had been up since the dawn, working to clear a heap of pointless work he had assigned to me. I had almost finished, and had planned, later, to meet Menexenos. Now, stung by the injustice of his words, I replied, ‘Is there anything I have left undone, sir?’

  ‘I daresay there is,’ he huffed, ‘if I bothered myself to look. But I have better things to do.’ He sat down at his desk and began pushing irritably through the tablets and scrolls. ‘But what I wanted to say to you, Marcus, is this. I am planning a gathering at month-end for my friends. I expect you to attend.’

  He ran through the names of several of his business associates, adding at the end, ‘It is time I showed them how a man of means can entertain. It is not only the praetor who can hold a banquet. Oh, and there are some female friends of mine who will be there as well.’

  I said nothing. Just then the door sounded. It was Telamon, carrying a tray with a cup and flask – my stepfather’s morning wine.

  ‘Set it there, and leave,’ snapped Caecilius.

  Telamon, who knew the danger signs as well as I, hurriedly set down the tray and left, pulling the door shut behind him. There was a tense silence, like the quiet before a storm. The only sounds were the rattle of the wooden writing-tablets as Caecilius shuffled them, and his occasional snorts of displeasure.

  Then it came. With a loud crack he slapped the tablets down on the desktop and cried, ‘I suppose you are waiting to take yourself off to the palaistra again, is that it? Do you think I don’t know how you spend your time? Virilis saw you only the other day, loitering there.’

  ‘Loitering, sir?’ I felt my colour rising. As usual he had found the weak spot in my armour. ‘I make no secret of where I go. You need only ask, if you wish to know. And I do not loiter. I go for exercise, and to meet my friends.’

  I was tempted to ask what pallid round-shouldered Virilis was doing at the palaistra, but it did no good to goad him.

  ‘Exercise!’ he shouted, gesturing so violently that he hit his wine- cup, spilling black wine in an arc across his papers. ‘You are not so young that you do not know the reputation of those places.’

  I cursed inwardly, knowing I had reddened to my ears. ‘I have nothing to be ashamed of,’ I said.

  ‘No? Virilis has seen you there stripped naked, as bare as the day you were born . . . I see you do not even try to deny it.’

  ‘But sir!’ I cried. ‘Everyone strips. That is how it is.’

  ‘I dare say. Greeks, after all, are capable of any vice. But remember, boy, you are a Roman, and think of your mother’s honour, even if you forget your own.’

  He glared at me, daring me to reply. There was spittle on his lips.

  The vein in his temple throbbed, and his face had turned as dark as the wine in the flask.

  This, I knew, was a place I did not wish to venture. Somehow – for I was now very angry myself – I managed to collect myself. I told myself this outburst had nothing to do with me, or with the palaistra.

  I recalled the two girls I had seen leaving with the dawn: coarse, pale, overpainted, bitter-faced creatures, whispering harshly to each other as they went, clearly dissatisfied. So much, I thought, for my mother’s honour. And as for Caecilius’s paternal guiding hand, I reflected that he was all for discipline, e
xcept when it came to himself.

  Month-end came, and with it Caecilius’s banquet. It was everything that a symposion of Titus’s was not. It was like the screech of an untuned fiddle after the harmonious lyre. There was a great bonfire in the garden, roaring into the night beside the palms and cypresses. There was raucous, drunken conversation. There were torches of flaring pitch, and piles of seared meat. And later, when the tables were at last cleared, a dancing girl came on, with a painted belly and castanets on her fingers, who cavorted and leered between the couches, and pressed the laughing guests’ faces towards her crotch.

  ‘Buy in bulk’ was one of my stepfather’s precepts, one of the lessons of trade he said I should learn. This he had done with the girls. They had not been brought to converse, even if they could have made themselves heard. But in any case the noise was a relief; it spared me having to make small talk with my neighbours, whose conversation was limited to shipping costs, the price of slaves, and the prospects for the corn harvest.

  Later, when the fire had burned low, one of the girls threw herself on my couch, and without any pretence of talk shoved her hand up under my tunic. I recognized her. She was one of those I had seen creeping through the garden. I pulled her hand away.

  ‘What?’ she cried indignantly, slurring her words. She smelled of Lydian oil, and female sweat. She snatched down the low front of her dress, exposing a drooping breast. ‘See! There is a feast here. Why don’t you eat?’

  She was speaking almost at the top of her voice. From across the courtyard I saw Caecilius’s eyes slew round.

  ‘I find,’ I answered, as she lolled before me, ‘that I am not hungry.’

  She shrugged and went off muttering, leaving her breast exposed, and settled on another couch, where, I saw, she was eagerly welcomed.

  In such ways as this the evening passed, as slowly as a sickness.