Killer of Men - Christian Cameron [15]
Don’t fool yourself, honey. We’re tyrants, too.
At any rate, while I was a boy, the Pisistratidae fell. The survivors ran off to the Great King of Persia and Athens became a democracy. Suddenly, in a day, Athens had the manpower to field a big army – ten thousand hoplites or more. The Athens of my boyhood was like a boy who has just developed his first muscles.
You’ve stayed awake through my history lesson – that fellow who is courting you must be having his effect. The point is – there is a point, honey – that for the first time, Athens was feeling strong, and she was suddenly open as a market for the Plataeans, just over the mountains and guarding the pass to Thebes. Some of the richer farmers had learned that if they carted their olive oil and grain and wine over the mountain to Athens, they fetched a much better price than they got in the market of little Plataea – or in the market of mighty Thebes.
I longed to go to Athens. I dreamed of it. I had heard that the whole city was built of Parian marble. Lies, of course, but you have dreams of your own – you know what dreams are like. And we heard that the Alcmaeonidae were building the new Temple of Apollo at Delphi of marble – it had never been done before – and it was a marvel. Draco the wheelwright, as close to a good friend as Pater had, went on a pilgrimage to Delphi and came back singing of the new temple.
Bah, give me that wine cup and never mind an old man’s digressions. Anyway, the talk that summer was of the Daidala and the price of grain.
Epictetus was the richest of the local farmers. He’d been born a slave and made all his wealth from his own sweat, and he might have been old Hesiod reborn. A hard man to cross. But he’d just made the trip to Athens the year before and he swore by it. I remember the day that he pulled up with a wagon full of hired hands.
‘This is the party?’ he said. He had a grim, deep voice.
‘No party here,’ Pater said. He was making a cauldron, a deep one, and the anvil sang with every stroke as he bent the bronze to his will. ‘Just a bunch of loafers avoiding their work!’
There were twenty men around the forge yard, and they all laughed. It was mid-afternoon, and there wasn’t a lazy man there. They had a skin of last year’s wine, the good purple stuff that our grapes make at home, dark as Tyrian dye.
Epictetus got off his wagon and his hired men climbed down. It was a high wagon – Draco’s best work, the kind that would carry five farms’ worth of grain. He had a grown son – Epictetus son of Epictetus – who was a shadow beside his hard-working father.
‘Bring our wine, son,’ the father said, and then he walked into the yard.
It was quite the event, because Epictetus never came to loaf in the forge yard. He said that a man had but one life, and any time he wasted counted against him with the gods. He was the only farmer in Boeotia who owned four ploughs. He only needed two, but he built the other two – just in case. He was that sort of man.
So he came into the yard and Pater sent me for a stool from the kitchen. It was like one lord visiting another. I fetched a stool, and Epictetus – the son – poured wine from a heavy amphora for every man in the yard. I had a taste of Pater’s. It was not cheap.
Epictetus looked around. ‘I’ve picked the right day,’ he said. He nodded. ‘I have a thought in my head and I can’t get it out. I wanted to talk to the men – the real men – without giving myself away to the Theban bastards in town.’
Pater handed Bion the new cauldron. ‘Punch her for rivets,’ he said. ‘Did you pour me a new plate?’
Bion nodded. He was better at casting bronze even than Pater. ‘Smooth as a baby,’ he said.
‘He’ll be a rival to you when you free him,’ Draco said.
‘No,’ Pater said. He pulled his leather apron off and tossed it to another slave. Then he poured some water over his head, wiped his face with a rag and walked back. ‘It is good to see you in my yard, and a guest is always a blessing,’ Pater said, and poured a libation.