The Gryphon's Skull

Despite Dorimakhos' corpse, they used the akatos' boat to go ashore. For an obolos, an old man pointed them toward the burial ground outside Sounion, and toward the gravedigger's house. “You'll be the Rhodians,” that worthy said when they knocked on his door. Gossip, as usual, had wasted no time. “You lost someone in your fight with the pirates?”

“We lost one man, and we're losing another,” Menedemos answered.

“Will you stay here till he dies?” the gravedigger asked. Menedemos and Sostratos looked at each other. Sostratos sighed and shrugged. Menedemos dipped his head. So did the gravedigger. “Three drakhmai, then, for two graves,” he said.

Sostratos gave him three Rhodian coins. He took them without a murmur, though they were lighter than Athenian owls. Menedemos asked, “Who's the chief priest at Poseidon's temple here? We'd like him to purify our ship.”

“That would be Theagenes,” the gravedigger replied.

As the two Rhodians walked toward the temple, Menedemos asked, “Where do we go from here?”

His cousin looked at him. “Why, back to the ship, I would think.”

Menedemos made an exasperated noise. “No. What I mean is, where does the Aphrodite go from here?—and you know it, too.”

“Well, what if I do?” Sostratos walked along for several paces, his bare feet kicking up dust from a dirt path that hadn't seen rain since spring. Then, suddenly he stopped and sighed and shrugged. “I'd hoped I would change my mind with some sleep, but I haven't. Without the gryphon's skull, I don't much care where we go. What difference does it make now?”

“It makes a lot of difference,” Menedemos answered. “It makes a difference in what we end up selling, and for how much.”

Sostratos shrugged again. “We'll show some profit this sailing season. We won't show a really big one, the way we did coming back from Great Hellas after the peafowl and that mad dash down to Syracuse loaded with grain.”

“That wasn't mad. That was brilliant,” Menedemos said. It had been his idea.

“It turned out to be brilliant, because we got away with it. That doesn't mean it wasn't mad,” Sostratos said, relentlessly precise as usual. A fly lit on Menedemos' hand. He brushed it away. Back among the trees, a cuckoo called. Sostratos continued, “Without the gryphon's skull, whether we go to Athens or not doesn't matter to me. It's just another polis now, as far as I'm concerned.”

“You really do mean that,” Menedemos said. His cousin dipped his head. He looked as sad as a man whose child had just died. Trying to cheer him up, Menedemos asked, “Couldn't you—I don't know— tell your philosopher friends about the gryphon's skull?”

He didn't know whether he'd cheered Sostratos, but saw he had amused him. “Kind of you to think of such things, my dear, but it wouldn't do,” Sostratos said. “It would be like. . .” He paused a moment in thought, then grinned and pointed at Menedemos. “Like you bragging about some woman you've had, where nobody else has seen her or knows whether you're telling the truth.”

“Don't you listen to the sailors?” Menedemos said. “Men talk like that all the time.”

“Of course they do. I'm not saying they don't,” Sostratos answered. “But the point is, half the time the people who listen to them think, By the gods, what a liar he is! If I can't hold up the skull to show the men of the Lykeion and the Academy, why should they believe me?”

“Because they know you?” Menedemos suggested. “I'd be likelier to believe you bragging about a woman than I would most people I can think of. I'm still jealous about that hetaira back in Miletos, and you didn't even brag about her.”

“Men know about women. They know what they're like—as much as men can hope to, anyhow,” Sostratos said, and Menedemos laughed. His cousin went on, “But suppose men had only known boys up till now. Think about that.”

“I like women better,” Menedemos said. “They enjoy it, too, and boys usually don't.”

“Never mind that,” Sostratos said impatiently. “Suppose all we'd known were boys, and somebody started talking about what a woman was like. Would you believe him if he didn't have a woman there with him to prove what he was saying?”

Menedemos thought about it. “No, I don't suppose I would,” he admitted.

“All right, then. That's what I'd be up against, talking about the gryphon's skull without being able to show it.” Sostratos let out another sigh, a lover pining for a lost love. “It's over now. Nothing to be done about it. Let's find this Theagenes and get the ship purified.”

The priest was pruning a fig tree in a little orchard by the temple when the Rhodians came up to him. “Hail,” Menedemos called.