The Gryphon's Skull

With a circumference of perhaps 180 stadia, Aigina wasn't a big island. These days, it also wasn't an important island, though that hadn't always been true. When the Aphrodite made for the polis, which lay on the western side of the island, Sostratos said, “This place would be a lot better off if it hadn't gone over to Dareios before Marathon.”

“It got what it deserved afterwards, eh?” Menedemos said.

“If you want to call it that,” Sostratos replied. “The Athenians dispossessed the Aiginetans and planted their own colonists here. Then, after the Peloponnesian War, the Spartans threw those people out and brought back the original Aiginetans and their descendants.”

“So who's left nowadays?” Menedemos asked.

“Aiginetans,” Sostratos said. “They're a mongrel lot, I suppose, but that's true of a lot of Hellenes these days. If a polis loses a war ...” He clicked his tongue between his teeth; he didn't like to think of such things. But he refused to shy away from them: “Remember, Rhodes had a Macedonian garrison when we were youths.”

His cousin looked as if he would have been happier forgetting. “It's our job to make sure that never happens again.”

“So it is,” Sostratos said. If we can, he added, but only to himself. He might think words of evil omen, but he would do his best not to speak them aloud.

Whatever their ultimate origins, the modern Aiginetans spoke a dialect halfway between Attic and Doric. It sounded odd to Sostratos. Menedemos, though, said, “They talk almost the same way you do.”

“They do not!” Sostratos said indignantly.

“They do so,” Menedemos said. “They sound like people who started out speaking Doric but went to school in Athens.”

“Most of them sound as though they've never been to school at all,” Sostratos retorted. He was proud of the Atticisms in his own speech; they showed him to be a man of culture. To his ear, the Aiginetans didn't sound cultured at all. He and his cousin might have been the asses in Aisop's fable, except that they were dithering over dialects rather than bales of hay.

“All right. All right. Let it go.” Menedemos, having planted his barb, was content to ease up. “We made it past the rocks. Now that we're in the harbor, we'll sell the lion skin and make the trip worthwhile.”

“Rocks?” Sostratos said.

Before Menedemos could answer, Diokles spoke up: “Didn't you notice how careful-like your cousin was steering, young sir? The approach to this harbor's as nasty as any in Hellas, but he handled it pretty as you please.”

Menedemos looked smug. Praise from a seaman as accomplished as the oarmaster would have left anyone feeling smug. And I didn't even pay attention to what he was doing, Sostratos thought ruefully.

The next morning, the two cousins took their tawny hide up to the temple of Artemis, which stood close by those of Apollo and Aphrodite. Menedemos peered into the one dedicated to Apollo. “We might try here if we have bad luck with Artemis' priest,” he said. “The Apollo is naked—carved from wood, looks like, and old as the hills.”

That made Sostratos look, too. “I wonder just how old that statue is,” he said. “People have been making images of marble or bronze for a long time now.” Menedemos only shrugged, and with reason. They had no better way of learning the statue's age than they'd had of finding out how old the gryphon's skull was. Sostratos grimaced, wishing he hadn't thought of that comparison. He couldn't see Attica from here; the higher ground of the north of Aigina shielded the mainland from his eye, which was more than a small relief.

The marble statue of Artemis was draped, but only in a carved tunic that didn't even reach the goddess' knees. “Why, she'd catch her death of cold if she didn't don our skin for a cloak,” Menedemos said.

Sostratos looked around. “Where's the priest?” he asked, seeing no one in the sacred precinct. He got no answer, either.

Before long, an Aiginetan ambled in. “Are you the priest?” Menedemos asked him.

He tossed his head. “Not me. Nikodromos is probably still in town. He's a man who likes to sleep late, he is.”

“What shall we do till he gets here?” Sostratos asked in annoyance. “Grow moss?”

“You might as well, pal,” the local replied. “He isn't going to get here till he gets here, if you know what I mean.”

Sostratos grunted. The Aiginetan had a point. Another man came into the temple. He wasn't Nikodromos, either. He was somebody else looking for the priest. “Lazy, sour bastard's probably still home snoring,” he said. Nikodromos' habits were evidently well known. He would never have made a seaman—but then, he hadn't tried. As a priest, he could sleep late if he wanted to.

“Maybe we ought to find his house in town and throw rocks at the shutters,” Menedemos said a little later.