Like any satyr play, Dionysos’ Nurses let the audience recover from the full force of the tragedies they had just watched. It was loud and lewd and foolish, with satyrs with jutting phalloi in pursuit of the women who had reared the infant Dionysos. Comedy had sprung from the same roots, but grown in a different direction. Satyr plays, indeed, had grown very little, changing hardly at all from the days when drama was something new in Hellas.

After the satyrs capered off the stage for the last time, the actors in the company and in the chorus came out to take their bows. The applause was loud and generous; they’d delivered their lines and danced and sung as well as anyone could want. Then Demetrios of Phaleron stood up; the production had been his. He looked up and out at the vast crowd and bowed as the performers had done.

He also drew cheers from those who had liked the plays-and louder ones here and there, cheers Sostratos suspected of coming from members of his claque. But, unlike the actors and chorus members, he didn’t come off unscathed. “Don’t serve us stale fish the next time!” shouted someone not far from the Rhodians.

“Your plays were even more boring than you are on the stump!” another man yelled from far up in the theater. He had lungs like a smith’s goatskin bellows, for Sostratos heard him plainly.

Some of the jeers that rained down on Demetrios had nothing to do with the plays he’d just presented. “How does it feel being Kassandros’ catamite, you wide-arsed effeminate?” an Athenian shouted.

“He won’t answer-it’s like farting at a deaf man,” somebody else said. That jerked a startled laugh out of Sostratos; the usual phrase, of course, was shouting at a deaf man. Somehow, though, the theater precinct seemed to give license to everyone, not just the performers.

“To the crows with Kassandros!” another man cried. “Athens should be free!” Those words brought shouts of agreement from the crowd. Here and there, men shook their fists at Demetrios.

“He has nerve,” Menedemos murmured.

Sostratos dipped his head. Despite the insults raining down on him, the lord of Athens stood there smiling and waving and bowing to the crowd, as if they were nothing but praise. “Of course, he also has the Macedonian garrison behind him,” Sostratos observed.

“Yes, you’re right,” Protomakhos said. “We’ve already spent too many lives and too much treasure. If we rose against Demetrios of Phaleron, Kassandros’ men would slaughter us. And the truth is, the Macedonian could have a much nastier puppet. So… We yell, but that’s all we’re likely to do.”

The Rhodian proxenos was right. After getting the abuse out of their systems, the Athenians filed from the theater peaceably enough. The sun had traveled across the sky, and was low in the west. Menedemos said, “My rear end is as petrified as that lump of wood turned to rock you bought in Mytilene, Sostratos.” He rubbed at his haunches, and he was far from the only man doing so.

“Sitting on a stone bench will make you feel it,” Sostratos agreed. He turned to Protomakhos. “Meaning no disrespect to your stock-in-trade, O best one.”

“My bottom’s sore, too,” Protomakhos said. “No such thing as soft stone.”

“Will there be another trilogy tomorrow, or will the modern tragedies be separate from one another?” Menedemos asked.

“Almost certainly single plays,” Sostratos answered. He turned to Protomakhos. “Who was the last tragedian who tried a trilogy?”

“To the crows with me if I remember,” the proxenos said. “Nobody writes them these days, because all the tragedians know they’d never find a khoregos who could afford to produce a whole trilogy. Demetrios of Phaleron can, but you have to know he’s spending his patron’s silver, not just his own. Finding a khoregos who can afford to put on even one tragedy is hard enough, but three and a satyr play?” He tossed his head.

“Say what you will about Demetrios, but I enjoyed the plays,” Sostratos said. “I enjoyed the staging, too. That has to be what it was like in the old days.”

“Yes: splendid and a little clumsy at the same time,” Protomakhos said.

“They knew they were splendid. They didn’t know they were clumsy, didn’t know and didn’t care,” Sostratos said.

“But we know,” Menedemos said. “That makes watching the plays different for us from what it would have been for them. We know what they turned into. By the dog, we are what they turned into.”

Sostratos started to answer that, but then checked himself. After a few steps, he started over: “You’d better be careful, my dear. Every once in a while, you say something that shows you’re much more clever than you usually let on.”

“Who? Me?” Menedemos was used to mockery from Sostratos. He didn’t seem to know what to make of praise. After a startled blink, he turned it into a joke, saying, “Believe me, I’ll try not to let it happen again.”

Protomakhos laughed. “Anyone can see at a glance you two like each other pretty well.”

That offended both Sostratos and Menedemos. They both indignantly denied it-so indignantly, they started laughing, too. Sostratos said, “Oh, yes. We get on fine… whenever I don’t feel like strangling this thick-skin, which I do about half the time.”

“Only half?” Menedemos bowed to him. “I must be getting better. And I haven’t said a word about how often I wish I could pitch you over the rail.”

They came down the little street south of the temple of Dionysos, the one that opened onto the street where Protomakhos lived. A couple of women came up the street from the other side of the theater. They had been chattering. When they saw the Rhodians and Protomakhos, they drew their veils up higher and fell silent.

One of them hurried past the men. The other turned down the same street. She walked on without a word. In a low voice, Protomakhos murmured, “My wife.”

“Oh.” Sostratos discreetly didn’t look at her. He did glance at Menedemos. To his relief, his cousin had developed an apparently absorbing interest in some swallows circling overhead. Chance meetings after festivals were the wine and opson of the plots of modern comedies. In real life, though, they were liable to cause trouble-especially with Menedemos’ taste for adultery.

Protomakhos knocked at the door. A slave opened it. Protomakhos’ wife went through first. The men followed. Now Menedemos couldn’t look up at birds. Was he eyeing the woman’s hindquarters and the way she moved her hips when she walked? Or was he simply looking straight ahead, as anyone might do? Sostratos would have believed that of anyone else. Put his cousin, even accidentally, around a married woman, and who could say what might happen?

Protomakhos’ wife behaved with perfect propriety: she pretended the men with her husband didn’t exist. Menedemos didn’t watch her as she went over to the stairway and, presumably, up to the women’s quarters. Sostratos was jumpy enough to mislike the way Menedemos didn’t watch her.

“I’ll go see how Myrsos is doing with supper,” Protomakhos said, and headed for the kitchen.

Menedemos let out a small, soft sigh. Sostratos felt ice run up his back. He was as frightened as if he’d heard an owl in daylight: more so, in fact. He could, if he worked at it, dismiss his fear about the owl as superstition. But he knew what that sigh meant. Out of the side of his mouth, he hissed, “She’s our host’s wife. Do try to remember that.”

“Yes, my dear,” Menedemos said in a way that proved he’d barely heard. “Doesn’t she have the most exciting walk you ever saw? With a walk like that, she must be a handful and a half in bed.”

“You’re a handful and a half all the time,” Sostratos replied in something not far from despair.

Menedemos only smiled at him. Protomakhos came out with a smile on his face, too. “Oysters, Myrsos said,” the Rhodian proxenos reported. Menedemos’ smile got wider. Now Sostratos’ despair was unalloyed. Why had the cook chosen this of all nights to do up a supper widely thought to be aphrodisiac?