Seeing Antipater’s behavior at the Olympiad, I realized that, though I had known him most of my life, in some ways my old teacher was still a mystery to me.
When all the punching, poking, bone crunching, arm bending, and general mayhem was finally over, Protophanes emerged victorious in the pankration. His face was bloody, one eye was swollen shut, and his whole body was covered with scrapes and bruises, but his grin was brighter than ever as he accepted his victor’s wreath—his second of the Games, for not only did he win the pankration, but the wrestling competition as well, a feat that thrilled Antipater.
“Hercules was the first to win both wrestling and pankration,” he gushed, “and in all the hundreds of years since then, only three others have done the same. Now Protophanes is the fourth. His fame shall outlast us all!”
“Even the fame of Antipater of Sidon, Teacher?”
Antipater sighed. “What is the achievement of a mere poet, compared to that of an Olympic victor?”
To his credit, Protophanes was gracious in victory. After the closing ceremonies, and the procession in which the victors were showered with leaves, he sought me out in the crowd.
“Gordianus! What did you think of the Games?”
“Grueling,” I said.
“Indeed! But to those of us who win, it’s worth all the effort.”
“I’m sure. But may I be candid? The so-called spirit of the Games eludes me. Such a fuss is made about the ideals of sportsmanship, discipline, piety, and fair play, yet the contests themselves seem to me sweaty, hectic, brutish, and violent. What’s touted as a gathering in honor of sport simmers just beneath the surface with politics and intrigue; we even witnessed a murder! And the unspoken tension between Greek pride and Roman hegemony casts a shadow over everything. It makes me wonder about the times we live in, and the customs men live by—‘O tempora! O mores!’ as my father says in our native Latin.”
Protophanes looked at me blankly. Somewhere along the way I had lost him.
“I suppose you’ll be off to the victors’ banquet now,” said Antipater, sighing at the thought of all the winners gathered in one place.
“Yes, and what a feast it’s going to be! But before I go, I wanted to settle a debt.”
“A debt?” I said.
“To you, Gordianus. If they’d blamed me for the Cynic’s death, I’d never have been allowed to take the oath. You took care of that! The city fathers of Magnesia have promised to be very generous to me—doubly generous, since I’ll be taking home not one but two Olympic wreaths.” He held forth a leather pouch. “This is all the money I brought with me, but I won’t be needing it now—rich men will be fighting each other to provide my lodging and to pay for my dinners all the way home. So I want you to have it.”
He pressed the money bag into my hands. It felt quite heavy.
“But I couldn’t—”
“Don’t be modest, Gordianus. Cynicism gets a man nowhere in this life—and neither does modesty. But if you take my advice, you’ll donate whatever portion you can afford to the Temple of Zeus. It’s Zeus who makes all things possible. Zeus gave me victory, and I have no doubt it was Zeus who opened your eyes to the truth about the Cynic’s death. Now I must be off. Safe journeys to you! If you should ever get to Magnesia, look me up.”
“What a fellow!” whispered Antipater, watching him depart. “And what a windfall for you, Gordianus. You should heed his advice, and donate every drachma to Zeus.”
I frowned. “A good part of it, perhaps, but not every drachma, surely.”
“But what would you spend it on? I’ve seen you in the market. You care nothing for all the trinkets and souvenirs for sale.”
“I did see a couple of desirable items,” I said, remembering the blond and brunette who had sauntered by on our first day, as tall as Amazons and wearing chitons no more substantial than a spider’s web. I wondered if they were still in Olympia.
V
Interlude in Corinth:
THE WITCH’S CURSE
On our journey to see the Seven Wonders, Antipater and I saw much else along the way. As a poet, and a Greek, Antipater wished to pay homage to his great predecessors, so we stopped at Lesbos to visit the tomb of Sappho, and at Ios to see where Homer was buried. (Had we wished to see where Homer was born, we would have had to stop at almost every island in the Aegean Sea, since so many claimed that honor.)
We saw many remarkable places and things. None could match the Seven Wonders, though some came close. The Parthenon in Athens was certainly a marvel, as was the statue it housed, the chryselephantine Athena by Phidias; but, having seen the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus, and Phidias’s statue of Zeus at Olympia, I understood why those were on the list instead.
We stopped at the island of Delos to see the Keratonian Altar, which some claim should be counted among the Wonders. The name of the altar comes from the Greek kerata, “horns,” because it is made entirely of antlers ingeniously fitted together without any sort of binding by Apollo himself, who used the horns of deer slain by his sister Artemis. To be sure, the altar was an astonishing sight, but the visit was not pleasant. Under Roman rule, Delos had become one of the largest slave markets in the world, a place of misery and foul odors. Men came to Delos to purchase humans by the thousands, not to marvel at Apollo’s altar.
Of the many sites we visited other than the Seven Wonders, one stands out especially in my memory: the ruins of Corinth.
After seeing the Games at Olympia, we hired a driver and a mule-drawn wagon and headed east on the road that crosses the Peloponnesus, that vast peninsula that would be an island were it not for the slender strip of earth that connects it to the mainland. The road was a winding one, skirting mountains and passing through clefts in the rugged landscape. At last, toward the end of a long day of travel, Antipater told me that we were drawing near to the isthmus.
“At its narrowest, the isthmus is less than four miles wide,” he said. “A young fellow like you, Gordianus, might easily walk from the Gulf of Corinth on the north to the Gulf of Aegina on the south and back again in a single day, with time for a leisurely lunch beside this road, which at the isthmus links the two parts of Greece.”
“The route is certainly popular,” I said. Since leaving Olympia, we were constantly being passed by faster vehicles and travelers on horseback.
“Yes,” said Antipater, “there’s always a great deal of coming and going between the cities of the mainland—Athens, Thebes, and the rest—and the cities of the Peloponnesus, like Sparta and Argos. But the traffic is especially heavy now, and particularly in the easterly direction, since the Games at Olympia have just ended and all the athletes and spectators who poured into the Peloponnesus from the mainland are now heading home again. To do so by land, this is the only route.”
The winding road took a turn to the north, skirting a craggy peak to our left that erupted from the earth like a knuckle of sheer rock. As the road crested a hill, I suddenly saw the Gulf of Corinth straight ahead of us, and at the same time, far away to our right, I had my first glimpse of the Gulf of Aegina, a glimmer of silver beyond a long blue ridge.
“With the two gulfs so close on either side, and this road the only route from west to east, I should think this would be an ideal location for a city,” I said.
I was rather proud of this astute observation, and expected my old tutor to reward me with a smile. Instead, Antipater scowled. “Gordianus! Do you remember nothing of the geography I’ve taught you? Do you not realize where we are?”
I was eighteen, and a man, but Antipater had a way of speaking that made me feel I was a boy again.
He shook his head. “Fifty-four years ago, for the glory of Rome, Lucius Mummius utterly destroyed the city of Corinth and its people. And you, a Roman, don’t even know where Corinth was! Could you even find it on a map?”