golden skin and red flesh, a fine wine jug from Athens covered with painted lovers-that made plain his admiration.
While Molobrus lived she did nothing to encourage him. In this she was somewhat unusual: extramarital couplings that enhanced the chances for procreation-legitimate preferred, illegitimate if necessary-were more than tolerated in Sparta. And if the long-absent husband gave his consent to share his young wife with an older man, such as his childhood patron, the act was not thought adulterous at all, but more properly a stroke of civic philanthropy. Damatria had seen them herself, those patriotic wives with compliant husbands, making their pious rounds of the temples with rouged faces and a swing in their hips. With her experience limited to a rape and the oafish pokings of her husband, she found it all incomprehensible.
Molobrus’ death, and her wealth that followed, changed her view. The estate she inherited was only a fair one, sufficient to feed the household and pay Epitadas’ mess one day. Dorcis’ holdings were more impressive, including twice the land and steady income from several potteries and shipping interests out of Gytheion. Combining their properties would make the largest estate in Kynosoura. Accordingly, when Dorcis came to visit bearing a cart full of jars of imported Thasian black wine, she allowed him to tap one of the vessels to share a taste. As they drank together in the glow of the evening, Damatria let her eye wander over the rim of her cup and linger on his.
The next month they were married.
Their honeymoon was a revelation. Dorcis was nearing sixty but was left with all the appetites of a boy a third his age. With his unctuous smile and full head of hair, he presented a tempting prospect for lonely women all over the village. For the first time in her life Damatria experienced a degree of satisfaction in the bedroom-and a girlish possessiveness she would never have expected in herself.
“You’re not betraying me with that slut Gyrtias, are you?” she asked him one day when he came home with a faintly fucked-out look.
“Certainly not,” he replied, reaching down to adjust himself down there.
“Good. Because if you’re lying, you’ll lose those balls.”
Dorcis believed she was serious, but couldn’t help himself. With her conquest his enthusiasm for his new wife was flagging. Damatria kissed like a teenager who had never learned how, and her empty eye socket, which she hid under a patch during their courtship, was now too often on display for his comfort. He credited himself, though, for telling the literal truth about their married neighbor, Gyrtias.
His taste ran instead to pretty helots who worked in his kitchen and gardens. Erinna, an eighteen-year-old, was unusual among the Messenian girls for her shameless gaze. She shot him with it when she carried baskets of figs across his path, and she shot him again when she fetched water. She challenged him until, during a rushed knee-benders in the root cellar, with his face in hair stinking sweetly of mint and sheep manure, he ground the pride out of her. The other girls were aware of it all, either not meeting his eyes or going out of their way to do so, and Dorcis was so flush with his mastery that he grew indiscreet enough to make a gift to his nymph in sackcloth. It was just a bit of lacework from the cargo of one of his Cretan freighters. But when Erinna wore the cloth on her head one day, Damatria needed nothing more to guess the truth.
She confronted him that very night. “Do you deny it?” was the first thing she asked, too furious even to say the words that made up her accusation.
“Hmm?” he responded as he unwrapped his cloak, knowing full well what she meant.
“You don’t deny it. You can’t. I only wish that the gods will strike me dead for being so foolish as to attach myself to you!”
She gave pious punctuation to this statement by spitting into a fold in her frock. He eyed her, tempted to insist on a denial, but strangely encouraged by the speed at which she had diverted her anger at herself. He frowned.
“All right, what of it? She is only a helot. Besides, am I expected to change overnight? You must have known about me already.”
“I knew nothing. I don’t talk to anybody.”
With a shrug that he intended to be rueful, he turned to unlace his riding shoes. Damatria chewed a finger as he left, looking confused, and then with a certain coolness reached out to slash his eyes with her nails. He caught her easily, spinning her around and pinning her arms. She then felt, with a frisson of disgust, his erect manhood pressing against the small of her back.
“Accuser, be sure thou do not offend,” he said, resting the pad of his left thumb against her surviving eyeball. He pressed until she gasped. “Do you understand? Say something. Shake your head.”
She shook her head for yes-she understood.
He shoved her to the floor. Surprised, humiliated, Damatria looked up at him in frank disbelief.
“See the ephor if you want to make something of this,” he finally told her. “But I think not. You may have been ignorant of me, but I know about you. What you really want has always been clear.”
Thus Damatria learned the true nature of the creature she had married. It was a bitter lesson, invited by the tenderness she had foolishly shown him. It was not a mistake she would ever repeat.
Dorcis thereafter made no effort to hide his infidelities. At night Erinna’s voice-or the voice of a woman she took to be Erinna, for she had never heard her speak-was audible through the floor of her upstairs apartment. The next morning Dorcis would speak to Damatria in a friendly way, as if nothing had happened. This seemed to be his way of suggesting that his betrayal bore no significance to him, and therefore shouldn’t to her.
At this point Damatria did what any practically minded Greek wife would do. Seizing a lead tablet, she pried the metal out of its wooden frame and, by bending one end back and forth, came away with the strip about three inches wide by six long. She then took her bronze stylus in hand and etched onto the lead every malicious hope she could imagine for Dorcis and his helot whore: Borphorbabarborphorbabarborphorbabarborphorbabaie. O divine Hekate under the earth, bind Dorcis whose mother is Leonis, and Erinna whom he beds, so that their ardor goes as cold as this lead, and that his penis may droop, and her vagina go as dry as the earth that covers this prayer to you, and to you, O Meliouchos Marmaraoth. May they be bound, that Dorcis may burn only for Damatria, who desires him not, and Erinna burn only for that which is shown by the pulled-back foreskin of the he-goat, so that they forget each other, and share passion no more.
It wasn’t enough just to compose such a curse, fold it up, fix it with a nail, and drop in some well to send it on its way to the goddess. Though she judged her letters to be good, and her use of the charmed formulae adequate, she would enhance her chances for success by finding a magician to pronounce the right words at the time of its deposition. For that she would have to make her inquiries around the marketplace, and so was obliged to nurse her fury through to the morning.
She had a dream that night about three girls traveling to the Apollo sanctuary at Amyclae in a carriage wreathed with carnations. All of the youngsters, who had all just been cropped for their wedding night, laughed like drunks with every dip of the carriage wheels on the road. In their hands they bore their own shorn hair, the locks they had been growing since infancy, gathered tenderly in brushes that were fastened at the center with iron rings. In the sanctuary, under the great columnar image of the god, Damatria consecrated these remnants of the girlhood that would end with the mystery they all blushed about, but already understood. Her hands shook as she put her offering in the ground and buried it. Then she dreamed that she sang, in a voice of such ingenue purity that she shed tears in her sleep, the maiden song of the virgin bride.
She was jerked awake by the fear that she had made a terrible mistake. Lighting a lamp, she picked up the lead again and added a line to the curse:
And may any other women he desires or will desire be thusly bound.
7.
Damatria soon learned that the hearts of men, fathomless as they are, cannot match the inscrutability of the gods. Her fitful sleep caused her to rise late the next morning. Before she left for the market, she was informed that Dorcis had to be carried home from his morning ride.
“Why has he been brought back?”
“It seems he has suffered a grave accident-” began the slave.
