was like a blight on my crops.
Euphoria was not afraid of me. She never was — a rarity in those days, when men feared my wrath. Ah — you still fear it, do you, young man? Very wise. My hand is not yet a willow branch. But in those days. .
Nonetheless, when I was rude to my mother, Euphoria would look at me across the room. ‘May I have a word with you in private, my dear?’ she would ask. And when we had a door between us and the rest of the world, she would say, ‘I am mistress in this house, and I insist that my husband have the manners of a gentleman. Rude to your mother? How boorish is that?’
I remember it well, my honey. Her tongue was as sharp as my sword, and she was seldom wrong. And I was so besotted with her that I seldom troubled her with a reply. Indeed, I felt that I was the luckiest man in the world that such a creature had agreed to be my wife. I sometimes wondered if I was one of those monsters in our myths who keeps the maiden until slain by a hero — was I the hero or the Minotaur?
And we did fight. It will sound odd, when you consider her birth and mine, but I found her stinginess offensive. She disliked spending our winter stores on guests, on Cleon, on Idomeneus. She would keep yesterday’s barley in a pan by the hearth to feed to local men who appeared through the spring mud to talk about politics, and she tasted all the wine in my cellar, then divided the amphorae into those for guests and those for the house.
‘We are not poor!’ I remember shouting at her.
‘And I will keep us that way!’ she shouted back.
On another evening, when Idomeneus made a remark about the age of the lamb he was eating, I winced — there was some screaming. I remember asking, ‘Are you the daughter of some shepherd? No — Attic shepherds are generous. A slave, perhaps?’
‘Slave?’ she roared, turning on me. ‘This from a man with his arms black to the elbows?’
Now this hurt, as I washed and washed each night before I went into the house, because I didn’t want to seem like the blackened smith to my glorious, aristocratic wife.
I cocked back my hand to hit her. Most men hit their wives, and with various amounts of reason — some because they are weak fools who have to be stronger than someone, and others because their women hit them first. But let us be honest — men are, by and large, bigger than women, and far stronger, and my pater taught me that any man who uses force on a woman, to get her into bed or merely win her agreement in argument, is contemptible.
You heard me. If you think otherwise, let’s hear it.
Despite which, married for a month, I found myself with a hand in the air. And I wasn’t going to give her a swat — I was going to knock her teeth out. Trust me — I know what I intended. Rage consumed me. Black hands, indeed.
You have to love someone to be that angry, I think.
She didn’t flinch.
I stormed out of the house rather than hit her. I got a horse and rode over to see Peneleos, and had a cup of wine with him and his sister and his wife. They told me, in short, that I was a fool and I needed to go back and apologize — excellent advice — and I rode back to find Euphoria’s door shut and barred, and I had to listen to the sound of her weeping. I called, and she shouted something.
Peneleos had told me not to worry if we weren’t reconciled before bed. But I couldn’t sleep, and it was a long, long night. I lacked the courage to go to her door again, and when I went to the pantry to get a cup of beer in the night, the two kitchen slaves — both hers — flattened themselves against the wall in terror of me.
When the sun rose, I went out into the courtyard and sang a hymn to Helios, hoping that she would come down, and then I went and lit the forge. Tiraeus came in, munching a crust of stale bread. He had no idea that there had been a quarrel.
‘You look like goat crap,’ he said, after we had worked for an hour.
‘Bad night,’ I said.
‘Bah — newly-weds!’ he said. ‘She’s pregnant. You can stop fucking now.’ His grin took the sting from the words.
‘No,’ I said. ‘We had a fight.’
He shrugged. ‘Never been married,’ he said. ‘But it does seem to me that most people fight. You and me, for instance.’
That was true enough, and Tiraeus and I were, in some ways, closer than any other two men I knew, except maybe me and Hermogenes. When we shared a project, we were inseparable. Craft made us closer than brothers. And still we could disagree on everything and anything, and when a helmet or a cup was in that dangerous stage just short of completion, it would all boil over into anger and disappointment and outrage. We were so used to it that we’d get the edges on a helmet trimmed and shake hands and say, ‘Tomorrow, we fight.’ And we’d laugh — but the next day, as we raised the last lines on the skull, the fight would start.
All of which is by way of saying that, as usual, Tiraeus had a point.
‘So, what did she do?’ he asked.
‘Served Idomeneus some three-day-old stew.’ Put that way, it just didn’t sound as bad.
‘I see. Death sentence for that, I agree. And what did you say?’ Tiraeus punctuated his remarks with taps on the bowl he was planishing.
‘I. . called her a slave. Pretty much.’ I cringed at the thought.
‘Ahh.’ Tiraeus picked up his bowl, stared at the area he was planishing and shook his head. ‘Well, that doesn’t sound so bad.’ He looked at me. ‘You call me the son of a whore all the time.’ His smile told me differently, and I understood — both that he felt I had behaved badly, and that he resented my epithets when I was angry.
And while I took this in, the door opened and there was Euphoria with a cup in her hands — warm wine and spices. ‘Husband?’ she asked from the door. She had never been in the forge before.
‘Wife?’ I asked in reply, and I caught the handle of the cup and pulled her gently in. ‘Welcome to the forge.’
‘Empedocles would have a fit,’ Tiraeus said. He got up from his stool and came over. ‘I’ll just step outside for a piss, eh?’
I put a hand to stop him. ‘Wife, I have behaved badly, and I used a phrase which no free person should ever use to another. I wish to apologize in front of my fellow master smith. And I understand that I am guilty of doing the same to him — when in anger.’
‘You do have a temper,’ Tiraeus said.
Euphoria looked at me for a moment. There were questions in her eyes, and those questions were, in some ways, more painful than shouted arguments and closed doors. ‘Apology accepted,’ she said. ‘I’ve brought you wine, and there’s breakfast for both of you in the andron.’
The breakfast was an apology of its own — eggs and good bread and spiced wine for me and Tiraeus and for Hermogenes when he came in from the vines. And that day I learned what was best about Euphoria — the thing that made me the luckiest of men. When she accepted my apology — why, then, the argument was
Beautiful breasts and a lovely waist and a face like a statue are all very well — but an even temper and a sense of fairness will last longer. Ask any married man. Or woman, for that matter.
That was the spring of contentment. We argued — twice, I think, and I’ll tell the story of the second time in a moment — but we also ate and danced and made love and went into Plataea for market days — together. And because Euphoria was such a lovely, pleasant girl, everyone wanted to meet her, and suddenly I was a man with friends, acquaintances, invitations.
Penelope visited twice — it was only thirty stades from her home to mine, and once the roads were dry she could come on a whim. As the days grew longer and hotter, and the season prepared to turn again, she was pregnant, too, and delighted to be so, and she told me with a giggle that she thought that the bonfire of Pan had had a salutary effect, and her husband rolled his eyes.
They were served our best food and drink, I noticed. And then dismissed, because there are fights not worth having.
We hosted Myron to dinner before midsummer’s eve — he hadn’t eaten in my house since my father was
