but she did not. Hippothous knew things were not good between them. Her eyes gave it away. They were black, and that was seldom good. They had a lack of depth, almost an insubstantiality, about them which often pointed to a deep, tightly controlled anger. And they were dry, the sure sign of immorality. The eyes were the gateway to the heart.
Yet it was far from certain that all lay with her. Ballista’s eyes were heavy lidded, sloping at the outer corners. When he spoke, especially when talking to his wife, he often sighed. The great physiognomist Polemon had identified such a combination as characterizing a man contemplating evil. But Hippothous was not sure yet about Ballista. As Polemon had also said, one single sign will not suffice; your judgement should not be confirmed until you have considered the testimony of all the signs.
The humiliores among the new arrivals dismissed to the further reaches of the house, the honoured guests took their places on the couches. Tatianus poured a libation, spoke a short prayer, and reclined on the most honourable couch with his eldest son and Ballista. Neither Corvus’s wife Nikeso nor any other woman was present. The freedmen had a couch near the back. Old-fashioned ways held in the provincial town of Priene.
The wine was Aromeus, one of the best of the Ephesian region. The bread was warm. In addition to the inevitable hard-boiled eggs, the first dishes were local clams, grilled scallops with vinegar and Median silphium, and samphire conserved in brine. Hippothous decided that the rusticity of the latter was designed to emphasize the exquisite good taste of serving the shellfish at the optimum season and the hideous expense of the imported spice. Many men got rich importing silphium from the distant recesses of Asia. The Maeander plain may have reduced the town of Priene, but it had created rich farming land. If you owned enough of it, as Tatianus obviously did, poverty was far from the door.
Tatianus was treating Ballista to an exposition of the sights to be found in Priene: the temple of Athena and Augustus, that of Demeter and Kore, the Alexandreum – the latter, down by the West Gate, the very house in which the Macedonian had stayed when he was besieging Miletus.
Having not eaten since before dawn, when they set out, Hippothous addressed himself with a will to the food and drink. He was hoping there would be more good things to follow, and that the Aromeus would not give him too much of a headache later.
There was a commotion out by the door, movement in the dark corridor, and a messenger ran out into the atrium. Blinded by the sudden glare, the man stood blinking, peering at the indistinct figures in the shade of the peristyle.
‘ Kyrios.’ Unable to identify Tatianus, he addressed those on the couches in general. ‘ Kyrios, Flavius Damianus has arrived from Ephesus. He is to speak to the Boule. The Goths are sailing south.’
In the Bouleuterion, Flavius Damianus was on his feet, speaking. The descendant of the famous sophist of the same name, Flavius Damianus clearly considered that he knew how to make a good speech. Sonorous and weighty, the Attic words poured out like a river in flood. Arcane ancient history was paraded. Courage had always been the virtue of the men of Priene. This andreia, instilled by nature and training, had thrown back the barbaric fury of the Galatians. It had confounded the combined forces of Ariarathes of Cappadocia and Attalus of Pergamum when those monarchs, most impiously, had attempted to seize the city.
Seated by Ballista in the front row, on the speaker’s right hand, Hippothous knew that Flavius Damianus would continue for some time. He surreptitiously picked food out of his teeth, and looked around. The council chamber was high and dark. It smelt of antiquity. Some one hundred men sat on the banked seats that filled three sides of the room. There was room for many more. Five hundred? Six? The town may have decayed, but Hippothous wondered if it could ever have boasted a Boule of anything like that number.
Flavius Damianus had settled into an extended excursus on the unchangeable nature of northern barbarians. Galatians, Goths, Scythians, they were all the same: fierce, yes, but irrational as they were, they lacked the true moral dimension of courage, as possessed by a Hellene. Just as they had no moral fortitude, their big, pale bodies could not endure the heat or hard labour.
Out of the corner of his eye, Hippothous checked how Ballista was taking all this. The northerner was staring impassively at the low fire smoking on the altar in the centre of the room. Probably he had heard the like many times before. Hippothous worried at a fragment of lamb stuck in his teeth. He had a slight headache.
At last, Flavius Damianus finished, with a rousing panegyric of the men of Priene, the descendants of the heroes of the battle of Lade. What did such men have to fear from a drunken rabble of Scythians?
There was a murmur of applause, rather muted. Carried away by his rhetoric, Flavius Damianus possibly had forgotten that the Ionians had lost the battle of Lade. Not the man with an oration your ancestor was, thought Hippothous. That is the problem with us Hellenes: forever dwelling on the distant past. Maybe the Romans are right: we Hellenes talk too much and do too little.
Tatianus thanked Flavius Damianus, and called the Vir Ementissimus Marcus Clodius Ballista to take the floor.
Hippothous sat forward. He knew what Ballista was going to say. Although he did not understand the reason for it, he was interested to see what reaction it would provoke.
As Ballista stood, collecting his thoughts, a shaft of light came from the door at the top of the northern steps. Ballista waited as the latecomer found his seat.
‘Councillors of Priene.’ Ballista spoke Attic Greek well, with no barbarisms and almost without a northern accent. He had, after all, been educated at the imperial court in Rome. ‘Your city lies some miles inland. The Goths will not go far from their boats. If they lose them, they are cut off in a hostile land. Further down the coast, the city of Miletus and the sanctuary of Didyma have much to fear; the city of Priene little. Should the Goths come here, you have stout walls. The Goths have come to plunder, not to besiege. I believe, if sensible precautions are taken, that the city of Priene is safe. So safe that I intend to leave my familia – my beloved wife and small sons – here while I travel to Miletus. As an experienced military officer, I will offer my services in their defence.’
Ballista stopped. There were cries of protest. What malignant daemon had put this in his mind? Ballista should stay here and help them.
The northerner shook his head. ‘My mind is made up. I will take just my accensus Marcus Aurelius Hippothous and my freedman Marcus Clodius Maximus. The rest of my familia I entrust to your protection. They will stay at the house of my friend Marcus Aurelius Tatianus. May the gods hold their hands over all of us.’
Outside, walking through the Sacred stoa, Hippothous recalled the parting at Tatianus’s house. Ballista’s sons had behaved well. The younger, Dernhelm, might be too young to realize the full import, but the elder, Isangrim, had been brave. There had been few words spoken between Ballista and Julia: brief platitudes, a simple kiss. The atmosphere had been tense with things unsaid, thoughts never to be formed as they had not been uttered. At the last, Ballista had embraced old Calgacus, they whispered close – fierce, strong things – and it had been done.
Leaving those you loved – Hippothous had done it many times. But two stood out. Tauromenium, all those years ago: the last, brief meeting with Cleisthenes, upstairs above a bar, in a room rented by the hour, time running out, the retainers and hired toughs already out looking for him. The youth crying, pleading to leave with the man he loved – he would not care when his family disinherited him, if the whole world called him a cinaedus. Hippothous was moved, but he knew Cleisthenes did not mean it or, if he did, he would soon change his mind. He had loved the boy one more time, and set off for the docks.
Cleisthenes, dear boy though he had been, was nothing compared with Hyperanthes. They had grown up together. Hippothous and Hyperanthes, ephebes of the city of Perinthus; their families rich, well connected. Possibly, if they had not been the same age, the polis would have looked more indulgently on them – as the older erastes and his younger eromenos, a throwback to the great days of free Hellas, the time of Harmodius and Aristogeiton, Alcibiades and Socrates. Maybe then Hyperanthes’ father would not have sent him away to Byzantium into the so-called care of Aristomachus. Even then, after Hippothous had killed Aristomachus, even then it would have been well but for the shipwreck. Not a night passed that the memory did not haunt Hippothous. The dark waters off Lesbos, the life slipping from Hyperanthes in the cold, the boy slipping away in the dark.
They reached the crossroads to the north-east of the agora where the horses were waiting, and Hippothous came back to the present. The two slaves Ballista had hurriedly purchased held the bridles of the five horses and two pack mules. The animals looked up from the fountain, mouths dripping.
Ballista had asked Tatianus to provide a messenger to go to the governor Maximillianus. The man was there. Ballista led him away from the fountain, away from the others, then called for Maximus to join him. He did not ask Hippothous. The horses went back to drinking.
Ballista talked earnestly to the messenger. Hippothous watched. He felt jealous of the northerner’s intimacy
