The wag spoke up again: 'I'm not doing that with a peacock!' He got another laugh. Menedemos didn't have a comeback ready. But Sostratos said, 'A polis with a peacock is surely more splendid than one without. You'll be the envy of all the other cities of Great Hellas, and of the local barbarians, too.' Menedemos feared the response was too serious, but it seemed to go over well. 'How much do you want for that creature?' asked a fellow whose threadbare chiton made him a most unlikely candidate to buy. 'Ah, that would be telling,' Menedemos said slyly. 'Suppose you ask the man who buys him, and see if you get a straight answer.' 'Fat chance,' the Tarentine said mournfully. Menedemos smiled. That's just what it is, he thought: a chance to get fat. And I intend to make the most of it. Taras' central district had the streets laid out in a neat Hippodamian grid. Farther west, they ran every which way, as they had throughout the city in the old days. Sostratos rented a house right on the border between the grid and the alleyways. But for the peafowl, he would have sold from the ship or from a stall in the agora, but he didn't want to keep them caged up any more than he had to. They could also be displayed to better advantage strutting around the central courtyard than huddled behind wooden slats. 'And,' Menedemos said, 'this is a much more comfortable arrangement for us.' 'That's not why I did it,' Sostratos said. 'I know.' Menedemos grinned at him. 'That doesn't make it any less true.' Sostratos started to get huffy. Before he launched into a lecture, though, he checked himself - that was just what his cousin wanted him to do. 'All right,' he said mildly, and Menedemos looked disappointed. 'Maybe we should have got a stall, too,' Menedemos said. 'If our goods don't move so well as we'd like, I'll get one,' Sostratos said. 'But for now, I think going through the agora and letting people know where we are and what we've got for sale will work well enough. We've already moved a lot of the Ariousian - and all that papyrus, too.' Menedemos laughed out loud. 'Didn't that Smikrines say he was going to write a history? You should have made him promise to have a copy made for you when he finished.' 'If I'd thought he'd do it, I would have,' Sostratos answered. 'If you thought he'd do which?' Menedemos asked. 'Finish the work, or have a copy made once he did?' 'Either one,' Sostratos said. 'Writers are an unreliable lot.' He knew that was true. How much writing had he done himself, after all? What he wanted to do was leave behind a work to rival those of Herodotos and Thoukydides, but what was
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