fascinated by the way that small men make money. The tale of the purchase of our second boat fascinated most of them in a way that the tale of my trip beyond Gades did not.
When I mentioned Anarchos, the tyrant slapped his thigh and laughed. ‘I know him,’ he said. ‘He is precious to me.’
Well, well.
By the time I had the ships off the beach at Massalia and off the Inner Sea coast of Iberia, two-thirds of my listeners had lost interest. The Tyrant and the Lady Dano, on the other hand, were rapt with attention, and young Dionysus gazed at me with genuine hero-worship. When I told the story of running the mill race at the Pillars of Heracles, he clapped his hands together and said, ‘Odysseus, come to life,’ and Dano’s eyes shone.
Let me tell you a secret. No matter how far down you are, the admiration of a handsome woman will almost always bring you up in your own estimation, and some male hero-worship doesn’t hurt, either.
Not at all.
I took them up the coast, out to sea in storms, in raids on the Carthaginians, up to Alba and all the way home. The sun was gone, the lamps were lit and half the guests had left when I was done.
I took a long drink of wine.
Dano threw back her veil and drank some wine. She looked, not at me, but at Gelon, who nodded.
‘Indeed, for an hour, I was the King of the Phaekeans, listening to the Man of Sorrows tell his tale. If you ask me for a ship to take you home, I will have to give you my treasure. That was a great tale.’
Dano raised the communal cup. ‘How my father would have loved you,’ she said.
I smiled. ‘I eat meat,’ I admitted. ‘I don’t think I could give it up.’ Sorry — that quip was aimed at her, because the secretive Pythagoreans didn’t let outsiders know anything of their practice, but everyone knew they didn’t eat meat.
She shrugged. ‘He loved men who do things, and men who learn things. It seems to me you are both. And that was a marvellous story. What will you do with the rest of your life?’
I shrugged. ‘You overwhelm me with so much unmerited praise.’ I slid off my couch and stretched.
Gelon rose and crushed my hand in the two of his. ‘Stay here with us, then. Be one of my captains. Persia and Carthage are combining to extinguish the Greek world: a single great war to dominate the earth, or so my spies tell me. Come and help me stop them. This is the richest city in the Greek world; we can have a grand fleet.’
Dano made a motion with her hand. ‘Athens has built more than a hundred triremes in the last three years,’ she said.
I whistled.
‘I can buy and sell Athens,’ Gelon said. ‘A commercial city ruled by a squabbling assembly of proles. They will never rise to greatness. Men require to be led, and well led, by those who are better. Syracusa will be a greater city, because those who rule her are themselves greater.’
I shrugged again. ‘Men on ships require to be led,’ I said. ‘Men on farms require only to be left alone.’
Dano laughed. ‘May I quote that? It’s brilliant. And you say you studied with that fool Heraclitus?’
‘He was not a fool, but a great thinker and a brilliant man, humble before the gods, capable of solving almost any problem. And yet he studied other men’s thoughts and learned from them, too — in Aegypt, in Persia. Even your father, who he viewed as the greatest mathematician of the age.’ I had a thought, then, of sitting in the garden of Hipponax’s house, teaching Briseis from a book of Pythagoras, watching her beautiful fingers work the geometric figures with the compass I had made her.
Gelon smiled. ‘Can you work any of Pythagoras’s solutions?’ he asked me.
‘Several,’ I said. ‘I can find the value of the hypotenuse given the lengths of the two other sides.’ Seeing his surprise, I said, ‘I use it every day to figure my dead reckoning at sea. If I am rowing twenty stades an hour to the south, and wind and current are moving me six stades an hour to the west, what is my true course and speed?’ I asked.
‘A little less then twenty-one stades an hour, south by east,’ Dano said, clapping her hands together.
‘What do you do when your course and the current aren’t at perfect right angles?’ Gelon asked.
‘Guess,’ I said, and he laughed.
‘And how do you measure the speed of your cross-current? Or the wind? Or even your own speed through the water?’ Dano asked.
‘We cast the log for speed — it is guesswork, but accurate guesswork. My young friend Seckla can cast the log for a ship’s speed and he’ll be accurate within… well, within my tolerance, anyway. Currents: more guesswork.’ I waved my hands.
Gelon nodded. ‘It is experience, is it not? That gives a mariner the ability to make these guesses?’
I sensed I was entering into another argument.
‘But you could teach another person to do it, could you not, Lord Arimnestos?’ she demanded. ‘I am reckoned intelligent — could you teach me to command your ship?’
‘Or could she teach herself?’ asked the Tyrant. ‘Could she work it all out from first principles and then put to sea?’
‘My lord, my lady, I have the feeling that I am caught between Scylla and Charybdis here. But I would say that yes, I could teach Lady Dano to command or to pilot; and yes, she might even teach herself, although she might also die in the attempt. But I would insist that while she might learn to be a brilliant navigator by practising mathematics, seamanship is a great deal more, and requires years at sea. I started late, and my helmsman Megakles, for example, a fisherman born, has a deep understanding of waves and weather — and I do not. So I ask him, often. Nor have I learned his knack. Yet I can pilot a ship from here to Gades with a few landfalls, and the sun, moon and stars, and he would have to coast the whole way. There are many skills at sea, just as on land, and not every skill is acquired the same way.’
The Tyrant’s laugh boomed out again.
‘You don’t lose an argument often, do you?’ he asked. He rose from his couch and went to be gracious to other guests, and I gathered I had annoyed him.
Dano sat on the edge of my couch. ‘I wonder if you could come and speak about navigation for our school in Croton?’
I was flattered. ‘I would be delighted,’ I said. ‘But I understood that your father was exiled from Croton, and no longer had a school there?’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘That was many years ago. Members of our… group-’ She looked up and met my eye. ‘Men can be fools, no matter how well born and well educated. Indeed, it sometimes seems to me that well-born, well- educated Greek men are the greatest fools in the world.’
I laughed. ‘Such speech must endear you to all such men.’
She shrugged impatiently. ‘It is foolish to speak in generalities,’ she said. ‘Indeed, you make me garrulous, when I would prefer to be silent.’
‘Because women should be seen and not heard?’ I asked.
She glared, and then saw that I was smiling. ‘Because a philosopher learns more from listening than from talking,’ she said.
‘You are a philosopher?’ I asked.
‘Everyone is,’ she said simply. ‘Only a few mortals have the leisure to devote the time to it that it deserves, but everyone who travels the face of the world is a philosopher — unless they sink to become animals.’ She smiled, at her own vehemence, I think. Pythagoreans eschewed displays of emotion.
‘I think I must agree to that, or be characterized as an animal,’ I said.
She looked at Gelon, with the last of his guests, and said, ‘I love it here, but I am merely a curiosity. I came for the friendship my father bore Gelon. I have been well received, but Gelon imagines that I am a woman, and sends me yarn. Will you take me back to Croton? I can pay.’
I nodded. ‘With pleasure.’ I wanted out of Sicily.
And I had remembered Anarchos.
The next morning, sober and of sounder mind, I wandered the inner harbour — not where the big foreign ships beached, but where the local trade came. It took me about two hours to find one of Anarchos’s enforcers, and an hour later, I was with the man himself.
He looked at me over the rim of his wine cup, and toasted me.
‘Here’s to success,’ he said. ‘The greatest mariner of the age, or so I hear it.’
