“No, no, no!” he would bellow at me. “Will you pay attention, Nicholas? This is Agamemnon’s most important speech, you dolt!” clouting me around the ear at the same time for good measure.
I tried to plead with my father, but to no avail. He wanted his son to be better educated than he. And so it was that I grew up schooled in the Classics while he remained an untutored countryman who through native resourcefulness and hard
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work had become wealthy. Yes, by any standards of the market place he was a successful businessman.
It hadn’t always been like that. He had been born into relative poverty in a small hamlet outside Patara where his parents, my grandparents, had been basket-makers. They used the willow wands from the trees growing in the marshlands down by the river to make hampers and carriers for the commercial markets in the city. I never knew them; they died relatively young, having not really advanced. But through contacts, my father was apprenticed to a family of perfume makers who lived in the upper city. He was given all the menial jobs, like spending hours and hours on end picking rock-roses on the mountainside, or filling sacks with wild jasmine which could be boiled to extract the essence to make scent.
And that’s how he got into the incense business. At first it was restricted to bleeding the terabinth trees which grew on the slopes above the river which he did for himself while he was collecting the flowers his employers wanted. He had to slash the bark with a sharp knife, a difficult task as the bark was hard and rough. He then had to wait a few days for the tiny beads of resin to ooze out of the cut and dry into hard little droplets, at which point he prised them off the tree into a waiting bowl. It was really back-breaking work, up early each morning and out on the hillsides finding the right trees to cut. He would spend every evening gathering his meagre harvest and sorting
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through the glaucous pellets, cleaning off any dust or flies that had got stuck to their surface until well after dark. It did not sell for a huge price down in the market. It was a much cheaper option than, say, frankincense. But he sold enough of it that slowly he began to make a substantial living. The advantage was that it didn’t need processing, like the oils and unguents the perfume makers produced. He just needed a lot of it, which took all the spare time and effort he could put into it.
The day came when he felt he could go it alone, so he said farewell to the perfume business and set out on his own. Everyone wanted incense. They burnt it in braziers around the house to ward off evil spirits (and to disguise the household smells that hung around the rooms!) It was used in a prayerful way in the smaller temples, ‘to ascend to the gods,’ to placate their senses. And most importantly it was burned at every funeral, to enable the person’s spirit to lift with it to the heavens, or so everyone believed. My father didn’t care one way or the other, so long as people went on buying his little bags of dried resin. And the smell it exuded while it was smouldering was quite pleasant, I suppose. I was brought up with it so I can’t really say I liked or loathed it. But it put food on the table and I didn’t think anything about it.
Gradually, with hard work and long hours my father amassed quite a sizable amount. I never saw any of it when I was growing up. He always retained that village cunning with which he had
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been born and kept his cards very close to his chest and his gold well out of sight, suspecting everyone. My mother died when I was born which had made my father somewhat reclusive, so I knew little of his business affairs. Whilst I was a child he remained single, but once I had reached manhood he changed. Having come from such poverty, I think he needed someone to appreciate just how well he had done over the years. So, when I was at the end of my teens, he took a much younger wife.
He was already quite an old man by then, but Calista, the woman he married, was almost the same age as me. She was a country girl from up the Valley and my father had been prevailed upon to marry her by his friend and kinsman, Eugenios, a farmer from near Pinara. She was no doubt very pretty, but I was concerned that she didn’t seem to have an idea in her head except how to present herself as the new wife of a wealthy man. She seemed solely interested in her hair and appearance and how much money she could spend on clothes, so I didn’t have much to do with her. She had rustic good-looks, curvaceous and coquettish, and I think my father thought he could dress her up and make her his mascot, his mannequin who would demonstrate that he’d made something of his life after all that struggle. He could afford to show her off as an emblem, a symbol of the elevation in society he’d achieved.
She wasn’t the least interested in befriending me. I was just an appendage that my father brought with him, something she’d
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have to put up with, so we rarely spoke. At meal-times I tended to eat in silence and at other times in the house she was too busy ordering our maid Irene around to care about me and what I might be doing. Irene on the other hand was a city girl who had earned her manumission from slavery and she felt harassed by this jumped-up village hoyden, but she couldn’t say anything. Irene used to tell me quietly how miserable she felt, being bossed around by this nobody. When she wasn’t doing that, Calista spent her time flirting with Chronos, a strapping young man who was my father’s apprentice. I often heard them giggling together in the tablinum, our dining room, when my father was out haggling prices in the market.
“That Chronos is up to no good!” Irene would say. “He’s far too interested in Calista, if you ask me. Your father should watch out for him.”
But I felt unable to speak to him about it. To him I was only ever someone who would know nothing of the trials and pitfalls of married life. So I kept quiet and just watched and listened. One afternoon, I must have been in my early twenties, I came back early from the city. The sky was a bit overcast that day and there was a storm brewing out at sea. The harbour had shut up shop early against the bad weather, so there wasn’t much going on. I was in the atrium at home and I heard voices the other side of the tablinum door.
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“Oh, Chronos, take me with you.” It was Calista’s voice, pleading with Chronos in a cajoling voice. “I know you’re going to leave soon and you know I love you, don’t you? I don’t want the old man; he’s nothing to me. And listen, I can get his gold. I know where he keeps it. We can go far away from here and start a new life together, away from all this.”
The mention of gold seemed to have a galvanizing effect on Chronos. His usually sour attitude changed and he became obviously very interested in Calista’s proposition.
“Listen,” he said quietly, “don’t say such things out loud! Alright, I am going far away if you must know. I’ve got passage on a ship arranged. If you can get the gold, you can come with me, right? The ship’s leaving in two days’ time. Do you think you can do it in time?”
“I’m certain. I know just where he’s hidden it. He doesn’t think anyone knows. But I’ve seen where he puts it. I’ll get it, for sure!”
They made to leave the tablinum and I faded into another room so that they wouldn’t know I was there. I thought for a while, but I knew I had to tell my father. He would be furious at me for interfering, but I didn’t have any other option. So when he came home that evening, I suggested that I knew where he kept his money hidden and maybe others knew too. Did he think that it was such a safe place? As I expected he