Stage Money

by Artemidorus of Daldis, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The sea closes in the month after the Pleiades set, and a man who has missed the last ship to Corinth stays where he is until spring. I missed it at Smyrna by two days. I had been at Pergamum longer than I meant, copying out the dreams a temple slave had kept on sherds for eleven years. He was dying and wanted them to go somewhere, and I was the only man in the city who wanted them. By the time I came down the valley to the coast the harbour at Smyrna was full of hulls drawn up on rollers, their masts unstepped and lashed along the decks, and the shipmasters were drinking in the taverns by the water with the faces of men who have nothing to do for four months and have been paid for none of it.

I took a room above a rope-maker's near the lower agora. The room smelled of tar and hemp, and the shutter did not close against the wind off the gulf, so I stopped it with a folded cloak and wrote by lamplight with my left hand held against the flame. It cost me three obols a day with bread. I had brought from Pergamum a roll and a half of copied dreams and twelve wax tablets, and I meant to fill the tablets in the agora as I fill them in every city: by sitting near the men who read dreams for money and listening to what is brought to them.

People of solemn face do not sit near those men. They are called beggars and conjurors and buffoons, and some of them are. I have spent most of my life on benches beside them, at festivals in Greece and Asia and Italy and on the large islands, because the dreams of a city do not come to a man of solemn face. They come to the one with a painted board and a stool under the plane tree, who charges two obols and is quick about it.

At Smyrna that was Zoilos.

---

He had his stool at the corner where the colonnade of the lower agora meets the street to the harbour, beside a seller of dried figs and opposite the table of a money-changer. His board leaned against the column behind him. It had been painted once in red and black and touched up in other colours since, and it was a list: a ship, a snake, a wedding, a funeral, teeth, an eagle, fire, a river, a dead father, and beside each a word or two. Teeth: a death in the house. Snake: an enemy. Wedding: a funeral. Funeral: a wedding. The last two pleased people. They would stand and read them and laugh, and then sit down on the stool and tell him about their teeth.

I put my bench against the next column, near enough to hear, and the first morning he looked at me the way a fishmonger looks at a man who stands by his slab and buys nothing.

"You're the Lydian," he said on the second morning. "From Ephesus. You write a book."

"From Daldis. My mother's city. I live in Ephesus."

"You write a book." He did not care which city. "They say you write down what I say."

"I write down what everyone says."

"Then pay me two obols a dream, like the rest."

I paid him. I paid him two obols for each dream that I copied from his stool for the four months I was in Smyrna. I have it written: the sum came to a little over forty drachmas, which is more than I paid for the room. He thought me a fool for it and was cheerful about it, and on cold mornings he gave me figs from the stall beside him, which I suspect he did not pay for.

---

He was quick. A fuller came, with his forearms bleached to the elbow, and said that in the night his teeth had fallen out into his hand, the front ones, and he had held them and they were warm.

"A death in the house," said Zoilos. "The front teeth: the young. Do you have children?"

"Two."

"Watch the younger." He held out his hand for the obols.

The fuller paid. He went away down the harbour street with his shoulders up near his ears, and I wrote it on my tablet, the dream and the answer, and then I wrote what Zoilos had not asked. I did not know whether the man was slave or freedman or free. I did not know whether the teeth were sound in the dream or rotten, or whether he had felt grief at losing them or relief, which is not rare when a tooth has been aching. I did not know whether he had gone to bed with a toothache, in which case there was nothing in it to read at all. The body dreams of what hurts it, and a sore tooth dreams of teeth. I wrote not asked four times down the edge of the wax and let it stand.

A woman came whose husband poled the ferry across the head of the gulf. She had dreamed of a river in flood carrying her loom away. Zoilos looked at the board, where it said River: a journey, and told her that her husband would go on a journey, and she said that he went on a journey every day, there and back, eight times, and Zoilos said this one would be longer. She seemed satisfied with that. I wrote down that she was a weaver and that the loom was her living and her mother's before her, and that she had wept in the dream, not at the water but at the threads tearing. I would have asked her whether anyone owed her money for cloth. Zoilos did not ask her anything.

At the end of the first week I had thirty-one of his dreams on four tablets, and I had begun to recognise the shape of a morning. He read from the board as a man reads a price from a list in a market. He did not argue with a client. He did not send anyone away because the dream was nothing more than yesterday's hunger come back in the night. A boy came who had dreamed of honey cakes, and Zoilos told him that sweetness in a dream meant bitterness to come, and the boy paid with an obol he had evidently stolen, and I wrote: went to bed hungry; signifies nothing. Zoilos read that over my shoulder and laughed so hard the fig-seller looked round.

"You'd send him off with nothing?"

"There is nothing."

"There's an obol," said Zoilos. He held it up. "There's always an obol."

---

The money-changer opposite was called Philetos. He sat behind a table with a stone top and a bronze balance and a row of small leather bags, and he changed silver for bronze and Roman coin for local and the reverse, and lent at interest to the shipmasters against their spring cargoes. He bit coins. He did it absently, all day, the way another man scratches his ear. I saw him reject three denarii in a morning by the taste of them alone, and he was not wrong about any of them; the men who brought them did not argue but went away quickly.

He watched me for a month before he crossed the street. When he came he sat on the end of my bench, not on Zoilos's stool, and said that he would rather pay a man who asked questions.

"Tell it to me whole," I said, "every part of it. But first tell me about yourself."

He told me. He was free-born, a citizen of Smyrna, fifty-three years old, a widower, no sons living. He had kept the table for twenty-eight years, as his father had before him. He had a cough in the winter but none now. He had seven loans out to shipmasters, the largest of them twelve hundred drachmas, all due when the sea opened, all secured on cargo or on the hull.

"The dream," I said.

He had been at his table, he said, counting a sum into columns, ten coins to a column, the way he always counted. They were good coins, Roman silver, new. He had stacked eight columns and was starting the ninth when he looked down and saw that they were not coins but lupins, the flat yellow beans, stacked up just as neatly as the coins had been, and he went on counting them anyway because the count was not finished.

"How did you feel?"

He thought about it. Most people do not, and the ones who do are worth twice the others.

"Amused," he said. "As if I'd been caught out at something. Not afraid. I finished the count."

"Did you eat lupins that day?"

"I don't eat them. They give me wind."

"Did you see any? Did anyone in the agora sell them, or pay you in them for a joke?"

"No."

"Had you been counting a sum like that, in columns, that day?"

"Every day," he said. "That's my trade."

So I set the counting aside. A money-changer who dreams of counting coin has dreamed his own day, and there is nothing in that for anyone to read. But a man does not see lupins on his table every day, and the coins had turned into them while he watched. That was the part of the dream that did not come from his day.

In Italy, in the theatres, when a character in a comedy pays out a fortune, the actors count out lupins. I have seen it at Puteoli and at Rome: the slave in the play stacks lupins on the stage and calls them gold, and the audience laughs because everybody knows the money is beans. I told Philetos this. He had not been to Italy, but he had changed enough Roman coin to believe me.

"So the coin is stage coin," I said. "Coin that looks right while it is being counted and is worth nothing when the count is done. For another man I might read this some other way. For a weaver it might be cloth promised and not paid for; for a slave, a promise of freedom that will not be kept. But you are a money-changer with seven loans out against the spring, and you were counting a sum that was owed to you. I would watch the largest of them. I think one of your debtors will not pay what he has promised. Perhaps the cargo will be less than he said, or the hull worth less. You were not afraid in the dream, so I do not think the loss will be ruin. You were amused and you finished the count, so I think you will find it out in time."

He listened the way he bit a coin, as though tasting it for lead.

"That's a reading," he said.

"It's what the dream points to for a man in your life. It is not a decree. You can still look at the cargo."

"I always look at the cargo," he said. He paid me a drachma, which was too much, and when I told him so he said that a man who asks questions is paid by the question. Then he went back across the street to his table and wrote something on a slip and put it in one of the leather bags.

---

That evening I sat by the lamp with the shutter stopped and the cloak pushing in and out with the wind, and copied the day's dreams from wax to papyrus, as I do every evening. I could not get through them. Something Zoilos had said that morning had stuck, and I kept stopping on it.

It had come about in this way. A sailor had come back, a short man with one ear cut, who had dreamed in the autumn that an eagle sat on his mast. Zoilos had told him: Eagle: good fortune; you'll come home rich, and he had come back now to say that he had won at dice in the tavern by the water, four nights running, and that a man from the ship he had missed had been drowned off Chios, and he gave Zoilos a whole drachma out of the winnings. Zoilos took it and bit it, imitating Philetos across the street, who did not look up. When the sailor had gone I asked Zoilos how many came back like that.

"Some," he said. "One or two a month."

"And how many come back to say that you were wrong?"

He looked at me as though I had asked how many fish come back to the net.

"None," he said. "Why would they? Do you go back to the baker when the bread was fine? Nobody comes back to say nothing happened. Nothing happening isn't news."

And then, because he was in a good mood with a drachma in his hand: "You've got it in your book, haven't you? All the ones that came true. Hundreds, they say."

"Many hundreds."

"Who brought you those?"

I did not answer him, because the answer was the people who had come back.

I have gathered dreams for thirty years. I did not build my book out of conjecture, as other men have; I went where dreams were told and I wrote down what came of them, case after case, the way a man who studies animals writes down what they eat and where they make their dens. When I say that a dream of falling teeth, to a man with children and a household, points to a loss in the household, I say it because I have seen it come true again and again. But a death in a household comes often enough, the young die easily, and I have no tablet anywhere with the falling-teeth dreams after which nothing happened. Those dreamers did not come back. Nothing happening isn't news.

I had always thought Zoilos's board was worth nothing because it took no account of the dreamer. I still thought so. But I had never asked how many of Zoilos's clients came back and how many of mine did, and I suspected the proportions were not so different, and that every case in his memory and every case in my book had come through the same door.

I took a clean tablet. I drew the stylus down the middle of the wax and made two columns. Over the first I wrote came true. Over the second I wrote came to nothing. Then I put it in the bottom of my satchel and copied no more that night.

---

The next morning I asked Zoilos whether he would send his clients to me when they came back, either way, and I would pay him an obol for each.

"Either way?"

"If it came true or if it didn't."

"If it didn't come true," said Zoilos, patiently, as if to the boy with the honey cakes, "they don't come back. I told you. And if they did come back I'd tell them it hadn't happened yet." He looked at the board behind him. "A man pays for a reading, not an account."

So from then on I said to every dreamer who sat on my bench: come back when the sea opens, whatever has happened or not happened, and tell me, and I will give you back an obol. I said it to the weaver from the ferry, whom I found on the harbour street and asked about the cloth. Somebody did owe her for cloth, a dyer, a large sum, and she had been to his door three times. I said it to the fuller, whom I found by the smell of his vats; his toothache had been in the lower jaw, and he had had a tooth drawn the day after the dream. I struck a line through Zoilos's reading and moved the fuller to my own notes, among the dreams that signify nothing. I said it to a girl who had dreamed she was given a crown of olive, to a mule-driver, to a priest's slave from the temple of the two Nemeseis on the hill. By the end of the winter I had said it to forty-six people, and I had a second tablet ruled for when the first was full.

Eleven came back. All eleven sat down on my bench with something that had happened. The dyer had paid the weaver, but less than he owed. The mule-driver's mule had died. The girl with the crown of olive was betrothed, and I could not tell from her face whether she wanted to be. I wrote each of them into the first column, as carefully as I have ever written anything, with the dreamer and the trade and the feeling and the interval in days. The second column stayed clean wax.

Zoilos saw it in my hands one morning in the month of the new-wine festival, when the wind had gone round to the south and the shipwrights had come back to the hulls on the beach.

"Still empty," he said, and gave me a fig.

---

Philetos came across the street on the third day after the first ship sailed for Corinth. The harbour was loud with it, and the figs were gone from the stall beside Zoilos, replaced by onions, and there was a queue at Philetos's table four deep. He left it to a boy and crossed over and sat on the end of my bench, where he had sat before, and put down in front of me a small leather bag.

"Seven loans," he said. "Seven repaid. The largest first, the day the ship came off the rollers. Full sum, the interest, a jar of fish sauce on top for the delay, which was a day. The cargo was what he said it was. I looked at it."

He took out of the bag a slip of papyrus, the one I had watched him write in the autumn. On it, in a money-changer's hand, small and square: Lupins. Read by the Lydian: one debtor will not pay. Largest loan. Then a date. Then, under it, in fresher ink: All paid.

"I close my accounts before the sailing," he said. "Every one. Yours was open."

I took out the tablet. I did not need to make room. I wrote in the second column, at the top, Philetos, money-changer, Smyrna: coins becoming lupins; amused; read as a default on the largest loan; all seven loans repaid in full. My hand was steady and I took care with it.

"There," said Philetos. He looked at the tablet upside down. "That's a lot of wax for one line."

"It is the only line."

"Out of how many?"

"Forty-six I asked. Eleven came back. You are the twelfth."

He thought about that, the way he had thought about how he felt in the dream.

"The other thirty-five," he said. "Do you think it all came true for them, and they didn't bother?"

"I don't know."

"No," he agreed. "You don't." Then, kindly enough: "The weaver wouldn't come back to say nothing happened. She has a loom. The mule-driver's gone up-country. Who comes back to close an account that's cost him nothing?" He tapped the edge of the tablet with one finger. "A man of my trade. That's all you've got there. Not the dreams that came to nothing. The dreams that came to nothing for money-changers."

I looked at the line I had written, and then I picked up the stylus and wrote above the word money-changer, in smaller letters, closes his accounts. It was the most important thing I knew about the man, and I had not known it in the autumn, when it might have changed the reading. I had taken the trade and not the habit.

Across the street Philetos's boy was having trouble with a Rhodian and a handful of drachmas. Philetos glanced over, and did not get up.

"I have something else," he said. "Last night. I don't know if it's anything."

"Most things aren't. Tell it to me whole."

"I was weighing," he said, and settled himself on the bench with his back to his own table, "on the bronze balance, as usual, something on each pan. But I couldn't see what was in the left-hand pan. I could see the right. It was —"

I smoothed the wax at the top of a clean tablet with the flat end of the stylus and began to write.

✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾ ✾ ❦ ✾ ❦ ✾

THE END

Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Nōnīs Octōbribus (7 October 2026), ab Artemidōrō Daldiānō per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Artemidorus of Daldis, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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