The Weigher of Aegina

by Plato, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

---

The scale stood on a trestle under the awning at the north end of the harbour, where the wind off the water kept the flies down. It was a good scale. The beam was bronze, as long as a man's forearm, and the two pans hung from it on chains that Hermon oiled every tenth day with a feather. The weights lived in a box of olive wood beside it: the stater, the drachma, the half, the obol, and the big leaden mina with the tortoise stamped on its top, which the market overseer checked twice a year against the one kept in the temple. Hermon had never once been found short.

He weighed silver, mostly. When a lot was sold on the quay the buyer paid, and the seller wanted to know that he had been paid in good metal and full measure, and the buyer wanted to know the same thing in the other direction, and so both of them came to Hermon, who belonged to neither of them and who took one obol in the hundred for his trouble. He also wrote. Every lot sold under the awning went down on his wax tablet in the order of its selling: what it was, where it came from, what it fetched. In the evening he copied the day onto a papyrus roll for the overseer and then smoothed the wax flat with the broad end of his stylus, so that it would be clean in the morning.

The lots were sometimes jars of oil. More often, since the war had brought the Spartans and their ships to the island, they were men.

One morning in the spring, a Laconian ship had come in at first light from the west, and by the time the sun was over the temple on the hill the Spartan aboard her had had his goods brought up onto the quay. There were nine. Eight were the usual kind, Sicilian Greeks and two Campanians taken off a merchantman, still salt-stiff and quiet. The ninth was standing a little apart from them, as if he had been placed there by someone who was not sure where he belonged, and he was looking with what seemed real interest at the scale.

The Spartan was called Pollis. He had been in Syracuse on an embassy, and he went about the selling like a man doing an errand for someone else. He came to the trestle and put down a fig and a list scratched on a sherd.

"You keep the record," he said.

"I do."

"Then write these. The Athenian I want sold apart from the others. I'll take a good price for him or none."

Hermon looked at the man again. He was about forty, broad in the shoulders and the forehead, a wrestler's build gone a little slack with sitting. His cloak had been good once. His feet were bare. He had the skin of a man who had been at sea too long, burnt across the nose and pale where his beard had grown out.

"An Athenian," said Hermon.

"Yes."

"You know the law here."

Pollis spat over the edge of the quay into the harbour. "I know it. I was told to sell him, not to keep him safe. Let your people do as they like. If they leave him whole, I'll sell him."

---

The law was not old. It had been passed in the war, after Athenian soldiers had come over the gulf and dug themselves in on the island and burned vines and been driven off again, and it said that the first Athenian who set foot upon the island should be put to death without trial. Hermon had thought it a foolish law when it was passed, because it was not clear to him what it was for, and he had thought so more as the war went on, because since the soldiers had gone no Athenian had been fool enough to set foot on the island, and so the law had sat in the archive doing nothing, like a weight that is never taken out of its box.

But now there was an Athenian on the quay, and by the middle of the morning half the harbour knew it. A man called Charmandros, who had lost a ship to the Athenians and liked people to remember it, went up to the magistrates. Before noon two of the town's public slaves came down with a rope, and the Athenian was walked up to the stoa where the court sat in the shade, and Hermon, because he kept the record of the quay and because the law said that the record must follow the lot, went up behind them with his tablet.

They put the Athenian in the little pen at the side of the stoa where the accused waited while the court was gathered. There was no one else in it. Hermon sat on the step outside with his tablet on his knee. He wrote: An Athenian. About forty. From the Laconian ship, sold by Pollis. Held for the court. There was a space at the end of the line where the price would go, if there was a price.

"What are you writing?" said the Athenian.

He had a pleasant voice, unhurried. He was sitting on the floor of the pen with his back against the wall, as if he were waiting for a friend.

"Your lot," said Hermon. "Where you came from. What you fetch."

"And what do I fetch?"

"Nothing, yet. You may fetch nothing at all."

The Athenian seemed to consider this. "Then you will leave the space empty."

"I'll write died."

"Ah," said the Athenian. "Yes. That would fill it." He looked up at the roof of the stoa, at the swallows' nests under the beams. "May I ask you something, since we are both waiting? You set the prices on the quay?"

"I weigh what's paid. The seller sets the price. Or the buyer, if he's the stronger."

"But you have seen a great many men sold."

"I have."

"Then you must know, better than anyone on this island, what a man is worth."

Hermon did not answer at once. It was a question people asked him at the harbour sometimes, buyers mostly, as a joke, and he had an answer ready for them. But the Athenian had not said it as a joke.

"Two hundred drachmas," he said. "A strong one. Less if he's old. More if he has a trade."

"Two hundred. Good." The Athenian nodded as if a sum had come out right. "And that is what a man is worth."

"That's what he fetches."

"Is that different?"

"Of course it's different."

"Tell me how. I ask because I don't know. If I say a jar of oil is worth twelve drachmas, and on this quay a jar of oil fetches twelve drachmas, I would not think there were two things there. Is a man not like that?"

"No."

"Why not?"

Hermon put the tablet down on the step beside him. "Because if a man fetches two hundred today he'll fetch a hundred and eighty next year, and less the year after, and nothing when he's old. Is he worth nothing when he's old?"

"I don't know," said the Athenian. "Is he?"

"He's the same man."

"So whatever a man is worth, it is something that stays when the price goes down."

"I suppose."

"Then the price is not what he is worth. You've shown that. The price changes and the worth, whatever it is, does not." He said this mildly, as though Hermon had given him a present. "So let us leave the price. What does the buyer look at, when he looks at a man?"

"His teeth. His hands. Whether he can lift. Whether he has a trade."

"And if he has a trade, he is worth more."

"He fetches more."

"Yes, I beg your pardon. He fetches more. But you would say he is also worth more? A potter is worth more than a man who carries water?"

Hermon thought about it. "To the man who wants pots."

"And to the man who wants water?"

"The water-carrier."

"Then this worth of yours is like the price after all. It depends on who is buying." The Athenian rubbed his face with both hands; the salt crackled in his beard. "I'm afraid I've made a muddle. We said that the worth stays when the price changes, and now we have found it changing with every buyer. Either it is a different thing from what we said, or we have not yet said what it is."

"You're the one saying things."

"That's true," the Athenian said. "I say things, and you tell me whether they are so. It is a poor way to divide the work. Shall we change places? You say what a man is worth, and I'll tell you whether I agree."

Hermon picked up the tablet again. Up in the stoa he could hear the magistrates' chairs being set out, a scraping of wood on stone.

"I'll tell you what I know," he said. "I was sold on that quay when I was eleven. Ninety drachmas, because I was thin and had a cough. I worked for a man who traded in hides, and he let me keep one obol in six of what I earned him on the side, and after fourteen years I paid him three hundred drachmas, which was what he said I was worth by then, and he went to the temple with me and I was free. Three hundred. I know that sum. I counted every obol of it twice."

The Athenian said nothing for a little while.

"So you were worth ninety," he said at last, "and then three hundred."

"I fetched ninety. I paid three hundred."

"And were you the same man?"

"No," said Hermon. "Yes. I don't know."

"Nor do I," said the Athenian. "That is as far as we have got."

---

The court was not long. There were five magistrates, and the space before them was full of harbour men who had come to watch an Athenian die, and Charmandros stood in the middle of it with his hands spread and told them about his ship. Then the clerk read the law. Then the chief magistrate, an old man named Theogenes whose vines the Athenians had burned, asked the Athenian whether he was from Athens.

"I was born there," said the Athenian.

"Then you know what the law says."

"I heard it read. May I ask one thing about it?"

Theogenes looked at his colleagues. One of them shrugged.

"Ask."

"The law says the first Athenian who sets foot on the island. I did not set foot on it. I was carried, in a ship that is not mine, by a Spartan who is your ally, and I was walked up the gangway at the end of a rope. I do not say this to escape the law. I only ask whether the men who made it meant by sets foot a man who comes, or any man who is brought."

There was a sound in the crowd, not quite a laugh.

"The meaning is plain," said Charmandros.

"I'm glad," said the Athenian. "Then perhaps you will tell me, because it is not plain to me. If a corpse washed ashore from an Athenian wreck, would the law require you to put it to death?"

That was a laugh. Theogenes rapped his staff on the floor.

Hermon was standing at the back, by the pillar, with the tablet against his chest. He had been looking at the space at the end of the line.

"That's no Athenian," he said, loudly enough. "That's a philosopher."

The laugh then was large and went all round the stoa and out into the street, and Charmandros turned purple, and even old Theogenes put his hand over his mouth. A philosopher. One of those who walked about Athens asking people what they meant. Everybody on the island had heard of them, and nobody on the island had ever seen one. It seemed to settle something. You did not put a man to death for being a philosopher. You did not need to. You only needed to keep him out of earshot.

The magistrates talked among themselves for less time than it takes to weigh a stater. Then Theogenes said that the law was the law but that its purpose was the defence of the island and not the killing of captives, and that this man, being a prisoner of war brought by an ally, would be sold as a prisoner of war, and the price, less the court's fee, would go to his captor. And that was all.

The Athenian, as they took him out, looked across the stoa to where Hermon stood. He did not smile, exactly. He lifted one hand a little, as a man does to someone he knows on the far side of a crowded street, and then the public slaves turned him round.

Hermon looked down at the tablet. After Held for the court he wrote: To be sold.

---

He was sold the same afternoon, on the quay, apart from the others, as Pollis had wanted.

It went badly at first. The harbour men had enjoyed the court and were not inclined to pay for the joke. A Corinthian who dealt in rowers said he would give sixty, for the shoulders. A man from the mainland said eighty if he could read and write, and the Athenian said that he could, and the man asked him to prove it, and the Athenian asked what he would like written, and the man said his own name, and the Athenian wrote it in the dust of the quay with his finger and then asked him whether the name was the same thing as the man it named, at which the man from the mainland said he did not want a slave who talked, and walked off. Pollis swore.

Then a stranger came down from the town. He was a young man, perhaps twenty-five, dressed in fine wool dyed a deep red, and he walked with a light step as though he had eaten well and expected to again. He had a slave behind him carrying a leather bag on his shoulder, and the slave was walking slowly, as men do when what they are carrying is heavier than it looks.

"Is this the one?" the young man said to Pollis. "The Athenian they tried this morning?"

"It is."

"What do you want for him?"

Pollis looked at the red wool and the bag and the slave, and his eyes went narrow. "Thirty minae," he said.

Three thousand drachmas. The quay went quiet. Hermon, at his trestle, felt the number arrive in him like a stone dropped down a well. It was ten times what he had paid for his own life. It was fifteen strong men. It was a small ship.

The young man laughed. "For a philosopher? I heard they gave him to you for nothing. I'll give you twenty."

"Twenty-five."

"Twenty," said the young man, "and you'll take it, because no one else on this quay will give you twenty obols." He turned to Hermon. "You're the weigher? Twenty minae, Attic. Weigh it."

The slave set the bag on the trestle and untied the neck. The silver inside was Cyrenaean, most of it, heavy coins with the silphium plant on one face, and some Attic owls among them, all of it bright and good. Hermon set the leaden mina on one pan. He had never in his life weighed twenty minae at one buying. He began.

It took a long time. The Attic mina was lighter than the island mina, and so he did not count by coins but by the beam: he loaded the pan with silver until it lifted the tortoise weight, and tipped the silver into a basket, and loaded it again, and the young man's slave counted the loads aloud. Fourteen island minae and a little over; Hermon reckoned the difference on his fingers and added a handful of drachmas until the last pan hung level. The quay watched. Pollis watched. The Athenian, sitting on an upturned crate with his chin on his fist, watched the beam rise and fall and settle as though it were the most interesting thing he had seen in his life.

When it was done Hermon took his obol in the hundred, which came to more silver than he usually saw in a month, and wrote on the tablet: To Anniceris of Cyrene. Twenty minae, Attic. He knew the young man's name now because the young man had told the overseer's clerk to write it in his book, and had spelled it, twice.

Pollis took his silver and went off down the quay without a word to anyone, the basket on his hip. The young man from Cyrene clapped the Athenian on the shoulder.

"There's a boat going across to the Piraeus at dusk," he said. "I've paid your passage. Go home."

"You have bought me," said the Athenian.

"I've bought you so that you can go home. I don't want a slave. I wanted to see a man they couldn't make up their minds about." Anniceris grinned. "You may tell your friends in Athens they owe me twenty minae, if you like. I shan't take it."

"Why not?"

"Because then I should have sold you back to them," said Anniceris, "and I should be a dealer, like him," and he nodded down the quay after the Spartan, and went away up the hill with his slave and the empty bag, whistling.

---

The boat for the Piraeus was a fishing boat, half-decked, and it lay at the far end of the quay, where the stones were green. Toward dusk the Athenian came and stood by Hermon's trestle while the boatman was making ready.

"I have not thanked you," he said.

"For what?"

"For the joke."

Hermon was putting the weights away into their box, each in its own hollow, the mina last. "It wasn't a joke."

"No? What was it?"

"I don't know," Hermon said. "You were going to argue with them. I've seen men argue with the court on this island. It doesn't help."

The Athenian was quiet for a moment.

"There was a man in Athens," he said, "a friend of mine, who argued with a court. He argued better than any man I have ever heard. He told them exactly what he was, and why, and he would not stop asking them questions even then. They voted, and it went against him, not by many. I was not there at the end." He looked out at the water, where the light was going. "I've often thought that you were right. It doesn't help. And yet I don't know what else he should have done."

The boatman called.

"Twenty minae," the Athenian said. He looked at the tablet on the trestle, where the day was written in Hermon's small square hand. "So that is what I am worth."

"That's what you fetched."

"Yes," said the Athenian, and seemed pleased, as if Hermon had answered well. "We should go on with it some other time. I don't think we finished."

He went down the green steps to the boat and got into it clumsily, like a man who has spent a great deal of his life on land, and the boatman pushed off. Hermon did not watch it go. He had the day to copy.

He sat under the awning with the papyrus and the ink and copied the lots one after another for the overseer, the Sicilians and the Campanians and the oil, and the last line, To Anniceris of Cyrene. Twenty minae, Attic. Then he turned the stylus round in his fingers and, as he did every evening, began to draw the broad end of it across the wax, line by line from the top, so that it would be clean in the morning. He came to the line that said An Athenian. About forty, and stopped there for a while with the stylus resting on it, and then went on.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, Kalendīs Octōbribus (1 October 2026), ā Platōne Athēniēnsī per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Plato, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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