Athens, the spring of 315 BC: the head of Plato's Academy, a foreigner who once refused Athenian citizenship, is dragged in for two years' unpaid metic tax and put up for sale. The public slave who keeps the city's registers must hold him for five nights, write him down, and watch who buys him.
by Xenocrates, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium
The tax farmer brought him in on the third day of the Dionysia, when the Agora was half empty and everyone who could stand was up at the theatre.
Sosias heard them on the steps before he saw them. Deinias had a voice that went in front of him like a dog, and he was using it now, saying keep up, keep up, the way a man speaks to a donkey he has paid for. Then the door, and the light from the square, and Deinias in it with his hand closed on the elbow of an old man in a brown cloak.
"Arrears," Deinias said. "Metic. Two years. I had him at the Dipylon."
Sosias knew the old man. Everyone in Athens knew him, the way they knew the Acropolis: not by looking at it but by having it always there in the corner of the eye. He had never been this close. The face was long and grey and without expression, and the eyes went once round the room, the shelves, the tablets, the brazier, the bench, Sosias, and came to rest on nothing in particular. He did not pull at the hand on his elbow. He waited for it to be taken away, and after a time it was, because Deinias needed both hands to find his contract.
The Poleterion had three rooms. In the front one the ten poletai sat when they sat, which was on sale days and when the silver-mines were leased; the rest of the time it belonged to Sosias, who was a public slave of the city and had kept its registers for nineteen years. The poletai changed every year. Sosias did not. He knew where every lease lay and every confiscation, and the names of men who had owed the city money since before the battle at Chaeronea, and he knew, because he had written it, the lists of metics in arrears for the years of the archons Archippus and Demogenes, which were the two years before this one.
He found the tablet. He did not need to look at it; he looked at it anyway, because the tax farmer was watching him and because a thing done properly is done with the eyes.
Xenocrates son of Agathenor, of Chalcedon, dwelling at the Academy. Twelve drachmas. Unpaid.
And on the next tablet, for the next year, in the hand he had used last autumn, which was a little smaller than his hand now, the same line and the same word.
"Two years," Deinias said again. "Twenty-four drachmas and the penalty. I asked him at the gate. I asked him properly. He says he has not got it."
"I have not got it," the old man said.
It was the first thing he had said. His voice was lower than Sosias had expected and slower, as if each word had to be brought from some distance and set down.
"Your students," Sosias said. "The young men at the Academy. Some of them are rich."
"Some of them are."
"Then send to one of them. Deinias will wait an hour." He looked at Deinias, who shrugged, meaning that he would wait an hour for twenty-four drachmas and the penalty and would not wait an hour and one moment more. "There's a boy outside who'll run for a triobol."
The old man looked at him for the first time properly, as a man looks at a tablet he means to read.
"It is my tax," he said.
Sosias waited for the rest. There was no rest.
He had heard, as everyone had heard, that the Macedonian king Alexander had once sent fifty talents to the Academy, and that this man had taken three thousand drachmas of it and sent the remainder back with the message that the king had more people to feed. He had heard that the Athenians, in their assembly, had offered him the citizenship in the year of the war with Antipater, and that he had refused it, and that for this reason the Macedonian would not receive him as an ambassador, since he was not an Athenian, and he had come home from the Macedonian camp with nothing. Sosias had thought, when he heard it, that it was the sort of thing philosophers did so that it would be told about them afterwards. Now he looked at the brown cloak, which was clean and had been mended at the hem in two places with thread of a different brown, and he thought that perhaps there had been no afterwards in it at all.
"You understand what happens," Sosias said. "If it is not paid."
"Tell me. I should like to hear it from the man who knows."
"Deinias hands you to the poletai. That is done now; you are handed. The herald cries you in the Agora. At the next sale you are sold for the debt, and what is over the debt goes to the city." He found he did not want to say the next part and said it. "Whoever buys you owns you."
"And if no one buys?"
Nobody had ever asked him this. Sosias opened his mouth and closed it.
"Somebody always buys," Deinias said from the door.
They could not put him in the prison, because the prison was for men under sentence and for men waiting to die, and he was neither; and they could not let him go, because he had been handed. So he stayed in the back room of the Poleterion, where the old tablets were, on a bench, and Sosias stayed in the front room, which was where he slept in any case, and the door between them stood open because nobody had thought to close it.
The sale would be on the next sale day, five days off. The herald had cried it at noon from the stone before the Royal Stoa, and by the middle of the afternoon the thing was through the whole city and out to the theatre and back. People came to look. They came up the steps in twos and threes, stood in the door of the front room, and looked past Sosias at the old man on the bench, and the old man sat with his hands on his knees and let himself be looked at, the way a column lets itself be looked at.
Some of them spoke to Sosias.
A potter from the Kerameikos, whom Sosias knew because the poletai had once sold his neighbour's kiln, said: "Is this what the city has come to?"
A man in a good cloak whom he did not know said: "You should be ashamed. You. A slave, selling a free man."
A woman spat on the threshold, carefully, not on the floor inside, which Sosias would have to wash, but on the stone just outside it, which he would also have to wash.
He did not answer any of them. For nineteen years men had been angry with him in that doorway. They were angry when their fathers' farms were sold for the fathers' debts and when the lease on a mine went to another man for a drachma more, and they were angry with Sosias because he was the one who stood in the room. The poletai were not in the room. The Assembly that had made the law of the metic tax was not in the room; it had made that law before anyone's grandfather was born. Sosias was in the room. He had long ago stopped minding. He found now that he minded a little.
When the light went, the people stopped coming. Sosias lit the lamp, ate his bread and his onion, and after a time took the second half of the bread into the back room.
The old man was sitting as he had sat at noon. Sosias did not think he had moved. Some of the young men at the Academy said, and Sosias had heard it repeated in the Agora with a laugh, that their master set aside one hour of every day in which he did nothing and said nothing; and it was also said that he could sit through a whole day that way, and that Plato, long ago, had said of him that he needed a spur where other pupils needed a bridle. Sosias put the bread on the bench beside him.
"Thank you."
"It's the city's bread. The city feeds what it holds."
"Then thank the city," the old man said, "and thank you for carrying it." He did not eat it yet. "How many are there this year?"
"How many what?"
"Metics in arrears. On your list."
Sosias did not have to think. "Forty-one. Thirty-eight men and three women."
"And how many of the forty-one have been handed?"
"Seven. The others paid when Deinias came, or their friends paid, or they left Attica." He heard himself and added: "Most of them leave. They go to Megara. The tax farmer doesn't follow them to Megara."
"And the seven?"
"Five were sold last year. Two will be sold on the sale day." He had not meant to say it like that. "You. And a Phrygian who mends sandals by the Stoa of Zeus."
"Who bought the five?"
"Their relations, mostly. One a man who needed a mule-driver."
The old man nodded slowly, as if Sosias had given him the correct answer to a long sum. Then he broke the bread in two and ate one of the halves and put the other half back on the bench.
"You know the numbers," he said.
"It's what I'm for."
"No," the old man said, but he said it mildly, as a man corrects a date, and did not go on, and Sosias found that he did not want to ask him what he had meant. He went back to the front room and lay down, and for a long while he could hear nothing at all from the back, not even breathing, so that twice he rose on his elbow to be sure there was still a man there.
Polemon came in the second watch.
Sosias knew him by his height before he knew him by his face. He came up the steps alone and without a torch, which a rich man does not do, and stood in the door as all the others had, except that he was out of breath. He had run from the Dipylon. He was perhaps thirty-five, heavy in the shoulders, with a short beard going grey at the corners of the mouth, and he held in his hand a purse that was very much larger than twenty-four drachmas and a penalty.
Everyone in Athens knew about Polemon, too. When he was a young man he had been the most famous drunk in the city; he kept money hidden all over Athens so that he would never be too far from the price of a jar; and one morning, coming home from a party with his friends, still in the garland, he had pushed into the Academy to make a noise in the lecture, and the old man, who had been speaking about temperance, had gone on speaking about temperance, and Polemon had sat down, and taken off the garland, and never gone home. That was the story. Sosias had always assumed it was a story.
"Take it," Polemon said, and held the purse out. "Take whatever is owed. Take the penalty. Take something for yourself."
"I can't."
"Of course you can. You're the clerk."
"He's been handed," Sosias said. "Once he's handed, the herald cries him, and once the herald has cried him, he is sold. The law says the sale. It doesn't say the debt." He had explained this so many times to so many relatives that the words came out smooth, and he disliked them for coming out smooth. "The poletai can't stop a sale that's been cried. I can't. You would need the Assembly."
Polemon looked past him into the back room. The old man had not moved. Sosias could not see whether his eyes were open.
"Then I'll buy him," Polemon said. Loudly, towards the back room. "On the sale day. I'll stand in the Agora and buy him, and I'll free him the same hour."
"No," said the old man.
Polemon went into the back room. Sosias did not follow, but the door was open and the Poleterion was small.
"There are three parts to that," the old man said, "and you have looked at only the last. First you would own me. Then you would free me, and I would be your freedman, and you would stand as my patron before the polemarch, and when I went to law it would be in your name, and every year when I paid my tax I would pay three obols more than I pay now, because that is what a freedman pays, and it would be written against your name in this young man's list." Sosias, who was forty-four, did not correct the young. "I taught you, Polemon. Do not let us rearrange the order of things between us for twenty-four drachmas."
"Then who?"
"Whoever buys."
"And if it is some Macedonian's steward who wants a man to read aloud to him at dinner?"
"Then I shall read aloud to him at dinner."
Polemon stood a while. Then Sosias heard him sit down on the floor, which was stone, and presently heard nothing more, and when he himself woke before dawn the tall man was asleep against the wall of the back room with the purse in his lap, and the old man was sitting on the bench exactly as before, with his eyes open, looking at the grey square of the window.
The sale day was clear, with a north wind. The poletai sat for once, four of the ten; the others had sent word that they were ill, which Sosias understood. The herald stood on the stone. The Phrygian sandal-mender was sold first, for thirty-one drachmas, to his wife's brother, who had come down from Acharnai with the silver tied in a cloth, and who wept, and whom the Phrygian cuffed, not hard, on the side of the head.
Then the herald cried the old man.
There were more people in the Agora than Sosias had seen there on any morning of the festival just past. They filled the square from the Poleterion to the far fountain and stood on the steps of the Stoa of Zeus and on the base of the statues of the Tyrant-slayers, and none of them said anything. Sosias had stood beside many sales and had never heard an Agora so quiet. He could hear the wind moving the awning of a fish-stall on the far side.
The old man stood beside the stone in the same brown cloak. He did not look at the crowd and he did not look away from it. He stood the way he had sat, as if the standing were a thing he was doing rather than a thing being done to him.
"Twenty-four drachmas and the penalty," the herald said, "which is the debt. Who bids?"
Nobody bid.
Polemon stood at the front of the crowd with his arms at his sides. The purse was not in his hand. Sosias saw that he had put it away and saw what it had cost him.
"Who bids for the metic Xenocrates, of Chalcedon?"
Nobody bid. A man at the back laughed, once, and was hit by the men next to him, and stopped.
Sosias thought: and if no one buys? He did not know. There was no line in any law he had copied for what the city did with a man it had cried and could not sell. He thought that the poletai did not know either, because the eldest of the four had begun to look at Sosias, as the poletai always looked at Sosias when a thing had no precedent, as if Sosias kept precedents in a jar on the shelf. He had nothing to give him, and he let the man look.
Then someone at the side of the crowd was saying make way, and it parted.
The men who came through were not Athenians. They were big, clean-shaven, and they carried short staves which they did not need to use, because the crowd moved before the staves reached it. Between them walked a man not yet forty in a cloak of Milesian wool that was too fine for the morning, and his hair, which had been dark when Sosias saw him last from a distance on the Pnyx, was now a bright yellow like a woman's.
Demetrius son of Phanostratos, of Phaleron, whom Cassander of Macedon had set over the city two years before to govern it in his name, and who had been a pupil in the other school, the one in the Lyceum, before he was anything else.
He did not look at the herald. He looked at the old man and inclined his head, as one scholar to another, and the old man inclined his head exactly as far, and no further.
"The debt," Demetrius said to the herald, pleasantly. "Twenty-four drachmas and the penalty. And ten drachmas over, for the city, so that no one may say I bought cheap." He did not wait for a counter-bid; there would be none, and everyone there knew it. One of his men brought a bag to the table of the poletai and counted the silver out onto the board in front of the eldest, who counted it again, and moved it along to Sosias, who counted it a third time, because that was the procedure, and wrote the sum.
"He is mine," Demetrius said, and turned, so that the crowd could see his face and the old man's together. "And I free him. Let it be written that I free him this morning, before the city, for the honour of the Academy and of Plato, who was its founder."
It was a good sentence. He had made it before he came. Sosias could hear that it was meant to be answered.
The old man said: "I thank you, Demetrius."
That was all. It was the proper thing, in the proper words, the formula a freedman speaks to the man who has freed him; there was nothing missing from it. Demetrius waited a moment longer, still smiling, and then the smile went a little smaller and stayed there, and he said something to his men, and they took him away through the crowd the way they had brought him, and the crowd let him go in the same silence in which it had let him come.
Polemon had not moved. Nor, for a long moment, had the old man. Then he came over to the table where Sosias sat with the tablets and stood across it from him.
"Now write me," he said.
Sosias had already taken up the stylus. He wrote the sale: the name, the debt, the buyer, the price. He wrote the manumission beneath it. Then he took the register of freedmen for the year of the archon Democleides, which had only a few names in it yet, and he wrote the line that the law required him to write, and he found that his hand was slow over it, and made it go at its usual pace.
Xenocrates son of Agathenor, of Chalcedon, freedman. Patron: Demetrius son of Phanostratos, of Phaleron. Dwelling at the Academy.
He stopped. The old man was reading it upside down.
"And the sum," the old man said.
"Twelve drachmas," Sosias said, "and three obols."
He wrote it.
The old man looked at the line for a while. Then he nodded, the same slow nod he had given in the back room over the forty-one, and Sosias understood that he was being told the sum was correct.
"Next year, then," the old man said.
He turned and went down across the Agora towards the Dipylon road. He did not hurry. The crowd opened in front of him without being asked, and closed behind him, and Polemon went after him and fell into step half a pace behind, as a pupil walks. Sosias watched until the brown cloak was gone among the tombs of the Kerameikos and there was nothing left to watch but the road.
Then he went back into the Poleterion. The half of the bread was still on the bench in the back room, where it had been since the first night. He picked it up. It was hard as a tile by now. He stood holding it in the empty room, in the light from the grey window, and after a while he sat down on the bench where the old man had sat, and put his hands on his knees, and was still.
Outside, the herald was crying the lease of a mill at Eleusis. Sosias heard it and did not get up.
THE END
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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem nōnum Kalendās Octōbrēs (23 September 2026), ā Xenocrate per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.
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Published by Centaurus Press · Universitas Scholarium · All rights reserved.