Erinna had lived with her second husband, Damonax, for the past year (her first had died after they’d been married only three years). She wouldn’t be going out of his house for a while, anyhow; their little boy, Polydoros, was just over a month old. Sostratos said, “I’m glad Erinna had a boy.”

“So am I.” Lysistratos dipped his head. “Both because it’s better to have a boy and because…” His voice trailed away.

Sostratos finished the thought: “Because Damonax might have exposed it if it were a girl.”

“Yes.” His father dipped his head again. “Whether or not to rear a baby is a husband’s privilege.”

“I know. But Erinna would have been very unhappy if Damonax had decided not to raise it,” Sostratos said. When his sister came back to live at the family home after losing her first husband, she’d fretted that she would never remarry and never have the chance to bear children. To have a child and then lose it at a husband’s whim… That would have been cruelly hard.

“On the whole, your brother-in-law seems a pretty reasonable fellow,” Lysistratos said.

“On the whole, yes,” Sostratos said. “When it comes to olive oil, no. How many times do we have to tell him we’re not going to fill the Aphrodite to the gunwales with the stuff and haul it to Athens? I thought you and Uncle Philodemos had made him understand why we can’t do it.”

“Oh, we did,” his father answered. “But he can’t be reasonable-or what we think of as reasonable-about that. He’s got his own family’s interests to worry about, too, you know. They still aren’t all the way out of debt, and olive oil is what they’ve got to sell. And so…” He sighed and shrugged.

“It’s good oil. I’ve never said it’s not good oil. But it’s not the right cargo for a merchant galley, not with the overhead costs we’ve got because of all the rowers we need.” Sostratos sighed, too. “I almost wish we hadn’t done so well with it last sailing season. Then Damonax could really see why we don’t want anything more to do with it.”