And Philodemos was polite, especially to everyone but his son. Menedemos chuckled again. Now his father was paying the price for his good manners.

When Sostratos got out of bed and opened the shutters, he blinked in delighted surprise. Yesterday’s rain clouds had blown away. The sky was a brilliant, velvety dark blue, shading toward pink in the east. Something flew by overhead: by its skittering path through the air, probably a bat returning to wherever it would hide during daylight hours.

Sostratos went back to his bed and pulled the chamber pot out from under it. After he’d used the pot, he dumped it out the window into the street below. This early in the day, he didn’t have to worry about splashing passersby with its contents. He stuck the pot under the bed once more, put on his chiton, and went downstairs for breakfast.

His father was already sitting out in the courtyard with a chunk of bread, a plate of olive oil into which to dip the bread, and a cup of un-watered wine. “Hail, son,” Lysistratos said. He was Philodemos’ younger brother, and a good deal more easygoing than Menedemos’ father. “How are you today?”

“Not bad, thanks,” Sostratos answered. “Yourself?”

“Tolerable, tolerable,” his father said. “My bones ache when I get up in the morning, but that comes of living as long as I have.” He smiled. “If I weren’t alive, I don’t suppose I’d ache at all.”

“Well, no,” Sostratos said. He went into the kitchen and came out with a breakfast identical to his father’s. He was just sitting down beside Lysistratos when a slave girl emerged, yawning, from her little room. “Hail, Threissa.”

“Hail, young master,” she replied in accented Greek. As her name suggested, she came from Thrace. She was red-haired and snub-nosed, a few years younger than Sostratos himself. She yawned again, then went to get her own breakfast. Lysistratos wasn’t a slaveowner who measured out his slaves’ rations to the last grain of barley. Threissa would eat about what he and his son had had.