All the same… He sighed again. All the same, he wished he could have gone right on studying in Athens. Some men were lucky enough- and rich enough-to be able to pursue the love of wisdom their whole lives long. He wasn’t. He’d had to come back to Rhodes to help his family and make his own way in the world. Though five years had passed since that sorry day, he still felt as if he’d torn his heart out and left it behind when he sailed away from Peiraieus.

Most of him still longed to return. The rest… For the rest, it was too late. He’d quoted Herakleitos the day before at Uncle Philodemos ’ house. The Ionian philosopher had surely been right: you couldn’t step into the same river twice. When you went back in, it wasn’t the same river any more.

And I’m not the same any more, either, Sostratos thought. Knowledge for its own sake did still matter to him. It mattered very much; he hoped it would for the rest of his life. One day, he wanted to write a history of his times to rival those of Herodotos and Thoukydides. But he was more practical, more hard-headed, than the weeping, gangling young man who’d so unwillingly come back to Rhodes when Lysistratos summoned him. He’d been dealing with trade goods and money these past few years, and they’d inevitably left their mark on the way his mind worked.

He said, “Do you know, Father, there’s a bit of me that dreads going back to Athens? I never would have imagined that.”

“I can see why,” Lysistratos answered. “If you’re very much in love with a hetaira when you’re a young man, do you really want to see her again twenty years later? Do you want to find out she’s got fat and gone gray and lost a front tooth? Wouldn’t you rather recall the beauty you knew once upon a time?”

“That’s it,” Sostratos agreed. “That’s exactly it. How can Athens live up to the way I remember her?”

“She probably won’t,” his father said. “But it isn’t the city’s fault. Cities don’t usually change that much, not in a few years. People are the ones who change.”