"We shall be more comfortable in Fulvius' house. He is a most honorable Roman who swears that he has quarreled with water. Day before yesterday he received a famous wine from Laurona. I smell its perfume even here."
"I have not a single obolus in my pouch."
The philosopher sniffed as if inhaling the vapor of the new wine, and made a gesture of disappointment. Then he looked at the Greek affectionately.
"You are worthy to hear me; poor, like myself, surrounded by these merchants who stock their vaults with silver! Since there is to be no wine for us, let us take a walk. That clears the brain. I will treat you as Aristotle treated his favorite pupils."
Strolling along the portico Euphobias began to relate what he knew of Sónnica's life.
She was believed to have been born in Cyprus, the isle beloved of mariners. On those shores where the poets made the triumphant beauty of Aphrodite spring from the foam, the women of the island run by night in search of mariners to offer themselves in memory of the goddess. Sónnica was the fruit of one such alligation with a rower. She vaguely recollected the early years of her childhood, running about the deck of a ship, springing from one bank of rowers to another, fed and scorned like the cats on shipboard, visiting many ports populated by people diverse in dress, customs, and language, but seeing it all from afar, and vaguely, like images in a dream, never setting foot on terra firma.
Before she became a woman she was the mistress of the owner of the ship, a pilot from Samos, who, grown tired of her, or tempted by money, sold her one night to a Bœotian who maintained a dicterion in the Piræus. She was not yet twelve years of age, and little Sónnica attracted special attention among the dicteriadai who swarmed by night in the Piræus, the chief centre of Athenian prostitution.
The floating population of the city, composed of foreigners, gamblers, and young men thrown out of their homes by severe fathers, congregated in that suburb of Athens which surrounded the ports of the Piræus and Phalerum and formed the deme of Estiron. No sooner had night closed in than the whole noisy and corrupt world gathered in the great square in the Piræus, between the citadel and the port, and prostitutes began to circulate, who with the coming of the shadows, were privileged to leave the dicteria in which they had been confined. On the porticos around the square the gamblers shook dice, wandering philosophers argued, vagabonds slept, mariners told of their voyages, and through this confusion of diverse peoples passed the dicteriadai, with painted faces, almost nude, or wearing striped mantles of vivid colors which revealed an African or Asiatic origin. There the young daughter of Cyprus grew up and became acquainted with the world, seeking each night some wheat merchant from Bithynia, or some exporter of hides from Magna Graecia, rude and merry people, who, before returning to their native lands wished to spend some of their earnings on the courtesans of Athens. By day she was a prisoner in the dicterion, a house of sordid aspect, without other ornamentation on the façade than an enormous phallus which served the establishment as a sign, the door standing open at all hours without the chained dog customary at other dwellings, and displaying, immediately the heavy curtain was raised, an open courtyard, in which, near the entrance to the rooms, squatting or lying on the pavement, were all the wares of the house, women worn and consumed by the fires of concupiscence and girls barely arrived at puberty. All were nude, the dark and velvety skin of the Egyptians contrasting with the pale countenance of the Greeks and the white and silky flesh of the Asiatics.
Sónnica, who was at that time called Myrrhina, wearied of the life of the dicterion. All the women there were slaves whom the Bœotian beat when they allowed a customer to leave discontented. It disgusted her to take the two oboli stipulated by the laws of Solon from those calloused hands which wounded as they caressed, and she was nauseated by the dirty, brutal people from all the countries in the world who came in search of pleasure, and went away surfeited, being immediately replaced by another and another, like an incessant surging of desires excited by the solitude of the sea, repeating similar caprices and identical demands.
One night she visited for the last time the temple of Venus Pandemos raised by Solon in the great square of the Piræus, and deposited an obolus as her final offering before the statues of Venus and her companion Peitho, the two divinities of the courtesans, before whom she went many times with her lemans of the moment, before giving herself up to them on the seashore or near the long wall constructed by Themistocles to unite the port with Athens. Then she fled toward the city, eager for liberty and joy, wishing to become one of those Athenian hetæræ whose luxury and beauty she had admired from afar.