When he awoke he begged to turn over to her the entire product of his cargo; but Myrrhina, hardly knowing why, refused to accept it, in spite of his urging. He was rich; he had no parents; far away in that land of barbarians he possessed immense flocks, hundreds of slaves who cultivated his fields or worked in his mines; great potteries, and many ships like the three which awaited him in the Piræus; and seeing that the courtesan, with kindly smile, treated him like a generous boy, declining to accept his money, he bought in the Street of the Goldsmiths a prodigious collar of pearls, the despair of the hetæræ, and sent it to Myrrhina before he left the city.
Afterwards he came back many times. He could not decide to return to his country. He set sail with his flotilla, but in the next port he took on a cargo for Athens, paying no regard to the price, and scarcely came to anchor in the Piræus before he rushed to the courtesan's house, nor could resolve to leave until he suspected Myrrhina's weariness of his presence.
The courtesan finally became accustomed to this submissive lover, ever at her feet, who was ready to die for her, showing his adoration with the fervor of a foreigner, so different from the cynical and mocking courtesy of the Athenians. She called him "little brother," and this word, which the hetæræ used with young lovers, gradually took on her lips a warmth of sincere affection. When he was delayed in returning from the islands she longed for his presence, and when she saw him at the door she ran to him with outstretched arms, in a transport of joy such as her other friends never witnessed.
She did not love him as she had loved the poet, but the earnest humility of Bomaro, his respectful and docile love, so different from the ardor she inspired in others, moved Myrrhina to a sentiment of gratitude.
One night, the Iberian, who seemed preoccupied, ventured after much vacillation to express his inner thought.
He could not live without her; he would never return alone to Zacynthus; he was resolved to abandon his fortune rather than never to see her more. He would sooner be a stevedore on the wharf at Phalerum; and finally, like one who makes a dash to more quickly overcome an obstacle, he abruptly proposed to make her his wife, turning his fortune over to her, and to take her to smiling Zacynthus with its flowery fields and its rose-colored mountains, so like those of Attica.
Myrrhina smiled while listening to him and her heart was touched by the affectionate self-abnegation of the Iberian who, to unite with her forever, was willing to overlook a shameful past in the dicterion and in the Cerameicus. She rejected his proposals with an ironical smile; but Bomaro was persistent. Was she not tired of her mode of life, of seeing herself flattered as a thing of great price, but often scorned by coarse creatures who thought they made themselves her masters by merely offering their gold? Would she not like to be a sovereign on the coasts of Iberia, surrounded by people who would admire her Athenian attainments?
Bomaro conquered her by his loving determination, and one day Athens beheld with surprise that the house on the Street of Tripods was sold, and that Myrrhina's slaves were carrying to the port the riches gathered during three years of mad fortune, loading them in the ships of the Iberian who had unfurled from the masts his purple sails for a triumphal voyage.
Myrrhina, in her desire to propitiate him who gave himself up to her so completely, wished to leave her whole past behind. She proposed to be a new woman, to put away her sinister cognomen, and begging Bomaro to repeat the most beautiful names of the Iberian women, she chose that of Sónnica as the most pleasing to her ears.
Arrived at Zacynthus, the navigator and the Greek woman were married in the temple of Diana before all the Senate, of which the young man was himself a member.