A Peerless Peer by Helena P Schrader

Author:Helena P Schrader [Schrader, Helena P]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Cultural, Fiction, Greece, Historical
ISBN: 9781604946024
Amazon: 1604946024
Goodreads: 30639083
Publisher: Wheatmark
Published: 2011-09-14T23:00:00+00:00

The news that the master had taken a wife and that she would soon be coming to take up residence at his kleros sent Laodice into a panic. For the last three years, ever since their own quarters were finished, she had been making the main house ready for a mistress—but that was very different from the prospect of actually meeting her. In reality, Laodice and her family had become used to being “masters” of their own house. The master’s occasional holidays on the farm had been like having an honored guest. A woman living here permanently would be something else again.

Laodice was suddenly certain that a woman would find fault with everything. She looked around the house and noticed all the little things that hadn’t been done yet. Oh, they had the rebuilt and plastered walls. The roof was strong and leaked nowhere. The floors were well surfaced with practical local terra cotta—but nowhere a mosaic scene or even a pretty patterned walkway. And the walls were simply whitewashed—no frescoes or even pretty stenciled borders. Most distressing to Laodice was the realization that all the furniture had been built by her son Pantes. He was very proud of his work, all the more so now that the master had loaned him the money to set up his own shop. Maybe he really was good, Laodice thought, looking at his creations with their very sparse but “strategic” decorations in a new light. But what did she know? The new mistress might find it all very primitive and beneath her dignity.

The master had told them, full of pride, that his bride came from a “very good” family, that her father was one of Sparta’s lochagoi, and that she had been married to a priest of Apollo at Delphi. That sounded very exalted to Laodice. She was desperately afraid that the mistress would find many things to complain about at the kleros.

At least her arrival would be in the dark. The master had explained the peculiar Spartiate marriage custom of “capturing” the bride by night and leaving her at his residence, only to return to his barracks before morning roll call. It seemed a very funny custom to Laodice, and she had heard the helots from the surrounding farms laughing about it. It saved the Spartiates huge amounts of money in wedding feasts and presents, the helots joked; but how many times had the bride woken up and discovered she’d been carried off by the wrong man? The Spartans all looked alike in their cropped hair and training armor, they teased. And the girls cut their hair and dressed as boys, too—so they could get by the watch more easily.

Pelopidas, Polychares, Mantiklos, and the new field hand Leonidas had brought from one of his other estates to replace Pantes doubled up laughing when Polychares told the story about some ardent bridegroom who had failed to get the girl’s father’s permission. The father, an officer it seemed, found out about the planned elopement and made sure the meleirenes knew when and where to look for the young man and his daughter.

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