The Treasury

Karnon led us across the sanctuary, to a temple building in the northeast. “This is the Porinos Naos,” he said. “It’s a temple to Apollo, but these days it serves another purpose. This is where we keep the treasury of the Delian League.”

Porinos Naos meant limestone temple in our language, which was appropriate enough, since this temple to Apollo was made of limestone. The blocks that made the walls were very, very weathered. Some of the decorations etched into the facade were almost completely worn away. The columns were broken in places, but still doing their job. The paint had worn to almost nothing, so that bare stone was the only color.

“I’d hate for all our temples to end up looking like this,” Diotima muttered under her breath, but the accountant heard her.

“The priests stopped worrying about upkeep when the building was taken over by the League and lost its sacred status,” Karnon explained.

This nondescript temple contained more wealth than perhaps any other building in all of Hellas. I marveled at what an odd thing that was.

Karnon walked up the steps. At the top there were two guards in armor and carrying spears, with their helmets pushed back upon their heads.

I raised an eyebrow. “Only two?” I asked.

“Two are enough to keep away inquisitive tourists,” Karnon explained. “A hundred would not be enough to repel a serious attack from outside.”

I didn’t like that answer at all. The more I saw of the security on Delos, the more I was convinced that Pericles was right. The treasury was not remotely safe here.

I said as much. “Then some city-state, say, Sparta, could land here, grab the money, and sail off with it,” I said.

“You mean like Athens is doing right now?” Karnon said sarcastically.

“Here!” I said. “That’s uncalled for.”

“Is it?” Karnon said. “I may be an Athenian, but I’m not blind to how the rest of the world will see our actions.” Karnon took the key, which he’d been carrying over his shoulder. “Have you seen one of these before?” he asked.

“We were there when Anaxinos recovered Geros’s keys. But I’ve never seen one used. How does it work?” I asked, fascinated.

“Here, I’ll show you,” Karnon said. “See this slit in the door?”

Diotima and I nodded.

“This key goes in that hole, but you have to angle it just right.”

He moved the key to the hole, but the unwieldy tool slipped from his fingers. It fell to the stone floor and rebounded with an enormous clang.

“Curse it,” Karnon muttered. “I hate it when I drop my keys.”

He picked it up and tried again, this time with two hands, holding the key at the long end so that the kink was down. He pushed it through, jiggling hard as he did.

“These things are always sticky,” he explained.

When it was all the way in he turned it in place.

“What’s happening?” I asked.

“As I turn the key, the big curve in the metal is turning to lift the bar on the other side. That’s why only this key works,” Karnon said. “The bend has to be in just the right place to meet the bar.”

Personally I didn’t think these new-fangled keys were likely to catch on, and said as much to Karnon. “A slave behind the door is a much better idea,” I said. “The slave can identify you, that key can’t identify anyone, and then the slave only needs to lift the bar. What could be simpler?”

“I somewhat agree with you,” Karnon said. “That works in every home in Athens, but in this case we’d have to leave the slave standing in that enclosed temple for days on end with nothing to do. We don’t open this treasury every day, you know.”

“Oh, I see what you mean.”

We heard a clunky bang on the other side.

“That’s it,” Karnon said. He put a hand on the door handle.

“Is there any other access in?” I asked.

“What do you think?” Karnon laughed. “No, of course not.”

“Then what if you lose the key?”

“I’ve never lost the key,” he said flatly. “But if I did, then at great expense and at the cost of my job we could dig a hole through the wall.”

Several priests passed by in a group. Karnon ceased speaking until they had passed.

“You shouldn’t confuse the key with any security, in any case,” said the accountant. “I have no delusions that it would stop anyone for long. The real security are the guards, and the fact that no one, and I mean no one, could run off with that treasure anytime soon.”

Diotima said, “Karnon, a moment ago you seemed upset about Athens taking the treasure. But at your home, you said moving the treasury didn’t bother you.”

“You asked me whether the removal would affect me personally,” Karnon said. He looked from one of the guards to the other. They were, of course, listening to every word we spoke. Both stared straight ahead, expressionless, and made no movement.

“Let’s go inside,” the accountant said. He opened the door.

“This is the most private place on all of Delos,” he continued, when the door was shut behind us. “It’s the only place I know of where nobody can overhear us.”

“You brought us here on purpose. What did you want to say?” Diotima asked.

“Of course at my home I spoke the words that I did. Marika was listening. I don’t want to distress her. Above all else, I don’t want her unhappy.” Karnon let us think about that for a moment, then went on. “This move by Pericles affects her deeply. How do you think she feels?”

“Not good?” I suggested.

“What am I supposed to do if I’m forced to return to Athens?” Karnon put his hands to his head. If he’d had hair, I was sure he would have pulled it out. “You guessed the truth, didn’t you?”

“The moment we saw you together,” I told him. “The boys look too much like you to believe any other story.”

“My wife will see it too. If Marika and the boys return with me, my wife will make their lives miserable.”

“Marika is truly a slave?” I asked.

“Yes.”

Karnon had a terrible problem. Household slaves are traditionally under the orders of the lady of the house. Karnon’s wife could persecute Marika.

“Is your wife the vindictive sort?” I asked.

“Why do you think I volunteered to live on this miserable island?” Karnon said with feeling.

“You could free Marika,” Diotima suggested. “If you were forced to go home, that is. Marika and the boys could live here, or some more pleasant place, and you could see them from time to time.”

“And Marika should live on her own?” Karnon said.

That was a good question. Freed slaves often had trouble making a living. Freed female slaves with children had very few options indeed, and none of them were pleasant.

“Besides, Marika’s the one I want to be with, and she wants to be with me. What would my boys think of me if I abandoned their mother?”

I was pleased to hear that the accountant wasn’t prepared to abandon his slave woman. There were plenty of men who would. The child of a citizen and a slave is a slave, by law. Karnon could have sold Marika and his two boys, and no one could have objected.

But I knew, from the tone of his voice and the set of his shoulders, that if I had suggested such a thing then Karnon would have punched me in the face.

I didn’t bother to ask why the accountant didn’t divorce his wife to marry his lover. He had already mentioned that the wife’s father was a wealthy merchant, and Karnon would not be the first man dependent on his wife’s dowry. If he divorced her then by law the dowry remained with the lady.

“Did you know Geros was preparing to hand the treasure over to Athens?” I asked.

“Yes. Or rather, I suspected. Geros has always had an unhealthy interest in the treasuries.”

“The Delian League’s treasure?”

“All of them,” said Karnon shortly. “We’d had words in the past.”

“Oh?”

“I caught him trying to talk his way in here once. He argued that since he had access to all of the sacred treasuries, he must also have access to this one. He was wrong. The Delian League has its own rules.”

“Who does have access?”

“Me. That’s it. No one enters unless I am present.”

“Is it that precious?” Diotima asked.

“You tell me. I’ll show you,” Karnon said.

It was dark within the temple. Karnon lit a torch, using the flint that he had brought with him. His actions were so automatic, moving in the dim light, that I knew he had done this hundreds of times before.

As light filled the room I saw the temple was full, stacked from wall to wall and floor to ceiling with box upon box of coins, more coins than I could count if I lived to be a hundred. Stacked to both sides of the boxes were bars of silver, all the way to the roof.

I stepped forward to inspect the treasure, kicking something on the ground.

I looked down. The doorstops in this place were blocks of solid gold.

“Dear Gods!”

“You see before you the treasury of the Delian League,” Karnon said.

“Why haven’t you run off with all this wealth?” I asked. “I certainly would.”

“How would I lift it?” Karnon asked. I could hear the humor in his voice.

It was a good question. I could see now why Pericles had turned up with fifty triremes. It would need that many to carry this much metal without risking the boats sinking.

“Does Pericles know there’s this much in here?” I asked.

“Oh, yes,” Karnon said. “I showed him in here once, when he visited for a meeting of the leaders of the League.”

“Then the other leaders know how much gold you hold too,” Diotima said.

“Of course they know!” Karnon said. “They read my accountant reports. Or at least, I hope they do.”

“So since you know exactly, how much money are we talking about here?” I asked.

“There are something like four thousand talents in this room.”

He spoke calmly, but I staggered in shock. I’d had no idea the treasury was that large. One talent was six thousand drachmae..

It was mind-boggling.

“How in Hades do you store that many coins?” I asked. “It must make a mountain.”

“No, there aren’t that many coins in our treasury,” he said, laughing at my question. “Most of it is in the gold and silver bars that you see.”

“Where does it all come from? All those bars of solid metal, I mean.”

“Either delivered by the wealthier states, or converted by us from silver coin sent by the poorer states.”

“You turn silver coins into gold? Are you magicians?”

“It’s a bit simpler than that,” he explained patiently, even perhaps with a touch of enthusiasm. “Most of the contributing states are poor island nations of fishermen and farmers. All they can send us, in accordance with the tribute lists, is an amphora or two of coins.”

“Such a measly sum?” I said in mock horror. I’d never owned as much as an amphora of coins in my life, and I never hoped to.

“It’s not much,” he agreed, oblivious to my sarcasm. “But it would be inconvenient to store so many random coins. I take the contributions from several member states, merge them together, and use the sum to buy gold bars. The bars stack much more easily.”

“I can imagine. So the treasury of Delos is mostly this gold?”

“Mostly,” he agreed. “We keep enough coins for ready cash. Those are the coins you see in the center. They’re much harder to stack.”

“How much is that?”

“Oh, not more than a few hundred thousand drachmae,” he said calmly.

I felt faint. This man spoke of enough money to buy a medium-sized town, but he called it spare change. Dear Gods, no wonder Pericles wanted this money safe in Athens.

“How in Hades did you accumulate so much money?” I asked.

“The yearly contribution from all the member states is four hundred and sixty talents.”

The only people who talked of money in terms of talents were state treasurers and the mega-wealthy. “You don’t just store all that, surely?”

“Most of it goes on operational expenditures, to run the combined navy. That’s what the money’s for, after all. But I also scrape and save what I can. I’ve managed to make some good investments in profitable cargos, joint ventures, olive oil presses, shield factories, that sort of thing. That’s with the spare funds, you understand.” He shrugged. “A talent here, a talent there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”

The men who ran these finances lived in a completely different world to the ordinary men in the towns and villages. Enough money passed through this man’s hands every day to buy an entire village.

Diotima was more level-headed. “You said ‘something like’ four thousand. Don’t you know exactly?”

“I know to the drachma according to the official books. But you need to understand, when we’re talking of such sums, even a very tiny error in the accounting could amount to a few thousand drachmae, one way or the other.”

One way or the other. I was willing to bet that one way was a lot more common than the other. I suggested that, as delicately as possible.

“Then you’d be wrong,” he said shortly. “I’m an honest man.” And then, because he was honest, he added, “Anyway, I’d never get away with it. My books are audited like you wouldn’t believe.”

We exited the room, and Karnon locked it behind us.

“Let’s go to my office.”

As we walked, he said, “I wanted to show you that, so you would appreciate the scale of the problem.”

“I’m glad you did,” said Diotima.

“You suggested, when we first met, that moving the treasury was a simple matter.”

“I see now that it’s not,” I said.

“The Oikos is about a hundred years old,” Karnon said as we walked up the steps to his office. “I’m not sure of the exact age, but the building’s still in better condition than the older administration site. Those are the buildings you’ll find north of the sanctuary wall, close by the Sacred Lake.”

“Damon showed us.”

“Damon’s a strange man,” said Karnon. “But a good one.”

“Is he the village chief?” I asked. “No one’s ever said so, but he acts like it.”

Karnon laughed. “As far as I can tell, yes. Certainly no one else does the job, and everyone seems to listen to him.”

“He was here when you arrived?”

“Of course he was.”

Karnon clapped his hands. One of the office slaves brought watered wine, bread, cheese, and olives. Anywhere else it was basic fare, but on Delos it was a good meal.

We sat upon camp stools at the great table where I had first seen Karnon, which had only been this morning. It had been a long day.

I knew I was going to regret asking it, but the question had to be put. “You said you invest some of the money?”

“Yes. It makes no sense for it to lie there doing nothing. I am free to invest a large portion. That way I can add to the fund’s wealth using the fund’s money.”

“What do you do with it?” Diotima asked.

“Mostly I buy silver mines,” he said, and I was struck again by the unreality of this man’s life. “Farm property is too hard to move when I want to sell it on. Better to stay liquid.” Karnon was warming to his subject, and becoming more enthusiastic with everything he said. “In addition I can manipulate the markets. I have another assistant who buys up gold and silver on my orders.”

“But isn’t it gold and silver from your own mines that he’s buying?” I said, confused.

“Yes, and I lend him the money to buy it.”

“That makes no sense whatsoever.”

“Yes it does,” Karnon said happily. “After my factor has accumulated a big reserve, I order my mines to lower production, until the market has fewer gold and silver ingots for sale than people actually want. That drives up the price. Then I order my factor to sell his reserve. It raises the profit for the League treasury, you see.”

I was shocked. “Is that legal?”

Karnon looked at me oddly. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

As Diotima and I left the Oikos, completely convinced that Karnon was a financial genius, Diotima had one final question. “What will you do now?”

“I’ll proceed at once with getting the treasure ready to travel. A final accounting, if you will.”

“What about those silver mines you mentioned?” I asked.

“They’re the easiest to transfer to Athens!” Karnon chuckled at our incredulous expressions. “We don’t have to move a mine, you know. Only the deeds of ownership. Effectively, the League investments go wherever the treasure goes, without doing a thing. It makes my own job easier too. I only have to count what’s here. Nothing can go wrong with that.”