The evening meal was about as frugal as breakfast had been. Sostratos ate bread and oil and olives and cheese. Menedemos bit into an onion pungent enough to make Sostratos' eyes water from three cubits away. He washed it down with a sip of wine. Catching Sostratos' eye, he said, "It's not what we got at Gylippos' supper, but it fills the belly."
"What you got at Gylippos' supper was trouble," Sostratos replied. "How's your ankle today?"
He'd meant that as a gibe, but Menedemos answered seriously: "Standing at the steering oars all day long doesn't do it any good, but it's healing. It would be worse if I had to run around a lot."
"You did that back in Taras," Sostratos pointed out.
"Yes, O most beloved cousin of mine," Menedemos said, so poisonously that Sostratos decided he'd pushed things about as far as he could go.
On the second evening out from Hipponion, the Aphrodite reached the town of Laos, which lay at the mouth of a river of the same name. Laos' harbor was rather better than that of Hipponion, and the merchant galley tied up at one of the piers. Hardly any of the longshoremen and loafers spoke more than a few words of Greek: they talked among themselves in one Italic language or another.
Across the pier was a sailing ship from Rhegion. Her skipper, a tubby, gray-haired fellow who gave his name as Leptines, ambled by to look over the Aphrodite. "I envy you your oars," he said. "I've been crawling up the coast - crawling, I tell you - tacking all the way. I'll be a month getting to Neapolis, maybe more. How am I supposed to make ends meet if I can't get from here to there?"
Sostratos poured him some of the same wine he was drinking himself and asked, "Why didn't you sail south, to take advantage of the winds?"
"I usually do." Leptines gulped the wine. "Ahh, that's good. I usually do, like I said, but not this year. Too big a chance of somebody's navy snapping me up if I went along the Sicilian coast."
Sostratos dipped his head. The Aphrodite hadn't tried sailing down to Syracuse, either. Menedemos gave Leptines an engaging smile. "Any special ports we should know about on the way up the coast?"
Leptines didn't directly answer that. Instead, he returned a question for a question: "What are you carrying?"
"Peafowl chicks and perfume, papyrus and ink, fine Khian wine, Koan silk, perfumes - things like that," Menedemos replied. "How about you?"
"Wool and timber and wheat and leather," Leptines said. "I should've known a merchant galley from out of the east would only come here for the luxury trade. If we were competing, I wouldn't give you the hour of the day, but you won't do my business any harm even if you will get up north ahead of me."
"Well, then?" Menedemos asked in his most ingratiating voice. Sostratos hoped his winecup hid his own snicker. His cousin sounded as if he were trying to talk a girl into bed. Had he sounded that way with Phyllis? Sostratos wouldn't have been surprised.
His tone certainly worked on Leptines. "There's one place by the coast south of Neapolis where there's more to it than you'd think," the trader from Rhegion said, "provided you don't mind doing business with Samnites, that is."
Menedemos glanced at Sostratos. Sostratos shrugged. Menedemos said, "When we were in Taras, we sold our peacock to a Samnite. He paid what he said he would. I'd do it again."
"What is this town?" Sostratos asked.
"It's on the Sarnos River," Leptines answered. "You can go a ways farther up the river, too, if you're really feeling bold. But this place I have in mind does duty as the port town for Nole and Noukeria and Akherrhai, too. Those places are all fat, fat, fat - some of the richest farming country in the world in those parts."
"Sounds promising," Sostratos agreed. "But you still haven't told us the name of this place."
Leptines snapped his fingers in annoyance at himself. "You're right, I haven't. It's called Pompaia."
"I never heard of it," Sostratos said. "What about you, Menedemos? You know more about Italy than I do."
"I think the name sounds familiar," Menedemos said. "I've never been there, though, and I don't know anyone who has."
Leptines tapped his own chest with a forefinger. "You do now. I'm telling you, the place is worth a visit. And the Pompaians are mad for anything from Hellas, too. They've got a Doric-style temple there that's kind of old-fashioned nowadays, but you wouldn't be surprised to see it in a real polis even so."
Sostratos eyed Menedemos. "What do you think?" Such decisions, in the end, were up to his cousin.
"I don't know." Menedemos rubbed his chin. Bristles rasped under his fingers; with the Aphrodite at sea the past two days, he'd had no chance to shave. "I hadn't planned to put in there; I was just thinking of heading on up to Neapolis."
"Don't listen to me, then - it'll be your loss," Leptines said. "I'm telling you, with the farms they've got up there, the rich men make a nice pile of silver. They'd be able to afford whatever you've got, and a lot of them speak Greek."
"That's good," Sostratos said. "We certainly don't speak Oscan, or whatever language they use there."
"Oscan, sure enough," Leptines said. "No, you wouldn't need to, not coming out from Rhodes the way you do. I've learned some over the years. It comes in handy now and again, if you do a deal of trading in Italian waters."
"Yes, I can see that it would," Sostratos agreed, and looked toward Menedemos again.
His cousin rubbed his chin once more. Then he reached out to Leptines. "Let me have your cup." He poured it full, and refilled his and Sostratos' as well. Then he raised his in salute. "To Pompaia!"
"To Pompaia!" Sostratos and Leptines echoed. Sostratos drank. Menedemos had watered the wine only a very little.
Leptines noticed that, too: the trader from Rhegion appreciatively smacked his lips. "Glad to help my fellow Hellenes," he said, "especially when I don't have to hurt myself to do it. If you boys were carrying wheat and wood, too, you couldn't pull the name out of me if you gave me to a Carthaginian torturer."
"Back in Rhodes, we'd speak of a Persian torturer," Sostratos said.
"All boils down to the same thing." Leptines tipped his head and his cup back. "Obliged to you boys for your hospitality. If you hang around in Pompaia for a bit, you'll eventually see me there. How much do you pay your rowers, anyway?"
"A drakhma and a half a day," Sostratos answered.
Leptines made a horrible face. "And you've got what, twenty-five rowers on a side?"
"Twenty."
"Even so. That's a lot of silver to have to lay out every day." Leptines chuckled. "I think about having to spend money like that and all of a sudden I stop caring so much that I don't get places in a hurry. Hail." He went back to his own ship.
"He's a piker," Menedemos said, but in a low voice so the other skipper wouldn't overhear. "He worries about money going out, but he doesn't think about how to bring lots of money in." He grinned. "All the better for us."
"I should say so," Sostratos answered. "And if this Pompaia place is even half as rich as he makes it out to be, we ought to do well for ourselves there."
"Worth a try," Menedemos said. "I don't expect it to reward us the way Aphrodite rewarded Paris, but worth a try."
"What would we do with Helen if we had her?" Sostratos pointed at Menedemos. "I know what you'd do, you satyr. But that's not profitable. Wouldn't you rather be rewarded as Kroisos the Lydian king rewarded Solon of Athens? He let Solon into his treasury to carry out as much gold as he could hold, and Solon went in wearing baggy boots and a tunic too big for him and even greased his hair with olive oil so gold dust would stick to it."
Menedemos laughed. "No, I wouldn't mind that. But I don't mind women, either. Why can't I want everything at once?"
"You can want everything at once," Sostratos said. "But you can't be too disappointed when you don't get it. How many men do?"
"Some must," Menedemos insisted.
"Some, maybe, but only a handful," Sostratos said. "When Kroisos asked Solon who the happiest man in the world was, he thought Solon would name him. But Solon picked Athenians w
ho'd lived long and died well. Kroisos was offended, but Solon turned out to be right in the end, for the Lydian king first lost his son in a hunting accident and then lost his kingdom to the Persians. Was he happy at the last? Not likely."
"But he had plenty of good times before that last," his cousin said.
Sostratos sighed. "You're incorrigible." Menedemos gave him half a bow, as if at a compliment. Sostratos sighed again.
9
On the second day after leaving Laos, the Aphrodite sailed between the island of Kapreai and the Cape of the Sirennousai. As Menedemos swung the merchant galley east toward Pompaia, he pointed to an old, tumbledown temple on the headland of the cape and remarked, "They say Odysseus built that place. And they say some of the rocky islands off Kapreai are the ones where the Sirens lived."
"They say all sorts of strange things," Sostratos answered. "Do you believe them?"
"I don't know," Menedemos said. "I truly don't. There was the whirlpool off Messene, right where Skylle was supposed to be."
"Yes, there was the whirlpool," his cousin said, "but where was the horrible monster sucking in the water to make it? Did you see her? Has anyone since Odysseus heard the Sirens singing on those rocks off Kapreai?"
"I don't know any of that, either," Menedemos said, a little testily. "But if anyone did hear the Sirens singing, they'd lure him to his doom, so how could he come back and say what he heard?" He smiled a smug smile.
But Sostratos wouldn't let him get away with it. "Odysseus figured out a way to do it. With Homer known wherever Hellenes live, don't you suppose some other bold fellow would have put wax in his sailors' ears so he could listen to the song the hero heard?"
"Maybe." Menedemos gave Sostratos a sour look. "Sometimes when you take things to pieces, you take all the fun out of them."
"No." Sostratos tossed his head in emphatic disagreement. "Taking things to pieces is the fun. If you leave them sitting there the way they were when you found them, what have you learned? Nothing."
"Why do you have to learn something all the time?" Menedemos asked. "Why can't something be interesting just because it is what it is?"
"If everyone thought that way, we'd still be sailing pentekonters and swinging bronze swords, the way the men of the Iliad and Odyssey did," Sostratos said.
"How do you know that's what they did?" Menedemos said. "You call the Odyssey nonsense when it suits you, so why do you choose to believe that?"
Sostratos opened his mouth, then closed it again. When at last he did speak, it was in thoughtful tones: "Do you know, I never once wondered about it. The strange pieces are those that seem the hardest to believe, not the homely little details of the heroes' world. We know pentekonters and bronze - we don't know Sirens and Skylle."
"Well, then, you believe what you want to believe and I'll believe what I want to believe, and we'll both be happy," Menedemos said. Sostratos did not look happy about that, but Menedemos didn't worry about it. He'd distracted his cousin, which served almost as well as convincing him, especially since he could cut the conversation short right after that by adding, "I believe we're just about to Pompaia, and I'm going to pay attention to that."
He had to pay more attention to it than he'd expected, for Pompaia lay not on the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea, as Leptines had led him to believe, but a few stadia up the Sarnos River, on the northern side of the stream. Soldiers - presumably Samnites - peered down at him from the wall as his rowers guided the Aphrodite into place at one of the piers thrusting out into the stream.
As a couple of locals tied the akatos to it quay, Sostratos pointed north. "Look. That mountain there in back of the town has a good deal of the look of Aitne to it, doesn't it? It's not nearly so tall, of course, but it's got the same conical shape."
"So it does," said Menedemos, who, up to that moment, had had no chance to worry about the mountain.
"I wonder if it's a volcano, too," Sostratos said. "What did Leptines say its name was?"
"I don't think he did." Menedemos raised his voice to call out to one of the roustabouts: "Hey! Do you speak Greek?"
"Me?" The fellow pointed to himself. "Yes, I speak some. What do you want?"
"What's the name of that mountain north of your city here?"
"You must be from far away," the roustabout said, "not to know about Mount Ouesouion."
"Ouesouion?" Menedemos echoed, trying to imitate the local's pronunciation. "What an ugly name," he murmured in an aside to Sostratos, who dipped his head in agreement. Menedemos gave his attention back to the Pompaian: "We are from far away - we've sailed all the way from Rhodes."
"Rhodes?" The roustabout had almost as much trouble with the name as Menedemos had with Ouesouion. "Where's that at? Is it down by Taras, where so many of you Hellenes live?"
"It's farther away than that," Menedemos answered. "You have to cross the Ionian Sea to go from Taras to the mainland of Hellas, and then you have to cross the Aegean Sea to go from the mainland of Hellas to Rhodes."
"Do tell," the Pompaian said. "I went over to Neapolis once, I did. Had to walk two days to get there and two days back." Menedemos carefully held his face straight. Then he wondered how many people here had never gone two days' journey from their little town, if this fellow thought doing so was worth bragging about. The roustabout went on, "So what did you bring us from this Rhodes place, wherever it's at?"
Now Menedemos did smile, and launched into his sales pitch: "Fine wine from Khios, fine silk from Kos - "
"What's silk?" the local asked. "I don't know that word."
"It's a fabric, smoother and softer than linen," Menedemos answered. "And we have perfumes from Rhodian roses, and papyrus and ink" - not that we're likely to sell any of those here, he thought - "and . . . peafowl."
"What are peafowl?" the Pompaian said. "Don't know that word, neither."
"Sostratos . . ." Menedemos said, and Sostratos displayed one of the chicks. Menedemos gave a highly colored description of what an adult peacock looked like, ending, "It were not too much to call him the most magnificent bird in the world."
To his surprise, the roustabout burst into raucous laughter. "Tell me another one," he said. "You're going to sell us those ugly birds for half the money in the world, and they'll stay ugly, and you'll be gone. Do you think we're that stupid?"
Oh, a pestilence, Menedemos thought. We've sailed so far, we've come to a place where the people have no idea what a peacock is like. How are we supposed to sell the chicks if no one believes they'll grow up to be beautiful? He hadn't thought of that when he decided to stop at Pompaia.
As Sostratos put the chick back into the cage, he said, "The rich folk here will know what peacocks are, I think. And even if they don't, the Hellenes up at Neapolis will."
"I hope so," Menedemos said. "We'll find out when we go into the market square, I expect."
"Silk and wine will sell," Sostratos said. "Silk and wine will sell anywhere."
"That's true." Remembering that it was true made Menedemos feel a little better. With a small sigh, he said, "I suppose we can sell leftover chicks back in Rhodes, too, but we'll get more for them here in the west - if we can get anything at all for them, that is."
"Shall we go find out?" his cousin asked.
Before answering, Menedemos gauged the sun. It was sliding down toward the western horizon, but would still be a while getting there. "Why not?" he said. "We'll do some business today, I expect, and we'll let word get around tonight."
When he and Sostratos entered Pompaia, they didn't go in alone. They made a procession of it. Menedemos led, his hands free. "Peafowl chicks!" he called in Greek. "Rare wines from Khios! Fine silk from Kos!" Sostratos carried a cage with several chicks in it. Behind them strode sailors with bolts of silk in their hands, and others hauling amphorai of Ariousian between them on carrying poles.
The procession would have been more impressive if Menedemos hadn't had to pause a couple of times to ask passersby how to get to the agora. Not everyone spoke Gr
eek, either, which made things more complicated. Even though the blank housefronts and narrow, winding, smelly streets put him in mind of a polis that had never heard of Hippodamos and his grid, he was acutely aware of having come to a foreign part of the world.
Sostratos noticed something he hadn't: "Look! Some of the signs over the shops must be in Oscan, because that certainly isn't Greek."
"You're right," Menedemos said after a moment. "I hadn't paid much attention to them."
"I hadn't either, not at first," Sostratos said. "A lot of the poleis here in Great Hellas still use old-fashioned alphabets with characters you'd never see in Athens, for instance, but even when I can figure out what all the letters are supposed to sound like, the words they spell out don't make any sense."
"I suppose they do if you're a Pompaian," Menedemos said. "I didn't even know the Samnites could write Oscan. Looks like they can, though."
"So it does," Sostratos agreed. "I wonder if the Romans, up farther north still, have an alphabet of their own."
Menedemos looked back over his shoulder at his cousin. "There are times, O marvelous one, when you find the least important things in the world to worry about."
Sostratos chuckled. " 'O marvelous one,' is it? You sound like Sokrates when he's being sarcastically polite to some poor fool. And I wasn't worried. I was just - "
"Curious," Menedemos broke in. "You always are. But before you start learning to write history in Oscan, remember that we're here to sell things first."
"I know that." Sostratos sounded angry. "Have I ever disrupted anything because I'm interested in history?"
"Well, no." Menedemos admitted what he couldn't deny.
"Then kindly leave me alone about it." Sostratos still seemed hot enough to fire a pot.
Menedemos might have given him a hot answer, too, but they finally came out into Pompaia's agora, and he started crying his wares instead. Not far from the agora stood the temple Leptines had mentioned, its columns and walls cut from the rather dark local stone and the decorative elements brightly painted, just as they would have been in a Hellenic polis.
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