“Wasn’t Sokrates supposed to be ugly as a satyr?” Menedemos asked. “And wasn’t Alkibiades the handsomest fellow in Athens back whenever that was?”
“About a hundred years ago,” Sostratos said. “Yes, Sokrates was ugly, and yes, Alkibiades was anything but.”
“Why did Alkibiades try to seduce him, then?” Menedemos asked. “If he was as handsome as that, he could have had anybody he chose. That’s how things work.”
“I know,” Sostratos said, a certain edge to his voice. Menedemos feared he’d stuck his foot in it. He’d been an exceptionally handsome youth and enjoyed the luxury of picking and choosing among his suitors. Nobody’d paid court to Sostratos, who’d been—and who still was—tall and gawky and plain. After a moment, Sostratos went on, “If Alkibiades could have chosen anyone he wanted but set out to seduce Sokrates, what does that tell you?”
“That he was very nearsighted?” Menedemos suggested.
“Oh, go howl!” Sostratos exclaimed. Diokles laughed out loud. He wasn’t beating out the stroke now; with a good breeze from out of the north, the Aphrodite made for Patara by sail alone. Sostratos visibly gathered himself. “He knew Sokrates was ugly. Everybody knew Sokrates was ugly. So what did he see in him, if not the beauty of his soul?”
“But it wasn’t his soul Alkibiades was after,” Menedemos pointed out. “It was his—”
“Go howl,” his cousin said again. “That’s the point of the Symposion: how love of the beautiful body leads to love of the beautiful soul, and how love of the soul is a higher thing, a better thing, than love of the body.”
Menedemos lifted a hand from a steering-oar tiller to scratch his head. “Love of the beautiful body, yes. But you just got done admitting Sokrates’ body wasn’t beautiful, or anything close to it.”
“You’re being difficult on purpose, aren’t you?” Sostratos said.
“Not this time.” Menedemos tossed his head.
“A likely story,” Sostratos said darkly. “Well, look at it like this: Sokrates’ soul was so beautiful, Alkibiades wanted to take him to bed even though his body was ugly. That’s quite something, don’t you think?”
“I suppose so,” Menedemos said. Sostratos looked as if he would have brained him with an amphora of olive oil had he said anything else. Of course he looks that way, Menedemos thought. If somebody handsome could fall in love with ugly Sokrates for the sake of his beautiful soul, why couldn’t someone do the same with plain Sostratos for the sake of his soul? No wonder he takes that story to heart.
He wasn’t used to such insights. It was as if, for a moment, a god had let him look out from Sostratos’ eyes instead of into them. He also realized he couldn’t say anything to his cousin about what he’d seen, or thought he’d seen.
The sun set. Sailors ate barley bread and olives and onions and cheese. Menedemos washed his frugal supper down with a rough red Rhodian wine: good enough to drink, but not to sell anywhere off the island. He stepped to the rail and pissed into the sea. Some of the sailors settled down on rower’s benches and went straight to sleep. Menedemos couldn’t. He sat down on the planks of the poop deck—he’d been standing all day— and watched the stars come out.
The moon, a waxing crescent, hung low in the west. It wasn’t big enough to shed much light, though its reflection danced on the sea behind the Aphrodite. Ares’ wandering star, red as blood but not so bright as it sometimes got, stood high in the southeast.
Sostratos pointed east. “There’s Zeus’ wandering star, just coming up over the horizon.”
“Yes, I see it,” Menedemos said. “Brightest star in the sky, with Ares’ fading and Aphrodite’s too close to the sun to spy for a while.”
“I wonder why a few stars wander like the moon but most of them stay in one place in the sky forever,” Sostratos said.
“How can you hope to know that?” Menedemos said. “They do what they do, that’s all, and there’s an end to it.”
“Oh, I can hope to know why,” his cousin answered. “I don’t expect to, mind you, but I can hope. Knowing why something happens is even more important than knowing what happens. If you know why, you really understand. Sokrates and Herodotos and Thoukydides all say the same thing there,”
“And that must make it so.” Menedemos gave his voice a fine sardonic edge.
But Sostratos refused to rise to the bait. All he said was, “Homer says the same thing, too, you know.”
“What?” Menedemos sat up straighter, so abruptly that something in his back crackled. Unlike his cousin, he had no great use for philosophers and historians. They breathed too rarefied an atmosphere for him. Homer was another matter. Like most Hellenes, he looked to the Iliad and Odyssey first, everywhere else only afterwards. “How do you mean?” he demanded.
“Think about how the Iliad starts,” Sostratos said. The Aphrodite bobbed up and down in light chop, the motion just enough to remind men they weren’t on land any more. Sostratos went on, “What’s the poet talking about there? Why, the anger of Akhilleus. That’s what causes the Akhaioi so much trouble. Homer’s not just talking about the siege of Troy, don’t you see? He’s talking about why it turned out the way it did.”
Menedemos did think about that famous opening. After a moment, he dipped his head. “Well, my dear, when you’re right, you’re right, and you’re right this time. Do try not to let it go to your head.”
“Why don’t you go to the crows?” Sostratos said, but he was laughing.
“I’ve got a better idea: I’m going to bed.” Menedemos got to his feet, pulled his chiton off over his head, wadded up the tunic, and laid it on the planks for a pillow. Then he wrapped himself in his himation. Like most sailors, he made do with chiton alone in almost any weather. But the thick wool mantle, though he didn’t wear it over his tunic, made a perfect blanket. “Good night.”
Sostratos lay down beside him, also snug in his himation. “See you in the morning,” he said around a yawn.
“Yes.” Menedemos’ voice was blurry, too. He stretched, wriggled . . . slept.
Patara stood near the mouth of the Xanthos River. The hills above the city put Sostratos in mind of those above Kaunos, which the Aphrodite had just left. Red and yellow pine, cedar, and storax grew in those hills. “Plenty of good timber there,” Sostratos remarked.
“Hurrah,” Menedemos said sourly. “More for the polluted Lykians to turn into pirate ships.”
A couple of fives patrolled outside Patara’s harbor. The big war galleys had two rowers on each oar on the thranite and zeugite banks; only the bottom, or thalamite, oars were pulled by a single man. All those rowers made the ships speedy despite their heavy decking and the planks of the oarbox that protected the rowers from flying arrows. One of them, displaying Ptolemaios’ eagle on mainsail and small foresail, made for the Aphrodite.
“I don’t mind Ptolemaios drawing timber from this country,” Sostratos said.
“Better him than the Lykians, that’s for sure,” Menedemos agreed. “And the trees he turns into triremes and fours and fives, they can’t use forhemioliai and pentekonters.”
“Ahoy!” The call from Ptolemaios’ war galley wafted across the water, “What ship are you?”
Menedemos’ chuckle had barbs in it. “Sometimes it’s funny when round ships and fishing boats think we’re a pirate. It’s not so funny when a five does: this bastard can sink us by mistake.”
“Let’s make sure she doesn’t, eh?” Sostratos cupped his hands in front of his mouth and shouted back: “We’re the Aphrodite, out of Rhodes.”
“A Rhodian, are you?” the officer at the how of the war galley said. “You don’t sound like a Rhodian to me.”
Sostratos cursed under his breath. He’d grown up using the same Doric drawl as anyone else from Rhodes. But he’d cultivated an Attic accent ever since studying at the Lykeion. More often than not, that marked him as an educated sophisticate. Every once in a while, though, it proved a nuisance. “Well, I am a Rhodian, by Athana,” he said, del
iberately pronouncing the goddess’ name in the Doric style, “and this is a Rhodian merchant galley.”
“What’s your cargo?” the officer demanded. His ship came up alongside the Aphrodite. He scowled down at Sostratos; the five had twice as much freeboard as the akatos, and its deck had to rise six or seven cubits above the water.
“We’ve got fine olive oil, the best Rhodian perfume, silk from Kos, books, and a lion skin we just picked up in Kaunos,” Sostratos answered.
“Books, is it?” Ptolemaios’ officer said, “Can you read ‘em?”
“I should hope so.” Sostratos drew himself up very straight, the picture of affronted dignity. “Shall I start?”
The man on the war galley laughed and tossed his head. The crimson horsehair plume on his bronze helm nodded above him. “Never mind. Pass on to Patara. No pirate would get so pissy when I asked him a question like that.” The five went back to its patrol, big oars smoothly rising and falling as it glided away.
“Pissy?” Sostratos said indignantly. He turned to Menedemos and spread his hands. “I’m not pissy, am I?” Once the words were out of his mouth, he realized he’d asked the wrong man.
Menedemos smiled his sweetest smile. “Of course not, O marvelous one, not after you stood by the rail just a little while ago.” He could have done worse. Having expected him to do worse, Sostratos took that with hardly a wince.
Patara had two harbors, an outer and an inner. Menedemos took the Aphrodite into the inner harbor, but clucked distressfully when he saw how shallow the water was. He ordered a man up to the bow to cast the lead to make sure the merchant galley didn’t run aground on the way to a quay.
“Here we are,” he said with a sigh of relief as sailors tossed lines to longshoremen standing on the wharf. Some of the longshoremen were Hellenes, others Lykians who wore hats with bright feathers sticking up from them and goatskin capes over their shoulders. Most of the Hellenes were clean-shaven; the Lykians wore beards.
“This is a good harbor—now,” Sostratos said, looking around the lagoon. “I wonder how long before it silts up too much to use, though.”
“Well, it won’t be before we sail out of here,” Menedemos answered. “Nothing else matters right now.”
“You have no curiosity,” Sostratos said reproachfully.
“I wonder why not,” Menedemos said—-curiously. Sostratos started to reply, then gave his cousin a sharp look. Menedemos favored him with another of those sweet smiles he would sooner not have had.
One of Ptolemaios’ officers came up the quay to ask questions of the new arrival. Patience fraying, Sostratos said, “I just told an officer aboard one of your fives everything you’re asking now.”
The soldier shrugged, “Maybe you’re lying. Maybe he won’t bother telling what you said in any report he makes. Maybe he won’t come back here for a day or two, or maybe his ship will get called away. You never can tell, eh? And so ...” He went right on with the same old questions. Sostratos sighed and gave the same old answers. When the grilling ended, the officer dipped his head. “All right, I’d say you are what you claim to be. That’s what I needed to know. I hope the trading is good for you.” Without waiting for a reply, he turned and went back down the quay.
“What can we get here?” Menedemos said as he and Sostratos headed into Patara.
“Lykian hams are supposed to be very good,” Sostratos said.
“Yes, I’ve heard that, too,” his cousin replied. “Maybe we can take a few to Phoenicia,”
“Why not?” Sostratos agreed. A moment later, he snapped his fingers.
“What is it?” Menedemos said.
“We can take hams to Phoenicia, yes,” Sostratos answered, “but not inland, to the country of the loudaioi. Their religion doesn’t let them eat pork, Himilkon told me. Good thing I remembered.”
“So it is,” Menedemos said. “Why can’t they eat it?”
“I don’t know—Himilkon didn’t explain it.” Sostratos wagged a ringer at his cousin. “You see, my dear? Why? is always the interesting question.”
“Maybe,” Menedemos said, and then, “Maybe it’s for the same sort of reason that Pythagoreans can’t eat beans.”
“I’ve never heard that ham makes you windy,” Sostratos said.
“You’re already windy, seems to me,” Menedemos said. “You’re ready to quibble about almost anything, too, but that isn’t news.”
“To the crows with you,” Sostratos said, but he and his cousin both laughed. And he knew Menedemos hadn’t been wrong, either. Me, ready to quibble about anything? Now why would he say that?
Lykian houses looked little different from their equivalents back in Hellas. They presented blank fronts to the street. Some were whitewashed, some of unadorned mud brick, some of stone. They all had red tile roofs. Whatever beauty and valuables they held lay on the inside, behind tiny windows and stout doors. They gave robbers no clues about who had money and who didn’t.
Patara’s streets also seemed much like those of an older polis back in Hellas. That is to say, they were narrow and smelly and wandered every which way, more often than not at random. Dogs and pigs chased rooks and jackdaws away from piles of garbage. The stench was overwhelming.
“You forget how bad a city smells till you get out to sea for a while,” Sostratos said.
“You’re right.” Menedemos looked more nearly green than he ever did on the ocean.
Here in town, Sostratos couldn’t always tell whether the people walking along the streets were Hellenes or Lykians. A fair number of Lykians affected Hellenic styles, wearing chiton and himation, shaving their faces, and even speaking Greek. Their tongues betrayed them more readily than their outward seeming, though. They couldn’t shed the accent of their native tongue—and Lykian, to Sostratos’ ear, sounded like a series of sneezes strung together into a language.
Menedemos noticed something else. “Look how many women are out and about—and not just slaves and poor ones who can’t help coming out, either. That lady who just passed us had gold earrings and a gold necklace that had to be worth plenty, but she didn’t even bother wearing a veil. She was pretty, too.”
“Yes, she was.” Sostratos wasn’t blind to a good-looking woman, either. He went on, “I’m not surprised the Lykians give their women more leave to go out and about than we do.”
“Why? Because they’re barbarians who don’t know any better, do you mean?
“ No. Because they reckon their descent through the female line. If you ask a Hellene who he is, he’ll give you his name, his father’s name, his father’s father’s, and so on. But if you ask a Lykian, he’ll tell you his name, his mother’s, her mother’s. . . .”
“Why do they do that?” Menedemos asked.
“I don’t know,” Sostratos answered. He poked his cousin in the ribs with an elbow. “You see? Another why question.”
“All right. Another why question. I’d like to know.”
“So would I,” Sostratos said. “Just as a guess: a man’s always sure who his mother is. There’s room for doubt about his father,”
“Ah, I see. You’re saying the Lykians figure that way because they know their women are sluts.”
“I don’t think that’s what I said,” Sostratos answered. “And I don’t know for a fact whether Lykian women are sluts or not. I’ve never had anything to do with them.”
By the gleam in Menedemos’ eye, he was about to impart much more information on that topic than Sostratos wanted to hear. But he fell silent when a couple of squads of soldiers tramped by on a cross street, holding up traffic on the way to the market square. Some of the men were Hellenes, with pikes in their hands and shortswords on their hips. The rest were Lykians, many of them in their feathered hats and goatskin cloaks. In place of spears, some carried iron ripping-hooks; others were archers, with bows bigger than Hellenes usually used and with long, unfletched arrows in their quivers.
Once the soldiers had turned a corner, Sostratos remarked, “Well, best one, y
ou were probably wise not to talk about their women where they could hear you.” His cousin gave him a reproachful look, but kept quiet.
The street Sostratos had hoped would lead to the agora abruptly ended in a blank wall. He and Menedemos went back to the nearest intersection. As soon as he found someone who spoke Greek, he took an obolos from his cheek and gave the little silver coin in exchange for directions that would work. The Lykian turned out not to speak much Greek, and Sostratos made him repeat himself several times before letting him go.
Even then, he wasn’t sure he was heading the right way till he walked into the market square. By Menedemos’ pleased murmur, he was taken aback, too. “I only understood about one word in three from that barbarian,” he said,
“I had the advantage of you, then,” Sostratos said, doing his best not to show how relieved he was. “I’m sure I understood one word in two. Now let’s see if that obolos was silver well spent.” It wasn’t much silver, but he hated wasting money.
Menedemos pointed. “There’s a fellow with hams for sale. Shall we go over and see what he wants for them?”
“Why not?” Sostratos said again. He and his cousin pushed their way through the crowded market square. He heard both Greek and Lykian, sometimes in the same sentence from the same man. A fellow shoved a tray of plucked songbirds toward him, urging him to buy. “No, thank you,” he said. “I can’t cook them up properly.” The vendor gave back a spate of incomprehensible Lykian. Sostratos tossed his head and went on. The fellow understood that.
One of Ptolemaios’ soldiers was haggling with the man who sold hams.
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