“I’ll do you a good turn, if I can,” Epianax said. “Do you know the place called ‘Dinos’?”
“ ‘Whirlpool’?” Sostratos echoed. “No. Where is it? To a sailor, a whirlpool’s a good thing to stay away from. Do you fish for your eels as well as smoke them? Is that how you know about the place?”
“No, no, not at all,” the eel-seller said. “You misunderstand. It’s an oracle—a grove sacred to Apollo by the sea, a few stadia north of here. There’s one particular pool that’s always full of eddies. The person who wants to know the god’s mind takes two skewers, each with ten pieces of roasted meat on it. Some say you can use boiled, too, but I think they’re wrong.”
“An oracle,” Sostratos murmured. He prided himself on his rationality, but how could you deny there were ways of knowing the future? Intrigued in spite of himself, he asked, “How does the priest divine the god’s will?”
“He sits at the edge of the grove, while the man offering the sacrifice looks into the pool and tells him what kinds of fish come and eat the different pieces of meat,” Epianax answered.
“That would be a fine oracle for fishermen,” Sostratos said. “But suppose a farmer who eats cheese and olives for his opson every day comes to the sacred grove. How would he know what to tell the priest if he can’t figure out which fish is a mackerel and which one’s a shark?”
The eel-seller scratched his head. “Good question, my friend. I don’t know the answer, but I suppose the priest does, and I’m sure the god does. An oracle wouldn’t hardly be an oracle if just anybody could see how it worked, now would it?”
In a way, that made sense. In another way, it annoyed Sostratos. He had a restless itch to know, to find an explanation, Epianax had a point: divine things didn’t lend themselves to explanation. But weren’t things that didn’t lend themselves to explanation likely to be unreal? Part of Sostratos was tempted to think so. The rest resisted the impulse.
“If you’re going that way, you can see for yourself,” Epianax said.
They would be going up the Lykian coast toward Pamphylia, then east to Kilikia and the shortest crossing to Cyprus. Sostratos hedged: “I don’t know whether we’ll stop or not. My cousin’s the skipper. It’ll depend on how much of a hurry he’s in to get to Phoenicia.”
“Is that where you’re headed?” The eel-seller started to giggle.
“What’s so funny?” Sostratos asked.
“Only that you may have a harder time selling those smoked eels than you think,” Epianax answered. “A lot of Syrians and other folk like that don’t eat fish. Their gods won’t let ‘em, or some such.”
“Oimoi!” Sostratos clapped a hand to his forehead. “I knew the Ioudaioi won’t eat pork, but I’d never heard that any of those people wouldn’t eat fish. What do they do for opson?”
“Not my worry,” Epianax said.
“No, it’s mine,” Sostratos agreed. Why didn’t Himilkon tell me? Did he think I already knew? Or has he lived among Hellenes long enough to get over his silly superstition? No way to tell, not without sailing back to Rhodes to ask the Phoenician. After a moment, Sostratos brightened. “Well, there’ll be plenty of Hellenes in the coastal towns. If the barbarians don’t catch fish, the men who serve Antigonos will be all the gladder to see us.”
“Mm, that’s so.” Epianax looked down at the roll of papyrus in his hands. “I still think I got the better of the bargain. When those eels are gone, they’re gone for good, but I’ll be reading this book twenty years from now if I can keep the mice from nibbling at it.”
“The best sort of bargain is one where both sides go away happy,” Sostratos said diplomatically. “I’m heading back to the harbor now. Farewell, and enjoy the poem.”
“If it’s got Aphrodite in it without her clothes, I expect I’ll like it just fine.” Epianax sounded very sure of himself.
When Sostratos came aboard the merchant galley, he told Menedemos what he’d learned from Epianax. His cousin shrugged. “I’d thought we’d sell the eels to the Hellenes in Antigonos’ army anyhow,” he said. “I know we’re all opsophagoi when we get the chance. Who wouldn’t rather stuff himself with turbot or tunny or cuttlefish or lobster than with barley cakes or wheat bread?”
“Sokrates wouldn’t, for one. Opson is fine, he’d say, but it’s the relish— it’s what you eat with the staple, with the sitos. If you do it the other way round, then your bread turns into the relish, doesn’t it?”
“So what?” Menedemos said cheerfully, and smacked his lips. “If I had the silver for it, I’d eat fish till I grew fins.”
“Gods be praised you don’t, then,” Sostratos said. But how could you argue with somebody who not only admitted he was an opsophagos but sounded proud of it? Seeing no way, Sostratos didn’t try. Instead, he passed on what Epianax had said about the oracle at Dinos.
“That is interesting,” Menedemos said. “But what did he tell you? It’s only a few stadia north of Phaselis? I don’t see much point in stopping.”
“You surprise me,” Sostratos said. “Don’t you want to learn what the god has to say about our voyage?”
Menedemos tossed his head. “Not me, my dear. I’ll know in a few months any which way. Why? Are you that curious?” He answered his own question: “Of course you are. You always are. Do you really care about what the god says, or are you interested in watching how this particular oracle works?”
Sostratos’ ears heated. “You know me too well,” he mumbled.
“Only your mother and father have known you longer,” Menedemos said. “And they have to love you, for they bore you. Me, I see you as you are—and, somehow or other, I put up with you anyway.”
“Thank you so much,” Sostratos told him.
His cousin ignored the sarcasm. “My pleasure—most of the time, anyhow. But listen—I’ve got news. While you were talking with the eel-seller, I chatted up some of the sailors here in port. Things are stirring, sure enough.”
“What sorts of things?” Now Sostratos sounded interested. If anything could distract him from his own gloom, it was news of the outside world.
“Well, do you know Kleopatra, Philip of Macedon’s daughter and Alexander’s sister?”
“Personally?” Sostratos said. “No.”
Menedemos gave him the exasperated stare he’d hoped for. “No, not personally, you thick-head. Do you know of her? “
“Who doesn’t?” Sostratos replied. “When she married Alexandras of Epeiros, Philip was murdered at their wedding feast. That put Alexander the Great on the throne. It made him Great, in fact, because who knows what he would have been if Philip ruled another twenty-five years, as he could have? After Alexandros died, she married Alexander’s marshal Perdikkas, and after he died some other officer—I forget whom.
She’s in one of Antigonos’ Anatolian towns these days, isn’t she?”
“Yes, in Sardis—for the moment,” Menedemos said portentously.
“Ah?” Sostratos said. “ ‘For the moment,’ is it? Tell me more.”
“Well, what one of my chattering friends told me was that she doesn’t want to stay in Sardis or under old One-Eye’s muscular thumb anymore,” Menedemos replied. “The story is, she wants to go over to Ptolemaios.”
“He’s got that base over there on Kos, right across from the Anatolian mainland,” Sostratos said, and Menedemos dipped his head. Sostratos thought quickly. The conclusion he reached didn’t take much in the way of complicated calculation. “Kleopatra will never get to his men alive.”
“You sound sure of that,” Menedemos said.
“I’ll bet a mina of silver on it, if you’re in the mood,” Sostratos told him.
“A hundred drakhmai? By the dog of Egypt, you are sure, aren’t you?”
“Will you take the bet?”
Now Menedemos thought it over. He didn’t need long, either. “No, thanks. Antigonos can’t afford to let her get to Ptolemaios; he’d lose too much face. And he’s ruthless enough to kill her if she tries. In
other words, you’re likely right.”
“Whether I am or I’m not, we’re both reasoning the same way, anyhow,” Sostratos said. “All right, then, we won’t bet. And we won’t stop at the oracle, either?” He did his best to sound woefully disappointed.
“Not if it’s that close to Phaselis,” Menedemos answered. “Don’t you want to get to Phoenicia and Ioudaia and practice your Aramaic?”
The question was good enough to keep Sostratos from complaining as the Aphrodite’s, rowers took her out of the harbor of Phaselis. He wondered whether Kleopatra had already fled Sardis. Poor woman, he thought. If she’s tried it, she’s probably already dead. Who’s left from Philip’s dynasty, then? No one. No one at all.
As the Aphrodite slid past the sacred grove at Dinos, Menedemos eyed the pines and oaks. The grove looked like any other unhallowed Anatolian forest to him. As Epianax the eel-seller had told Sostratos, though, it did come right down to the sea. Its holiness had let it survive in the lowlands where most timber had been cut away to make room for farms. The only trees close by were cultivated groves of olives and almonds. But the hills rose steeply from the sea. A man wouldn’t have to go many stadia inland to find himself in the woods once more.
“Rhyppapai!” Diokles called. “Rhyppapai!” The breeze was fitful. When it did blow, it came mostly from the north. If the akatos was going to get anywhere, it had to travel by oar power.
Dolphins leaped and frolicked alongside the ship. “They’re a good omen,” Menedemos remarked to his cousin.
Sostratos dipped his head. “So says the part of me that goes to sea every sailing season. The part of me that went to the Lykeion in Athens has its doubts.”
“Why take chances?” Menedemos asked. “If you take omens but they aren’t real, you don’t hurt yourself, but if you ignore them and they are, you can end up in all sorts of trouble.”
“You can end up in trouble following omens that aren’t real,” Sostratos said, “Suppose you believe some lying fool of a soothsayer and do what he tells you, and it turns out to be the worst thing you could have done? Or what about the prophecy the Pythia at Delphi gave to King Kroisos of Lydia;
If Kroisos o’er the Halys River go
He will a mighty kingdom overthrow’?
What about that?”
“Oh, no, my dear.” Menedemos tossed his head. “You won’t get me with that one. That’s not the oracle’s fault. It’s Kroisos’ fault, for not asking whether he’d overthrow the Persian kingdom—or his own.”
Sostratos gave him an impudent grin, “I can’t fault your logic. I doubt whether Sokrates himself could fault your logic. But logic, remember, lies at the heart of philosophy. And you’re a man who sneers at philosophy. So where, O marvelous one, is the logic in that?”
“In your proktos,” Menedemos suggested.
“Aristophanes and his jokes arc funny in their place. When they get out of their place ...” Sostratos sniffed.
Menedemos started to point out that Aristophanes had had a good deal to say about philosophy and especially about philosophers. At the last instant, he held his tongue. He knew what would happen if he sailed down that channel. He and Sostratos would get into a row about how big a role Aristophanes and Clouds had played in Sokrates’ death. How many times had they had that argument? Too many for Menedemos to want to go through it again. By now, the steps were almost as formal as a dance.
“Sail ho!” Aristeidas shouted as Menedemos was casting about for something different to say. “Sail ho off the starboard bow!”
A sail was more important than any argument. Menedemos peered out to sea. After a moment, he spotted the sail, too. “Looks like a round ship. And . . . isn’t that another sail behind it?”
“Yes, skipper, it is—more than one, in fact,” the lookout answered.
“By the gods, you’re right,” Menedemos said after another look. “Three, four, five, six ... I make k eight sail altogether. Is that right?”
Aristeidas shaded his eyes with his hand. “I see... ten, skipper, I think. A couple of them are well out to sea there. And look! To the crows with me if the lead ship hasn’t got Ptolemaios’ eagle on its sail.”
“They must be grain ships, keeping his garrisons in Lykia supplied,” Sostratos said.
“He’s got nerve, sending round ships along this coast without any war galleys escorting them,” Menedemos said. “Two or three pirates could put paid to that whole fleet.”
“Ptolemaios has garrisons in all the good-sized towns around here,” Sostratos reminded him. “That has to make a difference.”
“Some difference,” Menedemos allowed. “How much, I don’t know. Most pirate ships don’t operate out of those towns. They skulk behind headlands or at the mouths of little streams, and then leap out at whatever passes by.”
“You make them sound like ferrets, or other little vicious animals,” Sostratos said.
“That’s how I feel about them,” Menedemos replied. “Don’t you?”
“I feel that way about pirates, not about pirate ships,” Sostratos said. “Ships are just—ships. It’s the whoresons inside ‘em who make the trouble.”
“You’re too subtle for me. If I see a pentekonter or a hemiolia, I want to sink it right there on the spot,” Menedemos said. “I don’t care who’s in it. Whoever’s in a ship like that is bound to be up to no good, because you can’t do good in a ship like that. If it weren’t for pirates, there wouldn’t be ships like that.”
“That’s why they’re going to build that trihemiolia you were talking about last fall,” Sostratos said. “She’ll be a pirate-hunter’s dream ship, if she sails the way everybody thinks she will.”
“And that’s why you build a new ship: to see if she sails the way everybody thinks she will, I mean,” Menedemos answered. “I wouldn’t mind being her skipper, though—I’ll tell you that.”
“If anyone’s earned the right, you have,” his cousin said. “If not for you, there wouldn’t be a trihemiolia.”
Menedemos shrugged. “That’s true. But I’ll tell you something else every bit as true, my dear: I’m out here on the Inner Sea, bound for Phoenicia to make a living for my family, and there are plenty of captains back in Rhodes who want to command a trihemiolia every bit as much as Ida”
“That’s not fair,” Sostratos said.
“The world’s not fair,” Menedemos replied with another shrug. “Anybody who goes out in it a little bit will tell you the same. Sooner or later, I expect I’ll get a chance. And when I do, I’ll show people what kind of officer I am.” That seemed enough of that. He pointed toward Ptolemaios’ approaching merchantmen. “Those are big ships, aren’t they?”
“I think they’re bigger than the ones that brought grain into Syracuse for Agathokles sailing season before last.” Sostratos plucked at his beard. “It makes sense they should be, I suppose, Agathokles had to take what he could get. Ptolemaios can pick and choose.”
“And Ptolemaios has more money than Agathokles ever dreamt of,” Menedemos added.
“I said something about Kroisos a little while ago. Ptolemaios has more money than Kroisos ever dreamt of,” Sostratos said. “Ptolemaios has more money than anybody ever dreamt of, except maybe the Great Kings of Persia—and they held Egypt, too.”
“Egypt’s the richest country in the world. It’s so rich, it hardly seems fair,” Menedemos said. Not only was the land rich in gold (and emeralds, as he had reason to know), but the Nile floods renewed the soil every year. They let the peasants raise enormous crops (some small part of which lay in the holds of those approaching round ships), and let whoever ruled Egypt collect even more enormous amounts of taxes.
“Ahoy!” The shout came thin across the sea from a sailor at the bow of the leading merchantman. “Ahoy, the galley! What ship are you?”
Are you a pirate? If you are a pirate, will you admit it? That was what the fellow meant. Menedemos shouted back: “We’re the Aphrodite, out of Rhodes.”
“Out of Rhodes
, eh?” The sailor on the round ship sounded suspicious. He had reason to; with Rhodes a leading trading partner for Egypt, a pirate would do well to disguise himself as coming from that island. “What trading house are you from?”
“Philodemos and Lysistratos’,” Menedemos replied. “Philodemos is my father; Lysistratos is my toikharkhos’ father.” Maybe Ptolemaios’ man knew a bit about Rhodes, or maybe he was just seeing if pirates would stumble trying to invent something plausible. Either way, Menedemos was not the sort of man to let him get by with cheek unchallenged. He shouted a question of his own: “What ship are you?”
And he got an answer. “This is the Isidora, out of Alexandria,” answered the sailor on the round ship. Then the fellow realized he didn’t have to tell Menedemos anything. He shook his fist at the Aphrodite. “It’s none of your business who we are and what we’re doing.”
“No, eh? But it’s your business who we are and what we’re up to?” Menedemos returned. “Well, you can go howl, pal! We’re free Hellenes just the same as you are, and we’ve got as much right to ask you questions as you do with us.”
“Euge!” Sostratos and Diokles said together, A couple of sailors clapped their hands. Menedemos grinned at the praise. The arrogance of the soldiers and sailors who served under Macedonian marshals could surpass belief.
The man on the Isidora had it in full measure, too. He threw back his head and laughed as the two ships passed closest to each other. “Go ahead and bark, little dog,” he said. “When a big dog decides he wants your house, you’ll run away yelping with your tail between your legs.”
Rage ripped through Menedemos. “I ought to sink that son of a whore. Who does he think he is, to talk to me that way?”
Again, Sostratos and Diokles spoke together. This time, they both said, “No!” Menedemos knew they were right, but he still steamed like a sealed pot forgotten in a fire. He felt as if he could burst and scatter shards everywhere.
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