Sostratos tossed his head. "No. You never know if anything will turn out to be interesting. Usually, nothing is. Most tavern talk is people lying about fish they say they caught and men they say they killed and women they say they had. I don't know how Persephone's name ever came up in a tavern, unless you were drinking with Hades."
That jerked a laugh from Menedemos. "I wasn't talking about Persephone, exactly. I was talking about Hipponion, and what the anchorage is like." He pointed ahead. "It's nothing much, is it?"
"No." Sostratos tossed his head again. "You almost wonder why anyone ever decided to build a polis here."
"You do. You really do," Menedemos agreed. "No proper bay to shelter a ship - just a long, straight stretch of coastline. The Hipponians haven't done anything to improve what they found here, either, have they? No mole to protect ships from waves and weather, hardly any quays. If Odysseus did sail up this way, he'd still feel right at home nowadays."
"If Odysseus did sail up this way, he did it in a pentekonter," Sostratos said. "Most of the Danaans who sailed to Troy went in pentekonters, if the Catalogue of Ships is right. To the Trojans, they were probably nothing but the biggest pirate fleet in the world."
Menedemos stared at his cousin. "Do you know something?" he said at last. "I care for Homer more than you do, I think."
"I'm sure you're right," Sostratos said. "He's a great poet, but he's not the man I turn to first."
"I know that," Menedemos said. "Still and all, though, you just made me look at the Iliad in a way I never did before. Who would have thought of trying to see things from the Trojans' point of view?"
He kept right on marveling as Diokles brought the Aphrodite to a stop not far offshore and the anchors at the bow splashed into the deep-blue water of the Tyrrhenian Sea. When Priamos and Hektor peered out from the windswept walls of Troy, how did they look at Agamemnon and Menelaos and Akhilleus and Odysseus? As a pack of gods-detested bandits who all deserved to be crucified? Menedemos wouldn't have been a bit surprised.
Sostratos might have been thinking along with him. He said, "I wonder how the Iliad would sound if Troy hadn't fallen."
"Different," Menedemos said, and they both laughed. Menedemos went on, "I'm sure it's better the way it really is." The effort holding that other perspective too quickly became too much for him. Sostratos didn't disagree. When morning comes, Menedemos thought as he stretched himself out on the poop deck, my mind will work the way a proper Hellene's ought to again.
When morning came, Sostratos' mind was still buzzing with the notion he and Menedemos had had the night before. "When Alexander invaded Persia," he said, "Dareios probably thought the Macedonians were a horde of barbarians, too. And from what I've seen of Macedonians since, he probably had a point."
To his disappointment, Menedemos didn't feel like exploring the idea any further. "The Persians had it coming to them," was all he said.
Sostratos dipped a barley roll into olive oil. "I suppose you'll say the Trojans had it coming to them, too," he said, and took a bite.
"Well, of course they did," Menedemos answered with his mouth full; his breakfast was the same as Sostratos'.
"Why is that, O best one?" Sostratos asked with honey-sweet venom. "Because Paris ran off with Menelaos' wife?"
"Why else?" Menedemos answered. Then he must have realized Sostratos hadn't been talking only about the Trojan War. Sostratos enjoyed the dirty look his cousin gave him. "Funny," Menedemos said. "Very funny. If I see Gylippos in a fast pentekonter, then I'll start to worry."
"When we're going back toward Rhodes, do you plan on putting in at Taras?" Sostratos asked.
Menedemos gave him another dirty look. Sostratos didn't enjoy this one nearly so much, because his cousin looked harried, too. "Don't ask me things like that right now," Menedemos said. "It depends on how much we've still got to get rid of by the time we're heading back from Neapolis. I suppose it also depends on just how angry with me Gylippos really is."
"How many toughs did he send after you?" Sostratos asked. "Nine?"
"Only seven," Menedemos told him.
"Excuse me," Sostratos said. "I do like to have the details straight. I would say that sending even seven toughs after you is a pretty good sign you won't be welcome in Taras again any time soon."
"I'd have to be careful in Taras, no doubt," Menedemos said . . . carefully. "No way to tell yet if things will be as bad there as they are in Halikarnassos. I hope they won't."
"They'd better not be," Sostratos said. "I'm not sure you could bring a ship into the harbor at Halikarnassos without getting it burned to the waterline - which is a shame, because the family's done a lot of business there over the years."
