His cousin grinned a sly grin. "You make me feel as if I were back at the Lykeion in Athens. Here, though, it's not Theophrastos lecturing on botany; it's Menedemos on seamanship."
Menedemos shrugged. "If your fancy philosophers would want to listen, I'd fill their ears for them. This is what I know, and I'm good at it." Like any Hellene, he was justly proud of the things he was good at, and wanted everyone else to know about them, too.
"And because you know these things so well, do you think you know others every bit as well?" Sostratos asked.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Menedemos gave him a suspicious stare. "When you start asking that kind of question, you're trying to lure me into philosophy myself, and I don't care to play."
"All right, I'll stop," Sostratos said agreeably. "But when Sokrates was defending himself in Athens, he talked about artisans who knew their own trade and thought they knew everything on account of that."
"And the Athenians fed him hemlock, too - even I know that much," Menedemos said. "So maybe he should have found something else to talk about."
For some reason - Menedemos couldn't fathom why - that seemed to wound his cousin, who subsided into sulky silence. Menedemos gave his full attention back to the Aphrodite. Getting the most from both sails and oars was a subtle art, one most merchant captains with their tubby roundships didn't have to worry about. He let the wind on the quarter drive the akatos westward, while using half the rowers - the others rested at their oars - to head the ram at her bow north as well, toward the little island of Syme.
As the island seemed to rise up out of the sea. Diokles pointed toward it and said, "Miserable little place. Not enough water, not enough decent land for it to amount to anything."
"Well, you're not wrong," Menedemos said. "If it weren't for sponges, nobody would remember the place was here."
That brought Sostratos out of his funk. He tossed his head, saying, "Thoukydides talks about the sea-fight between the Athenians and the Spartans off Syme and the trophy the Spartans set up there in the last book of his history. That makes the island, like the history itself, a possession for all time." He slid from Doric to old-fashioned Attic for the last few words; Menedemos presumed he was quoting his pet historian.
Hearing Sostratos quote Thoukydides, though, jogged his own memory, and he quoted, too, from Homer:
"You know the Iliad even better than I thought you did, if you can recite from the Catalogue of Ships in Book Two," Sostratos said.
"Homer to sink my teeth into, Aristophanes to laugh at," Menedemos replied. "To the crows with everybody else."
Before Sostratos could come back with something indignant, Diokles asked, "Whereabouts on the island will you want to beach her tonight?"
"You know the gnarled finger of land that sticks out to the south, the one that points to the islet called Tetlousa?" Menedemos said. "There's a small inlet there, on the western side of it, with the best and softest beach on Syme. That's where I want to put us."
"I do know that inlet, captain, and I do know that beach." The oarmaster dipped his head. "I asked because I was going to speak of them if you didn't."
"And the town on the island is at the north end, isn't it?" Sostratos said. "We'll be as far away from a lot of people as we can - though on Syme, that's not very far."
If Sostratos was talking about practical matters again, and not about literature, that suited Menedemos fine. He said, "You're right. We haven't got that many choices on Syme, anyhow, not when most of the coast is rocky cliffs."
Before long, he ordered the sail brailed up again, for the Aphrodite swung almost due north once it got past Tetlousa - straight into the teeth of the breeze. He put more men back on the oars. The sun was sinking in the west, and he didn't want to have to feel his way into that inlet in the dark. He was all too liable to misjudge things and run the Aphrodite up against the rocks. Sooner than risking that, he would have spent a night anchored at sea, with the rowers sleeping on their benches. They wouldn't be happy about that. They'd have to do it a few times, especially on the journey across the Ionian Sea from Hellas to Italy, but it would be a bad omen the first night out.
