Over the Wine-Dark Sea

"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."