Over the Wine-Dark Sea

Sostratos thought that a fair excuse, but not his cousin: "No, it didn't, the gods curse you." Menedemos' voice rose in both volume and pitch. It got so shrill, in fact, that Sostratos dug a finger in his ear. "You wide-arsed simpleton, you made the ship look bad. Nobody makes my ship look bad -  nobody, do you hear me?"

Half of Syracuse heard him. By the way he was shrieking, Sostratos wouldn't have been surprised if Agathokles, somewhere off the north coast of Sicily, heard him. He tried to remember the last time he'd seen Menedemos so furious, tried and failed. It's been a long time since anyone embarrassed him in public, he thought.

If the sodden rowers had had tails, they would have wagged them. "Yes, skipper," said the one who felt like talking. "We are sorry, skipper -  aren't we, lads?" All of them solemnly dipped their heads.

But Menedemos, like a Fury, remained unappeased. "Sorry? You aren't sorry yet!" He spun toward Sostratos. "Dock every one of those bastards three days' pay!"

"Three days?" Sostratos said -  quietly. "Isn't that a bit much?"

"By the gods, no!" Menedemos didn't bother lowering his voice. "One day because they've wasted a day's work with their antics. And two more to remind them not to be such drunken donkeys again."

Instead of getting angry themselves, as they might have done, the men in the Aphrodite's boat looked contrite, as if they were sacrificing their silver in place of a goat in expiation for their sins. That too was the wine working in them, Sostratos judged. "It'll never happen again, skipper," their spokesman said. "Never!" A tear rolled down his cheek.

Sostratos nudged Menedemos and spoke one word out of the side of his mouth: "Enough."

He wondered if his cousin would listen to him, or if Menedemos' anger, like that of Akhilleus in the Iliad, was so great and deep as to leave him beyond the reach of common sense. For a moment, he feared passion held complete sway over Menedemos. But at last, gruffly, Menedemos said, "Oh, very well. Come aboard, you clods."

The drunken sailors scurried away from him. Another Homeric comparison occurred to Sostratos. In a low voice, he asked, "How does it feel to be Zeus, father of both gods and men?"

Menedemos chuckled, the rage finally ebbing from him. "Not bad, now that you mention it. Not bad at all."

"I believe you," Sostratos said. "You don't often see anybody put men in fear like that."

"Every once in a while, a captain needs to be able to do that," Menedemos said seriously. "If the men don't know they have to obey, know it down deep, you won't get the most out of them. Sometimes you need to -  when a trireme is coming after you, for instance."

"I suppose so," Sostratos said, "but wouldn't it be better if they obeyed you out of love? As the godlike Platon said, an army of lovers could conquer the world."

His cousin snorted. "Maybe it would be better, but it's not likely. Try to make your rowers love you, and they'll just think you're soft."

Sostratos sighed. Menedemos' words had the hard, clear ring of probability to them, like silver coins dropped on a stone counter. As for an army of lovers . . . The soldiers of Philip, Alexander the Great's father, had killed the Theban Sacred Band -  made up of erastoi and their eromenoi -  to the last man, after which Alexander went out and conquered the world without them. Platon hadn't lived to see any of that. Sostratos wondered what he would have had to say about it. Nothing good, he suspected.

Platon had come here to Syracuse, to try to make a philosopher out of the tyrant Dionysos' worthless son. That hadn't worked, either. Sostratos sighed again. People seemed harder to change than lovers of wisdom wished them to be.

Menedemos changed the subject like the captain of a round ship swinging the yard from one side of the mast to the other to go onto a new tack: "Now all we need to do is a little more business here, maybe, and then get our silver home. Even my father won't have much to complain about."

"It'll be a shorter trip, or it should," Sostratos said. "We won't have to stop at nearly so many places." He coughed delicately. "And we'd do better not to stop at Taras after all, wouldn't we?"

"What if we would?" Menedemos said. "We can visit Kroton again, and then sail across the gulf there to Kallipolis. Old what's-his-name in Taras won't hear about us till we're gone."

"You hope Gylippos won't," Sostratos said. "Was Phyllis worth it?"

"I thought so then," Menedemos answered, shrugging. "A little too late to worry about it now, wouldn't you say?"

"A lot too late." But Sostratos didn't sound amused or indulgent. "When will you grow up?"

Menedemos grinned at him. "Not soon, I hope."

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