Over the Wine-Dark Sea

"I don't know," Sostratos answered. "Nobody knows -  including the Carthaginians, I'm sure. But I do know they can't be anxious to find out. No one's ever tried to take the wars in Sicily to their country before."

"Alexander conquered the barbarians in the east," his sister said. "Why shouldn't Agathokles conquer the barbarians in the west?"

"I can think of two reasons," Sostratos replied. Erinna raised a questioning eyebrow. He explained: "First, the Carthaginians are still strong. And second, Agathokles isn't Alexander, no matter how much he wishes he were."

"All right." Erinna hugged him again. "It's so good to have you home. No one else takes me seriously when I ask questions."

"Well, if your brother won't, who will?" Sostratos kissed her on the forehead. "I'll be home till spring, so you'll have plenty of chances to ask them. But now I'm going upstairs." With obvious reluctance, she dipped her head and let him go. As he headed for the stairway, she picked up the hydria and went back to watering.

He was halfway up the stairs when Threissa started down them. "Hail, young master," the redheaded slave girl said in her oddly accented Greek. "Welcome home."

"Hail. Thank you," he said, and went up another couple of steps. The Thracian slave wasn't so pretty as Maibia had been. But Maibia was back in Taras while Threissa was here -  and Sostratos had gone without a long time. "Come to my room with me," he told her.

She sighed. She couldn't say no, not when she was as much property as the bed on which he intended to have her. But she said, "All right," in a way that promised she would give him as little enjoyment as she could.

He considered ways and means. "I'll let you have a couple of oboloi afterwards."

He didn't have to do that, not with a family slave. "All right," Threissa said, but this time in a different tone of voice. "Maybe even three?"

Slaves are mercenary creatures, Sostratos thought. But then they have to be. "Maybe," he answered. Threissa waited for him at the top of the stairs. They went down the hall together to his room. He closed the door behind them.

"Come on," Menedemos said as he and Sostratos made their way toward the gymnasion in the southwestern part of Rhodes, not far from the stadium and the temple dedicated to Apollo. "It'll do you good. We've been away too long."

His cousin accompanied him only reluctantly. "What you mean is, it'll do you good to show you can still outrun me and throw me when we wrestle. I don't know why you bother. We both know how that will come out."

"That's not the point," Menedemos said, which was at least partially true. "The point is, a proper Hellene doesn't let himself go to seed."

"I can think of quite a few things you do that a proper Hellene doesn't," Sostratos said tartly. "Why shouldn't I get to pick and choose, too?"

Since Menedemos knew he had no good comeback for that, he didn't bother trying to find one. Instead, he repeated, "Come on," adding, "No point in going back now. Look, you can already see the theater and the southern wall beyond it."

"And if I went back home, I could see Demeter's temple," Sostratos retorted. "Did you drag me out here to see the sights? I don't mind that so much. Going to the gymnasion is a different story."

"Quit complaining," Menedemos said, beginning to lose patience. "You can let yourself get all hunched-up and flabby, like a shoemaker stuck at his bench all the time or a barbarian who doesn't care what he looks like because he never takes off his clothes, or else you can try to be as much of a kalos k'agathos as you can."

"I have much more control over whether I'm good than I do over whether I'm good-looking," Sostratos said. Despite his grumbles, he accompanied Menedemos into the gymnasion. They stripped off their chitons -  being seamen, they didn't bother with sandals -  and gave an attendant an abolos to keep an eye on the clothes while they went out and exercised.

Some of the men running on the track or grappling with one another in the sandy wrestling pits plainly didn't get to the gymnasion often enough. But others . . . Menedemos pointed. "There's a pretty boy, fourteen or fifteen, and handsome enough to have his name scrawled on the walls." His own name had gone up on more than a few walls when he was that age; Sostratos', he remembered rather too late, hadn't.

All his cousin said now, though, was, "Yes, and doesn't he know it? If he sticks his nose any higher in the air, he'll get a crick in the neck."

"When you look like that, you can get away with a few airs," Menedemos said. Sostratos only grunted.

They ran a few sprints to loosen up. Menedemos savored the feel of the breeze against his skin, the grass at the verge of the track flying by as he strained to get every bit of speed from himself he could. He also savored leaving Sostratos in his wake, hearing his cousin's panting breath fade behind him time after time.

"You're a pentekonter, sure enough," Sostratos said. "Me, I'm just a round ship."