Over the Wine-Dark Sea

Lysistratos beckoned to Gyges. He spoke in the majordomo's ear. The Lydian slave hurried out into the dark courtyard. As Sostratos' father had said, the entertainers were waiting there. A moment later, a couple of flutegirls in chitons of thin, filmy Koan silk pranced into the andron and began to play. The symposiasts whooped and cheered. A couple of them reached out to try to grab the girls, but they had no luck. Only a very raw slave would have let herself become a plaything so soon.

And then the men in the andron stopped reaching for the girls. There would be plenty of time for that later, and they'd done it plenty of times before. They whooped again, on a different note this time, and howled laughter, for into the room behind the flute girls bounded a naked dancing dwarf. His head and genitals were the size of a normal man's, his body and limbs sadly shrunken.

"Think I'm pretty funny, don't you?" he said in a light, true tenor as he spun in time to the music. "I'll tell you something, friends -  if everybody looked like me, you'd be the monsters."

That made most of the symposiasts laugh harder than ever. Menedemos choked on his wine, and all but drowned. Sostratos had been laughing, too. He'd known his father had hired the dwarf; that was what had touched off his thought about the large realms Antigonos and Ptolemaios held, with little Rhodes doing her best not to get crushed between them.

But, though the dancing dwarf had made his gibe to amuse the symposiasts, it also made Sostratos think. Most people reckoned dwarfs less intelligent than normal men, but this fellow sounded bright enough. How did he feel, when he was able to make his living only by showing himself off for others to laugh at?

Sostratos thought about asking the little man. He thought about it, but not even his own sharp curiosity gave him the nerve to do it. After all, what was he but one more fellow who reminded the dwarf of his freakishness?

Instead, he got very drunk, even with his father's well-watered wine and shallow drinking cups. Maybe some of the symposiasts did end up rumpling the flutegirls. If they did, Sostratos didn't see it. They might have taken the girls out into the dark courtyard, or the symposion might just have stayed on the decorous side. After a while, he was dozing on his half of the couch.

What roused him was Menedemos's talent for quoting Homer. His cousin started to recite the section from the Iliad where lame Hephaistos bustled around serving wine to the other gods, who laughed at him despite his labor. "No," Sostratos said. "Find some other lines. Leave the little man here alone."

Menedemos gaped. "That's why he's here: to be the butt of our jokes. Look at the silly capers he's cutting." Sure enough, the dwarf was waggling his backside like a coy courtesan, and he was funny.

But despite, or perhaps because of, the wine he'd drunk, Sostratos found the distinction he wanted to make: "Laugh at what he does, not at what he is."

"Why?" Menedemos said. "What he does isn't always worth laughing at. What he is, is."

Sostratos ran out of logical arguments. That was the wine. "If you can't find any other reason, don't mock him as a favor to me."

"All right, best one," Menedemos said, and kissed him on the cheek. "You're my cousin, and you're my host, and as a favor to you I will keep quiet. You see? I deny you nothing tonight."

"Thank you, my dear. You've made our homecoming perfect." Sostratos yawned. That was the last he remembered of the symposion, for he really did fall asleep then.

After the symposion at his uncle and cousin's house, several days of rain kept Menedemos close to home. What point to going to the gymnasion to try to run through mud or, worse, wrestle in it? What point to going to the agora when hardly anyone would be buying or selling or gossiping?

He wouldn't have minded so much being cooped up if he and his father could have walked past each other without growling. But they didn't get along, and being at close quarters only made things worse. Menedemos tried to stay out of Philodemos' way by taking one of the slave women into his bedroom and not coming out for most of a day, but that didn't work, either. When he and the slave did emerge, Philodemos grumbled, "She didn't do any work at all yesterday, thanks to you."

"Oh, I wouldn't say that, Father," Menedemos answered blandly. "She got very sweaty by the time we were through."

His father rolled his eyes. "I've got a cockhound for a son. Everything I've work so hard to get will end up in some hetaira's hands when I'm dead."

"With what I brought home from Great Hellas, I could keep three of the greediest hetairai in the world happy for a long time, and the family would still be ahead," Menedemos said.

"That's what you think," Philodemos said. "You have no idea how greedy and grasping a woman can be."

"What I have no idea of right now is why I bothered coming home," Menedemos snapped. "It seems everything I've ever done is wrong."