Harry Turtledove - Over the Wine-Dark Sea

"I'm bound for Italy, with papyrus and ink and perfume and crimson dye - and peafowl," Menedemos added with no small pride.

"Peafowl?" the fellow on the sailing ship said. "Good luck to you, friend. The peacocks are pretty, sure enough, but I've seen 'em - they're mean. I wouldn't have 'em on my ship, and that's the truth."

"Well, to the crows with you," Menedemos said, but not loud enough for the fellow on the beamy merchantman to hear. He turned to Sostratos. "Fat lot he knows about it."

Only about three plethra separated the tips of the two moles from each other. Inside, the waters of the Great Harbor were glassy smooth. As soon as the Aphrodite passed out into the Aegean proper, the light chop made the motion of the ship change. Diokles smiled. "Your rowing may get a little rusty over the winter," he said, never missing a beat with the mallet, "but you never forget how to stand when she rolls and pitches a little."

"No," said Menedemos, who'd made the adjustment so automatically, he hadn't even noticed he'd done it. He scratched his chin, then shot Sostratos an amused glance: his cousin's beard was a handy thing to be thoughtful with. "I'll keep them all at the oars till we round the nose of the island. Then, if the wind holds, we'll lower the sail and let it do the work."

The keleustes dipped his head. "That seems good to me." Diokles paused, then asked, "You'll want to drill them, though, on the way out, won't you? If we have to fight, the practice'll come in handy. It always does."

"Of course." Menedemos dipped his head. "Yes, of course. But let's give ourselves a couple of days to shake off the cobwebs and rub oil on our blisters. There'll be time for sprints and time for ramming practice, believe me there will."

"Good enough," the oarmaster said. "I just wanted to make sure it was in your mind, skipper, that's all. I think we'll have a pretty fair crew once we do shake down. A lot of the men at the oars have rowed in triremes or in fours or fives. Nothing like serving in the polis' fleet to turn out a solid rower."

As if on cue in a comic play, Aristeidas sang out from his post at the bow: "Trireme off to starboard, captain!"

Menedemos shaded his eyes from the sun with the palm of his hand. So did Diokles and Sostratos. Menedemos saw the ship first. "There she is," he said, pointing. The trireme, twice the length of the Aphrodite but hardly beamier, glided along southeast under sail, the rowers resting easy at the oars. As the lean, deadly shape drew nearer, he made out Rhodes' rose in red on the white linen of the sail.

"Pirate patrol," Sostratos remarked.

"Nothing else but," Menedemos agreed. "Unless a pentekonter or a hemiolia can run away, it's got even less chance against a trireme than we do in the Aphrodite against a pirate ship. But the other side of the coin is, you wouldn't want to take a trireme up against a bigger war galley these days."

"By Poseidon the earthshaker, I should hope not," Diokles said. "Anything from a four on up will have extra timbers at the waterline to make ramming tougher, and it'll have a deck swarming with marines. I wouldn't want to fight a big old mean spur-thighed tortoise like that in a trireme, and I don't know anybody who would, either."

"When we Hellenes fought Persia - even when Athens fought Sparta less than a hundred years ago - all the warships were triremes," Sostratos said. "No one knew how to build anything bigger."

"When the Argives sailed to Troy, they all went in pentekonters," Menedemos said. "Nobody back then even knew how to build triremes." He laughed at how surprised Sostratos looked to find himself topped. Menedemos grinned. "You can keep your fancy historians. Give me Homer any day."

"That's right," Diokles said, though Menedemos didn't think the keleustes could read or write. But everyone, literate or not, had heard the Iliad and Odyssey countless times.

Stubborn as usual, Sostratos tossed his head. "Homer is where you start. No one would argue with that. But Homer shouldn't be where you stop."

There were times - at supper, say, or in a symposion with his cousin leading the drinking and keeping things moderate - when. Menedemos would have been glad to argue that. Now he had the Aphrodite to run, and the ship came first. She'd traveled past the northernmost spit of land on the island of Rhodes. Looking south, Menedemos could see into the city of Rhodes' small western harbor.

"Lower the sail!" he called, and sailors leaped to obey. Down it came from the main yard, canvas flapping till the wind took it and filled it. Like any sail, it was made from oblong blocks of cloth sewn together; the light horizontal lines and the vertical brails gave it the appearance of a gameboard.

Even before Menedemos could give the orders, the men swung the great square sail to take best advantage of the wind coming down from the north. They brailed up the leeward half so as to get the precise portion and amount of sail needed.

"They're good," Sostratos said.

"Diokles said it," Menedemos answered. "They know what they're supposed to do, because they've done it before. The Aphrodite's not so big as a trireme, let alone a four or a five or those new ships the generals are making with six or seven men to a bank of oars, but we do things the same way the bigger ships do. And a sail's a sail, no matter what kind of ship you're in. Only difference between us and a proper warship there is that we're not big enough to need a foresail."

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: