Harry Turtledove: Over the Wine-Dark Sea

"Khian's a lot stronger than honey, too," Sostratos observed. "Those are vintages you need to drink well-watered."

With a snort, Menedemos said, "Those are vintages you can drink well-watered, my dear cousin. Me, I like to have some fun every so often."

Sostratos sighed. "I like drinking wine. I don't like swilling it down neat like a barbarian. I don't like getting drunk and breaking things and getting into fights." He was, or at least tried to be, moderate. All the philosophers maintained that moderation was a virtue. By the look on Menedemos' face, he reckoned it not only a vice but a nasty vice at that. Sostratos sighed again. His cousin had all the noteworthy good traits: he was handsome, outgoing, strong, nimble. He could as easily sing a song as guide a ship through a gale without showing fear.

And what about you? Sostratos asked himself. He shrugged. Nobody'd ever written Sostratos is beautiful on the walls when he was a youth. He wasn't a bad haggler, but he got what bargains he got with reason and patience, not by making people like him and go easy or by persuading them black was white. He towered over Menedemos, but his cousin always threw him when they stripped off their clothes and wrestled in the gymnasion.

I have a good prose style. Theophrastos told me that himself, up in Athens, and he doles out even less praise than Aristoteles did when he headed the Lykeion. Everyone says so. I remember what I read, too. And I've always been clever - better than clever, really - with numbers.

It didn't seem enough. Even with moderation and reliability thrown in, it didn't seem enough. Sostratos shrugged again. I can't be Menedemos. I am what the gods made me. I have to make the most of what they gave me.

His cousin laughed and pointed. "Look, Sostratos. It really is getting on toward spring. There's a gecko on a wall."

Sure enough, a gray-brown lizard clung to the gray-brown mud brick of a poor man's house. It walked up the wall as easily as a fly might have done, and snapped up a bug before the insect knew it was there.

Half a block past the house with the gecko, they turned right so as to go north. That was the only turn they'd have to make till they got to their homes. Sostratos said, "Gods be praised, Rhodes is laid out on a grid, the way Peiraieus is up in Attica. Anyone can find his way around here or in Athens' harbor. Athens itself?" He tossed his head. "You have to be born there to know where you're going, and even the Athenians aren't sure half the time. Hippodamos of Miletos was a man of godlike wit."

"I never much thought about it," Menedemos confessed. "But most towns are pretty bad, aren't they? You can't get from the harbor to an inn a bowshot away without asking directions three different times, on account of the streets go wherever they please, not where you need 'em to."

"Of course," Sostratos said musingly, "Peiraieus and Rhodes are new cities; they could be planned. It's what, two years shy of a century since Rhodes was founded? A town that's been there since before the fall of Troy, the streets probably follow the way the cows used to wander."

"Homer doesn't say anything about whether Troy was laid out in a grid," Menedemos said. He paused to eye a slave woman carrying a jar of water back to her house. "Hello, sweetheart!" he called. The slave kept walking, but she smiled back at Menedemos.

Sostratos sighed. If he'd done that, the slave woman might have ignored him - if he was lucky. If he wasn't lucky, she'd have showered him with curses. That had happened to him once, up in Athens. Like a puppy that once stuck its nose into the fire, he hadn't taken the chance of its happening again.

Potters and jewelers and shoemakers and smiths and millers and tavernkeepers and all the other artisans whose work helped keep Rhodes prosperous had their shops in the front part of the buildings in which they and their households also lived. Some of them steadily kept whatever they did for a living. Others made periodic forays out into the street in search of customers.

"Here - look at my fine terracottas!" cried a potter - or would he think of himself as a sculptor? Sostratos didn't know. He didn't much care, either. He hoped the fellow made better pots than burnt-clay images. If he didn't, his wife and children would starve.

"Coming out!" somebody else shouted, this time from a second-story window. Sostratos and Menedemos sprang back in a hurry. So did everyone else close by. The odorous contents of a slops jar splashed down in the middle of the street. Somebody who didn't spring back fast enough - and who got his mantle splattered as a result - shook his fist at the window, whose wooden shutters were now closed again.

More men than women strode the streets. Respectable wives and maidens spent most of the time in the women's quarters of their houses. They sent slaves out to shop and run errands for them. Poor men's wives - the women in families that had no slaves of their own - had to go out by and for themselves. Some were brazen, or simply resigned to it. Others wore shawls and veils to protect themselves from prying eyes.

"Don't you wonder what they look like? - under all that stuff, I mean," Menedemos said after such a woman walked past. "Puts charcoal on my brazier just thinking about it."

"If you did see her, you'd probably think she was ugly," Sostratos said. "For all you know, she's a grandmother."

"Maybe," his cousin admitted. "But for all I know, she could be Helen of Troy come back to earth again, or Aphrodite slumming among us poor mortals. In my imagination, she is."

"Your imagination needs cold water poured on it, like a couple of dogs mating in the street," Sostratos said. Menedemos mimed taking an arrow in the chest. He staggered around so convincingly, he alarmed a donkey with four big amphorai of olive oil lashed onto its back with a web of leather straps. The fellow leading the donkey had several pointed things to say about that. Menedemos took no notice of him.

And Sostratos felt a little guilty, for he too sometimes tried to imagine what women looked like under their wraps and tunics, under their shawls and veils. What man didn't, every now and then? Why did women conceal themselves, if not to spur men's imaginings?

Musing thus, he almost walked past his own doorway. Menedemos laughed and said, "Don't come along with me yet. You need to go in and let your father know what we've done, while I tell mine. Merchants' supper at our house tonight, you know."

Sostratos dipped his head to show he remembered. "I expect we'll have plenty to talk about, too - if our fathers haven't skinned us by then and sold our hides to the tanners."

"We'll make money with those birds," Menedemos said stoutly.

"We'd better," Sostratos said. His cousin winced, then waved and went on to his own house. Nothing got Menedemos down for long. Sostratos wished he could say the same. He knocked on the door and waited for his father or a house slave to let him in.

Gyges, the majordomo, unbarred the doors and threw the two panels wide. "Hail, young master," the Lydian slave said. "How is the Aphrodite shaping?" He knew almost as much about the business as Sostratos and his father.

"Well enough," Sostratos answered. "Is Father home? Menedemos and I bought some goods to take west when we sail, and I want to tell him about them."

"Yes, he's here," Gyges said. "He'll be glad to see you; Xanthos just left."

"He'd be glad to see anybody else, if Xanthos just left," Sostratos said with a laugh. The other merchant was honest and reliable, but deadly dull.

Sostratos walked through the courtyard on the way to the andron - the men's room - where he expected to find his father. His sister Erinna was out there, watering some of the plants in the herb garden with a jar. "Hail," she said. "What's the news out in the city? I think Xanthos had some, but I stayed in till he left."