Harry Turtledove - Over the Wine-Dark Sea

"It could be." Sostratos courteously dipped his head to the older man. "No one but Thoukydides ever knew how much of what was really said went into his speeches, and how much of what he thought men should have said."

"And what will you say, Uncle?" Menedemos asked Lysistratos.

Sostratos' father took a lyre down from the wall and accompanied himself as he sang a poem of Arkilokhos', in which he promised the girl he was seducing that he would spend himself on her belly and pubic patch, not inside her. The symposiasts loudly clapped their hands. "Sure, you always tell 'em that beforehand," somebody called, and everyone laughed.

Lysistratos waved to Menedemos. "Your turn now."

"So it is." Menedemos got to his feet. "I'll give you the Iliad, the section where Patroklos kills Sarpedon." The Greek he recited was even older, and more old-fashioned, than that which Arkilokhos used:

\t"Then Sarpedon missed with his shining spear.

The spearpoint passed over Patroklos' left shoulder,

But did not strike him. Patroklos made his

Second attack with the bronze. No vain cast left his hand,

But it struck just where the heart throbbed in his chest.

He fell, as an oak or a white poplar

Or a stately pine falls when men - carpenters - fell it

In the mountains with newly sharpened axes to make ship timber.

So he fell in front of his horses and chariot and lay outstretched,

Shrieking, clutching at the bloody dust,

As when a lion attacks a herd and kills

A great-hearted brown bull among the shambling oxen.

The bull bellows as it is slain by the lion's jaws.

So the warlike Lykians' commander raged after taking his death Wound

From Patroklos, and addressed his friend and companion - "\t

Menedemos didn't get the chance to say what Sarpedon had told Glaukos, for Xanthos burst out, "By Zeus of the aegis, the Argives didn't kill enough Lykians during the Trojan War. We've still got too many of the stinking pirates no more than a stone's throw from Rhodes."

"Not even Herakles could throw a stone from here to Lykia," the literal-minded Sostratos said, but heads all around the andron dipped in agreement with Xanthos. Lykia lay less than eight hundred stadia to the east, and every Lykian headland was liable to have a pirate crew's swift pentekonter or even swifter hemiolia lurking behind it, waiting to swoop down on an honest merchantman.

Instead of going on, Menedemos dipped his head to his father, who also chose Homer: the passage in the Odyssey where Odysseus, with his comrades, blinded Polyphemos the Cyclops after first cleverly giving his name as Nobody. When the other Cyclopes asked him what was wrong, he blamed Nobody - Outis, not Odysseus. The symposiasts smiled at the wordplay.

"Another round," Menedemos told the slave tending the krater. "Deeper cups this time, and then bring on the flutegirls and the acrobat." He raised his voice: "Drink, my friends! We've plenty of wine still ahead of us."

The deeper cups were businesslike mugs. They weren't nearly so pretty as the shallow, high-footed cups with which the symposion had begun, but they held more than twice as much. Menedemos poured the wine down his throat. Since he was the symposiarch, the rest of the men had to follow his lead.

In danced Eunoa and Artemeis, both playing a drinking song from Athens on their double flutes. The flutegirls wore silk chitons filmy enough to show they'd singed away the hair from between their legs with a lampflame. The symposiasts whooped and cheered. A moment later, those cheers redoubled, for Phylainis the acrobat followed the flutegirls into the andron walking on her hands. She was naked; her oiled skin gleamed in the lamplight.

Philodemos nudged Menedemos as the symposiasts' cheers got louder yet. "The girls are pretty enough," the older man said. "I can't very well deny that."

"I'm glad you're pleased," Menedemos answered. His father was a hard man, but fair. "I hope the racket won't bother your wife, up in the women's quarters." Menedemos' mother was dead; his father had married a young bride a couple of years before, and was hoping for more children.

"We've had symposia here before," Philodemos said with a shrug. "She can put wax in her ears if the noise gets too bad, as Odysseus' men did sailing past the Sirens." He cocked his head to one side, listening to the music. "They don't play the flute badly, either."

"One of them can play my flute in a while," Menedemos said. "They're good at that, too." His father chuckled. Then they both laughed out loud. After a series of cartwheels across the andron, Phylainis had ended up in Sostratos' lap. Instead of feeling her up or starting the lovemaking then and there, Menedemos' cousin dumped her off as if she were on fire.

"She doesn't bite, Sostratos," Menedemos said. "Not unless you want her to." He threw back his head and laughed; he could feel the wine, all right.

Sostratos shrugged. "She picked me because I'm young, and she hoped I'd fall head over heels for her." He shrugged again. "I'm afraid not."

"All right - someone else will put his mortise in her tenon before long," Menedemos answered, as if talking of the shipwright's business rather than Aphrodite's. Sostratos seemed to stay sober even when drunk. Poor fellow, Menedemos thought.

Sure enough, Phylainis soon pressed herself against Xanthos, who started talking a great deal. Are you going to bore her or bore her? Menedemos wondered. With wine in him, that seemed very funny. He ordered the slave to go round and fill the symposiasts' cups again. Telephos let Artemeis drink from his mug. As she gulped wine, the merchant ran his hand up under her tunic. "What a smooth little piggy you've got," he said, fondling her.

"It's even smoother inside," she said, and took hold of the side of the couch and stuck her backside in the air. Telephos got behind her and put her words to the test.

Menedemos waved to Eunoa. He was the host's son. He'd hired her and the other girls. She hurried to him. "What would you like?" she asked. He sat up on the couch. She squatted in front of him on the floor, her head bobbing up and down, then, at his gesture, got up onto the couch and squatted on him. Her breath was sweet with wine fumes. And she was smooth inside, too.

2

Waving a cloth, Erinna ran at a peahen. "Get out of my herbs, you nasty thing!" Sostratos' sister shouted. "Shoo!"

"What's it got in its beak?" Sostratos asked from the edge of the courtyard as the peahen beat a reluctant retreat.

"A wall lizard," Erinna answered. Sure enough, the tail disappeared down the peahen's gullet. Erinna went on, "I don't mind when the peafowl eat lizards and mice. But they eat the cumin and the fennel, too. I don't think you feed them enough."

"I do so." Sostratos indignantly pointed to the barley set out in a broad bowl, from which two other peahens were eating. "They get almost as much as a slave does. I just think they like some opson with their sitos, the same as we do."

Erinna rolled her eyes. "Well, they can get it somewhere besides my herb garden."

"It could be worse," Sostratos said. A horrible, vaguely hornlike noise from next door showed how it could be worse. "Menedemos has the peacock at his house. It does everything the peahens do, and squawks four times as much besides."

"I can't wait till you've bred all the peahens to it," his sister said. "I can't wait till you take them to the Aphrodite and sail far, far away with them."

"It won't be long," Sostratos said. "Now that ships are starting to put in to our harbor, Menedemos grudges every day the galley stays here."

"I'll miss you," Erinna told him. "But I won't miss these miserable, obnoxious birds at all." The peafowl she'd chased from the herb garden sidled back toward the plants, undoubtedly hoping she'd forgotten about it. Forgetting about a bird that big wasn't easy, though. Erinna flapped the cloth again, and the peafowl drew back.