Harry Turtledove - Over the Wine-Dark Sea

Menedemos chuckled. "No dirty stories, not when your father's running things."

"If you need that sort of thing at every symposion, my dear, go off and live in Great Hellas," Sostratos answered. Neither spoke loud enough for Lysistratos to notice.

As was the custom, the guests began at the far end of the semicircle from the couches Sostratos and Menedemos and their fathers shared. Diokles, by then, had drunk enough wine to blunt his shyness at drinking with men more prominent than he. He told a fine tale of shipwreck and rescue on the Lykian coast. Another man spoke of a brother who'd set off with Alexander and come back years later short an eye and three fingers on his right hand. Xanthos gave forth with an endless story that seemed to have no point whatsoever. Damophon told of ransoming his father, who'd been captured on a trading voyage by pirates from Crete.

And then it was Sostratos' turn. He rose. Dipping his head to Damophon, he said, "I don't think any man here would shed a tear if Crete sank into the sea, as the divine Platon says the island of Atlantis did in days gone by." No one contradicted him. Several men clapped their hands. He went on, "You meet Rhodians all over the Inner Sea. Menedemos and I ran into one on our journey to Great Hellas. Instead of making a long speech" - Xanthos wouldn't get the point of that, worse luck - "I was wondering if anyone here could tell me more about a soldier named Alexidamos son of Alexion."

Menedemos started to say something, then checked himself. Sostratos had only named Alexidamos; he hadn't told anyone what the mercenary had done, or even that he'd done anything. After stopping to think, Menedemos whispered, "Sly."

Sostratos bent down and whispered back: "You know me - I always want to find out."

"Alexidamos son of Alexion?" Damophon said. "A good-sized fellow a little older than you are, Sostratos, with a scar across his nose?"

"That's the man," Sostratos agreed, and didn't say anything about how he'd drastically revised Alexidamos' nose in Kallipolis.

"Alexion died five or six years ago," Damophon said. "I used to buy fish from him. Instead of taking his father's boat out, Alexidamos sold it and used the silver he got to buy his weapons. He said soldiering had to be an easier way to make a living than fishing. Where did you meet him?"

"Cape Tainaron," Sostratos answered. "We took him across to Italy. With all the wars in those parts, a soldier wouldn't have any trouble finding work."

From the couch Philodemos shared with Sostratos' father, he said, "With all the wars everywhere these days, a soldier has no trouble finding work."

"Wherever Alexidamos draws his drakhma a day and his rations, he'll likely lay his hands on more somehow or other," Damophon said. "His father was reliable, but I stopped buying from Alexidamos even before he sold the boat. He was the sort who'd drench yesterday's fish in seawater to make them look fresh. Any man can have that trick played on him once, but only a fool lets it happen twice." He glanced over to Sostratos. "Did he give you trouble?"

"Nothing we couldn't handle," Sostratos said, and Menedemos dipped his head.

When Sostratos reclined once more, Menedemos rose from the couch and said, "I'll give you the most famous return of all - Odysseus' return to Ithake, and to his own home town. Here's how Homer tells it:

\t'Then Odysseus of many wiles, answering him, said,

"I know. I understand. You order someone with discernment.

But let us go, and you lead all the way.

But give me, if you have one anywhere, a stick

On which to lean, since you said the road was rough."

He spoke, and flung his shabby pouch, full of holes,

Around his shoulder with a strap.

Then Eumaios gave him a staff that suited him.

The pair went off, but dogs and herdsmen stayed behind

To protect the farmhouse. He led the king to the city

In the guise of a wretched old beggarman

Leaning on his staff, and pitiful were the clothes on his back . . ..' "\t

Menedemos recited from the Odyssey for some time. As always, the ancient tale drew in all who listened to it, no matter how well everyone knew it. Even Sostratos, sophisticate though he was, found himself falling under Homer's spell. How does he do it? Sostratos wondered. The same question occurred to him whenever he read Herodotos or Thoukydides. They were all writers he, like most Hellenes, despaired of matching.

When Menedemos took his place on the couch once more, his father rose from the adjoining one. Sostratos hoped Philodemos might say something graceful about the return of the Aphrodite, but he didn't. Instead, he spoke of how the Rhodians had ousted the Macedonian garrison in the city after news of Alexander's death arrived, and "how we had our freedom restored to us, and nothing for a polis is more important than its freedom. May we keep it in the future as we regained it in the past."

He reclined again. The symposiasts clapped their hands, Sostratos among them - and Menedemos, too, he noted. Philodemos had struck an important chord, all the more important because Ptolemaios and Antigonos were fighting again. When giants clashed, how could a dwarf like Rhodes stay safe? That comparison made Sostratos smile.

Host and symposiarch, Lysistratos got to his feet last of all. "I'll be brief, for we've got people waiting in the courtyard," Sostratos' father said. "A voyage to Great Hellas is always a risk. I thank the gods that my son and my nephew and almost all the crew came home safe. That's the most important thing. You always have another chance if it's true, even if the business end of things didn't go so well. But when they not only sailed west but came back with one of the biggest profits an akatos ever brought home - well, my friends, all I can tell you is that I'm proud to be kin to both of them. Euge, Sostratos! Euge, Menedemos!"

"Euge!" the symposiasts shouted, and clapped their hands and raised their cups in salute. "Euge! Euge!"

"Thank you all," Sostratos said. "A man who deserves special praise is our bold keleustes Diokles there. You couldn't hope to find a better sailor. Euge, Diokles!"

"Euge!" the symposiasts echoed. Diokles' lined features wore the bashful, proud grin of a boy praised for his beauty for the first time.

"Now everybody here will try to hire him away from us," Menedemos said.

"Tell me he hasn't earned the chance," Sostratos said, and Menedemos only shrugged. He couldn't do it, and they both knew as much.

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.