But then Areios ran his fingers over the strings, and Menedemos stopped noticing anything but the music. Not only was his one of the most beautiful kitharas Menedemos had ever seen, it was also one of the most perfectly tuned he’d ever heard. Tuning the kithara—or its relatives, the lyre, the barbitos, and the phorminx—was anything but easy. Like anyone who’d been to school, Menedemos had learned to play the lyre . . . after a fashion.
The strings—four in a lyre, more in the other instruments—were attached to the sound box at the bottom by a string bar and bridge. Things were more complicated at the other end. The strings were wound around the crosspiece and held in place by a piece of hide cut from the neck of a cow or goat and rubbed with sticky grease to make them adhere to it. Menedemos remembered endless plucking, endless adjustments— and the schoolmaster’s stick coming down on his back when he couldn’t get the tone right no matter what. And even when he managed to persuade the strings to yield notes somewhere close to what they should have been, a little playing would put them out again. It was enough—more than enough—to drive anybody mad.
Here, though, the tones weren’t close to what they should have been. They were exactly right and seemed to pierce Menedemos’ very soul. “Pure as water from a mountain spring,” Sostratos whispered. Menedemos dipped his head, and then waved his cousin to silence. He didn’t want to hear anything but the music.
Areios played a little bit of everything, from the lyric poetry of the generations following Homer to the latest love songs out of Alexandria. Everything he did play had a slight sardonic edge to it. He chose Arkhilokhos’ old poem about throwing away his shield and leaving it for some Thracian to find. And the Alexandrian song was about a woman trying to bewitch her lover away from her rival—a boy.
At last, the kitharist struck one more perfect chord, bowed very low, said, “I thank you, most noble ones,” and left the stage.
Menedemos clapped till his palms were sore. He wasn’t the only one, either; a tremendous din of applause filled the tavern, enough to make his head ring. Cries of “Euge!” rang out from all sides.
“How is he next to Stratonikos?” Menedemos asked as they left the building.
“It’s been a while since I heard Stratonikos,” Sostratos replied, judicious as usual. “I think Areios is at least as good with the kithara itself—and I’ve never heard one better tuned—
“Yes, I thought the same thing myself,” Menedemos said.
Diokles dipped his head. “Me, too.”
“But Stratonikos, if I remember rightly, had a better voice,” Sostratos finished.
“I’m glad we went,” Menedemos said. He clapped the keleustes on the back. “Good thing you heard he was playing, Diokles—and I hope Nikokreon’s shade got himself an earful tonight.”
Sostratos wasn’t sorry to see Cyprus recede behind the Aphrodite’s goose--headed sternpost and the boat the akatos towed in her wake. He also was not eager to face Phoenicia or the land of the Ioudaioi. What he was was coldly furious at his brother--in--law. “When we get back to Rhodes,” he said, “I’m going to pour melted cheese and garlic over Damonax and fry him in his own olive oil. We’ll have plenty left to do the job, with some left over for the barley rolls we’ll serve with his polluted carcass.”
“You must be angry, if you’ve got the whole menu planned,” Menedemos said.
“Herodotos puts the Androphagoi far to the north of the Skythian plains, beyond a great desert,” Sostratos replied. “I wonder what he would have thought if he’d heard a Rhodian wanted to become a man--eater. “
“He’d probably wonder what wine went best with brother--in--law,” Menedemos said. “Something sweet and thick, I’d say.”
“Gods bless you, my dear,” Sostratos said, “for you’re the best man I’ve ever known when it comes to helping someone along with his mood, whatever it happens to be. I’m not surprised men often choose you symposiarch when they throw a drinking party—you’re the one to take them where they want to go.”
“Well, thank you, () best one,” Menedemos answered, raising his right hand from the steering--oar tiller to give Sostratos a salute. “I don’t know that anyone’s ever said anything kinder of me.”
“Now that I think about it,” Sostratos went on in musing tones, “that’s probably the same sort of knack that gets you so many girls, isn’t it?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it,” Menedemos said.
“Papai!” Sostratos exclaimed, now dismayed. He stared at his cousin, hardly believing what he’d heard. “Why not? Don’t you know what Sokrates said?—’The unexamined life is not worth living.’ He’s right.”
“I don’t know about that,” Menedemos said. “I’m usually too busy living my life to step back and take a look at it.”
“Then how do you know if you’re living well or not?”
Menedemos frowned. “If we go down this road, I’m going to get all tangled up. I can see that coming already.” He wagged a finger at Sostratos. “I can see you looking forward to it, too.”
“Who, me?” Sostratos said, not quite innocently enough, “Answer my question, if you please.”
“How do I know if I’m living well?” Menedemos echoed. Sostratos dipped his head. His cousin frowned in thought. “By whether I’m happy or not, I suppose.”
“Amazing, O marvelous one!” Sostratos said. Menedemos shot him a dirty look. Sostratos went on, “Could a dog or a goat speak, it would give the same answer. For a dog or a goat, it would be good enough, too. But for a man? No. Artaxerxes Okhos, the Great King of Persia, was happiest when he was killing people, and he killed a lot of them. Does that mean he lived well?”
“No, but killing people doesn’t make me happy.” Menedemos fixed Sostratos with a mild and speculative stare. “For certain people, I might make an exception.”
“You’re still talking around the question,” Sostratos said. “Just think, too: if you knew why you were so charming, you might get more women yet.”
That made Menedemos look sharply at him. Sostratos had thought it might. “Do you think so?” his cousin asked.
“I don’t see why it wouldn’t,” Sostratos replied. “An archer who knows what he’s doing is more likely to hit the target than one who just picks up the bow and lets fly, isn’t he?”
“Well, yes, I suppose so.” But Menedemos sounded suspicious. A moment later, he explained why: “I still think you’re trying to turn me into a philosopher behind my back.”
“Would I do such a thing?” Again, Sostratos sounded as innocent as he could.
He sounded so very innocent, in fact, that both Menedemos and Diokles burst out laughing. “Oh, no, my dear, not you,” Menedemos said. “No, indeed. Never you. The thought wouldn’t cross your mind.” He laughed some more, louder than ever,
“What I’d like to know,” Sostratos said with more than a little heat, “is what’s so dreadful about the notion that one man should want to persuade another to love wisdom and look for it, instead of just stumbling over it when he chances upon it or turning his back on it altogether. Can you tell me that?”
“Philosophy’s too much like work,” Menedemos said. “I’ve got real work to do, and I haven’t got the time to worry about becomingness or essences or any of that other philosophical nonsense that makes my head ache.”
“Do you have time to think about whether you’re doing the right thing, and why?” Sostratos asked. “Is anything more important than that?”
“Getting the Aphrodite to Phoenicia and not sinking on the way,” his cousin suggested.
“You’re being troublesome on purpose,” Sostratos said. Menedemos grinned at him. Sostratos went on, “Yes, you want to survive. Any living thing wants to survive. But when you get to Phoenicia, will you do good or evil?”
“Good to my friends, evil to my enemies,” Menedemos replied at once.
Any Hellene who answered without thinking was likely to say something much like that. Sostratos tossed his head. “I’m sorry
, my dear, but what was good enough for Homer’s heroes isn’t any more.”
“And why not?” Menedemos demanded. “If anybody does me a bad turn, I’ll give him a knee in the balls first chance I get.”
“What happens then? He’ll give you one back, or his friends will.”
“And then I’ll get my own back, or I’ll have a friend help me against his friend,” Menedemos said.
“And your faction fight will go on for years, maybe for generations,” Sostratos said. “How many poleis have been ruined by feuds like that? How many wars between poleis have started through feuds like that? By the gods, if the poleis of Hellas hadn’t spent their time fighting amongst themselves, could the Macedonians have beaten them?”
He thought that was an invincible argument. But Menedemos said, “Ha! Now I’ve got you!”
“You do not!”
“I do so.” His cousin leered at him. “For one thing, the Macedonians fight amongst themselves, too, even worse than regular Hellenes, Go ahead—tell me I’m wrong. I dare you.” He waited. Sostratos stood silent. He couldn’t disagree. “Ha!” Menedemos said again. “And, for another, if Philip of Macedon hadn’t whipped the Hellenes into line, and if Alexander hadn’t come along right afterwards, who’d be running Phoenicia now? The Great King of Persia, that’s who. So I say hurrah for feuds, I do.”
Sostratos stared at him, then started to laugh, “huge!” he exclaimed. “That’s the best bit of bad argument I think I’ve ever heard. Some people learn to argue from Platon and what he says of Sokrates. You took your model from Aristophanes’ Clouds.”
“Bad Logic there, you mean?” Menedemos asked, and Sostratos dipped his head. Not a bit abashed, Menedemos made as if to bow. “Bad Logic won, remember. Good Logic gave up and went over to the other side. And it looks like I’ve out-argued you.”
He waited to see whether Sostratos would challenge that. Sostratos didn’t, but gave back the same sort of bow he’d got. “Every once in a while, I surprise you when we wrestle in the gymnasion.” He towered over his cousin, but Menedemos was quicker and stronger and more agile. “Every once in a while, I suppose you can surprise me when we aim winged words at each other.”
“Winged words?” Menedemos echoed. “You knew the Aristophanes, and now you’re quoting Homer. By the dog, which of us is which?”
“Oh, no, you don’t. You won’t get away with that, you rascal. If you say you’re me and I’m you, you get out of the oath you gave me in Salamis.”
They both laughed. Menedemos said, “Well, it wouldn’t be hard for you to keep. You don’t go looking to sleep with other men’s wives anyhow.”
“I should hope not,” Sostratos answered. “But you can’t be me, because you didn’t spend all that time over the winter learning Aramaic.”
“I’m glad I didn’t, too. You sound like you’re choking to death every time you speak it.” Menedemos put on a horrible Phoenician accent: “Dis iz vat joo zound lige.”
“I hope not,” Sostratos said.
“Go ahead and hope. You still do.”
They kept on chaffing each other as Menedemos sailed the Aphrodite southeast. Going due east from Salamis would have shortened their journey across the Inner Sea, but then they would have had to crawl south along the Phoenician coast to get to Sidon, the city from which Sostratos wanted to set out and explore the interior. At this season of the year, with the sun hot and bright and the sea calm, the risk seemed worth taking.
Sostratos looked back toward Salamis. Already, the coast of Cyprus was no more than a low line on the horizon. The akatos would be out of sight of land for three days, maybe four, on the way to Phoenicia. Except for the journey south from Hellas and the islands of the Aegean to Alexandria, it was the longest journey over the open sea a ship was likely to have to make.
“I wouldn’t want to do this in a round ship,” Sostratos said. “Suppose you got halfway across and the wind died? Sitting out there, bobbing in the middle of nothing, hoping you wouldn’t run out of water and wine . . .” He tossed his head. “No, thanks.”
“That wouldn’t be much fun,” Menedemos agreed. “I don’t like the idea of riding out a storm out of sight of land, either. When that happened on the way west from Hellas to Italy a couple of years ago, we were lucky to make as good a landfall as we did.”
“There ought to be a better way to navigate out on the open sea,” Sostratos said. “Sun and stars, wind and waves, just aren’t enough. Ships that set out for Alexandria can end up almost anywhere along the Egyptian coast, in the Delta or in the desert to the west, and then have to beat their way back.”
“I won’t say you’re wrong, because you’re right,” Menedemos replied. “But how would you do such a thing? What else is there but sun and stars, wind and waves?”
“I don’t know,” Sostratos said fretfully. He’d feared Menedemos would ask him that, for he had no answer to give. “Maybe there’s something, though. After all, T don’t suppose the very first sailors knew enough to cast a line down to the seabed so the lead’s hollow bottom, full of tallow, would bring up sand or marl that helped tell them where they were.”
“That’s . . . probably true,” Menedemos said, “I don’t remember Homer talking about sounding leads in the Iliad or the Odyssey, and resourceful Odysseus would surely have used one if he’d known about it.”
“Herodotos does mention them, so they’ve been known for more than a hundred years,” Sostratos said. “Sometime between the Trojan War and the Persian Wars, some clever fellow figured that out. I wonder who. I wonder when. I wish I knew. That’s a man whose name deserves to live. I wonder if he was a Hellene or a Phoenician or a gods--detested Lykian pirate. I don’t suppose anyone will ever know for certain.”
His cousin gave him an odd look, “It hadn’t even occurred to me that the fellow who came up with the lead could have been anything but a Hellene.”
“We’ve borrowed all sorts of things,” Sostratos said. “The Phoenicians gave us the alpha--beta. Theirs is older than ours, and you should have heard Himilkon go on and on about how they’re happy with it just the way it is. The Lydians were the first ones to mint real coins, or so Herodotos says—before that, everybody had to weigh out scrap gold and silver. And even Dionysos is supposed to come from out of the distant east, so maybe we learned to make wine from barbarians, too.”
“Wherever we learned it, it’s a good thing we did,” Menedemos said. “I wouldn’t want to spend my whole life drinking water. Or it could be even worse than that. We could drink milk the way the Thracians and the Skythians do.” He made a revolted face, sticking out his tongue like a Gorgon painted on the facing of a hoplite’s shield.
“That would be dreadful.” Sostratos made a nasty face of his own. “Cheese is all very well—cheese is better than all very well, as a matter of fact—but milk?” He tossed his head. “No, thanks.”
“We found out the Syrians don’t fancy seafood, remember,” Menedemos said. “Now that’s ignorance, nothing else but,”
“Of course it is,” Sostratos said. “And that strange god the Ioudaioi worship won’t let them eat pork.” He sent his cousin a warning look. “You’re going to start talking about Pythagoreans and beans and farting again, aren’t you? Don’t.”
“I wasn’t going to do any such thing,” Menedemos insisted. Sostratos didn’t believe him for a moment. But then his cousin went on, “What I was going to do was tell you there’s a little tiny island between Lesbos and the Anatolian mainland that’s called Pordoselene.”
“What? Fartmoon?” Sostratos exclaimed. “I don’t believe it,”
“Apollo smite me if I lie,” Menedemos said solemnly. “It even has a polls of the same name. And there’s another island, even smaller, also called Pordoselene, in front of the polis, and that island has a temple to Apollo on it.”
“Fartmoon,” Sostratos said again, and shrugged in bemusement. ‘‘We’re not even out of sight of land yet, but we’re already getting ... peculiar. By the tim
e we spy the Phoenician coast, I expect we’ll all be raving mad.” He sounded as if he was looking forward to it.
5
“Ship ho!” Aristeidas called from the Aphrodite’s small foredeck. He pointed. “Ship off the starboard bow!”
Menedemos peered in that direction. “I don’t see a sail,” he said, but swung the merchant galley a little to the south anyway. Over the past couple of years, he’d come to rely on Aristeidas’ eyesight.
“No sail, skipper,” the lookout said. “There’s the hull—do you see it? Fishing boat, I’d guess.”
“Ah.” Menedemos had been looking for the wrong thing. As soon as Aristeidas told him what he ought to see, he spotted it. “We’ll come up to him, and he can tell us just where we are.”
The coastline of Phoenicia had come into view a little while before: a low, dark smudge of land rising up out of the endless blue flatness of the waters of the Inner Sea. Had Menedemos sighted land in Hellas, he wouldn’t have needed to figure out where he was. But neither he nor anyone else aboard the akatos had ever come so far east before; the silhouettes of the hills against the sky didn’t tell him where the ship was, as they would have in lands he’d already visited.
“He’s making sail, skipper,” Aristeidas called, and Menedemos dipped his head—he saw the pale square of linen coming down from the yard, too. The lookout added, “He must think we’ve got a pirate ship. A lot of these little boats do.”
“Well, we’ll keep after him anyhow,” Menedemos said. “We’d make a pretty sorry excuse for a pirate if we couldn’t catch up with a tubby scow like that, now wouldn’t we?” He raised his voice: “Sostratos!”
Sacred Land Page 15
