Sostratos started to answer, then checked himself. At last, after a long pause, he said, “That makes good logical sense. I try to be a logical man. Therefore, it should make me feel better. Somehow, though, it doesn’t, or not very much.”
“You mind if I say something, young sir?” Diokles asked, not missing a beat as he gave out the stroke.
“Please,” Sostratos said.
“I’m no philosopher, so maybe I’ve got it all wrong,” the oarmaster said. “If I do, I expect you’ll tell me. But it seems to me this logic stuff is only good for what you’ve got in your head, if you know what I mean. When it comes to what’s in your heart and your belly and your balls, logic goes out the window like a full pisspot.”
“Much truth in that,” Menedemos said.
“Some truth in it, certainly-but only some, I think,” Sostratos said. “If we don’t use reason to rule our passions, though, what are we but so many wild beasts?” He didn’t add, or so many adulterers, as he probably would have before meeting that Ioudaian innkeeper’s wife. That’s something, Menedemos thought.
“No doubt you’re right,” Diokles said. “But I don’t reckon we can rule everything all the time. We wouldn’t be people if we could.”
“We should be able to,” Sostratos said stubbornly.
“That’s not what Diokles said, and you know it,” Menedemos said.
His cousin sighed. “So it isn’t.” Sostratos looked out to sea, as if he’d had enough of the argument.
Menedemos looked out to sea, too, for different reasons. With the overcast and the spatters of rain, all he had to gauge direction were the waves and the breeze. He couldn’t find the sun, and neither Lesbos nor Psyra rose above his contracted horizon. He hated sailing under conditions like these. Navigation was somewhere between a guess and a bad joke. If the sea had been calm, he could have sailed in circles and never known it. He wasn’t doing that now-he was pretty sure he wasn’t, anyhow-but he hoped he wasn’t veering too far to the west or south. The one would only take him out of his way. The other might cause a meeting he didn’t want with Psyra or even Khios.
“What do you think of our course?” he asked Diokles.
The oarmaster checked the breeze with a spit-wet finger, then looked over the side-the sea, reflecting the gray of the sky, was anything but wine-dark today-to eye the waves. “Feels about right to me, skipper,” he replied at last. “Can’t say much more than that, not with the weather the way it is. Soon as it clears out, or soon as we get close to land, we’ll know where we’re at.”
“That’s true,” Menedemos said. “What I don’t want is to get too close to land too soon, if you follow me.”
“Oh, yes.” Diokles dipped his head. “Grounding a galley to dry out her timbers is all very well, if she’s not too heavily laden to get her afloat again afterwards. But going aground when you don’t want to, or ripping out her belly on a rock you never saw-that’s a whole different business.”
“Yes.” Menedemos wondered what his father would say if he wrecked the Aphrodite. Actually, he didn’t wonder-he knew, at least in broad outline. In something like that, the small details were unlikely to matter.
He tried to look every which way at once: dead ahead; to port and to starboard; astern past the boat, which bobbed in the chop behind the akatos. No suddenly looming land. No piratical pentekonter driving out of the mist and straight toward the Aphrodite. No trouble anywhere. He worried all the same.
When he said that out loud, Diokles dipped his head again. “A good thing you do, too. You’re the skipper. Worrying’s your job. Gods protect me from a captain who doesn’t.”
Sostratos spent a lot of time doing lookout duty up on the Aphrodite’s cramped foredeck. Part of that was expiation for Aristeidas, the best lookout he’d ever known. Part of it was a sensible desire to keep the merchant galley safe, combined with the knowledge that a toikharkhos was just cargo-or, more likely, ballast-as long as she sailed on the open sea. And part of it was the chance to watch birds and fish and other creatures at the same time as he was doing something useful.
Flying fishes leaped from the water and glided through the air before returning to their proper element. A black-capped tern folded its wings, dove into the Aegean, and came out with a silvery fish writhing in its beak. The flying fishes had most likely gone from water to air to keep from becoming prey. The tern had gone from air to water to turn fish into prey.
It didn’t get to enjoy its catch. A gull chased it and made it drop the sprat before it could gulp it down. Moskhion had come up to the fore-deck to check the forestay. He pointed at the gull, which grabbed the stunned fish from the surface of the sea and greedily gobbled it up. “Might as well be a Macedonian.”
“Why?” Sostratos said. “Because he’d sooner live off the work of others than work himself? Me, I was thinking of him as a pirate.”
“Six oboloi to the drakhma either way, young sir,” Moskhion answered. Dolphins leaped from the water and then dove back in with hardly a splash. The former sponge diver’s face showed unalloyed pleasure as he pointed to them. “I love dolphins. I think they’re the most beautiful fish there are.”
“I love dolphins, too. What seafaring man doesn’t?” Sostratos said. “And they are beautiful, no doubt about it. But they’re not fish.”
“What?” Moskhion scratched his head. “What are they, then? Cabbages?” He laughed at his own wit.
Smiling, Sostratos said, “They’re no more cabbages than they are fish.”
The sailor started to laugh again, but the mirth faded from his face as he studied Sostratos’. Moskhion frowned. Some men, when they heard an opinion they’d never met before, wanted nothing more than to wipe it from the face of the earth. So the Athenians served Sokrates, Sostratos thought. Moskhion wasn’t of that school-not quite. But he wasn’t far removed from it, either. He said, “Why, what else can dolphins be but fish? They live in the sea, don’t they? They haven’t got any legs, do they? If that doesn’t make ‘em fish, what does?”
“Being like other fish would make them fish,” Sostratos said. “But as my teacher’s teacher, a lover of wisdom named Aristoteles, pointed out, they aren’t like other fish. That means they have to be some different kind of creature.”
“What do you mean, they aren’t?” Moskhion demanded. “I just showed you how they were, didn’t I?”
“Seaweed lives in the sea and hasn’t got any legs,” Sostratos said. “Does that make it a fish?”
“Seaweed?” As if humoring a madman, Moskhion said, “Seaweed doesn’t look like a fish, young sir. Dolphins do.”
“A statue may look like a man, but is a statue a man? If you ask a statue to lend you a drakhma, will it?”
“No, but half the men I know won’t, either,” Moskhion retorted, and Sostratos had to laugh. The sailor went on, “How is a dolphin different than a fish? Just tell me that, if you please.”
“I can think of two important ways,” Sostratos answered. “You must know that, if you keep a dolphin in the sea and don’t let it come up for air, it will drown. Any fisherman who’s caught one in a net will tell you that. And dolphins bring forth their young alive, the way goats and horses do. They don’t lay eggs like fish.”
Moskhion pursed his lips and scratched at the corner of his jaw. “They’re funny fish, then. You’re right about that much, I expect. But they’re still fish.” He went down from the foredeck into the waist of the ship.
Sostratos stared after him. The sailor had asked for reasons why dolphins weren’t like fish. He’d given them. What had it got him? Nothing-not a single, solitary thing. “Funny fish,” he muttered. Sokrates had crossed his mind a little while before. Now the Athenian sage did again; Sostratos thought, If he had to deal with people like that, no wonder he drank hemlock. It must have seemed a relief.
Moskhion hadn’t been rude or abusive. He’d even gone through the forms of reasoned argument. He’d gone through them… and then ignored them when they produced a result he didn’t like. As far as Sostratos was concerned, that was worse than refusing to argue at all.