“Wasted? I should say not, O marvelous one.” Menedemos held up the two sacks of coins he'd got from Kallimedes son of Kallias. “Do you see these? Which do you suppose is more important to me, the business I did here or your paltry fare?”
“Paltry?” Dionysios said. “You've got your nerve, calling it that.”
“Next to this, it is,” Menedemos said. “You'll get to Kos soon enough, but you're out of your mind if you think I won't do business along the way.”
“And you're out of your mind if you think we didn't need fresh water,” Sostratos added. “We're not going to have our rowers fall over dead from working the oars too hard in this heat.”
Dionysios looked back toward Cape Sounion, whose headland was still plainly visible in the west. “I could have swum this far,” he grumbled.
“If you keep complaining, you will swim from here on out,” Menedemos said, no trace of smile on his face. That got through to the passenger, who fell silent.
The following day dawned as hot and bright as the one before. The breeze that came up from the south might have blown from a smithy's furnace. But it was a breeze; Menedemos ordered the akatos' sail lowered from the yard. By the time the sun came up over the eastern horizon, the Aphrodite had left Keos behind.
“Are you going to make Syros tonight?” Sostratos asked.
“I'm going to try,” Menedemos answered. “If the wind holds, we shouldn't have any trouble.”
“And if we don't run into pirates,” his cousin added. Menedemos spat into the bosom of his tunic. After a moment, Sostratos did the same. He went on, “Shall I pass out the weapons again, just in case?”
“Maybe you'd better,” Menedemos said with a sigh.
They saw no pirate galleys on the Aegean, only fishing boats and one round ship that took the Aphrodite for a pirate and sped away, running before the wind. Syros rose from the sea ahead of them: a sun-baked island much longer from north to south than from east to west. The only polis on the island, also called Syros, lay by a bay on the eastern coast; Menedemos brought the Aphrodite down from the north into the harbor.
He quoted from the Odyssey as the akatos' anchors splashed into the Aegean:
“That's Eumaios the swineherd talking to Odysseus, isn't it?” Sostratos asked.
“Yes, that's right,” Menedemos said.
Sostratos took a long look at Syros, then clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Well, if Eumaios was telling as much truth about his ancestors as he was about the island, he must have been a pig-keeper from a long line of pigkeepers.”
“Scoffer!” Menedemos said, deliciously scandalized. But, the more he eyed the dry, barren landscape beyond the steeply rising streets of the polis of Syros, the more he realized Sostratos had a point: he saw not a tree, hardly even a bush. Still, he went on, “It must grow something, or no one would live here.”
“I suppose so,” Sostratos said grudgingly. “All the same, this is one of those places that prove Homer was a blind poet.” He pointed ahead. “Even the polis is a miserable little dump. Herodotos never says a word about it, and neither does Thoukydides. I see why not, too.”
“Why should they?” Menedemos said. “Nothing much happens here.”
“That's what I mean,” Sostratos said. “You could live out your life in this polis. You could be as big a man here as that Kallimedes son of Kallias was back on Keos, and nobody who's not from Syros would ever hear of you, any more than we'd heard of Kallimedes. In Rhodes or Athens or Taras or Syracuse or Alexandria, at least you have a chance to be remembered. Here?” He tossed his head.
Menedemos wondered if bright young men, ambitious young men, left Syros and crossed the sea to some other polis where they could seek their heart's desire. He supposed some had to. But most, surely, lived out their lives within a few stadia of where they were born. All through the civilized world, most people did.
The heat wave broke that night. The northerly breeze that blew the next morning had a distinct nip to it, a warning that autumn, even if it hadn't got here yet, would come. Menedemos enjoyed that, but he enjoyed its steadiness even more. “Now we'll show that son of a whore what the Aphrodite can do,” he muttered, dipping a chunk of bread into olive oil and taking a big bite.
“If the wind holds, we'll make Naxos easy as you please,” Diokles agreed, “and that's a pretty fair day's run.”
Wind thrummed in the rigging and quickly filled the sail when Menedemos ordered it lowered. The merchant galley seemed to lean forward, letting that wind pull her along. Naxos lay at the heart of Antigonos' Island League. With malice aforethought, Menedemos asked Dionysios son of Herakleitos, “When we get there, shall we tell the Naxians how eager you are to go on to Kos?”
The passenger's eyes were cool as marble. “Tell them anything you please, O best one. It's all the same to me.” He was probably lying about that, but he'd made his point, and Menedemos stopped twitting him.
From Naxos to Amorgos the next day was an even better run. Menedemos steered past several little islands that housed a few shepherds and fishermen. He'd almost gone aground on one of them in the rain on his last trip through the Kyklades, with Polemaios aboard. No danger of that here; not with the weather fine and sunny, but he did have to do several usual days' worth of steering before he left them astern. Sostratos said, “Any one of those horrid little rocks makes Syros look like Athens.”
“And if that's not a frightening thought, Furies take me if I know what would be,” Menedemos replied.
He took the Aphrodite south and west again the following day, to Astypalaia, where they spoke Doric Greek like his own rather than Ionic. A great many fishing boats bobbed in the offshore waters; a fertile valley stretched behind the polis, which lay in the southeastern part of the island.
“One more place where nobody ever made a name for himself,” Menedemos said.
To his surprise, Sostratos tossed his head. “Don't you know the story of Kleomedes of Astypalaia?” he asked.
“Can't say that I do,” Menedemos admitted. “Who was he?”
“A pankratiast, back around the time of the Persian Wars,” Sostratos answered. “He would have won at the Olympic Games, but he killed his foe in the all-out fight and got disqualified. He must have gone mad with grief after that. He came back to Astypalaia and pulled down a pillar that held up the roof for a boys' school—fifty or sixty people died. He fled to Athena's temple and hid in a wooden chest there, but when the Astypalaians broke it open he wasn't inside, either: not alive, not dead, just. . . gone.”
Menedemos felt the hair at the back of his neck try to prickle up in awe and dread. “What happened then?” he asked.
“They sent to Delphi to find out what they should do, and the verse they got back was,