Over the Wine Dark Sea

'Khian's a lot stronger than honey, too,' Sostratos observed. 'Those are vintages you need to drink well-watered.'   With a snort, Menedemos said, 'Those are vintages you can drink well-watered, my dear cousin. Me, I like to have some fun every so often.'   Sostratos sighed. 'I like drinking wine. I don't like swilling it down neat like a barbarian. I don't like getting drunk and breaking things and getting into fights.' He was, or at least tried to be, moderate. All the philosophers maintained that moderation was a virtue. By the look on Menedemos' face, he reckoned it not only a vice but a nasty vice at that. Sostratos sighed again. His cousin had all the noteworthy good traits: he was handsome, outgoing, strong, nimble. He could as easily sing a song as guide a ship through a gale without showing fear.   And what about you? Sostratos asked himself. He shrugged. Nobody'd ever written Sostratos is beautiful on the walls when he was a youth. He wasn't a bad haggler, but he got what bargains he got with reason and patience, not by making people like him and go easy or by persuading them black was white. He towered over Menedemos, but his cousin always threw him when they stripped off their clothes and wrestled in the gymnasion.   I have a good prose style. Theophrastos told me that himself, up in Athens, and he doles out even less praise than Aristoteles did when he headed the Lykeion. Everyone says so. I remember what I read, too. And I've always been clever -  better than clever, really -  with numbers.   It didn't seem enough. Even with moderation and reliability thrown in, it didn't seem enough. Sostratos shrugged again. I can't be Menedemos. I am what the gods made me. I have to make the most of what they gave me.   His cousin laughed and pointed. 'Look, Sostratos. It really is getting on toward spring. There's a gecko on a wall.'   Sure enough, a gray-brown lizard clung to the gray-brown mud brick of a poor man's house. It walked up the wall as easily as a fly might have done, and snapped up a bug before the insect knew it was there.   Half a block past the house with the gecko, they turned right so as to go north. That was the only turn they'd have to make till they got to their homes. Sostratos said, 'Gods be praised, Rhodes is laid out on a grid, the way Peiraieus is up in Attica. Anyone can find his way around here or in Athens' harbor. Athens itself?' He tossed his head. 'You have to be born there to know where you're going, and even the Athenians aren't sure half the time. Hippodamos of Miletos was a man of godlike wit.'   'I never much thought about it,' Menedemos confessed. 'But most towns are pretty bad, aren't they? You can't get from the harbor to an inn a bowshot away without asking directions three different times, on account of the streets go wherever they please, not where you need 'em to.'   'Of course,' Sostratos said musingly, 'Peiraieus and Rhodes are new cities; they could be planned. It's what, two years shy of a century since Rhodes was founded? A town that's been there since before the fall of Troy, the streets probably follow the way the cows used to wander.'   'Homer doesn't say anything about whether Troy was laid out in a grid,' Menedemos said. He paused to eye a slave woman carrying a jar of water back to her house. 'Hello, sweetheart!' he called. The slave kept walking, but she smiled back at Menedemos.   Sostratos sighed. If