rocky islands off Kapreai are the ones where the Sirens lived.' 'They say all sorts of strange things,' Sostratos answered. 'Do you believe them?' 'I don't know,' Menedemos said. 'I truly don't. There was the whirlpool off Messene, right where Skylle was supposed to be.' 'Yes, there was the whirlpool,' his cousin said, 'but where was the horrible monster sucking in the water to make it? Did you see her? Has anyone since Odysseus heard the Sirens singing on those rocks off Kapreai?' 'I don't know any of that, either,' Menedemos said, a little testily. 'But if anyone did hear the Sirens singing, they'd lure him to his doom, so how could he come back and say what he heard?' He smiled a smug smile. But Sostratos wouldn't let him get away with it. 'Odysseus figured out a way to do it. With Homer known wherever Hellenes live, don't you suppose some other bold fellow would have put wax in his sailors' ears so he could listen to the song the hero heard?' 'Maybe.' Menedemos gave Sostratos a sour look. 'Sometimes when you take things to pieces, you take all the fun out of them.' 'No.' Sostratos tossed his head in emphatic disagreement. 'Taking things to pieces is the fun. If you leave them sitting there the way they were when you found them, what have you learned? Nothing.' 'Why do you have to learn something all the time?' Menedemos asked. 'Why can't something be interesting just because it is what it is?' 'If everyone thought that way, we'd still be sailing pentekonters and swinging bronze swords, the way the men of the Iliad and Odyssey did,' Sostratos said. 'How do you know that's what they did?' Menedemos said. 'You call the Odyssey nonsense when it suits you, so why do you choose to believe that?' Sostratos opened his mouth, then closed it again. When at last he did speak, it was in thoughtful tones: 'Do you know, I never once wondered about it. The strange pieces are those that seem the hardest to believe, not the homely little details of the heroes' world. We know pentekonters and bronze - we don't know Sirens and Skylle.' 'Well, then, you believe what you want to believe and I'll believe what I want to believe, and we'll both be happy,' Menedemos said. Sostratos did not look happy about that, but Menedemos didn't worry about it. He'd distracted his cousin, which served almost as well as convincing him, especially since he could cut the conversation short right after that by adding, 'I believe we're just about to Pompaia, and I'm going to pay attention to that.' He had to pay more attention to it than he'd expected, for Pompaia lay not on the coast of the Tyrrhenian Sea, as Leptines had led him to believe, but a few stadia up the Sarnos River, on the northern side of the stream. Soldiers - presumably Samnites - peered down at him from the wall as his rowers guided the Aphrodite into place at one of the piers thrusting out into the stream. As a couple of locals tied the akatos to it quay, Sostratos pointed north. 'Look. That mountain there in back of the town has a good deal of the look of Aitne to it, doesn't
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