Over the Wine Dark Sea

  'Well, I am.' Menedemos looked up the pier toward the dark, jumbled mass of houses and shops and temples that made up Kroton.   'Expecting Hipparinos with an army of ruffians at his back?' Sostratos asked.   'An army of ruffians and a Kastorian hound with a taste for peafowl.' Menedemos' tone was light, but Sostratos didn't think he he was joking. And, sure enough, he started shaking sailors awake. 'Come on, boys,' he said. 'The sooner we're on the open sea again, the better.'   'Says who?' a sleepy man asked around a yawn.   'Says your captain, that's who,' Menedemos answered.   'And your toikharkhos,' Sostratos added, throwing his obolos of authority after Menedemos' drakhma.   Diokles sat up straight on the rower's bench where he'd slept. 'And your keleustes,' he said. Formally, his rank was lower than Sostratos'. Among the sailors, though, his word carried more weight.   Hipparinos had not made an appearance, with or without bravos, by the time the Aphrodite left Kroton. 'Many good-byes to the town, and to the crows with him and his hungry hound both,' Menedemos said.   The wind kept backing and shifting, coming now from the north, now from the northwest. When it blew from the northwest, the Aphrodite could sail quite handily, but whenever it swung back toward the north Menedemos had to tack, zigzagging his course with the akatos taking the wind first on one bow and then swinging about to take it on the other. Grunting sailors heaved the yard round till it ran from bow to quarter and slanted toward the breeze. It was a slow business, and a miserably inexact one when it came to setting a course.   'Here's hoping we can find Kallipolis when we get in the neighborhood,' Sostratos said.   'As long as I head northeast, I'll strike the mainland somewhere,' Menedemos said. 'Then we can feel our way along the coast till we come to the island.'   'There ought to be a way to navigate more surely,' Sostratos said. 'The only trouble is, I don't know what it would be.'   'If you did, you'd get rich enough to make Kroisos look like a piker,' Menedemos said. 'Every captain in the world would buy whatever you had.'   'Buy it or try to steal it.' Sostratos pointed north. 'Here come those clouds.'   'I think they're finally done fooling around,' Menedemos said unhappily. 'When they cover the sun, I'll have even less idea of just where we're going -  one more drawback to sailing out of sight of land.'   'That storm almost sank us the last time you did it,' Sostratos said. 'I wonder if you