Over the Wine Dark Sea

That was one of the first things that struck Sostratos about the place. The second didn't take much longer. 'Do you notice how nobody's smiling?' he said. 'Everybody has a frown on his face.'   'What is there to smile about?' Menedemos returned.'If you lived in a miserable little town in the middle of nowhere, how happy would you be? They probably wonder whether the barbarians will snap them up tomorrow or the day after.' Since he was bound to be right, Sostratos took that no further.   They had to ask their way to the agora. On their way there, they passed several parties of mercenary soldiers: some Hellenes, others Italians in ordinary enough helmets but wearing odd, almost triangular, cuirasses that, in Sostratos' view, didn't cover nearly enough of the chest. The mercenaries looked no more cheerful than the ordinary Kallipolitans.   Menedemos was never one to leave well enough alone. Pointed to the soldiers, he said, 'You see?'   And Sostratos had to admit, 'I see.'   The market square looked as if it had been bigger than it was. Buildings encroached on it from all sides, like weeds growing at the edge of a field. People buying and selling huddled together in the shadows the buildings cast. By the way merchants and customers kept glancing over their shoulders, they might have thought more buildings would spring up while they weren't looking.   'Fine wine from Khios! Transparent silk from Kos! Fragrant Rhodian perfume!' Menedemos' voice rang through the agora, echoing from the buildings that seemed to lean toward him from all the edges of the square. People stared, as if wondering who this loud stranger was. He certainly made more noise than half a dozen locals. 'By the dog of Egypt,' he murmured, 'I think they're all so many wraiths here, like the spirits of the dead in the Odyssey.'   'Fine wine and transparent silk will liven anyone up, if he gives them half a chance,' Sostratos observed.   Menedemos shot him a quizzical look. 'You can say that, when you want to hit me over the head with something whenever I go out and have a good time?'   'Yes, I say that,' Sostratos answered. 'I also say there's a time and a place for everything, and you haven't got the faintest notion of when and where.'   'I think you're just jealous and using fancy talk to hide it,' Menedemos said, and went back to crying their wares before Sostratos could do anything but let out an indignant, incoherent protest. Sostratos spent the next little while wondering whether his cousin had slandered him. He thought so, but he wasn't sure, and that worried him.   He didn't have long to worry undisturbed. In that rather subdued agora, Menedemos' brash, raucous shouts drew people far more readily than they would have, say, back at Rhodes. A tailor and a brothelkeeper almost got into a brawl over the length of silk Sostratos had brought from the Aphrodite. Only when Sostratos said, 'We have enough for both of you, best ones,' did they leave off glaring and snarling at each other. The brothelkeeper ended up buying some perfume, too, as Sostratos had hoped he might.   When a man in a fine chiton said, 'Will you let me taste some of this fine wine of yours?' both Sostratos and Menedemos paused in embarrassment. They hadn't hauled an amphora from the merchant galley to the market square. They'd talked about selling Ariousian in Kallipolis, but they hadn't really believed they would. And now their failure was hurting their chances.