Sostratos considered that. 'Well, maybe you're right.' Diokles pounded his bronze square with his mallet hard enough to make a lot of the Aphrodite's sailors wince as the merchant galley left the harbor of Kallipolis. Menedemos leaned forward toward his crapulous crew and favored them with the smile of a man who'd stayed sober. 'Next stop, boys, is Hellas,' he said. He got a few answering smiles. He also got a few answering groans. Diokles said, 'Some of 'em don't want to live long enough to get to Hellas.' 'But they all will by this afternoon,' Menedemos replied. 'Hangovers don't kill you. You just wish they would.' Sostratos mounted to the poop deck. 'And how shall we go back to Rhodes?' he asked. 'Around Cape Tainaron again, or by the diolkos across the Isthmus of Corinth?' 'I don't know yet,' Menedemos answered. 'We have a good notion of the risks at Cape Tainaron. But who knows what's happened in and around Corinth while we've been out here in Great Hellas? How can we guess whether we should use the diolkos till we know who controls the polis?' 'Hmmm,' Sostratos said, and then, 'You've got something there, no doubt about it.' 'Nice of you to admit it,' Menedemos said. His cousin made a face at him. Ignoring it, he went on, 'We can put in at Korkyra and hear the news there before we decide what to do.' 'You're not going to sail southeast toward Zakynthos and reverse the way we came?' 'No. It's getting late in the sailing season for me to want to chance so much time on the open sea,' Menedemos answered. 'The cranes will be flying south for the winter pretty soon, and not many people want to do much on the water after that. How did Aristophanes put it in the Birds?' 'I don't know. How did he put it?' Sostratos said. 'If you remember it, it was probably foul.' 'That's not fair,' Menedemos said indignantly. 'Aristophanes could write lovely verses about anything at all.' 'Or sometimes about nothing at all,' Sostratos said. 'Not here,' Menedemos said. 'It goes something like this: 'Time to sow when the croaking crane migrates to Libya Which tells the shipmaster to lie idle after hanging up his steering oar.' ' 'Well, all right. That isn't bad,' Sostratos allowed.
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