Menedemos shrugged. 'If your fancy philosophers would want to listen, I'd fill their ears for them. This is what I know, and I'm good at it.' Like any Hellene, he was justly proud of the things he was good at, and wanted everyone else to know about them, too. 'And because you know these things so well, do you think you know others every bit as well?' Sostratos asked. 'What's that supposed to mean?' Menedemos gave him a suspicious stare. 'When you start asking that kind of question, you're trying to lure me into philosophy myself, and I don't care to play.' 'All right, I'll stop,' Sostratos said agreeably. 'But when Sokrates was defending himself in Athens, he talked about artisans who knew their own trade and thought they knew everything on account of that.' 'And the Athenians fed him hemlock, too - even I know that much,' Menedemos said. 'So maybe he should have found something else to talk about.' For some reason - Menedemos couldn't fathom why - that seemed to wound his cousin, who subsided into sulky silence. Menedemos gave his full attention back to the Aphrodite. Getting the most from both sails and oars was a subtle art, one most merchant captains with their tubby roundships didn't have to worry about. He let the wind on the quarter drive the akatos westward, while using half the rowers - the others rested at their oars - to head the ram at her bow north as well, toward the little island of Syme. As the island seemed to rise up out of the sea. Diokles pointed toward it and said, 'Miserable little place. Not enough water, not enough decent land for it to amount to anything.' 'Well, you're not wrong,' Menedemos said. 'If it weren't for sponges, nobody would remember the place was here.' That brought Sostratos out of his funk. He tossed his head, saying, 'Thoukydides talks about the sea-fight between the Athenians and the Spartans off Syme and the trophy the Spartans set up there in the last book of his history. That makes the island, like the history itself, a possession for all time.' He slid from Doric to old-fashioned Attic for the last few words; Menedemos presumed he was quoting his pet historian. Hearing Sostratos quote Thoukydides, though, jogged his own memory, and he quoted, too, from Homer: ' 'Nireus led three ships from Syme - Nireus son of King Kharopoios by Aglaie, Nireus, who was the handsomest man who came under Ilion Of the other Danaans except the illustrious son of Peleus, But he was not a powerful man, and only a small host followed him.' So even in those days, Syme was nothing much.' 'You know the Iliad even better than I thought you did, if you can recite from the Catalogue of Ships in Book Two,' Sostratos said.
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