'I suppose so,' Menedemos said with a shrug. 'Sounds like philosophy to me, though.' 'Maybe you don't want to know anything more, either,' Sostratos said, which left Menedemos feeling obscurely punctured. When the sun rose the next morning, he shouted his men awake. 'Let's get the Aphrodite back into the sea,' he called. 'If we push hard, we make Samos tonight. Wouldn't you sooner do that than sleep on the sand again?' 'After that Koan inn, I think I'd just as soon stay on the beach,' Sostratos said. 'Fewer bugs.' 'Don't think about bugs,' Menedemos said. 'Think about wineshops. Think about pretty girls.' He lowered his voice. 'Think about making the men want to work hard, not about giving them reasons to take it easy.' 'Oh.' Sostratos had the grace to sound abashed. 'I'm sorry.' He made a splendid toikharkhos. He always knew where everything was and what everything was worth. He'd done well in the dicker with Xenophanes. When the old coot got mulish, he'd picked the right time to get mulish in return. But ask him to be a man among men, to understand how an ordinary fellow thought . . . Menedemos tossed his head. His cousin didn't have it in him, any more than a team of donkeys had it in them to win the chariot race at Olympos. With men in the boat pulling and men on land pushing, the Aphrodite went back into the Aegean more readily than she had after beaching on Syme. Menedemos steered the akatos north and a little east, toward Samos. He wished the wind would swing round and come out of the south so he could lower the sail, but it didn't. Through most of the sailing season, winds in the Aegean would stay boreal. 'Rhyppapai! Rhyppapai!' Diokles called, amplifying the stroke he gave with mallet and bronze. Menedemos had ten men on the oars on each side of the galley. He planned on shifting rowers when the sun swung past noon, and on putting the whole crew on the oars if he was close to making Samos in the late afternoon. If not . . . Sostratos asked, 'What will you do if we come up short?' 'We have choices,' Menedemos replied. 'We could head for Priene, on the mainland. Or we could beach ourselves again. Or I might spend a night at sea, just to remind the men there will be times when they need to work hard.' 'You didn't want to do that before,' Sostratos remarked. Patiently, Menedemos explained, 'Before, it would have just annoyed them. If I can turn it into a lesson, though, that would be worthwhile.' 'Ah,' his cousin said, and stepped over to the rail: not to ease himself but to think about what Menedemos had told him. Sostratos was anything but stupid; Menedemos knew that. But he had a lot less feel for what made people work than Menedemos did. Once things were set out before him, though, as if at the highfalutin Lykeion at Athens, he could grasp them and figure out how to use them. After a bit, Menedemos interrupted his musing, saying, 'Why don't you give the peafowl some exercise?'
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