Over the Wine Dark Sea

'whether you decide to or not.'   'Not just a sweet lover but a generous lover, too,' Leuke exclaimed, and rode him as if she were a jockey. He would have had to pay a lot more than three oboloi for that at a brothel; courtesans charged more for it than any other way. After the sweaty exertions of the night before, being ridden suited him fine.   He was whistling when he ate barley porridge and drank wine for breakfast. Sostratos wasn't whistling; he looked glum. 'It's your own fault,' Menedemos told him. 'You could have had a good time, too.'   'Maybe another time,' Sostratos said, as he usually did when Menedemos asked him why he wasn't enjoying himself now. He ate porridge and drank wine with a concentration that said he didn't want to be disturbed.   But Menedemos said, 'Don't spend all day over breakfast. I want us back at the Aphrodite before Aristagoras' slaves fetch the wine. I don't think he'd try to palm off anything but what we agreed to on us, but I don't want to find out I'm wrong the hard way, either.'   'You won't really be able to tell unless you open an amphora or two and taste what's in them,' Sostratos said.   'Don't remind me.' Menedemos got down to the bottom of his bowl of porridge in a hurry. He sat there drumming his fingers till his cousin finished, too. They said their good-byes to Alyattes -  Aristagoras was sleeping late, since the sun was well up -  and hurried down toward the harbor.   'Where shall we head next?' Sostratos asked as they threaded their way along Khios' narrow, winding, grimy streets.   'West,' Menedemos answered.   His cousin paused to give him a mocking bow. 'Many thanks, O best one. I never should have guessed. I expected we'd go on to Italy by sailing north.'   'I was afraid you might have,' Menedemos said with a chuckle.   'Let me ask you some different questions, then.' Sostratos was at his most formal, which meant at his most irritating. 'Do you plan to put in at Athens? If you do, it's a good market for our papyrus and ink; they probably do more writing there than anywhere else in the world, except maybe Alexandria.'   'I hadn't intended to, no,' Menedemos said. 'The more we sell in the far west, the better the prices we'll get for it. Or do you think I'm wrong?'   'No, probably not -  if we can sell the stuff,' Sostratos said. 'If we can't, we might think about stopping at Athens on the way back to Rhodes.' That made good sense. In such matters, Sostratos usually did. But before Menedemos could do more than begin to dip his head, his cousin went on, 'How do you plan on getting to the west? Will you go over the Isthmus of Corinth on the diolkos, or do you intend to sail around the Peloponnesos?'   'That's a good question. I wish I had a good answer for it,' Menedemos said unhappily. 'Most times, I'd sooner have my ship dragged across the tramway from the Saronic Gulf to the Gulf of Corinth, but with Polyperkhon kicking up his heels in the Peloponnesos, who knows if some Macedonian army isn't going to come