Over the Wine Dark Sea

  'I won't,' Sostratos answered. 'I think we can get five or six passengers at twelve drakhmai, and we don't want any more than that. If it turns out I'm wrong, I'll come down a little. But I don't want to do that too soon.'   'No, I suppose not,' Menedemos said. 'You'd get a reputation like a girl who's easy with her virtue.'   'That's right.' The comparison was apt. Several others might have been, too, but Sostratos wasn't surprised that that one had occurred to his cousin.   Along with huts and tents, the mercenaries' encampment at Tainaron did boast taverns and cookshops and armorers' shops and swordsellers' establishments. Sostratos and Menedemos stopped at several of them, letting the proprietors know the Aphrodite lay offshore and where she was bound. Word would spread fast.   When one of the taverners heard they were coming from Khios, he surprised Sostratos by asking if they carried wine, and surprised him more by paying twenty-five drakhmai an amphora for some of the Ariousian without so much as a whimper. 'I'll get it back,' he said. 'You bet I will. Some of these fellows won't take anything but the best, and they don't care what they have to pay to get it, either.'   To celebrate the bargain, he poured cups of wine a long way from the best for Sostratos and Menedemos. Sostratos had taken one sip from his own when the ground jerked beneath his stool. The flimsy walls of the tavern rattled for a moment, then were still. 'Earthquake!' he exclaimed, as a nearby dog barked. 'Just a little one, though.'   'Gods be praised,' the tavernkeeper said, and everybody else in the place, Sostratos and Menedemos included, dipped his head in agreement. Even though the quake had been small, Sostratos' heart still thudded in his chest. When the earth started to shudder, you couldn't tell ahead of time whether it would stop again right away -  as it had here, as it did most of the time -  or go on and get worse, sometimes bad enough to level a city. Everyone living around the Inner Sea knew that too well.   Menedemos said, 'Let me have another cup of wine.' When the taverner gave it to him, he poured a small libation onto the dirt floor. 'That's for the Earthshaker, for not shaking too hard this time.' Then he drained the cup. 'And that's for me.'   'It's the Spartans' curse, that's what it is,' the tavernkeeper said.   'The what?' Menedemos asked.   Sostratos spoke before the taverner could: 'A long time ago, back before the Peloponnesian War, some helots took refuge in Poseidon's temple here. The Spartans hauled them out and killed them. Not long afterwards, a big earthquake almost knocked Sparta flat. Plenty of people claimed it was Poseidon's vengeance.'   'How did you know that?' The tavernkeeper stared at him. 'You said you were a Rhodian.'   'I am,' Sostratos said.   'He must have read it in a book,' Menedemos said. 'He reads all sorts of things in books.' Sostratos had trouble gauging his cousin's smile: was it proud or