“Neither do I,” Menedemos said. What a liar I am, he thought. 11 As the Aphrodite glided east through the Saronic Gulf, away from Aigina, Sostratos mournfully peered north toward the mainland of Attica. There were Athens' two chief ports, Peiraieus and Phaleron, seeming almost close enough to touch. There on the higher ground inland lay Athens itself, the magnificent buildings of the akropolis tiny but perfect in the distance. Pointing to port, he burst out, “A pestilence take those pirates! We should be there now.” “We'll get there yet,” Menedemos said soothingly. “But not with the gryphon's skull.” Sostratos scowled at his cousin, though it wasn't Menedemos' fault. But he couldn't get the picture out of his mind: the pirate, maybe—he hoped—wounded, undoing the leather lashing that held the sack closed, staring in horrified dismay at the skull that stared blindly back, and then, cursing, flinging it into the sea while all his thieving comrades laughed. “Can't be helped. We were lucky to get away with our freedom and most of our goods,” Menedemos said. He was right again; Sostratos knew as much. But his cool indifference grated. “So much knowledge wasted!” Sostratos said. “A lot, a little—how can you tell?” Menedemos remained indifferent. “You can't even tell for sure whether your philosophical friends would have cared a tenth as much about the skull as you did.” Sostratos bit down on that like a man biting down on a big piece of grit in a chunk of bread, and counted himself lucky not to break a mental tooth. He didn't know what the philosophers of the Lykeion and the Academy would have made of the gryphon's skull. He never would know now. He gave back the best answer he could: “Damonax was interested in it.” “Damonax didn't care about studying it—he wanted it for a decoration,” Menedemos said. “That says something nasty about his taste, but it doesn't say anything about what a real philosopher would think of it.” Stubbornly, Sostratos said, “Aristoteles wrote books about animals and the parts that make them up. His successor Theophrastos, whom I studied under, is doing the same thing with plants. He would have wanted to see the gryphon's skull.” “Why? Would he think it grew on a tree like a pine cone?” “You're impossible!” Sostratos said, but he laughed in spite of himself.
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