Salamis

XII

Ptolemaios lingered at Paphos until the moon was a skinny nail-paring of a crescent, rising just before the sun came up. A few ships dribbled in from nearby poleis, but only a few. Menedemos found himself agreeing with Sostratos: the boost Ptolemaios’ forces got wasn’t worth the delay in going off to fight Demetrios.

“Maybe you should hop into the boat again, head over to the flagship, and talk some sense into him,” he told his cousin.

Sostratos looked at him. “I didn’t know you wanted me dead so badly.”

“He wouldn’t kill you. He’d just curse you up one side and down the other for wasting his time,” Menedemos said. “You might hear some things even Diokles doesn’t know.”

The keleustes was gnawing on a chunk of hard-baked bread. He looked up long enough to say, “To the crows with you, skipper,” and then went back to eating.

“When the Ptolemaios really got rolling, he’d probably fall back into Macedonian, so I wouldn’t understand him anyway,” Sostratos said.

“There is that,” Menedemos allowed. “When he and his cronies talked to each other, I couldn’t follow more than maybe one word in five.”

Not long after sunrise, a boat came out to the akatos. It was the first time the Rhodian ship had been so honored since the summons to the captains’ conference. This boat didn’t draw any too near, as if afraid the Aphrodite carried a dangerous contagious disease. We do, too, Menedemos thought. Sostratos named it—freedom.

From a safe distance, the officer in the rowboat called, “Ahoy, the trading galley! Do you hear me?”

“I’m the captain. I hear you,” Menedemos said. “What’s the word?”

“We move east at noon,” the man replied. “Make sure you’re ready to accompany us.”

Menedemos waved to him. “We’ll be along,” he said. Ptolemaios’ officer grudgingly dipped his head, then spoke to the men at the oars. They backed water, turned around, and rowed away.

Quietly, Sostratos said, “What was that Aristophanes you were spouting? Daddle—Let’s ske—Daddle—Let’s ske—”

“Much as I’d love to, we can’t right now,” Menedemos said with real regret. “Sticking with the fleet is best for Rhodes right now. Antigonos and Demetrios already have plenty of reasons to want to grab the polis. I don’t dare give the Ptolemaios a new one to leave us stranded. If you think he doesn’t have an eye on the Aphrodite, you’re daft.”

“I understand that,” Sostratos said. “But there’s a big sea-fight coming. If Ptolemaios wins, euge! for him. If he loses, we’re liable to get sunk. We’re liable to get killed. If we live, we’re liable to get enslaved.”

“If you’re going to whine about every little thing …” Menedemos said. His cousin stared at him, then burst out laughing. Menedemos laughed, too. So did Diokles, who stood on the stern platform with them. Something about the oarmaster’s face, though, said he was laughing to keep from giving way to despair. Since Menedemos felt the same way, he didn’t remark on it.

Horns blared across the harbor, ordering the fleet into motion at the appointed hour. “Noon,” Sostratos grumbled. “Why couldn’t he have picked a cooler time of day to set out? What does he think he is, a genuine Egyptian or something?”

“Not likely,” Menedemos replied. “As far as I can tell, he speaks as much Egyptian as we do, and we don’t speak any.”

Ptolemaios’ warships left the harbor before the transports and freighters, and formed up in a protective arc ahead of them: the same formation the fleet had used coming north from Alexandria. Now, though, the ships raised their masts and spread their broad sails slantwise to take advantage of the wind. They couldn’t use it when it was dead against them, but took advantage of it when it blew at the quarter.

“Our rowers will be fresher this way,” Sostratos observed.

“So they will,” Menedemos answered. “Say, did you notice the catapults all the fours and fives carry? Nothing like getting a bolt through the brisket from a couple of stadia away!”

“Back when the catapult was newer—it would have been around the time the Alexander was born, I think—someone took a bolt to Sparta. King Arkhidamos looked at it and said, ‘O Herakles! The valor of man is extinguished!’” Sostratos said.

“Did he? He wasn’t so far wrong,” Menedemos said. “If the river keeps flowing the way it runs now, one of these days we’ll have the automata Homer says Hephaistos made doing our fighting for us, and the only way anybody will ever win a battle is if something goes wrong with one of them.”

“Only half a century since Alexander was born,” his cousin said in musing tones. “He would have been younger than Ptolemaios—much younger than Antigonos. He became king of Macedonia about the time we were born. The Persian Empire was still going strong. A few changes since.”

“Just a few,” Menedemos agreed. “When we were boys, every time a ship came in to Rhodes it would bring news that he’d conquered some other place a daimon of a long way away. I’d never heard of half of them before.”

“Neither had I.” Sostratos sounded angry at his own long-ago ignorance. He hated not knowing things; Menedemos had known that as long as he’d known him. His cousin went on, “Hearing all those strange names may have been what made me want to understand how the pieces of the world fit together, one next to another and through time.”

“It made me want to go out and see some of those places,” Menedemos said. “And I have seen … well, some of them, anyhow. I don’t know that I’ll ever get to Persia or India.”

“I suppose not,” Sostratos said. “There are Hellenes in those parts now, though. Who would have dreamt of that fifty years ago?”

“Nobody. Not a soul,” Menedemos said, and then, loudly, to the sailors tending the lines, “Shorten the sail by a brail’s worth. We’ll ram one of the scows ahead of us if we don’t slow down.” He hoped his voice carried over the water to the skippers commanding Ptolemaios’ transports. They weren’t really scows, but also weren’t as sleek in the water as the Aphrodite.

Nearing Kourion, the fleet swung south to round the islet off Cyprus’ southern coast instead of trying to slide through the channel separating it from the mainland. Menedemos dipped his head in approval as the akatos followed. The channel was shallow and treacherously full of ever-shifting sandbars. Better to stay safe. Someone advising Ptolemaios really did know these waters.

Diokles must have had the same thought, for he remarked, “One of these days, that passage is going to silt up and tie the little island to Cyprus for good.”

“I’m just glad Demetrios didn’t post any scout ships this far west,” Sostratos said.

“Didn’t post any we know about, anyway,” Menedemos said. “Ptolemaios’ fours and fives wouldn’t chase a pentekonter. He said so himself, remember? That would just wear out the rowers, and they wouldn’t catch it.”

“For all we know, Demetrios has watchers on the beach, or on the high ground a little ways inland,” Diokles added. “We aren’t out of sight of land on this leg, so the land isn’t out of sight of us. And as soon as somebody spots us, he gets a leg-up onto his horse and gallops off to give Demetrios the news.”

Menedemos’ laugh was sharp as pepper, sour as vinegar. “I wonder how many horsemen, Demetrios’ and Ptolemaios’, are galloping across southern Cyprus from west to east right now. Enough to make the chariot races at the Olympic Games seem like nothing next to them, I’d bet.”

“They don’t have rowing contests at Olympia. They don’t have them at any of the great Games, not that I know of,” Sostratos said. “But we’ll see one of those contests when our fleet finally runs into Demetrios’.”

“The winners won’t get crowns of laurel leaves and fancy amphorai full of olive oil, either,” Menedemos said. “They’ll get something better yet—they’ll get to stay alive.”

Kition, near the eastern end of Cyprus’ south coast, was only a couple of hundred stadia from Salamis … if one went by land. Ptolemaios’ fleet would have to round Cape Pedalion to reach the besieged city, which would make its journey at least twice as long.

The ships paused a day at Kition to take on water and wine and bread. Ptolemaios didn’t call another council, but gossip came out to the galleys along with the supplies. One of the men handing jars of wine up to the Aphrodite told Sostratos, “ ’Tis said the Ptolemaios hath commanded his brother to send Salamis’ sixty warships hither forthwith, but that shall not come to pass, for Demetrios hath blocked the channel with his own galleys.”

Like most Cypriots, the fellow spoke such old-fashioned Greek that Sostratos had to hide a smile. It wasn’t quite like hearing a rhapsode recite Homer for coins at a fair, but it wasn’t far removed from that.

However odd the local sounded, his news was important. “We’d be better off with those sixty ships than without them,” Sostratos said.

“Yea, verily. But the admiral Antisthenes yet stoppeth the harbor’s outlet, as a dose of poppy juice will plug the bowels,” the Cypriot replied.

When Sostratos passed on to Menedemos what he’d heard, his cousin dipped his head. “Forsooth,” he said. “I’ve heard the same.”

Sostratos grinned. “You must have heard it from a Cypriot, too, by the gods.”

“They do talk funny, don’t they?” Menedemos smiled, too. “You can follow them, but it’s as if the rest of the world has moved on while they stayed the way they were.”

“When you do that, the rest of the world will break in whether you like it or not,” Sostratos said. “Or how else would Ptolemaios and Demetrios be fighting a thunderous big war here?”

“Too true, too true. All I ever wanted to do here was buy and sell, but that’s all I want to do most places,” Menedemos said.

“The ones where you don’t run across any women who catch your eye, you mean,” Sostratos said with a different kind of grin.

Menedemos should have grinned back and returned something bawdy, either from his own wit or from Aristophanes’. Instead, just for a moment, his face went so hard and cold, he looked twenty years older than he really was. In that instant, Sostratos would have believed he was looking at stern Uncle Philodemos, not Philodemos’ fun-loving son.

And Menedemos must have realized from Sostratos’ expression that he was alarming him, for he did smile then, if crookedly. “I’m sorry, my dear,” he murmured, “but I have other things besides loose women on my mind right now.”

“Are you well? Let me take your pulse!” Sostratos made as if to grab Menedemos’ forearm.

His cousin jerked it away, but he laughed with something that sounded like real amusement. “I’ll last till we get back to Rhodes. After that …. After that, we’re all too likely to have other things to worry about,” he said.

“Something’s gnawing at you. You haven’t been right since we set out, maybe even since before we did,” Sostratos said. “If I can do anything to help, you know I will.”

“Yes, yes.” But Menedemos seemed like a man with an impatient small boy tugging at his tunic. “Nothing anyone can do, I’m afraid. I’ve told you that before.”

“I thought something might have changed since then,” Sostratos said.

“Something might have. Nothing has.” Menedemos looked old and bleak again. This time, he didn’t seem to care. Sostratos thought he was talking more than half to himself as he went on, “By the gods, though, I’ll be glad when we get back to Rhodes.”

Sostratos almost asked, Why? He would have, had he thought he would get an answer that meant anything. Since he didn’t, he kept quiet.

By the way his cousin eyed him, Menedemos was looking for him to ask, and had readied some sort of comeback that would pierce him the way a catapult bolt could pin a rider to his horse. Sostratos smiled his most innocent smile. All he did ask was, “What do you think of Ptolemaios’ chances against Demetrios?”

Menedemos visibly relaxed, as if the oversized bow that propelled a catapult’s bolt were uncocked. For a couple of heartbeats, he looked grateful—not an expression Sostratos often saw on his face. With a shrug, he answered, “You never can tell ahead of time. That’s why you roll the knucklebones: to see who takes home the drakhmai.”

“But knucklebones are all luck. There’s skill involved in this,” Sostratos said.

“Yes, but I don’t know who has the better admirals or the better sailors,” Menedemos said. “We’ve come all this way across the Inner Sea, but I don’t think our rowers are too worn to give a good account of themselves.”

“No, neither do I,” Sostratos said. Menedemos could talk coolly about a sea-fight in which he was liable to get killed. It didn’t bother him nearly so much as the thing he wouldn’t talk about at all, whatever that might be. Again, Sostratos was tempted to ask. Again, he thought better of it. He went on, “Whatever happens, it will happen soon now.”

“Be a relief to get it over with,” Menedemos said. “I feel as if Ptolemaios tied a fat bag of silver to each of my good sense’s ankles and then threw it into the sea to drown.”

“What else could you have done but what you did? He would have stolen the Aphrodite out from under you if you hadn’t come along, stolen her, and left us stuck in Alexandria,” Sostratos said.

“I understand that, my dear. Believe me, I do,” Menedemos replied. “And do you know what else? We might have been better off stuck down there than we are up here.” Sostratos found no answer at all for that.

Suitably refreshed, Ptolemaios’ fleet left Kition the next morning. Sostratos’ belly tightened as the harbor shrank behind the Aphrodite’s sternpost and then disappeared. Not much save fire happened quickly on the sea, but the meeting with Demetrios’ naval forces couldn’t lie far away.

But for Cape Pedalion projecting out to the southeast, the meeting would have been closer yet. As soon as the ships rounded the cape and swung north toward besieged Salamis, they lowered their masts and went to oar power. That was partly because the wind lay against them once more, partly because galleys never trusted the world’s fickle breezes in battle.

“We’re the last juggler in this parade,” Menedemos said as the akatos finally passed the cape. “All kinds of things may be going on up ahead of us without our knowing.”

“Sooner or later, we’ll find out.” Sostratos remembered thinking how useful a way of directly communicating between Alexandria and Cyprus would have been. A way for the front part of a fleet to communicate directly with the back part would have been just as useful, since the one and the other were separated by a good many stadia.

“Sooner or later. Sooner, I think.” Menedemos sounded as if he looked forward to it. Maybe he did. If he was in the middle, or even at the back, of desperate action, he wouldn’t have time to brood about … whatever he was brooding about. This wasn’t the time to ask. Sostratos suspected there was no time to ask.

Somebody at the stern of the nearest transport shouted something back toward the Aphrodite. Whatever it was, distance turned it meaningless, at least to Sostratos’ ear.

To Menedemos’, too, for he called to the rowers, “Did anyone make out what he was saying?” When no one admitted it, Menedemos said, “Up the stroke, Diokles, so we can get closer and hear him. Sostratos, go forward and shout for him to give us whatever that was again.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Sostratos said.

As he hurried up toward the little bow platform, Diokles clanged harder than usual and started calling “Rhyppapai!” to draw the rowers’ notice to the quickened tempo. Sostratos could feel the akatos moving faster over the sea.

The man at the stern of the galley ahead also noticed the Aphrodite coming closer. He stayed where he was instead of going back to whatever he’d been doing before. As the gap narrowed, Sostratos cupped his hands in front of his mouth and bawled, “Tell us your news over again!”

“We’ve been spotted,” Ptolemaios’ man shouted back. When the Aphrodite got closer yet, he added, “One of those polluted seagoing cockroaches with fifty oars. We tried, but we couldn’t catch it.”

“Too bad,” Sostratos said, and then, “Thanks!” He turned and waved to Menedemos and Diokles, a signal that he had what he needed and they could let the rowers fall back to their usual pace. Sure enough, the stroke slowed. Sostratos walked back to the stern platform.

“Well?” Menedemos asked when he got there, as his cousin hadn’t been able to make out what the sailor on the bigger transport was saying.

Sostratos relayed the message, finishing, “As soon as that gods-cursed pentekonter gets back to Salamis, Demetrios will come after us.”

“Or as soon as it gets back to his fleet,” Menedemos said. “He knew we were at Paphos. He’s bound to know we were at Kition, too. He knows which way we have to come—we’re not going to descend on him from the north. He may have his fleet waiting out there just over the horizon.” He pointed in the direction they were going.

“You’re right. He may.” Sostratos hated feeling outthought, but he did at that moment. Demetrios was only too likely to try to force the action. He’d done that in Athens, and here on Cyprus ever since invading the island. Menedemos had seen as much. Sostratos hadn’t, not till his cousin pointed it out to him.

“Chances are we won’t even know the sea-fight’s started till a galley catches fire and we spy the smoke from the pyre,” Menedemos said. “I can’t see Ptolemaios’ warships from here, only the transports. Can you?”

“No.” Sostratos tossed his head. “But the forward transports will be able to see them. When we see the ships ahead of us speeding up or changing formation, we’ll know what we need to do.”

“No, we’ll just know what’s going on. It’s not the same thing,” Menedemos said. “We won’t know what to do unless we have to run from a five or try to fight one, and that will mean the perfume’s gone into the soup.”

“Too right it will!” Sostratos spat into the bosom of his tunic. He told himself again and again that he didn’t really believe the apotropaic gesture would turn aside ill-fortune. If the gods were there at all, if they deigned to pay any attention whatever to poor, miserable mankind, surely they had too many other things to do to alter fate every time someone entreated them.

That all made perfect logical, reasonable sense. It didn’t keep him from spitting into the bosom of his chiton every now and again. The gesture couldn’t hurt anything, and it might just possibly do some good, so ….

Sostratos frowned and cupped a hand to his ear. “What is it?” Menedemos asked sharply.

“Horn calls ahead … I think,” Sostratos answered. “Ptolemaios’ war galleys are signaling back and forth, unless I miss my guess.”

“Makes sense,” his cousin said: a two-word epitaph that might go on Sostratos’ grave monument. “Trumpets carry a long way, and with luck the foe won’t know what your calls mean.” After a moment, Menedemos added, “Your ears are good. I can’t hear them.”

“Better you leave your hands on the steering oars,” Sostratos said.

“There is that,” Menedemos said, and then, “What are they doing? Can you tell?”

Now Sostratos used his hand to shade his eyes, though he faced away from the sun. He stared for a little while, but ended up tossing his head. “Whatever it is, they’re too far ahead for me to make it out. But they haven’t signaled like that before. If I had to guess, I’d say they’re likely shaking themselves out into the line of battle, but I can’t prove it.”

“Which means Demetrios will have sailed out to meet us. Happy day!” Menedemos whistled tunelessly between his teeth. “Which means that, by the time the sun goes down, we’ll have answers to the questions we’ve been asking since before we left Alexandria.”

Shadows told Sostratos it was a little past noon. The sun told him the same when he turned to glance at it. They’d got an early start from Kition. And, evidently, Demetrios had got an early start from Salamis.

“Here’s hoping Menelaos breaks out of the harbor,” Sostratos said. “Sixty ships coming to give Demetrios one up the prokton would hand him something new to worry about.”

“That would be marvelous!” Menedemos said. “Do you think he can?”

“I wish I did. How about you?” Sostratos said. Menedemos’ expression told him everything he needed to know.

“Well,” his cousin said, “we’ll do the best we can even without him. Keeping him jugged up in there is costing the Demetrios some ships, at least, ships he won’t be able to throw at Ptolemaios.”

“True enough.” Sostratos couldn’t help noticing that he and Menedemos had both tagged the enemy warlord with the the of respect, but not their own fleet’s commander. Maybe that just meant they were more familiar with Ptolemaios. Or maybe it meant they both thought Demetrios stood a better chance of winning.

Sostratos didn’t want to believe that. Your chances when you lost a battle ranged from bad to worse. Captured and held for ransom? Captured and sold into slavery? Maimed? Speared? Drowned? He tried not to think of any of those and wound up thinking about them all, in turn and together. Cursing his runaway imagination, he waited to see what the afternoon would bring.

Part of Menedemos wanted Ptolemaios’ transports to close up on his war galleys. That would give the transports’ skippers, himself among them, a better notion of how the fight ahead of them was going. But part of him wanted to stay as far away from the sea-fight as he could. If Demetrios beat Ptolemaios, the longer the start on enemy pursuit he had, the better his chances of getting away clean.

For now, all he could do was peer northwards, try to make out the distant horn calls, and worry. Maybe I should have let Ptolemaios take the Aphrodite away from me, ran through his head more than once. He and Sostratos and the rest of the crew could have waited out the war in Alexandria.

But Ptolemaios had paid, and paid extravagantly. This would be a profitable voyage … if it brought them back to Rhodes, anyhow. Menedemos wished he hadn’t thought of Rhodes. Thinking of Rhodes made him think of Baukis, of the baby that might be his, of her screaming in childbed the way women did, and of his own father listening to those screams. Next to thoughts like that, brooding about a mere sea-battle seemed a pleasure.

It did, at any rate, till Diokles pointed to the new plume of smoke rising a bit west of due north. “Something’s on fire,” the keleustes said.

“So it is.” Menedemos did some more tuneless whistling. “Isn’t that delightful? We just have to hope it’s something that belongs to Demetrios.”

Something. If you thought of a war galley on fire, you could pretend to yourself that it carried no rowers or naval officers or marines or catapult crewmen. Only a thing of rope and wood and cloth and metal was burning, not a small town’s worth of young men. No, those weren’t men roasting there like a sacrifice on an altar, or jumping into the sea to drown so they wouldn’t roast … jumping into the sea to drown with tunics already blazing or with flesh already blazing.

Yes, that was only a ship. Didn’t you have to think of war as being about things, not about men? How could you fight it if you thought about the men on the other side you were going to maim or kill, or about the men on your own side the enemy would slaughter? How could you fight if you thought about the enemy slaughtering you?

Diokles’ voice brought Menedemos back to himself: “Skipper, the transports ahead of us have stopped rowing. By your leave, I’ll do the same. We don’t want to get too close to the war galleys till we know what’s going on up there.”

“Yes, do it,” Menedemos said.

“Easy oars!” Diokles bawled, and emphasized the order by clanging away with hammer and triangle.

The Aphrodite glided to a stop as the rowers rested at their oars. Then she began to bob on the Inner Sea like a toy boat on a rain puddle. The motion felt odd to Menedemos: a galley on the open sea should be going somewhere, doing something. He looked forward to his cousin to see how Sostratos was taking it. To his relief, Sostratos seemed all right. Menedemos didn’t call out to him, lest he remind him things were out of the ordinary.

Part of the skipper still wanted to go north so he could find out how the sea-battle fared. But if he found out it was going badly, that would be worse than staying back and staying ignorant. Good news could wait.

He wasn’t the only one fretting. “Wish I knew what was happening,” Diokles muttered.

“What do you think? Shall we go up and get a better notion?” Yes, that part of Menedemos still wanted to.

“I’d like to, but ….” Diokles tossed his head. “To a five, we’d be no more’n a fried sprat. Wouldn’t even bother chewing, just swallow us whole.”

“That’s how it looks to me, too,” Menedemos said, not without regret. It had also looked that way to his cousin. Diokles’ notion of good sense was very different from Sostratos’. When the two of them coincided, going—or, here, not going—in the direction they both indicated seemed a good idea.

Time went by. The sun crawled toward the western horizon. Somewhere not very far ahead, horrible things were happening to men who probably hadn’t done anything in particular to deserve them. If those things didn’t go the way Ptolemaios hoped, before long those horrible things might start happening to the transports, too.

Or to me, Menedemos thought uneasily. He spat down his tunic front to turn aside the omen. Superstition came easy out at sea, and he was less skeptical to begin with than his cousin.

Not very much later, Diokles said, “Looks to me like the fighting is curling towards us, not away.”

“I was thinking the same thing. I kept hoping I was wrong,” Menedemos said.

Then came an unmistakable sign: almost in unison, the crews manning the transport galleys ahead of the Aphrodite started rowing again, and rowing as if their lives depended on it. And, no doubt, their lives did. They straightaway lost the order they’d kept so long. Some sped south; others wheeled in the water and hurried back toward the west.

Sostratos trotted aft from his station at the bow platform. Before he even got to the stern, he started calling, “Daddle! Let’s ske! Daddle! Let’s ske!”

In spite of everything, Menedemos laughed. Then he said to Diokles, “It’s gone bad. The Ptolemaios can’t blame us if we head for Rhodes now. I’ll bet he’s trying to save his own hide, if he still can.”

As if to underscore that, someone aboard a transport heading west shouted “Fly, you fools! It’s all up with the war galleys!” to the akatos.

Diokles said something pungent. Then he beat on his triangle. “Port oars forward, starboard oars back!” he shouted to the rowers. “Get ready, boys! We’re heading home, if we can get there. On the stroke!”

Aided by the steering oars, the Aphrodite turned almost in her own length. “O Sostratos!” Menedemos said sharply. “Come on up here and keep watch astern of us. If any of Demetrios’ ships get on our tail, I want to hear about it.”

“I’ll do it,” Sostratos said, and did. Standing on the stern platform, he could see a little farther. If the mast were up, if someone small could scamper to the top of it, that would be better yet. But the mast would stay down for now.

Menedemos kept wanting to look back over his shoulder himself. And he yielded to temptation every so often. He could afford such glimpses. He told himself he could, anyway. Sostratos might have had something sharp to say about the way he rationalized, but Sostratos didn’t know he was sneaking those looks. Menedemos’ dutiful cousin kept his eyes on the water behind the akatos and didn’t check to see what anyone ahead of him was doing.

Then, just when Menedemos was feeling proud of himself at not checking for a while, Sostratos sang out, “I think someone’s chasing us!”

“Oh, a pestilence!” Menedemos blurted. He did look back then. Sure enough, a beamy galley, a six or maybe even a seven, was churning up the Inner Sea as it came after the Aphrodite. To Diokles, Menedemos said, “Have the boys give it all they have. Maybe we’ll be able to run away from that overgrown seagoing catamite.”

Diokles grunted laughter. “I like the way you talk, skipper. The way you think, too.” He raised his voice to a shout so all the rowers could hear him: “Put your backs into it, lads, unless you reckon going up on a slaver’s block is the best thing that can happen to you.”

He upped the stroke again. The men at the oars couldn’t hold that kind of sprint for long. With luck, the rowers aboard their pursuer couldn’t, either. “Let me know if she’s gaining,” Menedemos told Sostratos.

“She is,” his cousin answered: not what he wanted to hear.