“Right, captain,” the young sailor answered, and hurried forward. He'd proved on the Aphrodites last voyage how sharp his eyes were. Menedemos wanted a pair of good eyes looking out for pirates. The mountainous seaside district of Lykia lay just east of Kaunos, and, as far as he or any other Rhodian could tell, piracy was the Lykians' chief national industry. Any headland might shelter a long, lean, fifty-oared pentekonter or a hemiolia—shorter than a pentekonter because its oars were on two banks rather than one but even swifter, the pirate ship par excellence—lying in wait to rush out and capture a prize. Spotting a raider in good time might make the difference between staying free and going up on the auction block, naked and manacled, in some second-rate slave market. Menedemos' eye went from the sea to the Karian coastline ahead. Mist and distance—Kaunos lay about two hundred fifty stadia north and slightly east of Rhodes—shrouded his view, but his mind's eye supplied the details he couldn't yet make out. As in Lykia, the mountains of Karia rose swiftly from the sea. The lower slopes would show the green and gold of ripening crops at this season of the year. Farther up grew cypress and juniper and even a few precious cedars. Woodcutters who went up into the mountains after the timber shipwrights had to have might face not only wolves and bears but lions as well. When he thought of lions, he naturally thought of Homer, too, and murmured a few lines from the eighteenth book of the Iliad: “ 'With them Peleus' son began endless lamentation,

Setting his murderous hands on his comrade's breast.

He groaned again and again, like a well-maned lion

From whom a man who hunts deer has taken its cubs

From the thick woods. It, coming later, is grieved.

It goes through many valleys, seeking the man by scent

If it might find him anywhere: for anger most piercing seizes it.' “