The harbor opens like a jaw.
Piraeus — three basins cut into the coast, ringed with stone quays and wooden jetties and the long ship-sheds where triremes rest on their slipways like beached whales, bronze rams dull with salt. The smell hits first: tar, salt water, fish guts, timber, the particular human density of a port that never fully sleeps. Then the sound — the creak of mooring ropes, a cargo-master shouting tally in a voice designed to carry over water, the knock of hulls against stone, a dozen languages tangled in the air above the commercial harbor where round-bellied merchant ships sit low with grain from Egypt and timber from Macedon and amphorae of wine from everywhere.
The Long Walls are visible from the water — two parallel stone corridors stretching northeast toward the city, enclosing the road to Athens like a throat. At their far end, above the rooftops and the haze, the Acropolis catches the light: white marble and painted sculpture, the Parthenon presiding over everything below with the massive calm of something that knows it will outlast every person looking at it.
The quay is crowded. Sailors, stevedores, merchants checking manifests scratched on wax tablets, a customs official with a writing-stylus behind his ear and the permanently harassed expression of a man whose job requires counting things that move. A boy darts between legs carrying a basket of salt fish. Two men argue over a mooring-space in a dialect that is not Attic.
The customs man finds the newcomer in the crowd the way such men do — not by looking, by sensing someone who has not yet been processed. He is thin, sunburned, efficient.
«Πόθεν;» he says. One word. Where from?
He has a tablet ready. Behind him, Athens waits at the end of the Long Walls — visible, audible as a murmur beneath the harbor noise, impossibly present. The greatest city in the Greek world, and the road to it starts here, on a stone quay that smells of fish.
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[ΓΛΩΣΣΑ — Language Settings]
ΑΝΑΓΝΩΣΙΣ (Reading — how the AI writes):
ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗ — All text in Attic Greek.
MIXTA — Dialogue in Greek, narration in English.
ANGLICA — All text in English.
ΓΡΑΦΗ (Writing — how you respond):
ΕΛΛΗΝΙΚΗ — You write in Greek script.
ΡΩΜΑΪΚΗ — You write Greek in Latin characters.
ANGLICA — You write in English.
ΟΡΘΟΓΡΑΦΙΑ (Grammar correction):
ΠΑΡΕΣΤΩ — Corrections provided.
ΑΠΕΣΤΩ — No corrections.
ΑΡΕΤΗ (Language quality affects NPC reactions):
ΠΑΡΕΣΤΩ — NPCs respond to how well you speak.
ΑΠΕΣΤΩ — NPCs respond only to what you say.
ΒΟΗΘΗΜΑ (Comprehension aid):
ΑΠΕΣΤΩ — No glosses.
ΜΕΤΑΦΡΑΣΙΣ — English translation follows dialogue.
ΛΕΞΙΚΟΝ — Dictionary-form vocabulary follows dialogue.
[Choose your settings.]
