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Finished Over the Wine-Dark Sea, The Gryphon's Skull, The Sacred Land, and Owls to Athens by Harry Turtledove, #1-4 in his Menedemos & Sostratos quartet of historical adventure novels originally published under his non-sfnal penname H. N. Turteltaub, starring two cousins who are sea-faring traders from Rhodes, which were a recent Phoenix Pick Press offer.
These are low-key sorts of trading/travel adventures set in the Ancient Greek-adjacent world, rather than more swashbuckling action stuff; although there are encounters with pirates and dangerous historical figures in the wake of the power-struggles arising after the death of Alexander the Great, as well as escaping from outraged husbands in selected ports. But the feel of them is almost domestically cozy, with most of the excitement coming from visiting new areas and trying to make trades and get bargains on desirable resaleable goods (sometimes successful, sometimes not).
It's actually a lot more compelling than that sounds, with the characters and their world very nicely fleshed out in such a way that their personalities often drive the encounters, and are in turn affected by them, with growth and change over the course of each novel and continuing throughout the series. And there's a good deal of variation in the travel plots, with each novel taking a different route (#3 goes east to visit Phoenicia and Palestine) with different objectives (#2 sees Sostratos the scholar wanting to bring a curious fossil to the Academy at Athens), with local customs and culture put on display, showcasing the surprisingly varied islands and cities of the ancient Mediterranean, who though mainly Greek/Greek-influenced, were hardly monolithic in nature.
I really liked these, and though I thought that due to certain character developments in #4, these were meant to end there as the leads moved on with their lives (one of them was based on a RL historical figure), but it turns out that wasn't a concluding storyline, and there was some setup which could easily lead into a 5th adventure, which would have been nice to see.
Medium-high recommend if you like cozy travelogue sorts of historical adventure novels. Turtledove does his usual high-quality job with interweaving period-accurate historical detail in with the story, which features many engaging personalities who feel like they could have lived in the time period (instead of being modern transplants quantum leaped into the setting), convincingly conveying the excitement they experience when they come across things like probably-Chinese silk (much nicer than the local stuff from the island of Kos) and the titular “gryphon's” skull and manage to finally dispose of some olive oil a pushy brother-in-law has stuck them with, as well as the various ways in which they personally fit in or clash with their surrounding cultural milieu, and provides notes on which real-life historical figures and events actually show up.
I think I could have used a little more in the way of contextual notes about the historical setting (it took me a while to figure out just what opsos and sitos were referring to when it came to the meals: for anyone else wondering, the latter is the starchy nourishing filler base and the former is the meaty/fishy treat), but that's something that could easily be remedied by reading up on Ancient Hellenic daily life on my own time.
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