The Isle of Stone

3.

The Peloponnesian ships were of similar design to the Athenian: slim and sharp, more than one hundred feet long, with three banks of oars projecting from their hulls and outriggers. To Demosthenes, Athenian triremes resembled breaching dolphins, with painted eyes, metal rams for snouts, and upswept curl at their sterns for lobbing flukes. The enemy ships had eyes too, painted on their prows. Now forty of the wooden beasts turned their unblinking eyes on the Athenians’ little outpost.

The enemy fleet approached in broad formation. The devices on their sails showed them to be a motley force-Corinthians, Aeginetans, Sicyonians, Anactorians, Megarians-each no doubt with a Lacedaemonian on board to command its contingent of hoplites. The Athenian camp was in an uproar as the men gathered their rude panoplies and took up their assigned positions. All of them could see that the Peloponnesians were rowing in hard, as if they meant to ground their vessels on the rocks. This was a tactic Demosthenes had not counted on.

In his fear, would his body shatter just standing there, like a flawed pot in the kiln?

The ships halted just out of bow shot from the shore. The Lacedaemonians, it turned out, were intent on offering sacrifice at the last possible moment. On the deck of the lead vessel, a Spartiate elder stood forth with his crimson robe faded from salt spray and dressed locks falling over his shoulders, brandishing a knife over a braying goat. The Athenians could see his unshaven upper lip move in unheard obeisances to the patroness, Artemis Agrotera. The Corinthians and Sicyonians stood by, fretting over the lost momentum of the attack. But their masters would not be rushed as the entrails came out for proper examination.

Something was wrong. The Lacedaemonians huddled around the goat as they disputed among themselves. After some time they all began to wag their ponderous heads, leaning back from the sacrifice as if afraid to partake of some pollution. As the Athenians and the Peloponnesian allies looked on in amazement, the Lacedaemonian commander gave an order to the captain of the Corinthian flagship. The entire enemy fleet then turned around and retired to the other side of the bay.

In this way, thanks to Spartan attentiveness to the portents of goats’ livers, the garrison got a one-day reprieve. Such an admirable reverence for the gods! thought Demosthenes, hoping that the delay would not invite his men to think too much. As a precaution, he absorbed them in laying yet more obstacles and building up the berm yet higher.

The next day dawned under a few clouds but no wind. The ships came on and paused again for the sacrifice. This time the signs were favorable; libations of blood and wine were poured out in the proper order until, with the consecration of the bones, the Lacedaemonians at last pronounced the auspices satisfactory for the day’s labor.

The Corinthians piped the signal to resume pulling for the beach. In good order, the ships sorted themselves into three columns, each aimed at an opening in the Athenian stockade. A stiff wind suddenly came onshore, bringing with it the bodily stench of seven thousand Peloponnesian oarsmen. To see one’s enemies coming on was one thing, but to smell their very sweat made for an unnerving kind of intimacy.

“This is it, boys!” Demosthenes cried. “Let’s let them know we’re here!”

The Athenians roared in defiance of the enemy. They were outshouted, though, by the forty helots at the barricade. These produced a baleful snarl that, in its bottomless sadness, was just big enough to contain the thwarted hopes of untold Messenian lives. Projected down the slope of the berm at the approaching land attack, the cry seemed to wither the hearts of the Peloponnesian allies. But the Lacedaemonians were somehow quickened by it, charging faster, as if they were bred to the sound.

The Athenians let the Peloponnesian ships come as close as they dared before revealing their defense. Just as the first ram passed the outer line of boulders, the defenders rushed out with their straight timbers and braced them against the enemy bows. Demosthenes hoped that in this way just a handful of upright men, leaning hard in the shallow surf, could hold off laden triremes of 170 oars. At first, it worked: the Lacedaemonians hung over the rails, striking at the timbers, but their spears were too light to dislodge them. Other Spartan hoplites tried to reach shore by jumping in the water, yet found themselves submerged too deep to stand and too encumbered by their weapons to swim.

The arrest of the first ship in each line caused all the rest to jam up behind. The ensuing disruption traveled like a wave throughout the Peloponnesian fleet, costing it all semblance of order. Demosthenes heard voices with Dorian accents screaming at the captains to break through the obstacles by smashing their hulls on the rocks. But the Corinthians were too jealous of their assets to make such a sacrifice.

The first serious challenge to Demosthenes’ strategy came when two enemy ships collided with one of the anchored Athenian vessels. The Lacedaemonian hoplites swarmed all over it before his men could set it alight. As the flames exploded through the shredded sailcloth and pitch-soaked cordage, some of the enemy managed to leap overboard into hip-deep water. Demosthenes sent a squad of reserves against them, half a dozen hoplites armed with spears and wicker shields. Having lost their own spears in the tumble off the deck, the Spartans struck at them with short, daggerlike swords. The shallow water under the Athenians gave them the decisive advantage: two of the Lacedaemonians were wounded, and had to be rescued by their fellows who, in turn, were forced to abandon all their equipment. The Spartans dragged their fallen comrades back to the gangway of their ship; the discarded shields were seized as trophies by the Athenians.

The attack got no farther on the land side. The Lacedaemonians approached the berm with shields locked, but could not keep the formation amid the pilings and boulders strewn in their path. As the Spartan line disintegrated, Athenian archery worked its effect against their exposed flanks. The few of the enemy who reached the top of the berm were met by forty wild-eyed Messenian furies who fought with clubs, shearing knives and, as necessary, teeth and fingernails. For their part, the Lacedaemonians failed to bring any archers or slingers to the battle, having nothing but their usual contempt for missile troops. A stalemate developed: the Lacedaemonians could not take the barricade, but the Athenians and Messenians were too few to risk driving the enemy from the field.

At length the Peloponnesian captains untangled their vessels. The attackers came in waves against the stockade, one ship at a time, each one using the same tactic with fresh troops. Demosthenes coped as best he could by rotating his reserves into the defense; the battle dragged on through the morning, and then into the afternoon, as the exhausted Athenians fought with tongues swollen from thirst. At last, as the sun descended over the island, the afternoon winds swirled, and the placid surface of the bay broke into a herringbone pattern of contrary waves. The enemy triremes struggled to avoid each other and the rocks beneath Koryphasion; the Lacedaemonians, landlubbers at heart, hung worried at the rails, and began to gaze longingly at their camp across the bay. They broke off the assault with an hour left of daylight.

The manner of the fighting had kept casualties light on both sides. At the barricade, just a few of the Messenians were down, mostly due to their own recklessness, and the Lacedaemonians suffered mostly nonlethal arrow wounds. In the water, no Athenians were killed, and the enemy lost a handful due to spear thrusts and drowning. The Athenians, delirious with this success, danced on the beach, holding aloft the captured shields with their crimson lambdas showing clear and dark against the flashing bronze. The Spartan troops watching from the heights of Sphacteria turned away in disgust.

At first Demosthenes could not help but share the elation of his men. But his downcast turn of mind soon asserted itself, and he found himself reflecting on the comparative childishness of the Athenians, celebrating the end of what was just an indecisive skirmish. The Lacedaemonians, in contrast, had the same expressions on their faces when they rowed away as when they had rowed in to attack. They never showed outward triumph or disappointment on the battlefield-victories, for them, were to be expected, and their reverses only transient conditions. They were never in a rush to redeem their setbacks, and the only ardor they ever showed lay in their conspicuous acts of piety.

When the next day dawned as calm as the last, the bulk of the Peloponnesian fleet came across the bay again. With typical persistence, they attacked in exactly the same way, with the ships coming in in virtually the same order. Demosthenes had seen this bloody-mindedness before, this conviction that their cause would prevail not through pretty tactics or innovation, but by virtue of the fact that they were Spartans. But Demosthenes soon understood the method behind their approach: with the Athenian blocking triremes burned to the waterline, his men had to defend a wider front. From the land side, a corps of Lacedaemonian slingers had been hastily organized. Their skills were so primitive, however, that they could hit nothing except from very close in, well in range of his archers.

The impasse resumed, the waves of attackers ebbing and flowing, until Athenian sweat salted the water of the bay and the Peloponnesian rowers grew ragged in their strokes. The sun climbed and loomed pitiless over them all, blazing with such intensity that its mere reflection in sand and water blinded the helmeted men. Despite the vain cleverness of their commander, Athenians were beginning to fall under the blades of the enemy hoplites. Into Demosthenes’ throat crept the same sense of futility that he felt in Aetolia-the suspicion of being overmatched, of holding back a crimson torrent with clenched fingers, of his arrogance to believe that mere strategy could stop men as determined as the Lacedaemonians. Though not a single Spartan had yet set foot on dry sand, he began to feel as good as defeated. The conviction settled like a boulder on his chest until he heard someone calling to him from far away.

The voices were those of his lookouts on the hill. His head pounding with heat and consternation, he watched with incredulity as his men leapt and pointed out to sea, to the southwest. In the noise of the fight he could not hear their voices; he began to suspect what they might be saying, and with that suspicion felt the boulder lift.

The Athenian fleet sailed into the bay like a squadron on review, in single file, through the narrow gap between the island and Little Sphacteria. Their attention having been focused on the main channels, the Peloponnesians seemed caught off guard by the maneuver. The Athenians had more than twenty ships in the bay before the enemy sallied out with fifteen. The fleets made for each other, rams gleaming in the sun, as the Athenians deftly arranged themselves in line abreast and the Peloponnesians dissolved into an ungainly mass.

The result was never in doubt. Attacking in synchrony, the Athenians rammed or sheared the oars off each enemy vessel in turn. The hindmost Peloponnesian ships didn’t wait to be taken, but broke for shore. Some of these were rammed amidships as they turned, and the rest pursued into shallow water as the enemy hoplites waded as far as they dared to support them. Demosthenes scaled Koryphasion to watch the aftermath: half a dozen half-sunk Peloponnesian vessels, their crews scattered around them like chaff, were pulled in opposite directions by the Lacedaemonian hoplites and Athenian sailors.

The battle around the stockade ground to a halt as both sides became spectators. Demosthenes’ men cheered as the rest of the Athenian fleet, twenty-five hulls strong, struck from the west and drove away the Peloponnesian vessels guarding the north channel. With that, the Lacedaemonians broke off their attack. Two more enemy ships were run down from behind as they tried to escape; the land forces withdrew in good order, enduring as they went the taunts of the Messenians atop the barricade.

Old Eurymedon came down the gangway with a frown on his face. Fixing his one good eye on Demosthenes, he disgorged a spitting torrent of curses before he was in earshot, and didn’t finish until the other was standing right in front of him.

“You will explain, Demosthenes, your defiance of our agreement!” Eurymedon snarled, looking as if he would hit the other with his staff.

“What explanation is necessary for men to make, when they mean only to defend themselves in a hostile place?”

“You insult all of us with your damnable arrogance! Why are you here at all, in this miserable trap, that you must force the entire fleet to come to your rescue?”

“Forgive my arrogance,” Demosthenes replied in measured tones, “but it seems that it is the Lacedaemonians who are trapped now.”

He was suddenly able to move again, as if blood had at last forced its way into the strangled vessels in his legs. Gifted now with a sudden fluidity, he wanted to dance the praises of Nike who had cured him. But no one danced before Eurymedon.

Across the strait, hundreds of Lacedaemonians stood on the high ground of Sphacteria. All around the island, meanwhile, the Athenian ships swarmed, driving every Peloponnesian vessel away from its shores. The enemy force that had landed there to help contain the Athenians instead found itself cut off.

Eurymedon stood with his mouth open, as if the implications of hundreds of marooned Spartiates took that long to sink into his mind. After some time, he spoke again.

“If this is what you had in mind… it is not worth risking the fall of Corcyra.” And then, turning to the captain of his flagship, he issued the command Demosthenes longed to hear: “Organize a blockade of the island. Let no one get off or come to the Lacedaemonians’ aid.”