Tides of War, a Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War

X

I did not take up Alcibiades' offer of a commission or follow Telamon into mercenary service. I did heed the Arcadian's advice, however, and shipped out as an armored infantryman under Eucles to the Thracian Chersonese. That campaign concluded, discovering myself yet among the living, I enlisted upon another, equally gloryless, and another after that.

It was a new kind of war we were fighting, or so we bucks of the heavy infantry were enlightened by our elders of the Old Corps. In their day men fought battles. They armed and contended line against line, victory determined in honorable trial of arms. This was not how we did it. Our war was not just state against state, but faction against faction within states-the Few against the Many, those who had versus those who lacked.

As Athenians we sided with the democrats, or more accurately compelled all who sought our aid to become democrats, with the understanding that their democracy would be only so democratic as we permitted. Assaulting a city in this new kind of war, one contended not against heroes united in defense of their homeland, but that gang of partisans which chanced to possess the state at the moment, while one's allies were those of the exiled faction, aligned with us, the invaders, to effect their restoration.

At Mytilene I saw my first list. Our company had been assigned its exiles, those democrats of the city who had been deposed in the oligarchic revolt and now constituted a species of political

auxiliary to the Athenian troops of the assault. I had never seen such men. They were neither warriors nor patriots but zealots. The one with us was named Thersander. We called him Quill. I was a sergeant then; our captain called us in to receive the list.

The list was a death warrant. It enrostered those of Quill's countrymen whom, the city taken, it would be our company's chore to arrest and execute. Quill had made up the list; he would accompany us in the syllepsis, the roundup, to identify those upon it. You have seen such catalogs, Jason. They are written in blood.

Quill's was no impartial manifest of civil foes or political opponents; his accounted neighbors and friends, comrades and kinsmen who had in their hour wreaked ruin upon him. They had slaughtered his wife and daughters. His brother had been torn from the altar and butchered before his own children's eyes. I had never known one to hate as Quill. He was no longer a man but a vessel into which hatred had been decanted. There was no negotiating with one like him, and they were all like him.

Later when the city fell, our company held eighty-two captives of the lists, Quill's and others, including six women and two boys.

It was raining, in sheets behind a warm west wind, so you sweated amid the drenching. We herded the prisoners into stock pens.

Another Mytilenean, not Quill but a confederate, appeared with our instructions. We were to put the detainees to death.

How, I ask, are such orders to be carried out? Not philosophically but practically. Who steps forth to propose the means? Not the best, I assure you. Incinerate them, cried one of our rear rank; seal them in the barn and torch it. Another wished to butcher them like sheep. I refused the order in its entirety.

Quill's abettor confronted me. Who had bribed me? Did I know I was a traitor?

I was young; outrage overcame me. “How will I command these?” I exclaimed, indicating my men. “How may I call them to soldierly duty after they have committed such atrocities? They will be ruined!”

Quill appeared. These are the enemy, he cried, indicating the wretches in the sheepfold.

Kill them yourself, I told him.

He thrust the list in my face. “I'm putting your name on it!”

My own hot temper was all that saved me as, seizing his board and scribing the mark with my own hand, this action so maddened my antagonist as to make him assault me bodily, the ensuing uproar overthrowing momentarily the impetus to mass murder.

Yet let me not style myself deliverer. The poor devils were massacred next day by another company and I, busted to private soldier, shipped off again to the North.

The years passed as if being lived by another. I glance back upon enlistments and discharges, pay vouchers and correspondence, bronze heads extracted from my own flesh and cached as souvenirs at the bottom of my pack; I dig out trinkets and mementos, the names of men and women, lovers indeed, jotted upon the felt of my helmet cawl and scratched with a blade edge into the straps of my rucksack. I remember none.

The season transited as in a single night, that species of slumber from which one awakens at intervals, fitful and feverish, and can reclaim by morning nothing save the sour smell of his own tortured bedding. It seemed I came to myself again before Potidaea, besieging the place a second time seven years after the first. I cannot say now if it was dream or real.

For two winters after my wife's death, I felt no call to passion.

This was neither virtue nor grief, only despair. Then one night I entered the whores' camp and never left. You understand the reckoning of accounts, my friend. Tote this up for me. How much in wages, and don't fail to include mustering bonuses and dividends of discharge, may a soldier accrue who remains upon campaign, retiring not even in winter except to recover from wounds, for a decade entire? A tidy sum, I'd imagine. Enough to buy a handsome little farm, with stock and hands and even a comely wife.

I fucked away every farthing. Screwed it or drank it, and in the end could not credit even my own recall that I had once harbored aspirations for myself.

Peace came, the so-called Peace of Nicias, whereunder both sides, exhausted from years of strife, contracted to retire until they could recover breath, scratching in the interval lines beyond which each vowed not to trespass. I came home. Alcibiades was thirty now, elected to the chief executive of the state, the Board of Ten Generals, the same post his guardian Pericles had held. But his star had not yet gained preeminence. Nicias held sway, his elder and rival, who had negotiated peace with the Spartans, or been appointed by them to do so, to deprive Alcibiades, whose enterprise they feared, of the recognition and prestige. My friend employed me, at captain's wages paid from his own purse, as a sort of private envoy to the Lacedaemonians, or those individual Spartans-Xenares, Endius, Mindarus-with whom he conspired to wreck the Peace. I am no diplomat. I missed the action. I needed it.

One comes to the mercenary's calling in this way, as a criminal to crime. For war and crime are twin spawn of the same misbegotten litter. Why else does the magistrate present his perennial offer to errant youth: servitude or the army. Each inducts into the other, war and crime, and the more monstrous the felony, the deeper the criminal must plunge to reclaim himself, disremembering kin and country, forgetting even crime, so that in the end the only riddle the soldier kens is that most occult of all: why am I still living?

Peace for me was war under another name. I never stopped working. Absent license to soldier for my country, I hired out to others. At first only to allies, but when times got tight, well…one's former foes proved the more eager employers. Thebes had got a taste for power, whipping Athens at Delium. War had brought into her fold Plataea, Thespiae, and half the towns of the Boeotian League; she saw no profit in buying into a Spartan peace. Corinth stood equally apart and aggrieved. The treaty had restored neither Anactorium nor Sollium; she had lost her influence in the northwest, not to mention Corcyra, whose revolt had started the war in the first place. Megara chafed to behold her port of Nisaea garrisoned by Athenian troops, and Elis and Mantinea, democracies, had lost all patience with life beneath the Spartan heel. In the north, Amphipolis and the Thraceward region defied the treaty. I worked for all of them. We all did.

Under the peace, states favored mercenaries over popularly drafted troops. Such lives lost did not haunt the politician; their acts could be disavowed when inconvenient; if they rebelled, you held their pay; and if they were killed, you didn't pay them at all.

You have observed the mercenary's life, Jason. Of a year's campaign there totals what, ten days of actual fighting? Boil it down to moments when one stands within hazard's jaws and the tally condenses to minutes. All a man need do is survive that and he's earned another season. Indeed the mercenary holds more in common with the foe, to preserve their lives and livelihoods, than with his own officers, seeking glory. What is glory to the soldier for hire? He prefers survival.

The mercenary never calls himself by that name. If he owns armor and hires out as a heavy infantryman, he is a “shield.”

Javelineers are “lances,” archers “bows.” A broker, called a pilophoros after his felt cap, will say, “I need one hundred shields and thirty bows.”

No shield for hire tramps alone. Peril of robbery makes him seek a mate; it's easier to hire on as a pair or even a tetras. There are sites in each city where soldiers congregate seeking employment. In Argos a taverna named the Anthem, in Astacos a brothel called Knucklebones. In Heracleion are two hiring plazas; one beside the dry spring called Opountis, the other on the rise east of the Shrine of the Amazons, called by the locals Hyssacopolis, Pussy Town.

The countryside holds sites of custom as well. A chain of bivouacs called “coops” runs from Sounium to Pella. “Coop” serves as noun and verb. “I need a dozen shields.” “Try the Asopus, I saw a mob cooping there.” Some sites are little more than dry slopes beside streams; others-one called Tritaeia near Cleonae, another along the Peneus near Elis simply Potamou Camps is, Where the River Bends-are quite commodious, shaded copses with part-time markets, even the rude linen shelters called hourlies, where a soldier packing a woman may obtain an interval of privacy before vacating for the next pair.

Abandoned hunting lodges are favored sites for shields overnighting on the road. One recognizes these haunts from the surrounding slopes, logged down for firewood. An informal but remarkably efficient postal service covered the country then.

Soldiers packed letters among their kit, parcels and “sticks” thrust into their fists by wives and lovers or the odd mate encountered on the tramp. Each arrival at a coop would be encircled eagerly while he ran through his packet. If a man heard an absent mate's name called, he took the letter for him, often packing it half a year before at last completing delivery.

Hiring notices, called show rags, were posted at coops and brothels, even upon landmark shade trees or beside favored springs. Learning of work, an entire coop will tramp off, electing their officers on the march. Mercenary rank is less formal than that of a state army. A captain is called by the number of men he brings.

He is an “eight” or a “sixteen.” Officers are “grade-men” or

“pennants,” after the service sashes they mount upon their spearpoints, as guidons in assembly and dressing the line. A good officer never lacks for men eager to serve under him, nor a good man for commanders keen to sign him on. You find a crew you can count on and stick with them.

One sees the same faces in the profession. They all make the rounds. I ran into Telamon twice, on a ferry out of Patrae and at a coop on the Alpheus, before signing on with him the first fight at Trachis. Few use their real names. Nicknames and war names abound. Macedonians, “macks,” make up the main of the soldiery, hazel-eyed and orange-haired. I never served with a unit that didn't have a Big Red, a Little Red, and a gang in between.

No man unblooded or unvouched for is taken on for pay. He must serve free, and none shares food or fire till he has held his ground in a fight. Later on the rallying square, the grade-man approaches. “When did you last draw wages?” “Never yet, sir.” The officer takes his name and slips him a coin or two. “Start tomorrow.” That's it. He's in.

Discipline, too, is less ceremonious among the breed for hire. At Heraclea in Trachis, the first scrape under Telamon, one of our number deserted in the assault. Astonishingly this rogue was waiting in camp when we returned, wearing a shit-eater and crossing toward Telamon, spooling an alibi. Without breaking stride our captain ran him through with his nine-footer, with such force that the iron shot forth, two hands' worth, from between the man's shoulder blades. In the instant the fellow lingered, impaled upon Telamon's shaft, our chief aired his edge and hacked him off at the neck. Still without a word he stripped corpse and kit, casting its contents to the whores and sutlers' boys, leaving nothing but a naked and dishonored carcass. I chanced to be standing next to an Athenian shield we called Rabbit. He turned to me deadpan: “Point taken.”

The rhythm of the mercenary's life is a narcotic, as the passion of the whoremonger or gambler, which careers the shield for hire, if he answers truly to that name, collaterally pursues. Its currents efface all that went before and all that will come after. First, and beyond all, fatigue. The infantryman breathes exhaustion night and day. Even in a gale at sea the soldier, returned from retching over the rail, drops to the planks and corks off with ease, beard buried in the bilges.

Second stands boredom and third hunger. The soldier is foot-weary. He treks, ever upon the march, advancing toward some object which draws near only to be superseded by another, equally bereft of meaning. The earth endures beneath his tread, and he himself stands ready to drop upon it, if not in death, then exhaustion. The soldier never sees the landscape, only the burdened back of the man trudging in column before him.

Fluids dominate the soldier's life. Water, which he must have or die. Sweat, which drips from his brow and drains in runnels down his rib cage. Wine, which he requires at march's end and battle's commencement. Vomit and piss. Semen. He never runs out of that.

The penultimate, blood, and beyond that, tears.

The soldier lives on dreams and never tires of reciting them. He yearns for sweetheart and home, yet returns to the front with joy and never narrates his time apart.

Spear and sword, the manuals tell us, are the weapons of the infantryman. This is erroneous. Pick and shovel are his province, hoe and mattock, lever and crowbar; these and the mortarman's hod, the forester's ax, and, beyond all, the quarryman's basket, that ubiquitous artifact the rookie learns to cobble on-site of reeds or faggots. And get her to set aright, my fellow, tumpline upon the brow, bowl across the shoulders with no knot to gouge the flesh, for when she is laden with rubble and stone to the measure of half your weight, you must hump her. Up that ladder, see? To where the forms of timber await to receive the fill that will become the wall that will encircle the city, whose battlements we will scale and tear down and set up all over again.

The soldier is a farmer. He knows how to shape the earth. He is a carpenter; he erects ramparts and palisades. A miner, he digs trenches and tunnels; a mason, he chisels a road from a sheer face of stone. The soldier is a physician who performs surgery without anesthetic, a priest who inters the dead without psalm. He is a philosopher who plumbs the mysteries of existence, a linguist who pronounces “pussy” in a dozen tongues. He is an architect and a demolition man, a fire brigadier and an incendiary. He is a beast who dwells in the dirt, a worm, owning a mouth and an anus and aught but appetite in between.

The soldier looks upon horrors and affects to stand indifferent to them. He steps, oblivious, over corpses in the road and flops to wolf his gruel upon stones painted black with blood. He imbibes tales that would bleach the mane of Hades and tops them with his own, laughing, then turns about and donates his last obol to a displaced dame or urchin he will never see again except cursing him from a wall or rooftop, hurling down tiles and stones to cleave his skull.

Half a dozen times with the macks of our coop we trekked through the pass at Thermopylae. Tourists, we trooped the Wall and dug for Persian bronze heads on the hillock where the Three Hundred made their immortal stand. What would they think, these knights of yore, to behold war as we fought it? Not Hellene against barbarian in defense of sacred soil, but Greek against Greek out of partisanship and zealotry. Not army to army, man to man, but party against party, father against son, and bring the kids and Mom to sling a stone or slice a throat. What would these heroes of old think of civil conflagration in the streets of Corcyra, when the democrats surrounded four hundred aristoi within the temple of Hera, lured them forth with sacred oaths, then slaughtered them before their infants' eyes? Or the massacre of six hundred in the same city, when the demos, the people, walled their foes within a hostelry, tore off the roof, and rained death with brick and stone, that the immured wretches in despair slew themselves by driving into their throats the very arrows they were being shot down with and hanged themselves with the straps of the bedstands? What would they make of the fate later on of Melos or Scione, when the order came from Athens to slaughter all males and sell the women and children for slaves? How would they countenance their own countrymen's massacre of the men of Hysiae, or their conduct in the siege of Plataea, when the sons of Leonidas put to their captives one query only-“What service have you performed for Sparta?”-then butchered them to the last man?

I had a woman in those years, of Samothrace originally, though when she was drunk she claimed to be from Troezen. Her name was Eunice, Fair Victory. She had been the camp wife of my mate, a captain-of-eight named Automedon who died, not of wounds, but a tooth of all things, infected. Eunice came into my bed that same night. “You should not be with whores.” Quick as that she became my woman.

In what ways was she different from my bride Phoebe? Do you care, Jason? I'll tell you anyway.

As my dear bride was a blossom grown within the cloistered court, this dame Eunice was a shoot sprung upon the storm. This flower grew wild. She was the kind of woman you could leave with a comrade and she wouldn't fuck him behind your back. You'd return and they'd be laughing together, she cooking him something, and when he took his leave, he'd tug you aside. “If you catch iron, I'll look out for her.” The supreme compliment.

Eunice was wise. When she ploughed you, her ankles set alongside your ears and her fingers clamped you hard at the ribs.

You felt her greed for you and your seed, and even though you knew she'd move on to the next man with as little ceremony as she'd crossed to you, you couldn't complain. There was an integrity to it.

We were in Thrace one year under contract to Athens, raiding villages to support the fleet. The enterprise was preposterous; forty men would trek three days into the hills and come back with a single starving sheep. The wild tribes defended their flocks on horseback, with painted faces and magic symbols plastered on the flanks of their runt ponies. It was like warfare from an era antecedent to bronze, a thousand generations before Troy. To stumble back alive to camp, without even a fly for shelter, and roll atop one's woman on the steppe…this was not all bad.

The soldier's life is primordial; surrendered to it, he reverts to a state not just pre literate but prehistoric. That is its appeal.

I had slain my sister Meri.

My edge had opened her throat.

What remained for me but to wander, as far as war could bear me, to tramp upon the earth and bleed on it and dare it to enfold me beneath its mantle? Of course it didn't. Why? Had I become so without worth that I would live forever?

In the second summer of the Peace our coop learned of work at good wages, rebuilding the walls of Argos and fortifying her port of Nauplia. This was Alcibiades' doing; he had double-crossed his Spartan friend Endius, leading a legation to Athens seeking to prevent this Argive alliance, making him out a fraud and liar before the people who, in rage, sealed the pact not alone with Argos but Elis and Mantinea as well. Alcibiades was at Argos now, with four hundred carpenters and masons brought from Athens. Here was the fruit of Euryptolemus' design that his cousin work his ambition abroad. By the force of his person and persuasion, in open assembly and private discourse with the leading men, Alcibiades had brought over to Athens the three great democracies of the Peloponnese, two of whom had been allies of Sparta.

Our coop gaped at the scale of construction. From the citadel of the Larissa, as far as vision could carry, the city circuit stood compassed by scaffolding and construction inclines, derricks and roller sledges, road cutters, timber mills, factors' tents and teamsters' trains, with overall such a multitude at labor that men shy of hods bore mortar on their bare backs, cupping it between their arms with fingers interlocked behind them. I located Euryptolemus, seeking a berth at wages for our coop. He clapped my shoulder, welcoming, and declared he could put us to far better use.

He signed us to train Messenian freedmen as heavy infantry, some two hundred who had been chattel at Sparta but fled to forts erected by Alcibiades and Nicias, securing their liberation. We would drill them all summer, accompanying Alcibiades to Patrae with the fall to bring that city into alliance as well. When I remonstrated with our commander, at last securing an audience, that these Messenians would never be ready to fight by fall, he only laughed. “Who said anything about fighting?”

He would win Patrae by love.

And he did. Here is how.

Patrae, as you know, commands the western portal to the Gulf of Corinth. She was a democracy and neutral. Now, however, with the other great democracies of the Peloponnese-Elis, Mantinea, and Argos-brought into alliance with Athens, Patrae was a fruit ripe to fall.

Have you spent time in Patrae, Jason? It is a most agreeable place. Her dishes are squid cooked in its own ink and baked thrush.

One dines there not in the marketplace, but at establishments called “flags,” which are private homes, many with terraces overlooking the sea. On entering, one takes a flag, a brightly colored swatch bearing a symbol, of a dolphin or trident, say, and ties it about his shoulders. With that, he is a son of the family.

That portion is his which he desires, or he may name a dish and the proprietress will produce it. At repast's end he folds his fare within his flag and leaves it on the bench.

The government of Patrae consists of two houses, the Council of Elders and the Assembly of the people. Alcibiades approached first those leading men with whom he was personally acquainted, and upon assuaging their fears of his and his nation's intentions, secured permission to address the commons. He was now thirty-two years old, twice a general of Athens, and the most spectacularly ascendant of the new breed of Greece. He spoke as follows:

“Men of Patrae, I proceed on the assumption that you, as all free Hellenes, would prefer independence and self-determination for your state, to having her affairs dictated by an alien power.

Neutrality, you must agree, is no longer an option. Today each state of Greece must align with Athens or Sparta; no third alternative obtains.”

The Assembly of Patrae meets in the open air on an eminence called the Collar, overlooking the gulf. Alcibiades gestured now to these straits.

“To which element, sea or land, is your nation's future bound?

This, I submit, is the decisive factor, for if land, her fate must stand with Sparta. This will produce the greatest security. But if one's hopes lie abroad through trade and commerce, he must recognize that that power which commands the sea cannot suffer another state to make use of this element to its advantage, if this works injury to herself.

“Patrae is sited on the sea, my friends, and upon a most strategic promontory. This works to your nation's benefit, making her of surpassing value to Athens as a friend, but to your peril, should you elect to make our city your foe. Do not delude yourself that this Peace will endure. War will come again. You must prepare now, determining which course yields the greater security-alliance with that naval power which needs you and must protect you, whose might opens up to your use all ports and sea-lanes of the world, shielding your merchantmen wherever their ambitions bear them and providing courts of law by which their interests may be safeguarded. Or choose to ally with a land power, Sparta and her League, which cannot defend you against seaborne assault, which will recruit your young men to fight as infantry where they are least well trained and equipped, and beneath whose hegemony you must suffer isolation and impoverishment, cut off from that intercourse of commerce which brings not alone the good things of life but the surplus of resource without which security is an illusion.”

He wanted Patrae to build long walls connecting the upper town to the port. When a Councilor resisted, narrating his fear that Athens would gobble Patrae up, Alcibiades responded, “What you say may be true, my friend. But if she does, it will be by degrees and from the feet. Sparta will take you headfirst and at one gulp.”

But his most telling argument required no articulation. This was the sight of the Messenian freedmen who, fired by their hatred of Sparta, had shaped into a crack unit. Here was what freedom and Athens could do for you, their presence said. Be like them, or face them.

Patrae did come over. With that, Alcibiades had detached from Sparta in her own backyard three powerful states and brought over a fourth from neutrality. He had fashioned a coalition whose combined armed forces rivaled that of her former master, all the while adhering to the letter of the Peace and setting not a solitary Athenian life at hazard. He would move next, or his proxies would, against a fifth state, Epidaurus, whose fall would complete that gambit by which the sixth and most crucial Spartan ally, Corinth, would find herself cut off and vulnerable as well.

Now for the first time one began to see Spartans and Spartan agents. Their cavalry appeared across Achaea and the Argolid, followed by those surrogates in scarlet of the seventy Laconian towns, the so-called Neighbors, heavy infantry drilled to such a pitch as exceeded all save the Corps of Peers itself. Mindarus arrived, the field marshal, and Endius and Cleobulus, leaders of the war party. They and their lieutenants began showing up at coops, the first time we had seen full Spartiates recruiting shields and free lances. One excelled all in the zeal of his application. This was Lysander the son of Aristocleitus, that same Lysander whose name would toll down Athenian annals, synonymous with doom.

Telamon took work from him and chided me for my reluctance.

Others of our coop ran “errands” as well. They would not recount these actions, even to me. One knew only that they were performed at night and they paid well.

With Telamon I heard Lysander address the Patraean Council.

“Men of Patrae, the speech of the Athenian general” (meaning Alcibiades, who had addressed the Assembly some days previous)

“is known to all and has been countered by ambassadors of my city, whose eloquence far outstrips my own. Nonetheless my regard for your nation is such that, though I come before you as a soldier only, I must add my voice to these rebuttals. Make no mistake, friends.

The course you elect now must bear profound consequences. I beg you resist the impulse to haste. The hare may leap into the pot, they say, but not back out once the lid is made fast.

“Let me speak to the distinction between the Athenian character and the Spartan. Perhaps you have not considered this.

What kind of nation are the Spartans? We are not a seafaring people, nor is it in our nature to covet empire. Our portion of the Peloponnese we hold, content, never seeking its aggrandizement.

Our alliances are defensive. Even when we strike overseas at our foes, our object is not to conquer, only to quell potential peril.

Those states which border upon us we hold fast; this is true. As distance increases, however, the reins slacken.

“Your state stands at a remove from ours, men of Patrae. What do we want of you? Only that you remain free, independent, and strong. In this, we believe, resides our security, for a free state will resist incursion with all her might. Do you fear we shall harm you?

On the contrary, Sparta will aid in every way to preserve your independence, so long as you do not turn such strength against us.

“Now consider the Athenians. They are a sea power. They are empire builders. Already they hold two hundred states in subjection. Patrae will make two hundred and one. This speechmaker who has come before you, this general of Athens, has dispensed honeyed words and reassurance. You must see through these, my friends, for by just such blandishments have other states been seduced from their liberty. Ask yourselves if you will find this man so charming when he returns with warships to exact tribute of your treasury, when he drafts your young men for his fleet and imposes upon your nation Athenian codes and laws. How equitable will this so-called alliance feel when you must turn in the very coins of your purse and take 'owls' of Athens in return?

Your guest has promised protection under Athenian law. What does this mean, except that even the most modest private suit may no longer be settled by your own courts but be adjudicated at Athens, before Athenian juries, amid such corruption and cupidity as I pray you are never compelled to endure.

“You of the nobility are estate holders and equestrians. When war resumes, and it will-in this our Athenian friend spoke truly-who will suffer most among your countrymen? Will it be the commons, who will find work with the fleet and discover their position enhanced by war, or yourselves, whose property, which lies outside these vaunted Long Walls, will be laid waste? Whose sons will die first, whose estates be reduced and devastated?”

My mates ran other jobs for Lysander. Pay for one that autumn was thirty drachmas, a month's wages for two nights' work, but it required a man acquainted with the roads inside Lacedaemon.

When Telamon informed his employer that his mate was an anepsios, educated at Sparta, I was sent for. Lysander had his headquarters then at an inn called the Cauldron, at Ptolis on the Mantinean frontier. We were ushered in after midnight when all other officers, and witnesses, had been dismissed.

Lysander claimed to remember me from the Upbringing, extremely unlikely as he was three age-classes ahead and in an elite training battalion. I remembered him, however. Of the four Firsts a youth could win in his commission year, in Wrestling, Chorus, Obedience, and Chastity, Lysander took three. His birth, however, was so mean, and he was seen so to curry favor with his betters, that such qualities failed to gain him the swift ascent they remarked. Peace further retarded his career. He was thirty-five or about; he should hold a lieutenant-colonelcy of infantry. Instead he was just a cavalry captain, the least prestigious element of Spartan arms. In fact nothing about him impressed me this night so much as his good looks, which were nearly as arresting as Alcibiades'. He was tall, with steel-colored eyes and hair falling to his shoulders. That this individual would one day preside over the dismemberment of the Athenian Empire and reign as a god over the entire Hellenic world seemed in this hour impossible of conception.

Lysander detailed the prospective errand. Telamon and I were to convey to Sparta a fledgling owl in a cage, a gift from himself to Cleobulus, chief of the war party. The real chore, however, was to deliver a dispatch, which for fear of discovery must be committed to memory and imparted to its addressee only. This was a plea to the Board of Magistrates to take seriously the intrigues of Alcibiades. The ephors must act, and act swiftly, for the measures set in motion by this solitary Athenian, Lysander professed, had placed the very survival of Sparta at hazard. When I balked at performing this, fearing it would work harm to my countrymen, Lysander laughed. “Remember, you can always tender this intelligence, and all else you see and hear at Lacedaemon, to your friend”-meaning Alcibiades-”for love or profit.” To this day I recall the text.

…our peril lies neither with the knight Nicias nor the so-called popular leaders of Athens-Hyperbolus, Androcles, and the demagogues-whose vision extends no further than pandering to the mob for next year's election, but with this glory-driven aristocrat who alone possesses both strategic vision and implacable will. He employs this Peace as if it were war, seeking to advance his personal renown through the surrogateship of other states, his object to cut off our nation from her Peloponnesian allies. We must counter these conspiracies before it is too late, my friend, nor scruple at means or measures.

Lysander knew Alcibiades. From summers in boyhood, when Alcibiades and his brothers visited their xenos, guest-friend, Endius at Sparta. As a youth Lysander, as I said, had been penniless; he had secured tuition to the Upbringing only as a mothax, a “stepbrother” or sponsoree, dues paid by Endius' father, named Alcibiades. You may reckon to what extent such subordination galled the youth's pride and fueled the acrimony he bore lifelong toward his rival.

I ran this job and others, courier chores mostly. At Sparta one indeed felt a sea change. The war party had seized ascendancy; the young men (and, more telling, the women) clamored for action that would restore Spartan pride. A battle was coming. You could smell it.

The army took the field twice that summer, both full call-ups under King Agis. When the second fizzled at the very gates of Argos, the Spartans turned upon their own king in fury at his fecklessness. Alcibiades leapt upon this. Rousing the allies, they took Orchomenos, securing the plain and passes north of Mantinea and cutting off Sparta from her allies beyond the gulf. Tegea and Orestheum now stood vulnerable as well. The fall of these was unthinkable to Spartan arms, as they opened the entire Eurotas valley. Yet still the ephors did not act. The knights and colonels thought their king a dunce or a coward, and no one trusted the freed helots who now constituted a significant portion of the army.

The cauldron bubbled just shy of the boil.

One night Telamon came with a job. We would run it on horseback with two Athenian shields, Rabbit and Chowder, so named for his incapacity to keep a meal down at sea. The task was to descend downvalley to Tegea, twelve miles; from there to escort in secret the commander of the Spartan regiment on-site, Anaxibius, to the fort at Tripolis, where he would receive orders from the home government. We must have him there at the second watch and back to Tegea by dawn.

Lysander did not inform us of this, but Alcibiades was at that hour at Tegea. He was there with his freed Messenians, addressing the Council.

We located the Spartan and got off. Before the party had ridden a mile, however, a runner from Lysander intercepted us. Plans had changed; we must divert to the shrine of Artemis on the Tegea-Pallantion road.

Our Spartan, Anaxibius, was a full colonel and in nowise averse to employing the ash of his staff upon the tardy or slow of wit.

Twice he cracked Chowder across the ribs, demanding to know who the hell had trained us and what kind of a cocked-up operation we were running.

We reached the sanctuary well into the second watch. Clearly our irascible charge would not be back by dawn. Nor, mounting the steps, could Lysander be discovered. “By the Twins!”-Anaxibius smote the stone with the butt of his staff such a blow as nearly ruptured the drums of our ears-”I'1I flay you all for this insolence, and that bastard mothax in his turn.”

From behind a column emerged Lysander, alone save his squire, called Strawberry after a birthmark. He beseeched the colonel's pardon, who yet clutched his staff before him and continued to beat it upon the stone, taking in vain the names of abundant divinities. Lysander appealed to him to desist, as troops were encamped about and the racket might be taken as an alarm.

“Take your staff to me, sir, if you wish, but hear the message I am ordered to impart.”

Anaxibius at last lowered his lumber. In that instant Lysander snatched forth his own blade and, striking upon the colonel's undefended right, fetched him such a blow, backhand, as to cleave his neck to the bone and in fact nearly decapitate him. Anaxibius dropped like a sack from a wagon; fluid gushed as from an overturned pail. Our four gaped as Strawberry spun the fallen form facedown on the stone and, plunging again and again into its back the bared steel of a nine-foot spear, inflicted such wounds as could only be read as the blows of cowards and assassins.

Weapons filled my mates' hands; our squad had formed up, backs to each other, certain that our own murders were next, at the hands of other concealed confederates of Lysander. No sound came, however. No squads materialized from shadow. If indeed there was a camp about, no stir arose from it.

“What a waste.”

Lysander broke the silence, indicating the corpse of his countryman. He spat blood. He had bitten his lip through, accidentally, as one does frequently in such exigencies. “He was a good officer.”

“For whose murder we four will be accounted.” This from Telamon, indicating himself and our party.

“Not by name,” was our employer's cool rejoinder.

Lysander knelt, examining what had been a man and was now meat.

One came by degrees to grasp his perfidy's object. The colonel's assassination would be passed off as the work of agents of Athens.

We who had been dupes need neither be named nor apprehended; the act alone would suffice to ignite outrage at Sparta. The home government would shuck its sloth and rise, in time to snatch Tegea from the brink.

“Will you murder us now, Captain?” Telamon inquired.

Lysander rose, pressing at his cut lip. He had, by his demeanor, never entertained such a notion.

“Men as yourselves, who stand apart from the fealty of statehood, are invaluable to me.”

He nodded to his squire, who accorded us our pay.

“Then we will require more than this,” spoke Telamon.

Our patron laughed. “I'm flat.”

“We'll have the horses, then.”

Lysander approved this.

Rabbit had crossed to the portico; he motioned all clear. My own blood, which had run chill for all this interval, now refound its course and heat. “Who slaughters his own, Captain,” I heard my voice address the Spartan, “scorns God as well as man.”

Lysander's eyes met mine, as steel-black as I recalled. “Take your man's portion, Polemidas, and leave heaven to me.”