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

XIV

After the Games we trekked home to Athens, my brother and I, employing the four days to reacquaint ourselves. I had wages due and sent Eunice ahead on the ferry, via Patrae and the Isthmus; she would be safe traveling with Telamon and Chowder. Others of our coop had set themselves to try the city as well. There would be work with the new fleet for Sicily.

Home again my brother and I at last disinterred from their unquiet berth the bones of our father and sister, and I those of wife and child, and set them to rest in the tomb of our ancestors at Acharnae. Perhaps now they would find peace. For myself, standing upon the earth that had borne the sons and daughters of our family time out of mind, I was stricken with such grief that I could not keep my feet even for the interval of the rite but sank to a knee, overcome.

Tell me, Jason, what is this power by which our native soil possesses us and holds us captive? We think we have seized it but it has taken us. It belongs not to us, but we to it.

I had spent few seasons on the farm as a boy. My aunt took me into the city at four; by ten I was abroad in the Upbringing. I never really knew my father's father or his cousins and brothers. I made their acquaintance now, largely by standing, with Lion, up to my ears in their debt.

You have run a farm, Jason. None who hasn't knows the meaning of poverty. In war at least one's wages pass one night in his fist before scattering to the wind. The farmer doesn't get even that. Before a seed is in the earth, the husbandman has mortgaged his crop, so that even if his harvest bears a bounty and he loads for market with prime figs and pears, the profit may not even wave how-do-you-do before it is whisked away by the counting clerk, the tax collector, and his own cranky kin. To say that a man owns a farm would be preposterous, were it not so cruel. One carries it, like an ox or an iron anchor, on his back.

The soldier thinks he knows fear. Tell that to the farmer. I have corked off at battle's eve and snoozed sound as stone; now on my landsman's bunk I tossed, sleepless as Cerberus. The farmer greets the dawn with one query only: what calamity has struck overnight? I never knew how many ways a sheep could run ill, or a spring turn sour.

Something is always breaking on a farm. You start mending at dawn and don't quit till midnight. Troy herself never suffered such assaults. Fungus infiltrates the farm, as mold, blight, mildew, rust, and dry rot; one duels canker and palsy, ague, colic, distemper.

Every creeping thing is the enemy. On the tramp I swatted insects and never thought of them more; now they haunted my nightmares.

Termites and carpenter ants, hornets and wasps, locusts, mites, aphids and grain beetles, moths, chiggers, weevils and blowflies; the corers and borers, burrowers and devourers. God alone may testify to the creatures which infest the innards of the farmer's livestock; canker and cutworms, leeches and tapeworms; into how many bungholes must one plunge to the elbow? The earth itself may not be relied upon, but each morn another retaining wall has toppled, another runoff ditch caved in. Every task costs money on the land, and the landsman never has money. The farmer's cash is sweat, the only commodity he possesses in unlimited bulk. Rain is the farmer's nemesis, too much or too little, and sun and wind and fire and time. Hired hands put out work only on payday, and if you're mad enough to invest in a slave or two, you import only their troubles. Calf-deep in sheep shit, my brother and I exchange this wordless query: how in hell's name did the old man do it? How could one man alone wring profit from this dirt when the team of us, yoked, is vanquished utterly? The farmer is ancient at forty. He endures season to season through the offices of one ally only: his dog.

Tireless, ever faithful, the landsman's Number One (all secondaries comprising a useless pack of curs) bounds to his heel at cock's crow and toils there daylong, unshirking, ever cheerful, craving no wages save the sound of his master's voice and a quick pat and ruffle at labor's end. Lord of all beasts, night sentry, bulwark of the line, the farm could not survive without him.

The land of course is bliss for a child, for whom each chore is a lark and every creature a playmate. A woman, too, comes into her own on a farm. Eunice reveled in it. Lion's Theonoe was a city dame; the country bored her. But her children throve, inflicting on my dame that ache only a childless woman knows. I must take Eunice to wife soon if I meant to remain; she would not stand the tramp more.

That fall a message came from Euryptolemus. There would be a fleet to invade Sicily; Alcibiades would hold command. I could name my appointment, as could my brother. The mustering bonus would be three months' pay, with officers' double wages for the duration.

Eunice would not remain in the room when Lion and I debated this.

Not long thereafter, Alcibiades appeared before our clan to make a presentation. He rode out to Weather Hill at Acharnae, my grandfather's ancient tile-roofed farmhouse. Above thirty of our kinsmen assembled-old wealth primarily, but with a salting of the younger bloods as well. Alcibiades addressed the gathering after dinner. He wanted money for the fleet. Not an assessment of the eisphora, the war tax, for which all citizens had been levied hitherto, but additional capital ventured uncompelled. Specifically he sought private sponsors, individuals to endow warships in their own names or as syndicates. He desired them to build these vessels from the keel up, bear all costs of commission and shakedown, then donate the completed craft to the fleet, with funding for a year for officers and crew. This was for Sicily, for the great invasion.

One must here note a distinguishing characteristic of Alcibiades' political style. This was his temerity to advance a cause, absent all office. Though he had been four times elected to the Board of Generals, the prestige he brought this night was neither backed by state authority nor issued in an official capacity. He came before us entirely on his own.

As to this Sicilian enterprise: it chanced, as you know, that Athens at that time had a treaty of mutual defense with the city of Egesta; representatives of this state had recently appealed to the Assembly, seeking assistance in a dispute with their neighbors, the Selinuntines, who, aided now by the might of Syracuse, held them besieged. Alcibiades and others who favored war had seized upon this pretext; in no time the measure was ratified by the people.

Funds were appropriated for an expedition; three generals, Alcibiades, Nicias, and Lamachus, appointed. Opponents, however, including Nicias himself, intrigued successfully to cap expenditures, hoping to sap the venture before it began. Alcibiades took his case to the people, meaning those with money, the great families and the private political associations. By the evening he appeared before our family, he had made presentations to at least three score such gatherings and had four more scheduled for the next four nights. In all Alcibiades put his pitch, it was estimated, to over two hundred clans and brotherhoods; it took the better part of fall and winter. Men joked of these nocturnal canvassings that at least they kept him out of the whorehouses.

This was serious business, however, and Alcibiades approached it in deadly earnest. Prior to his evening with the men of our family, he had taken the time to seek out each in private, on the land or in town, wherever he could catch the man at ease and speak with him informally and apart. This was to soften him up. Further each potential benefactor had received at his home a prospectus, and Alcibiades brought more, updated, which he distributed upon the actual evening. Worthy of note was that to two of my uncles, whose resources were too slender to foot such a monumental contribution, were proffered not brochures of the fleet, but more modest briefs soliciting donations to the cavalry. I recall my grandfather's astonishment, not to say indignation, that Alcibiades had acquired such intelligence of our family's most privileged holdings. What must he know of the city's loftier eupatridai, the true old-money rich?

The evening broke frosty and clear. Braziers had been set up on my grandfather's south terrace, which had for the occasion been cloistered on three sides by woolen blinds, open on the fourth toward Decelea. Alcibiades arrived early, accompanied by his comrades Menestheus and Pythiades, with the naval architect Aristophon to answer technical questions. It was lost on no one that both Alcibiades' colleagues were recipients of fleet prizes of valor, Menestheus as a ship's master at Mytilene, Pythiades as a squadron commander at Cos, and that the pair were men of mature years and oligarchic inclination, recruited no doubt to offset their principal's youth and notoriety as a champion of the commons.

The meal and hymn concluded, and all dining vessels cleared, Alcibiades saluted his hosts and thanked them for their attendance and hospitality.

“Let us plunge right in and, as the Spartans, keep it short and sweet. Though, as you gentlemen know, I have been elected to the Board of Generals and share command of the expeditionary fleet, I come before this college tonight in no capacity other than private citizen. I address you, friends, in my own name only. One may reprove this, calling it prideful or presumptuous. This is what our enemies the Spartans would say, who act, when they do, alone by procedure and through channels. This is why our polity is superior to theirs and why they never have, and never shall, excel us. For our way provides that any citizen may place an issue before any other or aggregation of others, seeking by reason and persuasion to build a constituency for his cause. This is democracy in its best sense. Not the grandstanding of the demagogue to the mob, but the cool and measured appeal to the judicious and the prudent, in the interest of all.

“I am aware, gentlemen, that a number of you are skeptical of my motives and hold me personally in less than high regard. Permit me to address this at once and, I hope, persuade you that those qualities of my person which may cause you distress will prove in the present circumstance not liabilities but assets to our cause as individuals and to our city as a whole.

“Some of you disapprove my ambition, of which I make no secret. It smacks of outrage; you fear its consequence. Others have been scandalized by instances of my personal deportment. If I may say, I've been scandalized myself! This is no more than youth, gentlemen, and excess of spirit. When one purchases a colt he wishes to race, he looks not for docility, but fire. He seeks a horse that will run. Let his trainers school the beast. This is what I ask of you gentlemen tonight. Take me in hand. Harness my rashness to your temperance. This balance is how great teams are made and mighty races won.

“Sicily is a mighty race. Her lands are vast, richer than all the Peloponnese and in arable acreage greater than Greece entire.

Barley grows in Sicily, and wheat and rye and oats. Olives thrive, and fruit of all kinds. Sicily has water and timber and horses; who holds her has no need of Black Sea grain. And Sicily possesses mineral wealth, gold and silver, iron and copper and tin. Her cities, fifty in number, are the equal of Greek poleis in resource and treasure.

“More tempting, Sicily squats on the threshold of Italy. I need not detail the wealth of that unexploited land. I see none disputes this, gentlemen. Good. Yet your unspoken question stands clear: what's in it for me?

“All of you have sons, some with sons of their own. Each heir dilutes your patrimony, as holdings must be divided. What may we leave our successors? Where will they find their portion? You, my friends, are of the fifty-measure and equestrian classes; you are estate holders and knights. Let me put a question to you. Which is easier: to build up a landholding from dirt and stone, or to conquer one whole and entire, a founded property already in possession of cleared and planted fields, with water and fences and pasture land and even crofters who know and work the land? When we take Sicily, to whose sons will the choicest of these prizes go? Whom but those who have funded the arms by which they have been mastered?

“You are thinking: war is no mean undertaking, Alcibiades. It brings in its train evils unnumberable; its outcome may as well be calamity as conquest. You frame this question as well: Sicily is strong, her fifty cities will not simply roll over and quit. In answer I wish she had more cities, for the more, the more divided, and more easily subdued. We must think of these cities as islands.

That is what they are. Each apart and self-interested, jealous of all others. We will take these cities as we took the islands of our empire: ally with the strongest against the weakest, conquer the main, then turn upon the holdouts. Leave one or two independent, that we may point to them in proof that none has been coerced into our alliance.

“Many of you have held command with the fleet. You understand sea power. You question the feasibility of its projection over so many leagues, so far from friendly harbors and resupply. I answer, friends, that were a fleet unnecessary, I should seek pretext to commission her anyway. Let me tell you why. Against a prize the size of Sicily, brute force will not suffice, but diplomacy and audacity, and above all the sudden and dramatic presentation of overwhelming might. For that, nothing may rival a fleet. Hear me, gentlemen.

“Land forces, no matter how numerous, present to the eye a spectacle bedraggled and ill defined. When they marshal upon the field, their numbers are often obscured by planted crops or hidden by defiles and mountains. A thousand infantry occupy a space little greater than this estate. An army even of fifty thousand is often dwarfed by the landscape or masked by the dust of its own tread; despite its numbers it looks puny and undaunting.

“Ah, but a fleet! Her spectacle sprawls unbroken across the main, brilliant with sails spread and oar banks extended. An army in the field looks like a mob, an armada like God's wrath. And recall: the foe never gets the chance to see our fleet eclipsed in scale by the vastness of the ocean. He beholds us only within the confines of his own harbor, which we fill end-to-end with fighting ships and men, daunting and overawing him.

“There is another telling aspect to a show of naval might. This is its temerity. A fleet carries with it the audacity of its enterprise.

The stay-at-home foe is stricken by its sudden apparition. The enemy beholding a navy advancing upon him out of the aether is struck with dread, as Priam himself when Achilles' black ships beached upon the plain of Troy.

“A fleet minimizes risk and casualties. Employing the theater of its spectacle, we overawe one city and another, rolling them up within our bag. Rhegium, Messana, Camarina, Catana, Naxos, and the native Sicels have all taken our cause in the past; played right, they will again. Our advance acquires a momentum of its own, indistinguishable in the foe's eyes from fate. He cannot prevail, he sees, and enrolls himself beneath our banner of his own will. Yes, yes, you say, all this sounds brilliant on paper, Alcibiades. But who will make it happen?

“Here I must set delicacy aside and speak straight and blunt.

There are those who are jealous of me, of my private celebrity. I understand this, friends. I ask you, however, to consider that I now place this fame at your disposal, to be yoked to your ends. What I achieve by my private exertions redounds to Athens' glory as well as my own. Recall Olympia; the leading men of Sicily stood present in the stadium when my horses took the triple. They erected pavilions in honor of my victory and clamored about me, seeking my friendship. Will they not be favorably disposed when I and my fellow commanders, backed by this mighty armada, address them as I do you tonight, not with arrogance, threatening the destruction of their homes and enslavement of their families, but seeking their alliance, bidding them join us? Immodest as it sounds, I ask: who else in Athens may command such attention?

“Two more points, gentlemen, and I will finish.

“First, to those who protest that our nation now stands at peace, that we have a treaty with the Spartans, and that this Sicilian venture, though technically not in violation, will in the event plunge us back into full-scale war. I answer with a question: what kind of peace is it when the nations of Greece are in fact fighting on more fronts now than they did under formal declaration? What peace is it when the third part of our young men elect to serve as mercenaries for these very states? War will come again, this is certain. What remains for us to decide is when.

Will it resume at the hour of our enemies' choosing, when they have elevated their forces to the peak of readiness? Or will it come at our election, when our cause stands most likely to prevail?

“Now to the nub. To others, gentlemen, I may confine my appeal to considerations of profit and risk, and these are not inconsequential. But to you who perceive with the eyes of wisdom, I may speak to deeper designs.

“Our nation is great. But greatness begets obligation. It must prove worthy of itself or it falls. You have all seen what this war, prosecuted piecemeal and without vigor, and this so-called Peace have done to our young men's spirit. Those fresh to maturity crave action, while veterans turn sour and sullen. They are going bad-let us call it by its name. Sicily is the antidote. A call to brilliance which will summon ourselves and our youth back from their depletion and despair. Pericles was in error to set us on the defensive. This is not Athens. It is not our style. We are dying by inches, shackled by this ignoble Peace, declining not for lack of goods, but want of glory.

“Athens is a sword rusting in her sheath. We may not sit still, we Athenians. Idleness is fatal to us. What I hate most about this Peace is the toll it has taken on our nation's soul. It will finish us, my friends, as surely as defeat in war. Athens is not a draft mule, but a mighty racehorse; she must be harnessed not to a plough, but to a chariot-and a chariot of war.

“Lastly this, gentlemen. To those who mistrust me and fear my ambition. When this fleet takes station before Syracuse, you will not discover me shrinking from the foe. My ram will be the first to seek and strike the enemy. Perhaps I will be slain. Then you will be quit of me. My pride will no longer vex you. But hear this…

“The fleet will remain.

“Long after my bones are dust beneath the earth, you will have her. Athens will have her. She will be yours, to make use of as you wish.

“Consider this proposal, my friends. Think it over. The spoils of our enterprise will be shared by all, even those who remain safe behind. But glory and honor are his who early sets his name upon the rolls. Join me, brothers and countrymen. Launch from our harbors this mighty armada and let the world stand back in wonder.”