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

II

The assassination party [my grandfather continued] was led by two nobles of Persia acting under orders of the Great King's governor of Phrygia. They proceeded by ship from Abydos on the Hellespont to the stronghold in Thrace to which Alcibiades had repaired in his final exile, whence, discovering their prey absconded, the party pursued him back across the straits to Asia.

The Persians were accompanied by three Peers of Sparta whose chief, Endius, had been Alcibiades' guest-friend and intimate since boyhood. These had been appointed by the home government, not to participate in the murder, but to serve as witnesses, to confirm with their own eyes the extinction of this man, the last left alive whom they still feared. Such was Alcibiades' renown for escape and resurrection that many believed he could cheat even that final magistrate, Death.

A professional assassin, Telamon of Arcadia, accompanied the party, along with some half dozen henchmen of his selection, to plan and execute the action. His confederate was the Athenian Polemides.

Polemides had been a friend of Alcibiades. He had served as captain of marines throughout Alcibiades' spectacular sequence of victories in the Hellespontine War, had acted as his bodyguard when the conqueror returned in glory to Athens, and had stood upon his right hand when Alcibiades restored the procession by land in celebration of the Eleusinian Mysteries. I recall vividly his appearance, at Samos, upon Alcibiades' recall from exile to the fleet. The moment was incendiary, with twenty thousand sailors, marines, and heavy infantry, distraught for their own fate and the survival of their country, enveloping the mole they called Little Choma as the longboat touched and Polemides stepped off, shielding his charge from the mob which seemed as ripe to stone as salute him. I studied Alcibiades' expression; nothing could have been clearer than that he trusted the man at his shoulder absolutely with his life.

It was this Polemides' duty now, some seven years subsequent, to draw the victim out and with his cohort, the assassin Telamon, perform the slaughter. For this his fee was a talent of silver from the treasury of Persia.

Of all this the man informed me, concealing nothing, within the first minutes of our initial interview. He did so, he stated, to ensure that I-whose family shared bonds of marriage with the Alcmaeonids, Alcibiades' family on his mother's side, and myself through my devotion to Socrates, whose link to Alcibiades was well known-would know the worst at once and could pull out, if I wished.

The actual indictment against the man made no citation of Alcibiades.

Polemides was charged in the death of a boatswain of the fleet named Philemon, who had been murdered some few years prior in a brothel brawl at Samos. A second impeachment was preferred against him, that of treason. It was under this rubric, clearly, that the jurors would read that more consequential slaying. Such obliquity was not uncommon in those days; yet its indirection was compounded by the specific statute under which his accusers had brought him to trial.

Polemides had been arraigned neither under a writ of eisangelia, the standard indictment for treason, nor a dike phonou, a straight charge of homicide, both of which would have permitted him to elect voluntary exile, sparing his life. Rather he had been denounced (by a pair of known rogues, brothers and stooges of acknowledged foes of the democracy) under an endeixis kakourgias, a far more general category of “wrongdoing.” This struck one at first as preposterous, the issue of prosecutors ignorant of the law. Further reflection, however, revealed its cunning. Under this category of indictment, the accused may not only be imprisoned before and throughout trial, without option of voluntary exile, but denied bail as well. The death penalty still obtained, and the trial would take place, not before the Councilor Areopagus, but a common people's court, where such terms as

“traitor” and “friend of Sparta” could be counted upon to inflame the jurors' ire. Clearly Polemides' accusers wanted him dead, by the right hand or the left. As far as one could predict, they would get their wish. For all those who hated Alcibiades and blamed him for the fall of our nation, yet many still loved him. These would raise no remonstrance to the execution of the man who had betrayed and slain their champion. Still, Polemides observed, his accusers were, he was certain, of the opposite party-those who had conspired with their country's enemies, seeking to purchase their own preservation at the price of their nation's ruin.

As to the man Polemides himself, his appearance was both striking and singular, dark-eyed, of slightly less than average height, extremely thick-muscled, and, though well past forty years, as lean through the middle as a schoolboy. His beard was the color of iron, and his skin despite imprisonment retained the dark copper of one who has spent much of his life at sea. Scars of fire, spear, and sword crisscrossed the flesh of his arms, legs, and back.

Upon his brow, though bleached by exposure to the elements, stood vivid the koppa slave brand of the Syracusans, token of that captivity endured by survivors of the Sicilian calamity and emblematic of unspeakable suffering.

Did I abhor him? I was prepared to. Yet in the flesh his clarity of thought and expression, his candor and utter want of self-exoneration, disarmed my prejudice. His crimes notwithstanding, the man appeared to my imagination much as might have Odysseus, stepping forth from the songs of Homer. Nor did he comport himself in the brutish or insolent manner of the soldier for hire; on the contrary his demeanor and self-presentation were those of a gentleman. What wine he had, he proffered at once and insisted upon vacating for his guest the solitary stool his cell possessed, pillowing it for my comfort with the fleece he used to bundle the chamber's single bare pallet.

Throughout that initial interview he performed as we spoke various calisthenics intended to maintain fitness despite confinement. He could place his heel upon the wall above his head and, standing flat on the other sole, set his forehead with ease upon his elevated shin. Once when I brought him some eggs, he placed one within the cage of his fist and, extending his arm, challenged me either to prize his fingers apart or crush the egg. I tried, employing all my strength, and failed, as he grinned at me mischievously the while.

I never felt afraid with the man or of him. In fact as the days progressed I came to embrace a profound sympathy for the fellow, despite his numerous criminal deeds and lack of repentance therefor. His name, Polemides, as you know, means “child of war.”

But he was not a child of just any war, rather one unprecedented in scale and duration and distinguished beyond all previous conflicts by its debasement of that code of honor, justice, and voluntary

restraint by whose tenets all prior strife among Hellenes had been conducted. It was indeed this war, the first modern war, which forged our narrator's destiny and directed it to its end. He began as a soldier and ended as an assassin. How was I any different? Who may disaffirm that I or any other did not enact in the shadows of our private hearts, by commission or omission, that same dark history played out in daylight by our countryman Polemides?

He was, like me, a product of our time. As to the harbor, high road and low follow their several courses along the shore, so his path had paralleled my own and that of the main of our contemporaries, only passing through different country.