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

XXIX

Sidescreens up, it is no easy matter to sight over the prow of a hurtling man-of-war. Spray blasts over the forepeak; the catheads sling seas with each belly and bounce; the craft's gunwales ride so tight to the waterline, her trim so precarious, that the marine topside who rises even to move half a yard is pelted with oaths, as his displaced weight, even for that reckless instant, destabilizes the entire ship. The oarsmen's backs are to the target; they can't see either. The top-bankers' eyes dart to the marines on deck, athwartships through the step-down, to guess at impact.

At Cyzicus Alcibiades' flagship was Antiope, taken over after Resolute went down off Teas. The top-bank oarsman beside me was an Acharnian called Charcoal, whom I knew from a chorus of the Lenaea when we were boys. A renowned gourmand, this fellow; he was instructing me on eels, the proper way to prepare them for the grill. The ship hurtled toward that stretch of shore called the Plantations, upon which two score Spartan triremes had been driven in flight, their seamen and marines, above eight thousand, hastening to jig the vessels into a rampart, as Antiope and two squadrons of sixteen bore down upon them. Such a delicacy must not be profaned with excess spice and seasoning, Charcoal proclaimed as he heaved on the beat; a simple basil and oil marinade will reveal the flesh's intrinsic sweetness. That was the word he used: intrinsic. We were among the breakers now.

Marines braced on their knees topside, slinging the salt-sticky javelins raked from the surface following the sea fight. “I'll write it down for you,” Charcoal bawled, meaning the grilling instructions, when a Magnesian ironhead took him square at the base of the ear, driving through and out the sheath of the neck. His oar fell and so did he.

There was a seawall shielding the planters' estates, and from atop this the defenders unleashed a fire of ungodly concentration as the ships drove onto the muck flat beneath. The foe hurled stones and javelins and the wicked double-edged darts the Boeotians call “nut-cutters” and the Spartans “hatpins.” I felt two rake the backs of my thighs and was seized with fury, diced by these utensils. A fist hauled me to my feet. “What are you doing-rat-holing?”

It was Alcibiades.

He rushed forward onto the prow, flanked by the others of our party, Timarchus, Macon, and Xenocles, whose office it was with me to protect him. Marines in armor rode both catheads and the wales at the cutwater, even the rams themselves. The trumpet blared “Back water!”; oarsmen set into the straps of their footboards and heaved forward on the beat. Marines were pouring over the prow and both gunwales. Alcibiades had sprung to the strand, shouting for grapnels.

The Lacedaemonians were above us, supported by the Persian Pharnabazus' infantry and mobs of Magnesian mercenaries, whom one recognizes by their beards, jet as ink, which they wear parted and netted. Furious fire poured from the foe. We wore only felt caps; you had to, or you couldn't pick out the flung ash as it shrieked toward your man, to deflect it. The Athenians foundered, fighting uphill in the sand. Now the Spartans made their rush. The lines crashed along the length of the strand. I heard Macon at my shoulder screaming profanity. Where was Alcibiades?

He had burst through on his own. We could see him, churning upslope into the no-man's-land between the Spartan rush and their beached ships. One cannot know the meaning of rage until he has served to protect such a man from his own fire for victory.

Alcibiades wore no helmet and bore only his shield and a marine ax. He reached the first ship and sank a grapnel. Two of the foe fought to rip it free; he stove in the first's skull with his shield, hamstrung the second with his ax. He hammered the iron into the timbers of the enemy prow. We of the lifeguard must now emulate him. There is a terrible skill to defending the flung javelin, particularly when one must set his own flesh as shield before another. I have never cursed any as our commander; I spit at him and slung stones; so did the others. He never saw a thing.

Three and a half years later, before Byzantium, I attended a nightlong drinking bout. Someone had put the query “How does one lead free men?” “By being better than they,” Alcibiades responded at once.

The symposiasts laughed at this, even Thrasybulus and Theramenes, our generals.

“By being better,” Alcibiades continued, “and thus commanding their emulation.” He was drunk, but on him it accounted nothing, save to liberate those holdings nearest to his heart. “When I was not yet twenty, I served in the infantry. Among my mates was Socrates the son of Sophroniscus. In a fight the enemy had routed us and were swarming upon our position. I was terrified and loading up to flee. Yet when I beheld him, my friend with gray in his beard, plant his feet on the earth and seat his shoulder within the great bowl of his shield, a species of eros, life-will, arose within me like a tide. I discovered myself compelled, absent all prudence, to stand beside him.

“A commander's role is to model arete, excellence, before his men. One need not thrash them to greatness; only hold it out before them. They will be compelled by their own nature to emulate it.”

Along the length of the strand Athenians bore cable and iron upon the foe. Alcibiades dragged the first ship off, and another and another. Mindarus' troops held as only the Spartan-commanded can, in the face of Athenian reinforcements under Theramenes and more, including cavalry, driven on by Thrasybulus, the Brick.

Alcibiades fell three times, seeking the Spartan commander. At last Mindarus' own wounds took him down. When the enemy broke and fled, Alcibiades ravened upon their backs and every other followed, and when he dropped they dashed to his side and lifted him, in terror that some fatal dart had found their champion. But it was exhaustion only. And I, too, who had so few seasons past pledged to bear hell's bane to this man, could no longer recall his crimes, even my own brother's murder. All were eclipsed in that flame which he bore for our country and by which he conducted her to triumph.

I cite a moment from the sea fight earlier that day, not to panegyrize him, for all testimony is superfluous in that cause, but as exemplar of this beast, this form of courage he evinced which one glimpses in a lifetime as frequently as a griffin or a centaur.

The sea trap had been sprung: Alcibiades' forty triremes emerging as he had planned out of the squall line had lured the enemy's sixty to pursue, thinking ours the whole of the Athenian force. These crews of Athens, the Samos fleet, were so good that when they fled, or even pretended, they maintained such order that the helmsmen must cry across to row more sloppily and make better feint of terror. Antiochus was Alcibiades' helmsman. At his signal the lines came-about employing the Samian anastrophe, or “countermarch,” where the ships do not put about simultaneously, making rearmost foremost, but wheel in sequence of line-ahead, as chariots round the turning post. Alcibiades ordered this, the more demanding maneuver, to unnerve the enemy, to let him know he had been suckered and must pay.

Now Thrasybulus' triples fell on the Spartans from astern. From concealment behind the promontory they emerged in four columns of twelve, pulling, as the chanty goes, with every shaft including the skipper's wooden dick. They cut Mindarus off from the harbor.

From the shoulder of the squall Theramenes' thirty-six materialized, blocking all flight to the north. Alcibiades was shouting for Mindarus' ensign and vowing a talent to the lookout who found it for him.

The Spartans fled for the shore two thousand yards distant.

Alcibiades' division pursued from the flank, picking a line to overhaul the foremost vessel. This was a squadron commander's and she, sighting Antiope's admiral's ensign, made to make it a fight. At two hundred yards the foe wheeled to port, executed a cutback around two of her own ships whose oars had fouled, and came back at us. Antiochus slipped her rush, passing with such swiftness across her bows that her helm, hard over seeking to strike, put her onto her sisters, each furiously backing water to clear. Antiochus holed two almost at leisure, but striking the third amidships as she fled, Antiope's ram became embedded; the momentum of the fleeing craft levered us against her flank-to-flank, snapping oars like kindling. As the ships crunched together, Spartan marines let fly with everything they had. Our men plunged for cover as the fusillade swept Antiope's deck. I heard a bellow of rage and glanced up. Alone and exposed stood Alcibiades amid the storm of steel, scouring the sea for his rival in flight. “Mindarus!” he cried. “Mindarus!”

There is a causeway on the Macestos plain, just a farm dike, to which the Spartans had fled from the rout on the strand. There in the dusk their infantry were making a stand of spectacular stubbornness, supported by Pharnabazus' satrapal guard, which had dashed up from Dascylium. The clash funneled to a neck a wagon-width wide, while round this the fight slogged on in the muck, flax fields which the foe had flooded to impede the Athenian advance. Horses of both sides sank to their barrels; cavalrymen slugged it out atop mounts dying and already dead, which beasts remained upright, marooned in the mire.

Alcibiades galloped upon this impasse, fresh from the shore.

Ahead squatted the bottleneck. Three squadrons of our cavalry and above a thousand infantry hung up where levees conjoined. A furlong ahead could be seen enemy horse advancing, with clouds of light troops and militia, farmers wielding pitchforks and muckrakes, driven by their masters' whips. If we couldn't break through we'd be overrun. You could get round by dikes east and west but there was no time, and if even a dozen of the foe beat the party to a juncture, there would be no breaking through.

Alcibiades rode a mare named Mustard, which had been Agasicles', Thrasybulus' adjutant, who had been slain by the ships.

A horse, uncoerced by its rider, knows how to make its way through mire. Alcibiades slung the beast's bridle and, taking about forty cavalry and two hundred infantry, set off through the slough.

Mustard cut a thousand yards off the go-round, mounting muck-slathered up a dikeway in the foe's rear. From there Alcibiades led the assault on the Spartan infantry, slaying their commander, Amompharetus the son of Polydamos, a knight and victor at Nemea. If you go even now to the Eurysacium at Athens you will see, on the left as you enter, a matchless bronze of a warhorse, no taller than a man's hand, with this dedication:

I led, Victory followed.

That afternoon Mindarus was slain, the Spartans' peerless general. Of the foe's total ninety ships, fifty-eight were sunk and twenty-nine captured. His brigades of Lacedaemon and the Peloponnese were routed on the plain of the Macestos by Thrasybulus and Alcibiades, along with the mercenaries and Persian cavalry supporting them. Next night found Alcibiades master of Cyzicus, calling in the carters to load up contributions in cash, and within twenty days before Perinthus and Selymbria as well, raising more money, and fortifying Chrysopolis to bind the straits and exact a tenth from all passing, to fund the fleet. This dispatch, intercepted, from the remnant Spartans to their home: Ships sunk, Mindarus slain, men starving. We know not what to do.

I need not recite for you, Jason, the litany of Alcibiades' victories.

You were there. You won your prize of valor at Abydos and earned it too. Did you know I forwarded the text of your commendation?

That was one of my duties in those days. I see you flush; I'll embarrass you no further, though I recall the citation, word for word.

To the young soldiers and sailors of the fleet, they for whom these victories under Thrasybulus and Alcibiades were all they had known, such bounty seemed no more than the merited produce of their preeminence, their birthright as Athenians. But for those of our generation, who had cut our teeth on plague and calamity, the experience of such ascendancy, each conquest succeeding so swiftly upon its predecessor, arose as if within a dream. No pharmakon like victory, the proverb says. And though we who bore the scars of Syracuse could not bring ourselves to trust them at first, when the wins kept coming, Bitch's Tomb, Abydos, Methymna, Fool's Cap Bay, Clazomenae, the Hollows, Chios, and Nine-Mile Cove, then second Chios and Erythrae, both on the same day, at last we, too, began to believe, as the youths from the start, that this run was neither fluke nor fortune but that at last conjoined upon one field Athens possessed such ships, crews, and commanders as to render her, barring the sons of Earth themselves ascending from Tartarus, invincible.

History was being made. A blind man could see it. Honoring Lion's wish of the quarries, I set about enlarging his chronicle, or at least preserving within my sea chest such documents as I imagined one day in retirement editing and publishing in my brother's name.

I went so far as to record notes and even sketch terrain. Only later did I grasp that a recounting of actions or tactics was not what interested me, or anyone.

What held us all was not what our commander did, but how he did it. It was clear that he manipulated some force to which others commanded no access. Though he possessed on occasion superiority of might, he never needed it to best the foe. He was always clement to the vanquished, nor was it in him to pursue vengeance against those who had worked him harm. He acted thus, not out of sentiment or altruism, but because he reckoned such actions ignoble and inelegant. Here, a communication to Tissaphernes, whom he called friend despite the notorious arrest at Sardis and after the Persian had bid ten thousand darics for his head.. it is not possession of force which produces victory, but its apparition. A commander of ability manipulates not armies but perceptions.

From the succeeding paragraph:

… the function of disciplined movement in battle is to produce in the mind of the friend the conviction that he cannot lose and the mind of the foe that he cannot win. Order is indispensable for these considerations beyond all others.

Alcibiades was an abominable speller. When he worked late, he got worse and would shake awake anyone to hand. “Brick, sit up.

How do you spell epiteichismos?” His bane was inversion of letters; his secretaries teased that he even wrote with a lisp. Thus many half-composed missives found their way to trash and from there to my chest.

In this note, addressed to his great enemy Anytus at Athens, but intended for circulation among the political clubs beneath his sway, Alcibiades seeks to allay the fears of those who had brought the indictments which led to his exile-fears, that is, that he, returning at the head of an all-conquering fleet, would exact vengeance upon them.

…my enemies accuse me of seeking to impose my will upon events, either for glory or fortune or, those who admit me a patriot, for the weal of my country.

This is erroneous. I do not believe in personal will, and haven't since I was a boy. What I have tried to do is to follow the dictates of Necessity. This is the solitary god I revere and in my opinion the only god that exists. Man's predicament is that he dwells at the intersection of Necessity and free will. What distinguishes statesmen, as Themistocles and Pericles, is their gift to perceive Necessity's dictates in advance of others-as Themistocles saw that Athens must become a sea power and Pericles that naval supremacy prefigures empire. That course of individual or nation aligned with Necessity must prove irresistible. The trick is that each moment contains three or four necessities. Necessity moreover is like a board game. As one option closes, a new necessity obtains. What has disfigured my career is that I have perceived Necessity but been unable to persuade my countrymen to act upon its dictates. My hope with you now, sir, is that we may act as mature men of politics..

From Thrasybulus to his fellow general Theramenes, the latter impatient at his star's overshadowing beside the sun of Alcibiades..I have found it of great utility to regard him less as a man and more a force of nature. My concern alone is for Athens. I brought him back from exile, and stuck my neck on the block thereby, the way one confronting an insuperable enemy at sea calls down a great storm, or facing the foe on land enlists a mighty earthquake.

From the same letter:

…remember, my friend, that Alcibiades himself does not comprehend his gift and is ruled by it as much as ruling. His immodesty, however galling you may find it, is to him objectivity.

He is superior. Why conceal it? To a mind such as his this course would be hypocrisy, and he is nothing if not the most frank of men.

Another:

… though his enemies style him a great double-crosser, in fact he is incapable of duplicity, and of all he has ever done, he has warned foe and friend long in advance.

The men loved Thrasybulus and feared and respected Theramenes, but Alcibiades they clasped to their hearts with a fierce solicitousness, as a magical child. Had he eaten? Had he slept? Fifty times a day sailors and marines approached me to inquire of their general's well-being, as if he were a sorcerer's lamp whose flame they feared would by heaven's jealousy be snuffed.

The security party's charge now turned upon its head, shielding our commander no longer from harm but the excessive affection of his own men and the relentless importunities of those trucklers and petition-pleaders who dogged his circuit day and night.

Then there were the women. They descended in clouds, not alone hetairai, courtesans, and pornai, common whores, but free women, maids and widows, sisters presented by their own brothers. More than once I must chase a lad pimping his mother.

The dame's response? “How 'bout you, then, mate?” Buck lieutenants screwed themselves witless, just on their commander's castoffs.

As for Alcibiades himself, the allure of the debauch had abated.

He didn't need fornication; he had victory. He had changed. A becoming modesty settled about his shoulders like the plain marine's cloak he wore, albeit clasped at the throat with a brooch of gold. He had become a new Alcibiades and he liked it. I never saw a man so revel in the triumphs of his comrades, absent envy, even and especially those who might be called his rivals, Thrasybulus and Theramenes. When a villa was vacated for him on Pennon Point at Sestos, he declined, not wishing to displace its occupants, and continued to bunk in the tent beside his ship, refusing even a floor till the carpenters framed it on their own while he was absent with the fleet. He became if not cheap, then frugal. Every spit went for the men, and every moment.

Correspondence. He posted a hundred letters a day. Entire watches were consumed with this, amid rotating shifts of secretaries, often through night and morn and into the next night.

This was the grind of coalition-building, the day-by-day extension of influence and persuasion. “How can you stand this?” I asked him once. “Stand what?” he replied. He loved it. To him these letters were not chores but men; it was a symphony to him and at last he held the conductor's stand.

There were other missives, the main in truth, whose lines he dictated late or scrawled in his own hand. These were the widow letters, the commendations of the maimed and fallen-ten, twenty, thirty a day. He directed these personally to the recipient himself if he were still alive, but often, as well, he had the rolls dispatched to father or mother or wife without the honored man's knowledge.

Can you imagine, Jason, the pride and relief such communications brought to those at home sick with fear for husbands and sons? I have met no few in subsequent seasons; they hold these artifacts yet in vaults, extracted with reverence, to be read aloud to children and grandchildren of the valor of their fathers.

When he wished to honor a man of the fleet, he dispatched meat or wine with his compliments to that officer's mess. He distinguished others by inclusion at his table. But to those he wished most to esteem, he sent not boons but trials. He singled them out for the most perilous duties, for in these, he said, he sent out lieutenants and got back captains. “Nothing he does,” as Endius had remarked, “is absent politics.”

He led not by edict but example. Rather than direct the commanders to intensify their training, he took his own wing to sea and commenced. Those drills he wished the fleet to master, his own squadrons practiced first. That mark he meant them to exceed, he drove his own ships to surpass. He did not command the fleet to embark before dawn; the captains simply arose to discover his ships gone, already at their exercise.

To his friend Adeimantus, a squadron commander:

… if force must be employed with a subordinate, take care that it be minimal. If I command you, “Pick up that bowl,” and set a swordpoint to your back, you will obey but no part will own the action. You will exculpate yourself, accounting, “He made me do it, I had no choice.” But if I only suggest and you comply, then you must own your compliance and, owning it, stand by it.

Later, when he took Byzantium, the tenor of the siege was, if such a word may be applied, cheerful. The men set to with a will, absent malingering and disgruntlement, and even the foe, in capitulation, appeared not downcast but sanguine, optimistic of the future.

The proper manner of investing a city is to present to the foe a choice of alternatives so constellated as to compel him to elect surrender or alliance, not as imposed upon him by force, but of his own will. A decision made in this way may not be disowned later, when we need our new ally to stand by us in future peril.

In the planning before Cyzicus, when Theramenes had presented to the commanders the brilliant scheme of bait-and-wheel, so that in his scenario the foe was cut off on all sides, Alcibiades approved it with this alteration: the leaving to the enemy of an avenue of egress. “Not that he get away, but that he know he played the coward. And we not only destroy his forces on that day but break his spirit to face us again.”

In like manner he applied discipline to the fleet. He never ordered a man beaten but only banished from his mates' company.

Such correction, he believed, spared the offender's spirit while spurring him to return with renewed vigor and will. If a man committed the same offense twice, he was exiled to the rear with the baggage and the cowards. By this measure and others Alcibiades made such posts pillories of shame.

I had participated in several actions with the younger Pericles, a squadron commander then and already preeminent among the corps. He was thrallbound by his commander. “It's mediocrity, do you see, Pommo? Alcibiades has debarred it altogether. One would rather die than fall short of the mark. Remember the night we made a hash of the soundings off Elaeus? I was making my report, trying to put the best face on it. He didn't utter a syllable. Just gave me a look. By the gods, I would sooner be flogged through the fleet than stand in its path again. It was a look that said, 'I expected so much of you, Pericles, and you have let me down.'”

Corollary to the principle of minimal force was that of minimal supervision. When Alcibiades issued a combat assignment, he imparted the objective only, leaving the means to the officer himself. The more daunting the chore, the more informally he commanded it. I never saw him issue an order from behind a desk.

Always assign a man more than he believes himself capable of.

Make him rise to the occasion. In this way you compel him to discover fresh resources, both in himself and others of his command, thus enlarging the capacity of each, while binding all beneath the exigencies of risk and glory.

Another to Adeimantus:

As we seek to make our enemies own their defeats at our hands, so we must make our friends own their victories. The less you give a man, and have him succeed, the more he draws his achievement to his heart. Remember we may elevate the fleet in two ways only. By acquiring better men or making those we have better. Even were the former practicable I would disdain it, for a hired man may hire out to another master but a man who makes himself master stays loyal forever.

There was an oarsman of the Mnemosyne named Lysicles, who could not swim. His mates had exhausted all remedies. Alcibiades, learning of this, walked the man out into the sea one evening, some fifty yards from the fellow's vessel anchored offshore. Such a sight was extraordinary to say the least; hundreds congregated, looking on. Alcibiades spoke to the man quietly for a number of moments.

At once the fellow screwed his eyes shut and plunged into the foam. When he made it, the entire strand erupted.

What had Alcibiades said to the man?

“He told me I could do it, and made me believe him.”

When Panegyris and Atalanta were mauled at Nine-Mile Cove and their trierarchs blaming themselves had made their spirits disconsolate, he called the pair to his tent and, stripping before them, commanded them to regard the many wounds upon his body.

“I'd rather have a man who has closed with the foe and bears the scars than all the bronze-and-brightwork of the regatta. I can find unscathed captains anywhere. But where will I get brave men like you and your crews?”

This to the younger Pericles and his officers, when they had made plea for additional vessels:

Never forget, gentlemen, that you command Athenians and that those elements which make our countrymen great are intangible.

Daring and intelligence, adaptability and esprit. Put these in the bank for me and I will get you all the ships you need.

As he chastened men with banishment from himself, so he rewarded them with access. He loved to have his officers about him, particularly late at night as he worked. “Bear in mind, my friends, that access to your person is a mighty incentive to those in station beneath you. A smile, a kind word, a nickname spoken with affection. Recall how we as boys gloried in the moments at our father's knee, or how even now an invitation to dine with our commanders makes light of many a long pull into a hard wind.

Don't hoard your person, gentlemen. Money cannot buy the prize of your attention, and the men know it.”

He schooled his captains to think in terms of squadrons and wings, never single ships, and to bear in mind ever the fleet as a whole, which squadrons were where and how quickly they could be brought up, how swiftly one's own may withdraw to their aid.

He would react with fury to the report of vessels advancing out of formation. The phrase “in support of' permeated his orders. To any scheme his first question was “Who sails in support?”

In the advance he demanded ships “blade-to-blade,” that each draw courage from her mates' proximity. At sea he maintained signal traffic night and day, to link all vessels as a unit. Casualties he refused to segregate, but the wounded must be borne home with their shipmates, no matter if the deck sprawl with litters and blood trail onto the oarsmen's backs. Each must know he would never be abandoned, but his mates would bear him off. “None fears death more than the sea fighter, for the infantryman, falling, cedes his bones to the earth from which they may be recovered, but the sailor to the barren and pitiless main.” This to the younger Pericles, when he heard he had lost his temper at one of his oarsmen: The infantryman may fight without his captain and take to flight without him. But the sailor advances to battle yoked to his commander, with naught dissevering him from hell but his faith in you and a thumb's-breadth of pine.

Alcibiades drilled the fleet tirelessly in self-presentation, to make few look like many and many like few. He practiced the exploitation of headlands and promontories to conceal our presence and numbers. He accustomed the men to launching at all weathers, for storms and squalls not only offered concealment but magnified the theater of terror with which to overawe the foe. In the great victory at Cyzicus he obscured the fleet in a downpour he had anticipated for months, intelligence of the terrain having determined that at that hour at that season such weather could be counted upon.

Before he came, the men had tended to break up by specialties, marines and infantry disdaining the nautai, topside oarsmen despising holdsmen, and cavalry styling themselves superior to all.

Alcibiades effaced these distinctions not with chastisement, but with glory. Later, when Thrasyllus came out from Athens with a thousand heavy infantry and five thousand sailors trained as javelineers, but suffered defeat at Ephesus, Alcibiades' men would not let them enter the camp; they who had never been beaten disdaining their countrymen who had let the enemy erect a trophy to their shame. Alcibiades broke this up by pitting them side by side against main-force Spartans. Victory again effaced all distinctions.

He sought to keep fresh those squadrons not on campaign or pillage by employing them to bewitch the civil populace. The report of Athenian men-of-war, even two or three anchoring in a cove, would draw the locals from miles. Far from spurning these gawkers, Alcibiades ordered them haled aboard. Let them see what battleship and battle crew look like. Lads he sought especially to beguile, for their youth makes them seek heroes and models of emulation. They will tell us everything. Intelligence of tides, currents, and weather he prized above silver. Fishermen, whom the Spartans despised, he ordained favorites. No dinner lacked at least one of these characters, debriefed later for quirks of tide and channel, storm and season.

Under fire I cannot read the chart, but a pilot at my shoulder who says steer there where the rip runs.

Often he led raids himself, materializing from the darkness to strike a harbor with ax and brand, or sailing in in broad daylight, compelling the populace to fear him more than the garrison who occupied them. He loved to snatch from their beds mayors and magistrates. These he often interrogated in person, restoring them to home with gifts, his object to abash them with the might of the fleet, for one snatched in the night will behold all he sees with eyes widened by terror and magnify reports of the invincibility of his captors.

He sought not to drill the fleet to dull uniformity, but to enliven it with individuality and self-enterprise.

…each wing, and squadron within a wing, must be encouraged to forward its own identity, some skill or talent at which it exceeds all and in which it may take pride. Let one wing carry double complement of marines; let them train with the grapnel and the flying outrigger. Let another build out its catheads Corinthian-style and call itself Hammerhead or Ram. When sailors from different divisions meet in a tavern, I want insults to fly. I want fistfights. The more the better, for in their aftercourse the men are bound yet more tightly together.

Here is how he went about acquiring cavalry.

From raiding to support the fleet he had become acquainted with Thrace, their hordes of horsemen and the spirit of their savage princes-two in particular, Seuthes the son of Maisades, and Medocus, lords of the Odrysians. Thrasybulus and Theramenes pressed him to pay court to these. The army could acquire cavalry nowhere else. But Alcibiades understood the hearts of these wild knights. One may not approach them giftless, nor may the friendship offering be less than spectacular or presented in any manner other than the grand.

Now Alcibiades had two trierarchs he favored, brothers, Damon and Nestorides, of his home district, Scambonidae. They were the youngest of the fleet, the one twenty-three, the other a year younger. Do you recall the scandal at Athens, Jason, of the chorus of boys? This was ten years earlier, before Syracuse. Alcibiades' uncle Axiochus had sponsored a chorus of beardless lads at the Panathenaea; in the celebration of their victory Alcibiades had contrived to have the youths overnight at his estate rather than return home with their fathers. Lubricating his charges with their first noseful of the grape, he then produced a cohort of glamorous (and full-grown) hetairai.

He got the boys laid.

This touched off a terrific hubbub. Suit was brought for outrage, hybris. That was when Meletus issued his famous indictment,

“Cite not the whores but the whoremaster!” Alcibiades of course had judged the prize worth the hazard. He recognized in these lads the flower of the city, commanders and generals of the future. He sought by orchestration of this passage to manhood, the most indelible of their young lives, to bind them to him with chains of adamant.

Now the brothers, Damon and Nestorides, had arrived from Athens. Alcibiades had brought them out as armored infantry, they being far too callow to be given command at sea without causing a mutiny among the senior captains. Here is how he got them ships.

He dispatched the lads first as marines, in a series of reconnaissances of the Spartan shipworks at Abydos. They went in, ten nights in all, mapping the yard and its approaches. They reported four vessels under repair, nearly seaworthy. “Bring one back,” Alcibiades pledged, “and you'll command her.”

A rainy night, the boys landed with thirty men, Antiochus lying offshore with four fast triremes. They towed off not one ship but two, naming them Panther and Lynx. These kits became holy terrors. They pitched their hulls black and painted cat's eyes on their prows. They ran the night missions that struck every other skipper with dread. It was these, lads not yet twenty-four, who severed the chain at Abydos, laying the harbor open to the raid that burned half the wharf district, assassinated a score of mayors and administrators, and kidnapped out of his mistress's bed Pharnabazus' secretary and all his notes. But their chief athlon, the exploit that brought the fleet its cavalry, was the carrying off of the three hundred women.

These were two slave parties, a hundred and fifty in each, whose movements the lads had detected and whom Alcibiades had ordered held under observation up and down the coast beneath Mount Coppias. The women were captives, Odrysian Thracians, digging irrigation works. He sent the brothers in at dusk with twelve ships. The lasses ran out to them, into the sea, shrieking with joy, while their Persian masters lobbed ironheads at the raiders, then scooted like hell up the Caicos Valley. The “Cat's Eyes” brought the maidens back to Sestos, thinking Alcibiades meant to sell them to the whoremasters. Instead the commander had them bathed and oiled, with orders to the fleet that they be treated as gentlewomen.

Here was the gift for the Thracian princes.

He sent the lads first, to inform the savage nobles that Alcibiades wished to meet with them and appointing time and place. He himself took the women in four galleys escorted by a dozen men-of-war, the girls themselves garlanded as brides, to efface all shame of captivity and render them legitimate consorts for the princes to bestow upon their favorites, to the wild strand of Salmydessos, where he presented them to Medocus, Bisanthes, and Seuthes, the great princes of the plains.

By the twin gods, those whores' sons knew how to say thanks.

They set up Antiochus and the lads with brides on the spot, brooking no protest, and brought down five hundred horses out of the hills, a gift for Alcibiades and the cavalry. Have you ever seen five hundred horses, Jason? It is a sight. We of the support party wished only to corral the beasts and make our exit before these savages changed their minds.

Except now comes the bolt. Alcibiades turns the princes down.

He will not accept the horses. Worse, he informs Seuthes, the prince has insulted him by offering these animals instead of what he knows his guest really wants. The hour is deep past midnight. A hundred bonfires blaze; our ships wait, shored on the strand with tribesmen cavorting all over, men and women drunk as coots, while an army a thousand times our party swells out of sight across the plain. More ominous yet, our host lord Seuthes is a mad buck, blind soused, as all habitually in that country; they don't trust decisions unless they make them drunk. And, as all Thracians, recipient of boons, he is honor bound to outdo them in generosity first; if he cannot come up with a better gift than he has received, what looms but a bloodbath? Alcibiades repeats that the prince has offered offense by his present and turns to us, the two score of his escort, commanding that we launch and begone.

Seuthes won't let us. He orders the horses brought forward and commences haranguing his guests, and his own tribesmen, on the magnificent qualities of these beasts, which all know the Athenians need desperately, possessing few cavalry of their own and at the mercy of Pharnabazus' Royal Persian Horse every time they advance inland out of sight of their ships. The prince has worked himself into a lather of incendiary dudgeon. What kind of a man, he demands of Alcibiades, what kind of commander turns down wealth like this, if not for his own use and glory, then for that of the gallant warriors entrusted to his charge?

Alcibiades weaves to his feet, as ass holed as his host, and proclaims that he would in fact be the wealthiest man in the East if the prince will give him what he wishes instead of the horses. And what is that? the buck demands.

“Your friendship.”

At one breath Alcibiades is sober, so cold and composed you realize he has not misplaced his wits for an instant, and the look on his face snaps-to every bandit round the blaze. If I take these horses now, he declares, I sail with a splendid gift but I myself remain poor. If on the other hand I leave the horses with you, their masters, and depart with your friendship-and now he crosses before Seuthes, who has gone as sober as he-then I count among my wealth not only these valiant mounts, for I may call upon them from my friend anytime I wish, but mighty warriors to fight from upon their backs. For my friend will not send me his horses and leave me to face my enemies empty-handed.

Now, Seuthes is no fool. He knows this man across from him has rigged it all from the instant he first saw the women. He recognizes the genius of it and recognizes that Alcibiades knew before and knows now that he would recognize it. He wants this genius, does Seuthes, and knows he's got a mentor now if he'll make him his friend, to counsel and instruct him in the acquisition of it. The kid embraces Alcibiades. Ten thousand tribesmen whoop.

Our party goes limp with relief.

And he did come with his horses, Prince Seuthes. Not five hundred but two thousand, when the fleet and army took Chalcedon and Byzantium, bottled up the straits, and drove the Spartans to their blackest ebb of the war. But I have gotten ahead of myself and overshot a tale, and a turning point, which must be recounted.

Passing down the straits, a month after the great victory at Cyzicus, the flag party was met by a dispatch cutter from Samos.

The night was moonlit and she signaled by flare; the vessels have to in midchannel. The state galley Paralus, the cutter reported, had this day arrived from Athens with news that a Spartan legation had approached the Assembly, seeking peace. A great cheer erupted from the men, clamoring to learn the terms proposed, which were an armistice in place, each side to withdraw from the other's territories, repatriating all prisoners. Another cheer, and a cry from the crews that they would soon go home.

“The Spartans are at Athens now?” Alcibiades called across to the cutter.

“Aye, sir.”

“Who leads the embassy?”

“Endius, sir.”

Fresh cheers arose.

“The Lacedaemonians have singled you out for honor, Alcibiades. Why else send Endius, your friend?” This from Antiochus, Alcibiades' helmsman and among the exiles who had shared his seasons at Sparta. “It shows they see you, even technically an exile, as foremost among the Athenians.”

Thrasybulus' Endeavor had come up to leeward and now hove-to within earshot. Her steersman called across. Did this indeed mean we could go home? Alcibiades made no answer, only held motionless in the moonshadow of the sternpeak.

“Here is no offer of peace,” he spoke soberly to the officers on the quarterdeck and the stern oarsmen close beneath at their benches, “but a ploy to sever you and me from the people of Athens and ruin us all.” He turned to his quartermaster: “Make signal to all, continue to Samos, and to Thrasybulus, follow us alone.” Then to Antiochus at the helm: “Take us in now, there, to Achilleum.” ~