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

XXX

The plain of the Scamander sprawls as sere and wind-scored today as it did seven hundred years past, when Troy fell beneath Achilles' spear. On the strand where Homer's Achaeans beached their undecked fifties, Athenians and Samians now made shore in their bronze-rammed two-hundreds. That stream of “whirling Xanthos” still flows, where Achilles in his valor drove the Trojans to flight. Our parties had overnighted on the site a dozen times, transiting in and out of the Hellespont, but never till this eve had our commander directed us inland to the mounds.

There are eighteen in all, seven great ones for the nations of the Achaeans, Mycenaeans, Thessalians, Argives, Lacedaemonians, Arcadians, and Phocians and eleven lesser for the individual heroes, and the final pair, conjoined, Patrocles and Achilles.

It is chill this night. The wind bends the sickle grass on the tombs' untended slopes; sheep have carved stairsteps in the faces.

We purchase a goat of some boys, inquire which mound is Achilles'. They stare. “Who?”

Upon this plain, Alcibiades has observed, men of the West carried war to men of the East and drove them under.

Our commander dreams of accomplishing it again.

Ally with Sparta and turn on Persia.

“As long as I have been with the fleet,” he states now, as he has heretofore, “we have believed we must bring Persia to our side in order to defeat the Spartans. We must ask: is this a phantom? I believe it is. Persia will never align herself with Athens; our ambitions at sea conflict with hers; she can never let us win this war. And though we thrash her satraps' armies up and down the coast, the wealth of the Eastern empire replenishes all. Persian gold makes her Spartan allies unkillable; we destroy one fleet, they build another. We cannot patrol every cove of Asia and Europe.”

Thrasybulus protests, sick of war and eager to accept this offer of armistice. “The enemy honors you, Alcibiades. All it takes is you to clasp his hand and peace is ours.”

“My friend, the Spartans' intent is not to honor me, but by this wile to make our countrymen fear my ambition. They slant their favor toward me to inflame Athens' fears that I, returning with the victories this fleet has won, will set myself up as tyrant. If they win-that is, incite the demos to displace me-that is Sparta's victory. This is her design, not peace.”

We must have more victories, he declared. “More, and more after that, until our forces possess the Aegean absolutely, the straits and every city on them, with the grain routes clamped tight in our grip. Till then we cannot go home.”

It took scant imagination for those about the fire to conjure the bastions of Selymbria, Byzantium, and Chalcedon, each formidable as Syracuse, and the trials we must endure to take them.

Thrasybulus slung his lees into the embers. “You mean you can't go home, Alcibiades. I can.” He rose, unsteady on his shoring timbers.

“Sit down, Brick.”

“I will not. Nor take your orders.” He was drunk, but plain-spoken and fit to have his say. “You may not go home, my friend, till you garb yourself in such a mantle of glory that none dare fart within a furlong. But I can go. We all can, who are sick of this war and want no more of it.”

“None may go. You least of all, Brick.”

The men looked on, torn between their commanders. Alcibiades saw it.

“Friends, if your eyes cannot perceive Necessity's dictates, I beg you to trust mine. Have I led you anywhere but to victory? The Spartans dangle peace before your noses and you snap at it like winter faxes. Peace to them means respite to rebuild for war. And us? Since when do we, or any victor, quit the field owning less than at contest's commencement, when that and more stand plump for the taking? Look around you, friends. The gods have led us to this plain, where Greek vanquished Trojan, to direct us to their will and our destiny. Will we die in our beds, praising peace, that phantom with which our enemies swindled us, who could not defeat us in fair fight upon the sea? I despise peace if it means failing our destiny, and I call upon the blood of these heroes to witness.”

He stood, addressing Thrasybulus. “You accuse me, my friend, of hunting glory at the price of devotion to our nation. But no such contradiction obtains. Athens' destiny is glory. She was born to it, as we her sons. Do not devalue yourselves, brothers, accounting our worth as meaner than these heroes' whose shades eavesdrop upon us now. They were men like us, no more. We have won victories equal to and greater than theirs, and will win more.”

“Those you call us to emulate, Alcibiades,” the younger Pericles spoke, “are dead.”

“Never!”

“Sir, we encamp beside their tombs.”

“They can never die! They are more alive than we, not in occupation of fields of Elysia, where Homer tells us not pain nor grief may follow, but here, this night and every, within ourselves. We cannot draw a breath absent their exemption, or close our eyes save to see their heritance before us. They constitute our being, more than bone or blood, and make us who we are.

“Yes, I would stand among them, and bring you with me, all.

Not in death or afterlife, but in the flesh and in triumph. You command me to look, Brick, to these about the fire. I am looking.

But I don't see chastened men, or meek. I see that valiant quick to which invincible battalions may be drawn; a corps of kinsmen who may say when death comes, as it must to all, that they have left no drop within the bowl. We clash tonight as brothers. What could be better? To gather on this site among brave and brilliant friends!

And who grander to stand among than these of yore? But one may not enter their company for the price of an iron spit. The toll is everlasting glory, won for that which one loves, at the risk of all he loves. I for one will pay that fare gladly. Let us dine with these, brothers, who brought fire to the East and claimed it for their own.”

Thrasybulus stood across, remarking the embers, which his mate and fellow commander had kindled to the blaze.

“You scare the breath out of me, Alcibiades.”