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

XXXII

That girl was Timandra, in whose garments Alcibiades' corpse was wrapped so few years later, in Phrygia, there being no other swathings with which to devise a shroud.

She was twenty-four, then on the straits. She entered his keep and no woman displaced her. She was what he needed; he knew it and she, at once. Those parasites who could not be chased even by armored marines, this slip of a lass scattered with but a glance.

Other than his wife while she lived, I never heard Alcibiades defend a woman save in jest or irony. Now his eyes darkened with such wrath at the least affront to this girl that captains of a thousand approached on tiptoe, lashes lowered as boys. She was like the dove of Trapezus, mated with an eagle, who became an eagle herself.

Much has been made of Alcibiades' lawlessness in his private life, by which his traducers meant that he would fuck an eel if it would hold still long enough. You have met Eunice, Jason. She is no eel, but he took her to his bed one night, or she went of her own, at Samos a year prior to Timandra's advent. This was her way of striking at me, when blows would not suffice, for lack of attendance upon her and her children, of which laxity I was surely culpable. I could not fault her, who was helpless as all women before the tempests of her heart, but must confront him who ought to know better, which prospect engendered no small apprehension, I confess, even in one as myself who, if possessed of no grander accomplishment, at least may say he feared no man face-to-face.

Not that I thought my commander would invoke authority against me, as he would never bend to such, but that upon the passion of the instant he might aim a blow. Such a prodigy was he as athlete and antagonist that I possessed, I felt, only a middling chance, myself armed and he empty-ended. Of course nothing of the sort fell out. Calling him to account, on a moment alone beside the hulk works, his response was of such grave rue that my anger failed at once, replaced, as you may believe or not, by sorrow on his account.

For his incapacity to govern his appetites was the single failing that made him feel mortal.

“She told me she was no longer your woman, that you had cast her into the street. Her pretext for entry to me was want of money.” He met my eye. “I knew it was a fraud and went ahead anyway, such a dog am I.” Then, dropping his hands: “Here, flatten me where we stand, Pommo, and I'll make no matter of it.”

What was I supposed to do, strike our fleet commander, there beside the strip yards?

“You don't even remember her name, do you?”

“My dear, I don't remember any of their names.”

Two evenings later I was training on the seawall when Mantitheus passed in a racing eight, working with ephebes fresh from home. “Got a clean set of spruces?” he called across, meaning the forest-green dress cloak of the fleet marine force. “The pleasure of our company has been requested. And bring your gentleman's manners!”

This was how my second wife was introduced to me, or me to her to put it exactly. She was the daughter of our Samian host of that evening, by name Aurore, whom I loved at once and with all my heart, though her time as my bride was barely a year before heaven took her, such has been my fortune. I never learned what Alcibiades told her father of me, or how it was communicated.

But upon the instant of this gentleman's welcoming Mantitheus and myself at his threshold, it was as if I were a prince anointed.

This was how Alcibiades made up his transgression, do you see?

It was the malformation of his destiny, and our own, that he must make up so many.

Timandra could not change him, but she took him in hand. They did not share the same room on the straits; she would not abide it, absent marriage, nor would she consent to such union, though he appealed for it strenuously. He must come to her bed and return to his own, unless she permitted. Nor did she install her lodgings adjacent his, to spy on him, but in the opposite wing, and as offices as well as quarters. She had means of her own which she managed, but her primary vocation upon entering his domain was to facilitate his practice, not of affairs of war, which were and must be his, but of matters of his well-being and efficient functioning.

Once, ambassadors of the Persians, Mithridates and Arnapes, called upon Alcibiades at his villa on Dog's Head Point and, being welcomed by Timandra in flawless Aramaic, took her for either the general's interpreter or his lover and brushed past her, seeking his offices. She had the marines jerk them up at swordpoint, and when the envoys expressed outrage and demanded her credentials, she told them:

“Gentlemen, it has been my observation among those whom men call great, that these may be addressed in only two ways-either to serve or to contest. In neither of these estates may the great man discover one to whom he may in safety unburden his heart. This is the service I afford our commander, and you, who have had abundant acquaintance of the great, may judge its worth.” She smiled. “Yet I have acted in overhaste to detain you thereby by force. Consider yourselves free, gentlemen, to pass as you wish.”

The envoys tendered that obeisance the Persians call ayana, proper to a prince or minister. “Summon us when you wish, lady, but please accept, until we find more material means of expressing it, our regrets at this infraction.”

From girlhood this Timandra had been pursued by suitors, offering, through her mother the courtesan Phrasicleia, worlds and universes to possess her, much as men had courted Alcibiades in his youth. Perhaps this was a bond between them, an understanding. One would say, observing them in public, that they conducted themselves as chastely as brother and sister; yet it was clear that each was passionately devoted to the other.

Timandra domesticated Alcibiades, if such a word may be applied, and lent order to the often chaotic practice of his genius, managed as it was entirely in his head. But the sword of her advent had an under-edge, which was that the apparition of this female, wielding such influence at the epicenter of a coalition of war, contributed to an atmosphere about Alcibiades that smacked of royalty. What was she anyway? A queen? An imperial gatekeeper?

Yet it must be said that someone had to shield him from the siege of distraction which drew him apart from the business of the fleet. For Thrasybulus and Theramenes, though of equal rank, never experienced such inundation of celebrity. They may walk abroad unmolested by the throngs of petitioners, supplicants, and rank-fuckers whose importunities tormented their counterpart without cease.

But to return to my embassy to Endius. It took a month to reach Athens by the required route; by then the Spartan mission was gone, repudiated by Cleonymus and the demagogues. I set off at once to overhaul them, but they had crossed the Isthmus; I must enter the Peloponnese on my own, at last catching up at the border fort of Karyai.

Endius listened gravely to my recitation of Alcibiades' message, rejoining nothing. Next dawn Forehand appeared, bearing a message for Alcibiades in Endius' hand, whose dispatch, the squire stated in distress, was an act of either extraordinary devotion or plain recklessness. Fearing for his master should the letter be intercepted, Forehand refused to depart. I broke the seal. I myself destroyed the letter, committing its contents to memory, to shield this Peer of Lacedaemon whom I had always respected but for whom, till that day, I had felt scant affection.

Endius to Alcibiades, greetings.

I dispatch these contents, my friend, knowing that their discovery may purchase my death. You are right; I may not contest the wisdom of the course you propose. I cannot help however. Not that our party has been overthrown; its agenda holds sway. But I myself have been displaced. Lysander now dominates. I can no longer control him.

Hear what I tell you. Lysander has made himself mentor to young Agesilaus, King Agis' brother, who will himself be king.

Through the youngster he has made Agis his patron, who hates you and you know why. Agis will welcome your head or your liver, but no other part.

Lysander intrigues tirelessly for appointment as fleet admiral.

He believes he can handle the Persian, unlike our other navarchs who could neither dissimulate their contempt for the barbarian nor their despising of themselves for groveling for his gold.

You know this yourself of Lysander's character. To him a lie and the truth are one; he employs which will effect his ends.

Justice in his view is a topic of the salon, personal pride a luxury the warrior may not afford. He despises as fools those of our country who will not bend the knee to the Persian, as he himself has before Agis and others, each prostration advancing himself and his influence. Lysander is by no means evil but by all means effective. He sees human nature for what it is, unlike yourself, who cannot resist sounding it for that which it may become. For what you must brave in him, you may reprove only yourself, as he has studied in your academy and disremembered nothing. All Spartan commanders are as children beside him, as they understand the fight and nothing more. Lysander understands the rest. He grasps the workings of the Athenian democracy, specifically the fickleness of the demos. He believes you capable of vanquishing all, save your own countrymen. They will destroy you, he contends, as every other of excellence before you. In other words, he does not fear you. He wants a fight. He believes he can win.

Lysander possesses all your virtues of war and diplomacy and one other. He is cruel. He will order assassination, torture, and murder wholesale, which are but tools to him, as perjury, bribery, subornation. He will not scruple to apply terror even to his own allies. Like Polycrates the tyrant, he believes his friends will be more grateful when he gives back what he has taken than if he had never taken it at all. Victory is his solitary standard.

Lastly, he believes he knows you. He understands your character. He has studied you, all the time you were in our country, knowing one day he would face you. Do not expect a fair fight. He will demur and dilate, absent all pride as a warrior, then appear from nowhere and overwhelm you.

It will come as cold comfort but I believe the course you outline, of Greek alliance against Persia, is one Lysander himself would champion were it politic at the moment.

I offer this page from his brief: do not undervalue cruelty or the employment of main force. Your style is to eschew coercion, which to you demeans coercer and coerced and backfires in the long run. But, my friend, everything backfires in the long run.

Be of stringent care. You may have met your match in this fellow.

The war for the Hellespont continued; Alcibiades' victories mounted. Lysander failed, for that year and the next, to achieve his posting as fleet admiral.

As for myself, I served at sea with the younger Pericles and in shore units, primarily under Thrasybulus. I paid court, by post and in person when action bore me south to Samos, to my heart's joy, Aurore. With time, acquaintance deepened as well with her father and brothers, for whom I came to feel such fondness and regard as I had known before only with Lion and my own father.

I returned to Alcibiades' squadrons in time for the capitulation of Byzantium. This was the sternest fighting of the Hellespontine War, against frontline Spartan troops, Peers and perioikoi of Selassia and Pellana, reinforced by Arcadian mercenaries and Boeotian heavy infantry of the Cadmus regiment, the same who had hurled us back on Epipolae. At one point a thousand Thracian cavalry under Bisanthes made a rush upon the Spartans, whose numbers had been cut to below four hundred, fighting before the walls all night. The Spartans carved them up, horse and all.

When at last the enemy gave way, overwhelmed by our numbers and the desertion of their Byzantine allies, it took all of Alcibiades' force, in person and shield in hand, to hold the Thracian princes from butchering them to the last man. He had to order our troops to drive the Spartans into the sea, as if to drown them, before the blood-mad tribesmen, who fear water more than you or I fear hell, would give back.

Our ships may not be beached that night, but ride to anchor, bearing the enemy dead and wounded. I assisted a physician of the foe, whom my tongue in error addressed as “Simon” more than once.

The strait lay choked in the morning, with smoking timbers and bodies drifting in the eddies where the outbound current abuts the in. Alcibiades ordered the channel swept and bonfires lighted on both shores, Byzantium on the European, Chalcedon the Asian.

Athens held them both now and with them the Hellespont.

At last Alcibiades commanded the Aegean.

At last he may go home.