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

XL

It was fall [Polemides resumed] before Telamon and I reached Miletus, via Aspendus and the Coast Road through Caria. I counted the calendar differently now; not by days, but by Aurore's term. She was due in forty-three days, by the ticks carved in the haft of my nine-footer. I warned my mate not to count on me, for when the hour came I'd be at Samos by her side.

“Hope is a crime against heaven,” Telamon reproved me as we trekked the gale-buffeted highway, where you packed your shield inboard at morning and outboard after noon and which rumbled at all hours with enemy caravans trucking war materiel and regiments of cavalry and foot. Every bridgehead was being outposted, every landing site fortified. “You were superb once, Pommo, because you despised your life. Now hope has made you worthless. I should quit you, and would but for our history.”

The coast towns through Caria were all Spartan-garrisoned.

They had changed, Miletus most of all. Under Athens the city had celebrated a festival called the Feast of Flags. Housewives draped the lanes with jacks and standards; guilds and brotherhoods massed in the squares; the town was gay night long with street dances and torch races and the like. Now that was over.

Housefronts squatted, sallow and stark. On the docks men worked their business and nothing more. You wore red, everyone, some rag or kerchief to show obeisance to Sparta. The greeting was no longer “Artemis,” the goddess's blessing, but “Freedom!” as from Athens' tyranny. This salutation was compulsory.

The Spartan garrisons ruled under martial law, with a curfew, but the affairs of the cities were run day to day by the Tens. These were political committees of the wealthier citizens, estate holders and such, which answered not to Sparta, but to Lysander. Under Athenian rule, civil cases must be tried at Athens, where the vultures of the courts picked the colonials clean. Now such shenanigans looked benign. In Lysander's courts each civil trespass was reckoned a crime of war. Breach of contract was dereliction, laziness treason. Even if the Tens wished to be fair, in a boundary dispute, say, between a crofter and his landlord, a lenient judgment might set them up for denunciation as democrats, partial to Athens. The fist must fall hard.

All Ionia had become a camp of war. Lysander had made dead ends of all other trades. Nor did he abide indiscipline within his company. Corporal punishment dominated; every quay sprouted its stocks and whipping post. One heard the boatswain's cry, “Fall in to witness punishment”; the lanes rang with the swish of the birch and the crack of the cat. Along the wharves laggards must labor in twenty-pound collars or shuffle about, hobbled by shackle-and-drag. Delinquents stood at attention daylong with iron anchors on their shoulders.

We saw Lysander gallop past once, on the Coast Highway south of Clazomenae. His party was a dozen, preceded by a guard of Royal Persian Horse, Prince Cyrus' men. You had to salute as he passed, or the buck cavalrymen would rough you up. Telamon admired Lysander. He was a professional. He had whipped this mob of civilians into a corps of fighters and taught them to fear him more than the foe. “Freedom!” We greeted mates on the street, a red rag round our necks.

Lysander had moved his bastion to Ephesus. The place was magnificent. Telamon sought out his old commander Etymocles, in whose service he technically remained. This officer's term had expired, however; he had been rotated home, replaced by Teleutias, who would later raid the Piraeus to such brilliant effect.

“Are you spies?” was the Spartan's opening query.

“Only him,” replied my mate.

“Blast! I had hoped to spit you both.”

Teleutias had other foxes to harry; he dispatched us straight to Lysander. The navarch, it turned out, had intelligence of both our cases, including my indictment and flight. I had been convicted, he informed me. I had not known this. He laughed. He was handsome, I had forgotten how much so, and his self-assurance, abundant in the days when he served without portfolio, appeared amplified tenfold by his accession to supreme command.

“You are sent by Alcibiades,” he observed without rancor. “With what instructions-my assassination?”

“To attest, sir, the fidelity of his call for alliance against the Persian and the faith of his overtures to you.”

“Yes,” Lysander observed, scanning his papers, “I have this from Endius in detail, and two other covert embassies from your master.” His glance searched mine, marking offense at that terminal word. With effort I governed my aspect. As for Telamon, the insult hadn't been coined which could induce him to renounce self-command.

How were we fixed for cash? Lysander scribbled a chit. He ordered his Persian aide, in Persian, to secure us accommodation, at the six level, for colonels.

“The Games of Artemis will be celebrated day after tomorrow; I will address the army. Be in attendance. Alcibiades shall have his answer at that time.”

Ephesus, as you know, is one of the great harbors of the East.

That massive seawall called the Pteron, the Wing, is a wonder of the world. At that time eight hundred of its ultimate eleven hundred yards had been completed, broad enough topside for two teams to pass abreast. Scaffolding sheathed the entire extent of construction, with cofferdams at intervals to sink the footings. The sea was white with mason's dust fifty yards out.

Here was the fruit of Lysander's regimen. Purses were flush; morale was high. The discipline which the Spartan had enforced was acknowledged, even by those who must endure it, as indispensable. Nor did he spare his own person. The commander could be descried before dawn at the gymnasium, training hard.

Nights he labored, late as Alcibiades. He bore himself as if victory were his already and himself not commander but conqueror. Shit rolls downhill, soldiers say, but so does confidence. You could see it down to the runtiest corporal.

The new theater, west of the temenos of Artemis and overlooking the sea, was grander than that of Dionysus at Athens.

There the corps assembled in the sequel of the Games, fifteen thousand within the amphitheater, another twenty thousand ascending the slopes, with heralds relaying their commander's address. Prince Cyrus took the admiral's box, compassed by the nobles of his guard, the Companions. From the theater's twin risers, the Ears, you could see the Athenian squadrons, commanded by Alcibiades, at their blockade stations picketing the harbor.

Lysander spoke: “Spartans, Peloponnesians, and allies, the sight of your manly vigor today brought joy not only to the cities in whose cause of freedom you labor but to the gods, who prize above all such enterprise and devotion. Yet I recognize that many among you chafe. You behold the warships of our enemies advancing with impunity to the very chain which seals our harbor and you burn to give them battle. Why must we continually train? you demand of your officers. Every day more skilled oarsmen come over from the foe. Every night our ranks swell as theirs diminish. Let us attack, you cry! How long must we idle? I will answer, comrades, by recounting to you the distinction between our race, the Dorian, and the Ionian strain of our foes.

“We, Spartans and Peloponnesians, possess courage.

“Our enemies possess boldness.

“They own thrasytes, we andreia.

“Pay attention, brothers. Here is a profound and irreconcilable division. These points of view represent hostile and incompatible conceptions of the proper relation of man to God and, in this, foretell and foreordain our victory.

“In my father's house I was taught that heaven reigns, and to fear and honor her mandates. This is the Spartan, Dorian, and Peloponnesian way. Our race does not presume to dictate to God, but seeks to discover His will and adhere to it. Our ideal man is pious, modest, self-effacing; our ideal polity harmonious, uniform, communal. Those qualities most pleasing to heaven, we believe, are courage to endure and contempt for death. This renders our race peerless in land battle, for in infantry warfare to hold one's ground is all. We are not individualists because to us such self-attention constitutes pride. Hubris we abhor, defining man's place as beneath heaven, not challenging her supremacy.

“Spartans are courageous but not bold. Athenians are bold but not courageous.

“I will detail for you, friends and allies, the character of our enemy. And call me short if I lie. Shout me down, brothers. But if I speak true, then acclaim my address. Let me hear your voices!

“Athenians do not fear God; they seek to be God. They believe that heaven reigns not by might, but by glory. The gods rule by acclaim, they say, by that supremacy which strikes mortals with awe and compels emulation. Believing this, Athenians seek to please heaven by making clay gods of themselves. Athenians reject modesty and self-effacement as unworthy of man made in the image of the gods. Heaven favors the bold. And experience, they believe, has borne them out. Bold action preserved them from the Persian twice, brought them empire, and has maintained it since.

Athenians are peerless at sea because boldness wins there. The warship accomplishes nothing holding the line but must strike her enemy. Boldness is a mighty engine, friends, but there is a limit to its reach and a rock upon which it founders. We are that rock.”

Tumultuous acclamation interrupted Lysander's address. A wave rose from those near enough to hear unamplified, augmented by a second crest, as the heralds relayed their commander's words to the thousands upslope, and enlarged yet again as the rearmost at last received the heralds' resonation.

“Our rock is courage, brothers, upon which their boldness breaks and recedes. Thrasytes fails. Andreia endures.

Imbibe this truth and never forget it.

“Boldness is impatient. Courage is long-suffering. Boldness cannot endure hardship or delay; it is ravenous, it must feed on victory or it dies. Boldness makes its seat upon the air; it is gossamer and phantom. Courage plants its feet upon the earth and draws its strength from God's holy fundament. Thrasytes presumes to command heaven; it forces God's hand and calls this virtue. Andreia reveres the immortals; it seeks heaven's guidance and acts only to enforce God's will.

“Hear, brothers, what kind of man these conflicting qualities produce. The bold man is prideful, brazen, ambitious. The brave man calm, God-fearing, steady. The bold man seeks to divide; he wants his own and will shoulder his brother aside to loot it. The brave man unites. He succors his fellow, knowing that what belongs to the commonwealth belongs to him as well. The bold man covets; he sues his neighbor in the law court, he intrigues, he dissembles. The brave man is content with his lot; he respects that portion the gods have granted and husbands it, comporting himself with humility as heaven's steward.

“In troubled times the bold man flails about in effeminate anguish, seeking to draw his neighbors into his misfortune, for he has no strength of character to fall back upon other than to drag others down to his own state of wickedness. Now the brave man.

In dark hours he endures silently, uncomplaining. Reverencing the round of heaven's seasons, he does what must be done, sustaining himself with the certainty that to endure injustice with patience is the mark of piety and wisdom. This is the bold man, and the brave.

Now: what is the bold city?

“The bold city exalts aggrandizement. It cannot remain at home, content with its portion, but must venture abroad to plunder that of others. The bold city imposes empire. Contemptuous of heaven's law, it makes of itself a law unto itself. It sets its ambition above justice and acquits all crimes beneath the imperative of its own power. Need I name this city? She is Athens!”

Such an ovation acclaimed this as to resound throughout the harbor and roll, as thunder, even to the Athenian ships at their stations.

“Look there to sea, brothers, to those squadrons of the foe which flaunt their supposed supremacy at the very portals of our citadel.

They have accounted our inexperience at sea and deliberateness of action, which they deem liabilities and by which they hold to overturn us. But they have not reckoned their own impatience and restiveness, which are their flaws, and fatal. Our deficiencies may be overcome by practice and self-discipline. Theirs are intrinsic, indelible, and irremediable.

“Alcibiades thinks he blockades us, but it is we who blockade him. He thinks he is starving us, but it is we who starve him. We starve him of victory, which he must have, which the demos of Athens must have, because they do not possess courage but only audacity. And if you doubt the truth of these words, my friends, remember Syracuse. The world knows how that game played out.

They err fatally, our enemies, in their conception of the proper relation of man to God. They are wrong and we are right. God is on our side, who fear and reverence Him, not on theirs, who seek to shoulder their way up Olympus and stand as gods themselves.

“Citations interrupted Lysander so repeatedly that he must make interval now at nearly every phrase and wait for subsidence of the uproar.

“Our race, brothers, has set itself to study courage, and we have learned its source. Courage is born of obedience. It is the issue of self-less ness, brotherhood, and love of freedom. Boldness, on the other hand, is spawned of defiance and disrespect; it is the bastard brat of irreverence and outlawry. Boldness honors two things only: novelty and success. It feeds on them and without them dies. We will starve our enemies of these commodities, which to them are bread and air. This is why we train, men. Not to sweat for sweat's sake or row for rowing's sake, but by this practice of cohesion to inculcate andreia, to lade the reservoirs of our hearts with confidence in ourselves, our shipmates, and our commanders.

“Men say I fear to face Alcibiades; they taunt me for want of intrepidity. I do fear him, brothers. This is not cowardice but prudence. Nor would it constitute bravery to confront him ship for ship, but recklessness. For I reckon our enemy's skill and observe that ours is yet unequal. The sagacious commander honors his enemy's might. His skill is to strike not at the foe's strength, but at his weakness, not where and when he is ready, but where he is lax and when he least expects it. The enemy's weakness is time.

Thrasytes is perishable. It is like that fruit, luscious when ripe, which stinks to heaven when it rots.

“Therefore possess your hearts in patience, brothers. I tell you: I am glad we are not ready. Were we, I would seek pretext to hold even longer. For every hour we deprive the foe of victory is another we turn his own strength against him. Alcibiades in his godless vanity flatters himself that he is a second Achilles. Well, if he is, boldness is his heel and, by heaven, we will strike that heel and send him sprawling!”

More acclamation, deafening and unbroken.

“Lastly, men, let me tell you of this Alcibiades, and what I know of him. Brave men tremble at his name, so many are the victories he has brought his nation. Yet I tell you, and stake my life upon it, that he will fade away, by the hand of heaven or his own countrymen's. He must; his own nature calls this fate forth. For what is this man but the supreme embodiment of Athenian thrasytes? His victories have all come from boldness, none from courage. Let him strike us with terror and we will hand him his triumph. But only hold firm, brothers, undaunted by whatever flash and dazzle he throws at us, and he will crack and his nation with him.

“I know this man. He slept under my roof at Lacedaemon when he had fled there, condemned by his own countrymen for outrage against heaven. I loathed him then and despise him now. Before God I swore a mighty oath, that if He brought this man before my prow, I would break his pride and free Greece of his blasphemy and the tyranny of Athens with which he seeks to enslave us all.

“I plant my trust in you, brothers, in our arms and our andreia.

But before all I place it in God. Nor is this wishful thinking but objective observation of heaven's laws, for I perceive these faithworthy as the tides and immutable as the transit of the stars:

“Boldness produces hubris. Hubris calls forth nemesis. And nemesis brings boldness low.

“We are nemesis, brothers. Called into being by heaven's outrage at this would-be tyrant's pride, and at his city's presumption. We are the Almighty's right arm, God's holy agent, and no force between sea and sky may prevail against us.”