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

IV

When I was ten, my father sent me for my schooling to Sparta.

This was far from unheard-of in the decades before the war, when fellow feeling still prevailed between the two great states by whose allied exertions Greece had been preserved from the Persian yoke. Periodic clashes and conflicts notwithstanding, the dominant disposition toward Sparta among the Athenian gentry was respect. Many of the older landed families, not alone of our city but of Greece entire, shared bonds of guest-friendship with clans at Sparta; such gentlefolk often felt keener kinship for their kind across borders than for the commons of their own states, whose increasing stridency and self-assertion threatened not only to overturn the old courtly ways but to coarsen and corrupt the rising generation of youth. What more satisfactory inoculation for these striplings, their fathers reasoned, than a turn or two in the Spartan agoge, the Upbringing, where a lad learned the old-fashioned virtues of silence, continence, and obedience?

Among my father's forebears were the Athenian heroes Miltiades and Cimon, the latter esteemed by the Spartans little less than their own kings, which affection Cimon returned in abundance, naming his eldest son Lacedaemonius, who himself trained at Sparta, though only to age sixteen. Through such ties and by his own exertions my father succeeded in enrolling his firstborn among that handful of foreigners permitted to “stand, steal, and starve” beside their Lacedaemonian counterparts.

Some twenty or thirty of us anepsioi, “cousins,” trekked in each year from all Greece, taking our places among the seven hundred homegrowns. Alcibiades himself, though he did not train at Lacedaemon, was xenos, guest-friend, of the Spartan knight Endius (who would stand present in Asia to oversee his friend's assassination). Endius' father was named Alcibiades, a Lacedaemonian name which alternated in both families. My own father's name, Nicolaus, is Laconian, as was mine at birth, Polemidas, but whose pronunciation and spelling I Atticized upon enlistment.

I was nineteen when war began, at Sparta, one season shy of that commencement called 0 and C, Ordeal and Commission, the accession granted to non-Lacedaemonians, equivalent to initiation into the Corps of Peers for citizens, the Spartiatai, and their

“stepbrother” comrades, the mothakes.

Few believed then that the war would last more than a season.

True, Athenian troops were in action, besieging Potidaea, but this was strictly an internal affair between Athens and one of her subject states, however vocally the latter might squeal, and did not violate the Peace. It was not Sparta's ox being gored. The Spartan army, egged on by her allies, had indeed invaded Attica in retaliation, yet so lightly was this regarded that I without demurral participated in the pack-out of the two line divisions, to be reinforced by twenty thousand heavy infantry of Sparta's Peloponnesian allies, which comprised the invasion brigades. All the foreign boys helped too. We thought nothing of it. The army would march in, raise hell, and march out, to be succeeded by some form of negotiated settlement by fall or winter. The idea that we lads in schooling might be sent home was never even broached.

It was on the eve of the Gymnopaedia, the Festival of the Naked Boys, that I learned my father's estate had been burned. I had been elected an eirenos, a youth-captain, and this night took charge for the first time of my own platoon of boys. We were at choral practice, just setting up, when one of the lads, a particularly bright youth named Philoteles, advanced in the scrupulous manner prescribed by the laws, eyes down, hands beneath his cloak, and sought permission to address me. His father, Cleander, was with the army in Attica and had sent a message home. He knew our farm. We had welcomed him as a guest more than once.

“Please convey to Polemidas my extreme regret,” Cleander's letter stated, employing my Laconian name. “I exerted all influence I possessed to prevent this action, but the district had been selected by Archidamus, prompted by the omens. One farm could not be spared when all others were torched.”

I applied at once for an interview with my commander Phoebidas, the brother of Gylippus, whose leadership in Sicily, scores of thousands of deaths later, was to prove of such calamitous effect against our forces. Should I return or complete my passage to initiation? Phoebidas was a gentleman of virtue, a throwback to a nobler age. After much deliberation, including taking of the dream omens at Oeum, it was decided that duty to the gods of hearth and fatherland superseded all conflicting obligations. I must go home.

I trekked to Acharnae, a hundred and forty miles in four days, without even a dog to accompany my steps, oblivious to the sequence of sorrows of which this blow was the precursor. I expected to find vines and groves blackened by fire, walls toppled, crops laid waste. This, as you know, Jason, is no calamity. The grapes and olives spring back, and nothing can kill the land.

I arrived at my father's farm, Road's Turn, during the hours of darkness. It looked bad, but nothing could prepare me for the devastation which greeted my eyes at daybreak. Archidamus' men had not simply scorched vineyard and grove but sheared the living plants to the nub. They had poured lime into the open stumps and spread this brew across every square yard of field. The house was ashes, and the cottages and barns. All stock had been slaughtered. They had even killed the cats.

What kind of war was this? What manner of king was Archidamus to countenance such depredation? I was enraged; more so my younger brother Demades, whom we called Little Lion, when at last I located him in the city. Eluding our father by whose command he was to maintain his study of music and mathematics, he had enlisted in the regiment of Aegeis, outside our tribe and under false papers. My two younger uncles and all six cousins had joined their companies. I signed as well.

The war had begun. In the far north the Potidaeans, emboldened by the vigorousness of the Spartan incursion into Attica, had enlarged their revolt from our empire. A hundred ships and ninety-five hundred Athenian and Macedonian troops held them besieged. Alcibiades, the most illustrious youth of our generation, had mustered already. Too impatient to wait for his twentieth birthday and the cavalry trials, he had shipped as a common infantryman with the Second Eurysaces, that company which his guardian, Pericles, had claimed as his first command. When weather and the close of sailing season threatened to strand the last of our unembarked Acharnian companies, we were piggybacked onto the penteconters of this unit. We sailed on the eighth of Pyanopsion, Theseus day, into a howling norther.

Of the hundreds of passages I have endured in subsequent seasons, this was the worst. No mast was even stepped; sail was broken out only as weather-cover, pitifully inadequate, against the seas which pounded over the bows daylong onto the exposed backs and shoulders of us, serving as oarsmen as well as infantry, bereft of refuge in the undecked galleys. It took eighteen days to get to Torone, whereupon our Acharnian companies and those of Scambonidae were conjoined under the Athenian general Paches and, reinforced by two troops of Macedonian cavalry, sent back the way we had come, by sea, with orders to capture and occupy the Perrhaebian fortresses at Colydon and Madrete.

These sites were unknown to me, as was the region entire; I felt as one washed up at the extremities of earth. Surely such weather could prevail only at the verges of Tartarus. We made south, twenty-two ships-among whose companies now stood my brother, “making the skip” from his original regiment-packed with puking neophytes greener even than ourselves, while enemy cavalry tracked the flotilla's progress from shore, barring all attempts at landing. Alcibiades was aboard our ship, the Hygeia.

He had made a nasty name for himself by assigning his turn at oars to his attendant (when none other younger than twenty-five even dreamt of such extravagance) while he himself monitored the convoy's passage more like a fleet commander than an untried shield-humper like the rest. About his shoulders he wore a black woolen cloak with the design of an eagle in silver, of such superb workmanship that its worth could be no less than a year's pay for a colonel. Every item of his kit was the finest, and his looks…well, you know these as well as I. One was torn between jealousy, for all knew well of his wealth and lovers, and awe, that any of flesh could be so spectacularly gifted by heaven. For three days the squadron alternately ran before, then beat into, a gale which the locals described as “moderate” but which to me was indistinguishable from the hoarblast of hell. At last at the third sunset a storm of homicidal ferocity struck. Paches' flagship signaled all vessels to make for shore, enemy be damned.

Do you know that headland, Jason, called the Blacksmith's Bellows? Its sound once heard may never be forgotten. The swifter vessels fetched the lee; those lumbering pots, as our own, were driven in and nearly dashed. The sole landing site was a splinter of gravel, walled on three sides by two-hundred-foot cliffs, and defended across its solitary channel of ingress by stone promontories exploding with white water and booming beneath the thunder of storm-pounded surf. Only after a struggle titanic in its exertions and sustained throughout the terrifying descent of darkness did our severed remnant, six ships, succeed in beaching upon that site called the Boilers, a strand so slender that the vessels' prows (beaching stern-first being out of the question in such a tempest) were staring straight into the face of rock. Waves taller than a man crashed about their sternposts, seeking to suck them back into the sea. To augment the hospitality of the place, the foe had gotten above us, at the summit of a precipice too sheer to scale, and begun raining boulders and initiating rockslides. Two of six ships were holed at once, nor could the youths of our force be induced to respond to orders to preserve the others, but hunkered in clefts at the base of the fall, drenched and dread-stricken.

Command had broken down. Paches and the Athenian officers had been swept beyond the headland; it took an eternity to determine the ranking senior of our shredded squadron, a captain of Macedonian infantry it turned out, and he, overcome by the extremity, had retreated to a cave at the cliff base, from whose shelter he could not be drawn.

Upon the strand boulders plummeted like hail. With each ship holed, our extinction became more certain; the enemy would simply close from above and take us down with stone and shaft.

Beside Hygeia, a horse transport had broached to. A number of the beasts thrashed in the surf, drowning; two who had made land had been struck by rockfalls and back-broken; their cries unstrung the rookie troops further. The vessel herself pitched among the breakers, secured only by bow and stern lines, each manned by twenty lads, frantic themselves and buffeted chest-deep in the maelstrom. Alcibiades and his cousin Euryptolemus had hurled themselves into this rescue. I found my brother Lion; we joined too.

After monumental exertions the transport was at last beached.

Without a word Alcibiades had become our commander. He strode off, seeking a senior officer to report to, ordering the rest of us to follow as soon as the horses had been secured ashore.

The gale continued to scour the landing beach. Boulders plummeted from above; concussions of thunder never ceased. My brother and I had just reached the brow of the strand, seeking the command post; we could see Alcibiades ahead, addressing the Macedonian captain. Suddenly this officer struck him with his staff. We dashed forward. Even amid the cacophony of storm and surf, the content of the confrontation was clear: Alcibiades demanding orders, the captain incapable of giving them. He wheeled upon the youth, twenty years his junior, whose family and reputation he knew, as we all. “Your kinsman Pericles is not here, young man, nor may you presume to dictate in his name!”

“I speak in my own and that of these who will perish, absent your deliverance,” Alcibiades rejoined. His gesture took in ships, gale, and the rain of rubble which continued to pelt from the enemy above. “Take action, sir, or by Heracles I will!”

Only two fifties remained unholed. Alcibiades struck for them.

The captain was shouting, commanding him to stay put and threatening hell if he disobeyed. The youth bawled no defiance, simply strode on; and we, my brother and two score others, followed in his train as if drawn by fetters of adamant. At breakers' brink he issued orders. No one could hear a word. Yet we seized oars and launched into the teeth, ten at each bank, without even stepping the steering oars, so worthless were they in that sea. How the ships got off without loss of life I cannot say. What preserved the party, beyond heaven's clemency, can only have been the beaminess of her craft and the quantity of seas shipped as unintended ballast. Of four pulls at oars, only one found purchase.

Gale-driven chop hammered the hull like a siege engine, while swells twice the vessels' length made them race like runaways.

Plummeting into a trough, the bows nosed under, sending seas cascading into the bilges; ascending from a crest, the gale struck upon the exposed keel, elevating the vessels vertical as vine stakes.

At oars we were literally standing on the thwarts of our comrades aft.

Somehow the two fifties managed to pull a half mile to sea. The lads communicated like dogs, by cries rendered mute in the blast; yet one understood the object: to make the first northward landing, scale the face, and get behind the foe.

Now Alcibiades rowed, with such a will as to impel all to emulation; his orders, shouted man-to-man down the banks, were to run into shore any way possible, taking no care for the vessels but only to land ourselves. The crest that bore us in unspooled with such velocity as to fling all bodily from their benches. We plunged over the gunwales. I was knocked senseless by the fall, coming to myself among breakers, shield filling with the weight of the seas, which hauled me under with a violence unimaginable. My forearm, seated through the sleeve to the elbow, bound me as a shackle; only the rivets' failure, wrenched from their sockets by the press of turbulence, loosed me to breach the surface. A boy drowned before my eyes, dragged under in the same way. On the strand our remnant collected, shattered with exhaustion and

bereft, all, of shields and weapons. Both boats were splinters. Lads shook as if palsied, blue to the bone.

One turned to Alcibiades. Drenched and weaponless as he was, and quaking as convulsively as we others, yet he reveled in this. No other phrase may describe it. To the lads unnerved by the ships' loss he responded that had the vessels not sunk of their own, he would have ordered them holed and scuttled. “Banish all thought of retreat, brothers. No avenue remains but to advance, and no alternative save victory or death.” He ordered count, and when three were discovered missing, drowned, he commanded our remainder to give meaning to their sacrifice. What we lacked accounted nothing beside the audacity of our stroke. “Want of weapons is no liability in this dark. Our sudden apparition in the enemy's rear will be weapon enough. The foe will flee from the shock of our assault alone.”

Alcibiades drove us up the face. He was a horseman and knew in this wet that the enemy, being cavalry, would seek before all to get his mounts under cover. We were not lost, he repeated, however black the tempest, but must only follow the brink, employing heaven's bolts as our beacon, till we discovered such a site. Of course he was right. A crag appeared. There they were. We fell upon the enemy's grooms with stones and clubs and the shivered shafts of our oars. In moments our commander had us mounted and pounding along the precipice in dark as total as the tomb. At the crest the main of the foe fled, as Alcibiades had predicted. We chased a dozen into the fells, myself desperate to strip the shield from one. For the Spartan-trained, death was preferable to return from action, even victorious, empty-handed.

Here the first man fell beneath my blow. A plunge among rocks; I heard his skull crack on the stone in the dark. My brother dragged me off him, seeking to strip breastplate as well as shield. I was mad with the joy of my own survival and felt myself invincible, as so many young soldiers who in such states commit acts of barbarity. Lion hauled me back to the precipice. Our party had collected, masters of the site. We had won! Below, our troops cheered their deliverance. The face of the cliff had been roped, I saw; several from the strand had mounted and now stood before us.

I recognized the Macedonian captain. He was berating Alcibiades, vehemently and with malice.

He declared the youth reckless and insubordinate, a disgrace to his country and the order of the Alliance. Three are dead by his defiance, two ships lost for his usurpation of command! Where are your shields and weapons? Do you know the penalty for their deficit? The captain's eyes blazed. He would see Alcibiades hauled up on charges of mutiny, if not treason, and by Zeus jig upon his grave!

Three Macedonian warrant officers, the captain's compatriots, reinforced him at arms. Alcibiades' expression never altered, awaiting only the harangue's termination.

“One must not make such a speech,” he declared, “with his back to the precipice.”

I will resist overdramatizing the moment, but report only that the three henchmen, considering their position, seized their commander and executed his precipitation.

The rest of us, who had just experienced for the first time in our young lives such a baptism of terror-and over such a sustained interval as we had never imagined-now discovered ourselves confronted with an even more extreme exigency. What would become of us? Surely those below must report Alcibiades' action.

We were accessories. Would we not be tried as murderers? Would our names be blackened, our families shamed and dishonored?

Would we be returned to Athens in chains to await execution?

At once Alcibiades stepped to the three Macedonians, setting a hand on their shoulders to assure them he harbored no malign intent. Might they inform him, he inquired, of the name and clan of their fallen captain?

“You will prepare the following dispatch,” Alcibiades commanded. He proceeded to dictate the text of a commendation for valor. Each act of heroism which he had himself performed, he now credited to the captain. He recited this officer's valor in the face of overwhelming peril; how he had, disregarding his own safety, put out into the storm, scaled the sheer face of stone to envelop and rout the enemy, preserving by his actions the ships and men of his company below. At the summit of triumph, as his sword slew the foe's commander, cruel fortune overhauled him. He fell. “The fame of this action,” Alcibiades concluded, “shall endure, imperishable.”

This dispatch would be sent, Alcibiades declared further, to the captain's father and presented personally by himself to Paches and the generals of Macedonia upon our squadron's return. He turned then to us youths, including Lion and myself, looking on.

“Which of you, brothers, will set his hand beneath mine on this citation?”

Need I recount, none failed to assent.

As to our unofficial company of infantry, it succeeded, reunited with the brigade under Paches, in its mission over a month and more of fighting, during which Alcibiades at nineteen, though by no means officially in command, was in fact deferred to by all superiors and sanctioned such latitude of action and initiative as to render him effectively its captain. When this unit at last reached Potidaea, our original destination, and joined the line troops engaged in the siege, it was disbanded as nonchalantly as it had been formed, and Alcibiades, undecorated but unindicted, was repatriated to his regiment.

It was my brother's observation regarding this incident that, though he, and I as well, served in subsequent seasons beside a number of the young men present at the precipice in that hour and had ample opportunity of converse, formal and informal, on this or any subject, never did one offer mention of this instance or confirm by word or allusion the actuality of its occurrence.