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

XLII

These journals of the younger Pericles [Grandfather continued] it has been my honor to preserve, along with this ensign of Calliope, sacrificed subsequently in the fight at the Blue Rocks, and Endeavor, whose helm was his at the Arginousai Islands. This was the last command he ever held. But such, my grandson, we shall get to presently.

To return to Polemides, whom we left at the inception of the raid. He had successfully fled Ephesus, he told me, exploiting darkness and the disorder wrought by the assault. His burns and their attendant shock caught up with him, however, in the country south of the city. He must seek cover.

In the raid's wake Lysander's coast guard had doubled watches and patrols. Rewards were posted for all stragglers of the Athenians; locals, boys, and even women swelled the manhunts.

Polemides survived on the flesh of mice and lizards spiked in the canals in which he had gone to ground, and leeks and radishes grubbed at night from the kitchen gardens of housedames.

Warships of Athens transited on night reconnaissance; he made signal and once attempted swimming out, but his strength failed.

He hid, he said, like a rat.

The term of his bride Aurore came and went. He had a child now or so presumed, but did not dare daylight, seeking a ship or even to post a letter. Though he declined as ever to confide to me such as he deemed overpersonal, it took scant imagination to conceive his distress, in terror for his life, whose preservation he now sought most desperately for the sake of his bride and child; with the consternation of being unable to reach her side for the birth; and the grief he had occasioned her, who could not know if he even still drew breath.

I was at Athens then. The city was sobered and chastened, groaning awake with a hangover from its bout of passion with Alcibiades. As a respectable matron recinches her girdle and reclaims her dignity after the excesses of the Dionysia, so did the city of Athena shudder and splash its face, embracing collective amnesia. Did we really say that? Do that? Promise that? Those who had capered most shamelessly to their new master's pipes now came to themselves and, repenting this license, snapped out to the bracing chill of abjuration. So that, the more abjectly a man had groveled for Alcibiades' favor or donated resources to his cause, the more he now affected indifference and swore himself superior to such slavishness.

As men reckoned how near they had come to forfeiting their freedom, their resolve redoubled never to hazard such derangement again. The oligarchic element closed ranks, fearing the mania of the multitude; the democrats scourged themselves for their eagerness to offer up their liberty. The mob's code was as concise as it was common: any shoot lifting its head beyond another must be mown down. The new radicals, championed by Cleophon, would not prostrate themselves before Alcibiades or anoint any omnipotent over themselves, the sovereign people.

It became clear now to what extent Alcibiades' rule had depended on his personal presence. The main of his ministers had embarked with him with the fleet, while those who remained-Euryptolemus, Diotimus, Pantithenes-possessed no specific program or philosophy to implement. Alcibiades had left the city with no agenda other than its adulation of himself, and without his celebrity about which to construct a consensus, a vacuum arose. Into this flooded his enemies.

Dispatches detailing the raid at Ephesus, considered a great victory, failed to ignite the city's joy. Daily from the fleet arrived pleas for money. I served then on the Board of Naval Procurement.

We were ten, one from each tribe, with an epistates, a presiding officer, serving each day in rotation. Only myself and Patrocles, son of the officer of the same name who had perished in Sicily, voted faithfully to fund the fleet. Our colleagues resisted, from legitimate concerns of economy but primarily under pressure from the foes of Alcibiades: to strangle him of cash and bring him down.

Formerly correspondence was received by the board only from the Curators of the Yards or the College of Architects, the Ten Generals, or the tribal taxiarchs. Now we admitted appeals, twenty a day, from squadron commanders and even boatswains and marines, begging for money. Here, a motion proposing citizenship for all aliens who manned benches with the fleet. Now a plea to slave owners, who had let out their chattel as oarsmen, to forgo their commission, permitting wages to the man “on the stick,” to hold him from deserting. Then a petition to enfranchise these as well.

Now Alcibiades' enemies' hundred suits at law began to take their toll. Each associate, as Polemides, accused of commerce with the foe added another razor's nick. Why had Alcibiades failed to take Ephesus? What other than his friendship with Endius and past association with Lysander? His enemies seized this moment to put abroad Alcibiades' scheme for league with Lacedaemon against the Persians. What could this be but a device to sell out the city to the foe?

In my own family debate protracted, of fear for the nation.

Ruinous as was the intemperance of the radical democrats, one dreaded their accession little less than that of Alcibiades. A figure on his scale, even a noble one, emasculated the internal intercourse of the state. Even those who loved him, or like myself acclaimed him as a commander and man of vision, came to fear his return, with victories or without.

But the element that worked him the most grievous injury was his notorious W.C.'s. These Warrants of Compensation, which he had issued in Athens' name throughout the Hellespontine War and which had succeeded spectacularly in lieu of plunder in securing the contributions that had maintained the fleet… now these came due. Of course they could not be paid; the treasury was bankrupt. But their very existence lent credence to the allies, poor-mouthing in return, when they inverted the cash box and shook out the terminal moth. Alcibiades' enemies seized upon the W.C.'s to denounce his regime as barren and corrupt. And when his victories stopped coming-when he failed to reduce Andros, when Lysander's enterprise reinvigorated the Peloponnesian fleet, when desertions proliferated among our islander oarsmen, drawn off by Cyrus' gold-the whispers became murmurs and the murmurs cries.

That spring I was assigned my seventh command, the trireme Thyone, and dispatched to Samos to join the squadron under the younger Pericles. Strife commenced before we had hauled down the slipway. A score of slave oarsmen deserted in port and twice that of foreign nautai at Andros when we touched to assist in the siege, so that we arrived at Samos “at half-stick,” so undermanned as to get only two oar banks in the water. Alcibiades was not there.

He had been absent for two months, in the Chersonese trying to raise money.

There is this about sailors, my grandson: they must have drink.

More even than women, whose use they require for physical release, they must have the psychic purgation of euphoria and stupefaction. In my judgment this is less a vice than a fact of nature.

Sailors need wine when they're in action and need it more when they're not. The hardship of the seaman's life is well accounted; what is understood less is the toll of fear. The landsman thinks sailors love the sea or feel at home upon it. This is erroneous. Most are in terror of the salt element even at its mildest; in a blow they must be driven to their benches by the lash. Nor has the architect's hand crafted a vessel less seaworthy than a trireme. Her freeboard to the thalamites' port is less than a yard; in the least swell, seas are shipped without letup. The trieres is built for speed, not strength.

In a hammering sea she buckles; her planks start. In a running swell she bellies and hogbacks. Her ram ploughs under driven before a gale, her perilous trim makes her hell to handle in a wind from abeam, and her long slender profile threatens to broach her to in a blow of any kind. To survive a gale leaves the seaman less hardened to hazard than in terror of the next. Add fear of the foe to the dread of death on the featureless waste, and you manage a brew of terror that few may endure, even over the short haul, and next to none, season upon season.

Alcibiades, fleet scuttlebutt declared, was skimming loot from the plunder. His mistress Timandra, now styled by the seamen

“the Sicilian” for her birth at Hyccara, was said to have cached above five talents, which she used to secure sanctuaries in Thrace for her lover, should affairs compel him to slip the cable. The men's disgruntlement went past bitching. “That's our drink and our pussy,” they complained, and they were right.

Want of funds drove Alcibiades to recklessness. With the princes Seuthes and Medocus he raided the Thracian interior. But the tribesmen proved of such warlike disposition and so adept at concealing their goods that casualties outstripped profit ten to one.

The men refused to march a step from the ships. Alcibiades could no longer “borrow” from friendly districts or merchandise his W.C.'s. As Lysander tightened fortification of the coastal cities, it became a task of peril even to land for water or to take the midday meal.

Our squadron was dispatched to reinforce Alcibiades' at Phocaea. My log records putting in on the way at Thercale.

Villagers in the hundreds lined the landing beach; these first stoned the ships, hurling curses; then, when after much remonstrance we had disabused them of any hostile intent and were at last permitted to land, the women flocked about us weeping. Alcibiades' troops had razed four towns, they claimed, carrying off money and cattle. Pericles assured the women they must be in error; the pirates could only be Lysander's men, impersonating Athenians to sow insurrection.

We pressed north. Smoke could be seen on the hills; fishing smacks repeated the refugees' story; columns of displaced villagers, they said, were fleeing to the interior. We encountered Theama and Panegyris, triremes under Alcibiades, returning to Samos with hostages. These were children of our allies, held for ransom. Had straits become so desperate? We caught up at Cyme. You know this city, my grandson. Its flavor is Eastern and easygoing, its siting above a charming harbor called the Saucer.

Alcibiades had demanded twenty talents of the district. The inhabitants had pled poverty and begged his sufferance, citing the prodigious levies contributed heretofore, which had left them barely eking survival. He countered that the fleet's needs superseded all. When the citizens could not pay, they took the step of barring the gates to him. He attacked. It became a fiasco.

Athenian units balked at aggression against allies; several refused orders. The only corps which followed Alcibiades without qualm were his Dii, those most savage of the Thracians. In the aftermath such atrocities were revealed as could not be covered up.

The city was taken. Treasure was extorted.

Our squadron arrived in the immediate sequel. Courts-martial had concluded; four Athenian officers and sixty-one men had been convicted. The charges, arising from an action under naval command, could not be reduced to simple insubordination. This was mutiny. The penalty was death.

Alcibiades had contrived to free a number under sundry pretexts and look the other way as more escaped. But nine oarsmen, led by one Orestides of Marathon, refused to ratify their blame by such expedients. They were guiltless, they maintained. It was their orders that were criminal.

It was postnoon, blistering and sere under a fierce Etesian wind.

The accused were being held in a saddler's shop just off that common called the Square of Truth. Alcibiades was drunk, not so as to derange his reason but only, one felt, to dull the sensation of this ordeal. He sought only a measure to get these men off the hook.

He could not compromise his authority by negotiating with the mutineers in person; he dispatched Pericles instead. I accompanied my friend on my own.

We spoke with the man Orestides and his companions as they were being led out by marines and bound to execution posts. The fellow was as honorable as any I have ever known. We wept to hear him state his case, and his men's, with such conviction, so absent artifice. He was running no bluff. Such was his honest outrage at the state of the fleet that he and his mates would, in his words, “forsake our lives before our purpose.”

Alcibiades ordered the execution. The marines refused. I have never witnessed such a scene of grief and consternation. Alcibiades had two companies of Thracian tribesmen, OiL He ordered them to do it.

They did.

Such outrage now swept the fleet, that free Athenians be massacred by savages, that Alcibiades must stand offshore all night aboard Indomitable in fear for his life. Next dawn he ordered the plunder of Cyme, which had been collected in the bowls of two shields, laid out by the paymasters along the beaching strand. The men were marched past the tables. Not one would take his pay.

That night came report of Notium.

A sea battle had been fought there, two days past. Lysander's squadrons had routed ours, commanded by Antiochus, whom Lysander had slain. Fifteen Athenian ships had been sunk or captured-no great loss in numbers, but calamitous in morale.

Alcibiades raced back to Ephesus, drew the fleet up at the harbor mouth. But Lysander was too shrewd to come out. The now-completed Pteron sealed the bastion tight. Spartan and Peloponnesian troops held every foot of shore.

Sixteen days later came this report from Athens: the vote for the new year's Board of Generals had been tallied. Alcibiades had not been reelected.

Two dawns later he addressed the fleet in farewell.

He dared not return home for fear of trial; he must retire, to Thrace perhaps if the rumors of strongholds acquired by Timandra were true. He dismissed Indomitable's crew, permitting each man to seek another berth. One hundred fifty-four oarsmen and marines volunteered to share Alcibiades' fate; they would stick with him.

That night my vessel, Thyone, drilled beyond the breakwater, the Hook, conducting signal exercises with several Samian corvettes and dispatch runners. We came in late, making our reversion by cresset-light. As the craft swung stern-to, preparing to beach, we remarked a warship launch from the strand and gather way, under half-stick, against the tide.

We peered. The vessel bore neither running lights nor signal lamp; her crew rowed in silence, stroke sounded only by the tapstone. She was Indomitable.

It had been eleven months to the day from our fleet admiral's apotheosis at Athens to this skulking decampment to exile, by the dark of the moon.