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

V

At the siege of Potidaea two young men established themselves as indispensable: Alcibiades and my brother. By his bearing both in action and in counsel it had become patent that the former was preeminent of hero's fire, without rival among the host.

Within all the corps he was acknowledged the most brilliant and audacious, possessed of the most abundant genius of war. At Athens his fields of enterprise had been limited by youth to sport and seduction. Campaign overturned this, granting him a sphere commensurate to his gifts. Overnight he came into his own. It was deemed by no few that he, though not yet twenty, could have been elevated to supreme command and not only prosecuted the siege with greater vigor and sagacity but brought it to a successful conclusion with far less loss of life.

As to my brother, he had made his name among the hard heads and raw knots of the corps. Experience teaches that however numerous the brigade or army, the work of war is performed by small units, and each must possess to be effective one man like Lion who is unacquainted with fear, who arises cheerful each morning despite all hardship, ready to shoulder another's load with a laugh and turn his hand to all tasks, however mean or humble. A unit lacking a man like Lion will never endure, while one with such a mate may be beaten but never broken.

Our father's letters caught up to us at Potidaea. We were summoned, Lion and I, to the tent of Paches' adjutant, a captain of Aexone whose name I cannot recall. The officer read aloud two pleas of our father, confirming my brother's age at sixteen years three months and pleading for his immediate discharge, with a pledge to pay all fines and fees of transport. “What have you to say, young man?” our captain demanded.

Lion straightened to his full height, such as it was, and swore by the waters of Styx that his years were not only twenty but twenty-three. Our father, he testified, though well-meaning, had come unhinged following the devastation of our district and now feared, understandably, the loss of his sons; thus this appeal from Athens, presented with such touching and plausible conviction.

When the captain summoned witnesses from our home district who testified to the truth of the letter, Lion refused to buckle. It was not age that made a soldier, but passion and heart! Our commander cut him short. I have never seen one so inconsolable as Lion; the sight was almost comical of him slouching aboard the galley home.

Payout for my brother's misdemeanor fell upon me, as it should, his elder. I was fined three months' pay and banished from line duty, assigned command of a platoon of boys, foresters. We were issued not arms but axes and packed off with the mules and logging sledges.

You were at Potidaea, Jason. I remember you. You came in with Eurymedon in the terminal spring, the squadrons bearing the relief parties of the cavalry and the replacements for the assault troops carried off by the plague. You were lucky. You missed the winter.

Winter in our fathers' time was the off-season. Who even dreamt of fighting in the snow and ice? Summer was the time of war; in Sparta men didn't even have a word for summer; they called it strateiorion, campaigning season. But a siege cannot be prosecuted in sunshine only. Thus a new calendar for a new kind of war.

It was a porous siege. On the line the troops had more intercourse with the enemy than with their own countrymen. We sold food and firewood; the Potidaeans traded treasure. Gold first, then jewelry and linen. They sold their armor and their swords.

From midwinter they were peddling their daughters.

By the gods, it was cold up there. Piss steamed on the air and turned to ice before it hit the dirt. To dress in armor made the skin peel in patches where it touched the freezing bronze. The glory of dying for one's country lost whatever pale luster it had possessed, especially to croak of plague or pestilence or some perverse mischance, a blind-luck bows hot lobbed from a battlement, only to have the campaign decided in spring by treaty and everyone suddenly allies again. We camped there, frozen and miserable, while the city of the Potidaeans loomed at the neck of the promontory, frozen and miserable as we.

The three northern gates, those that gave out upon the landward side, stood barred only in daylight. With nightfall they became avenues of skimmers, scavengers, and scum. You could see their tracks in the snow, broad as boulevards. Our company was commanded by a bribe-commissioned captain named Gnossos.

Here is what we did. For every eight trees logged, we turned over four to the army; the other four went to the foe. They paid our captain in women. Not whores but respectable wives and daughters of the city. They were ploughing us for firewood. I refused to permit my lads to take part in these orgies, in which it was not uncommon for one female to service a dozen men before returning through and under the walls to the city. Such degeneracy, countenanced by their superior, would debase what little warrior spirit these striplings possessed. In addition, overscrupulous as this may sound from a man of my subsequent deeds, I could not bear to witness the ravagement of person this commerce inflicted on the women themselves.

I was hauled up for this. Behind my back my bucks began calling me “the Spartan.” It was put about that I sided secretly with the foe and that my prudish intransigence was not only undermining the morale of youth but, defying as it did my commander's ordinance, was at best insubordination and at worst treason. In a clash with my captain the word “procurer” escaped my lips. I was cashiered.

I went for aid to Alcibiades. The army had engaged the enemy in full strength that autumn, an attempted breakout in force requiring the mobilization of our entire corps; Alcibiades had distinguished himself in this action and in fact been awarded the prize of valor, judged the bravest of the six thousand upon the field.

It took several months for the crown and suit of armor to be delivered. In fact he had just received the former this evening when I approached. He was celebrating with his tentmates.

Any encampment massed upon one site for a prolonged interval becomes, as you know, Jason, a city of its own. Its market becomes the agora, its training fields the gymnasium. The polis, battling boredom, throws up its own diversions and distractions, its characters and its clowns. There is a good part of town and a bad, a neighborhood one enters at his peril and a precinct of privilege and fame, which exercises its spell over all. Invariably one tent establishes itself for the brilliance of its occupants as the epicenter of the camp.

Alcibiades' tent, Aspasia Three (the main streets of the seven fortified camps ringing the city had been named each after a famed courtesan of Athens), had become this nexus. This was in consequence not alone of his celebrity but of the wit and converse of his tentmates, who included in their number of sixteen your own master Socrates (renowned then less as a philosopher than a doughty and stalwart campaigner, forty years of age), the celebrated actor Alcaeus, Mantitheus the Olympic boxer, and Acumenus the physician. These fellows were the most fun.

Everyone wanted to be with them. An invitation to dine at Aspasia Three was more highly prized than a decoration. For that reason I had avoided Alcibiades, not wishing to push myself uninvited upon him and also because I judged the status of our friendship to be cordial but remote.

Now, however, the gravity of my situation compelled me to come forward. I waited till that hour when the evening meal would be concluded, then hiked the mile to Aspasia Camp, seeking only a few moments of Alcibiades' time, perhaps to speak with him outside the tent and get him to put in a word for me with the brass.

I had thought I could simply rap at the post and get it over with.

To my surprise, and in contrast to the other snug-battened precincts of the camp whose lanes stood dark and vacated save the odd trooper dashing from one shelter to another in the cold, the court fronting Alcibiades' tent burned bright with torch and brazier, the intersection of the lanes milling gaily with a motley of off-duty officers and infantrymen, wine sellers, jugglers, sweets bakers, a party of acrobats in midperformance upon a stage of logs, and a professional fool, not to mention a number of gap-toothed trollops from the whores' camp, loitering in high spirits. The aroma of spitted meat augmented the cheer; bonfires blazed upon the earth, which had thawed and was churned by the press of celebrants. As I wedged through the crush, the tent flaps parted and there emerged to the air the most dazzling specimen of womankind I had ever seen.

Her hair was russet; her eyes of such violet they seemed to flash like diadems in the torchlight. She was mantled crown to toe in sable and escorted by two cavalry officers, six-footers, clad in the ermine-fringed cloaks of the enemy. Of the besiegers none attempted to lay hands upon them; in fact our lads drew the party's mounts before them, boosting them onto the horses' backs.

The lady trotted off not in the direction of the city, but up the slope toward that bluff called the Asclepium where, I later learned, a cottage of spruce had been erected for her use and her bodyguards'.

“That's Cleonice,” a fried-onion vendor volunteered.

“Alcibiades' girl.”

I would doubtless have remained marooned on the doorstep all night had not my host's cousin Euryptolemus chanced to pass, seeking the tent, and, recognizing me, tugged me forward. He informed me in merry spirits that the gentlewoman Cleonice was the wife of Machaon, the wealthiest citizen of Potidaea. Alcibiades had initiated a liaison with the lady, seeking through her husband to facilitate the betrayal of the town from within. “Now she's fallen in love with him and refuses to go home. She even claims to be carrying his child. What can one do?”

Euryptolemus, whom his companions called Euro, instructed me to wait while he ducked inside. Moments later I heard Alcibiades' laughter; the flaps parted and I found myself tugged clear of the mob and welcomed to the warmth within. “Pommo, my friend, where have you been keeping yourself? Not alone in the woods with those innocent boys!”

Alcibiades, I was informed, had appointed himself master of revels. He sat upon the bench of honor, with his crown before him, cheeks flushed with wine. He had been wounded; beneath his tunic one could see his wrapped ribs. He introduced me as his mate of the Boilers and ordered a seat and a bowl of wine. He had heard of my troubles. “Is it true you called your commander a pimp?”

My arrival had interrupted a discourse; I sought to deflect attention from myself and let the talk resume. The party would not hear of it. I was asked by the Olympian Mantitheus to state my objections to a little harmless ash-hauling. I replied that such acts were far from innocuous, but degraded the morale of the youths in my charge.

“I have a younger sister, Meri,” I found myself appending with passion. “I would eviscerate the man who so much as laid a hand on her garment absent my father's leave. How then may I stand by and watch other maidens despoiled, even the daughters of the enemy?”

This elicited an ironic chorus of “Hear, hear.” To my surprise the advocate who sprang to my defense was Alcibiades. His posture was greeted with amusement both wry and derisive, which he endured with good nature. “You may laugh, gentlemen, to hear me, whose reputation as a seducer of women is not inconsequential, take up the cudgels in behalf of the fair gender. But I of all may claim to know how it feels to be female.”

He paused and, turning to me, declared that I must set aside all concern regarding the charges lodged against me. Strings would be pulled. For now I must drink, not moderately as the Spartans, but deep, Athenian-style, so as to overhaul the company which had got the start of me. Otherwise, my host asserted, the jests would not seem as droll or the discourse as profound. He turned to his companions and resumed.

“Consider, my friends, that a beautiful youth is much like a woman. He is paid court to, flattered, celebrated for virtues he does not yet possess, and in general acclaimed for qualities which are not of his own making but accidents of birth. And do you not smile, Socrates, for this is much to the point of that matter upon which you were presently discoursing. I mean the disparity between the true self of the political man and the mythos he must project to participate in public life. I was stating, nor did you impeach its veracity, that I or any other who enters politics must be two: Alcibiades, whom my friends know, and 'Alcibiades,' that fictive personality who is a stranger to me but whose fame I must fuel and fashion if my influence is to prevail in the arena of policy.

“A beautiful woman is in the same fix. She cannot but perceive herself as two creatures-the private soul known to her intimates and that external proxy presented to the world by her good looks.

The attention she receives may be gratifying to her vanity, but it is empty and she knows it. She comes to resemble those urchins during the Festival of Theseus who wheel painted barrows with bulls' horns on the front. She recognizes that her admirers love her not for herself, that is, the wheeler, but for that fancy she wheels before her. This is the definition of degradation. It is why, gentlemen, I came very young to despise those suitors who paid court to me. I recognized even as a child that it was not myself they loved. They sought only the surface, and for reasons of their own vanity.”

“And yet,” Mantitheus the boxer put in, “you do not rebuff the advances of our comrade Socrates, nor reject the friendship of ourselves, the remainder of this company.”

“That is because you are my true friends, Mantitheus. Even were my face as punched-up as your own, you would still love me.”

Alcibiades endeavored to induce Socrates to resume his dissertation on that subject which my arrival had interrupted, but before he could, the actor Alcaeus returned the topic to the shamed women of Potidaea.

“Let us not employ lightly, gentlemen, the word 'degradation.'

War is degradation. Its object is the ultimate degradation-death.

These women have not been slain. Their bruises of the flesh will heal.”

“You surprise me, my excellent friend,” Alcibiades replied. “As an actor you of all people should know that death takes many and far more evil forms than the physical. Isn't that what tragedy is all about? Consider Oedipus, Clytemnestra, Medea. Their wounds would heal as well. Yet were they not ruined utterly from within?”

Mantitheus spoke. “If you ask me, it is not these women who suffer true debasement, but their fathers and brothers who permit them to be used in this hateful manner. These men possess options.

They could starve. They could fight and die. In truth these young women are heroes. Consider that when a man risks all in defense of his country, he is crowned for valor. Are not these girls the same?

Are they not sacrificing their most cherished possessions, their maidenhood and name of virtue, to succor their beleaguered countrymen? What if, come spring, their confederates the Spartans at last get off their asses and trek here to their aid? What if it is ourselves who are routed? By the gods, the Potidaeans should erect statues to these brave girls! In fact, taken in this light, our young gentleman here” [he indicated myself] “is not delivering these noble lasses from shame, but denying them their shot at immortality.”

Laughter and choruses of “Again, again” greeted this, accompanied by raps of wine bowl bottoms upon the wooden crates and trunks which served as tables for the banquet.

“But wait,” Alcibiades broke in, “I see our friend Socrates smiling. He is about to speak. In all conscience we must warn our comrade Polemides, or perhaps as Odysseus approaching the Isle of the Sirens stopper his ears with wax. For once exposed to the sweet discourse of our friend, he will find himself enslaved forever, as are we all.”

“You make sport of me as usual, Alcibiades,” the man Socrates declared. “Must I endure such abuse, gentlemen, coming from this fellow who of all ignores my counsel, attending only to his own pursuit of popularity?”

Socrates the son of Sophroniscus sat across from me. Of all assembled, his appearance was far the least prepossessing. He was stocky, thick-lipped and pug-nosed, already at forty quite bald, and his cloak, blood-besmirched yet from a skirmish earlier in the month, was of a cloth coarse and pecunious as a Spartan's.

The men began chaffing him about an incident of several days prior. Apparently Socrates, standing outside in the bitter cold, had been seized midmorning with some enigma or perplexity. There he remained, in open sandals on the ice, pondering the issue daylong to the marvel of all who beheld him, themselves shivering indoors with their feet swathed in fleeces. The soldiers peeked out at intervals; there Socrates remained. It was not until nightfall that, his puzzlement resolved, he abandoned his self-imposed post and decamped to the fire for supper. Led by Alcibiades, the party demanded now to hear what riddle had with such tenacity occupied their friend's mind.

“We were speaking of degradation,” Socrates began. “Of what does this consist? Is it not that apprehension of an individual according to a solitary quality, to the exclusion of all the manifold facets of his soul and being, then using him or her thereby? In the case of these unhappy women, that quality is their flesh and its utility in gratifying our own base desires. We dismiss all else that renders them human, descended of the gods.

“Note further, gentlemen, that this single quality by which we convict these women and sentence them to exile from humanity is one over which they themselves possess no authority, a quality thrust upon them willy-nilly at birth. This is the antithesis of freedom, is it not? It is the use one makes of a slave. We treat even our dogs and horses better, granting to them their subtleties and contradictions of character and esteeming or contemning them thereby.”

Socrates drew up and inquired of the company if any found fault with his meditation thus far. He was endorsed by all and exhorted to continue.

“And yet we who consider ourselves free men often act in this manner not only toward others but toward ourselves as well. We account and define our persons by qualities gifted to or deprived us at birth, to the exclusion of those earned or acquired thereafter, brought into being by enterprise and will. This to my mind is an evil greater than degradation. It is self-degradation. “

He glanced subtly toward Alcibiades. Our master of revels clearly discerned this look and returned it, amused and intrigued, and not without irony.

Socrates resumed. “Pondering this state of self-slavery, I began to puzzle: what precisely are the qualities which make men free?”

“Our will, as you said,” put in Acumenus the physician.

“And the force to exercise it,” added Mantitheus.

“My thoughts precisely, gentlemen. You are running along with me, and even outpacing my poor ruminations. But what is free will? We must agree that nothing that does not possess free will may be called free. And that which is unfree is degraded; that is, diminished to a state lesser than that intended by the gods.”

“I think I see where this is going,” Alcibiades put in with a smile.

“I feel chastisement coming, gentlemen, of myself and us all.”

“Shall I break off?” Socrates inquired. “Perhaps our master of revels is fatigued, worn out from heroism and the adulation of his peers.”

The company urged their comrade to recommence.

“I was observing the young soldiers of the camp. Conformity to the norm is their overmastering impetus, is it not? Each unprompted wears his curls like every other, drapes his hem to the same length, and strides about and even postures in the identical attitude. Inclusion in the hierarchy is all; exclusion the paramount fear.”

“This doesn't sound much like freedom,” volunteered Acumenus.

“It sounds like democracy,” put in Euryptolemus with a laugh.

“Would you agree, gentlemen, that these youths, tyrannized by the good opinion of their peers, do not possess freedom?”

All concurred.

“In fact they are slaves, are they not? They act not by the dictates of their own hearts, but to please others. There are two words for this. Demagoguery. And fashion.” The company responded with whistles and cheers. “To whose dictates you, Socrates, are mercifully immune,” declared Alcibiades.

“No doubt with my poor cloak and sword-barbered beard I am perceived throughout the camp as a figure of fun. Yet I maintain that, unfettered by the constraints of the mode, I am the most free of men.”

Socrates expanded his metaphor to include the Assembly at Athens. “Does there exist beneath heaven a spectacle more debased than that of a demagogue orating before the masses? Each syllable screeches of shamelessness, and why? Because we discern, hearing this vile wretch pimp himself to the multitude, that his speech springs not from the true conviction of his soul, but is crafted cunningly to truckle to the whim of the mob. He seeks his own advancement by their favor and will say anything, however wicked or infamous, to promote his stature in their eyes. In other words the politician is the supreme slave.”

Alcibiades was thoroughly enjoying this give-and-get. “In other words you would declare of me, my friend, that by pursuing politics I act the pimp and panderer, seeking to advance my station among my peers, and that by so doing, I neglect my nobler self in favor of my baser.”

“Is that what I would say?”

“Ah, but here I have you, Socrates! For what if a man seeks not to follow his peers, but to lead them? What if his speech proceeds not from the falsehoods of the flatterer, but from the truest precincts of his heart? Is that not the definition of a man of the polis, a politician? One who acts not for himself, but for his city?”

The conversation ran on with lively animation for most of the evening. I confess I did not, or could not, follow much of its twists and turns. At last, however, the discourse seemed to condense about one issue that the company had been debating before my arrival: could a man in a democracy be described as

“indispensable,” and if so would this man merit dispensation beyond that of his lesser contemporaries?

Socrates took up his post on the side of the laws, which, however imperfect, he professed, command that all men stand equal before them. Alcibiades declared this preposterous and with a laugh claimed that his friend did not, and could not, believe it. “In fact I nominate you beyond all, sir, as indispensable. I would sacrifice battalions to preserve your life, and so would every man at this table.”

A chorus of “Again, again!” seconded this.

“Nor do I speak from affection only,” the younger man continued, “but for the advantage of the state. For she needs you, Socrates, as her physician, to the tendance of her soul. Bereft of you, what shall become of her?”

The older man could not contain a laugh. “You disappoint me, my friend, for I had hoped to discover love rather than politics sheltering beneath that devotion you so passionately proclaim. Yet let us not pass over this issue lightly, gentlemen, for at its heart lies matter which compels our most rigorous examination:

“Which takes precedence, do we believe, man or law? To set a man above the law is to negate law entire, for if the laws do not apply equally to all, they apply to none. To install one man upon such a promontory founds that flight of steps by which another may later ascend. In fact I suspect, don't you, brothers, that when our companion nominates myself as indispensable, his intent is to establish that precedent by which he may next anoint himself.”

Alcibiades, laughing, declared himself indeed indispensable.

“Were not Themistocles, Miltiades, Pericles indispensable? The state would lie in ruins without them. And let us not forget Solon, who gave us those laws in whose defense our friend stands with such steadfastness. Do not misunderstand me. I seek not to overturn law, but to adhere to it. To declare men 'equal' would be absurd if it were not evil. In truth that argument which seeks to calumniate one man as 'above the law' is false on its face, for that man, if he be Themistocles or Cimon, conforms by his actions to a higher law, whose name is Necessity. To impede in the name of

'equality' the indispensable man is the folly of one ignorant of the workings of this god, who antedates Zeus and Cronos and Earth herself and stands everlastingly as their, and our, lawgiver and progenitor.”

More laughter and rapping of wine bowls. Socrates was about to respond when a commotion interrupted from without. An overturned brazier had set the adjoining shelter alight; now all poured forth to assist in its extinguishment. The salon broke up. I found myself beside Alcibiades. He motioned to his groom to fetch horses. “Come, Pommo, I'll escort you back to your camp.”

I secured the password of the changing watch and we set out into the cold. “Well,” Alcibiades inquired when we had cleared the first line of pickets, “what did you think of him, our Professor Baldpate?”

I replied that I could not quite make the man out. Sophists, I knew, grew rich from their fees. Yet Socrates, garbed as he was in homespun, appeared more like…

“A beggar?” Alcibiades laughed. “That is because he scorns to profit from that which he pursues out of love. He would pay if he could; he considers himself not a teacher but a student. And I will tell you something else. My crown of valor…did you notice this night that I never set it, as one decorated ought, upon my head?

This is because the prize rightly belongs to him, to our own coarsecloth master of discourse.”

Alcibiades related that at the height of the battle for which he had been honored he had fallen, wounded and cut off, assailed on all sides by the enemy. “Socrates alone came to my defense, dashing from safety to shelter me beneath his shield, until our comrades could rally and return with reinforcements. I argued vehemently that the prize belonged to him, but he convinced the generals to award it to me, no doubt seeking to school my heart to aspire to forms of glory nobler than those of politics.”

We traversed the remainder of the crossing in silence. Beyond the battlements of the besieged city one discerned cookfire smoke.

“Do you mark that smell, Pommo?”

It was horseflesh.

“They're cooking their cavalry,” Alcibiades observed. “By spring they will be done for, and they know it.”

At the foresters' camp Alcibiades made a show of his arrival, without words putting it clear to all that I stood in his esteem, and any who crossed me must deal with him. Sure enough, within ten days my commander received orders rotating him back to Athens, his replacement an officer with instructions to leave me free to run my platoon as I wished.

I dismounted now and handed the reins back up to my friend.

“What will you do with the rest of your evening?” he inquired.

I would write a letter to my sister. “And you? Will you return to continue your discussions of philosophy?”

He laughed. “What else?”

I watched him depart, trailing the companion horse. His track in the snow bore him back, however, not along the picket line toward Aspasia Three, but in ascent upon the slope called Asclepium to that cabin of spruce wherein awaited the lady Cleonice, she of the violet eyes.