Tides of War (27 page)

Exploiting the linguistic bonds of the Doric Spartans and Syracusans, Gylippus enlisted words, too, to the cause. Armored infantrymen he now called
homoioi,
Peers or Equals. Regiments were designated
lochoi,
divisions
morai
. Among other Spartan usages he compelled each member of a military unit to discontinue the practice of dining at home or with friends and to take his meals in the common mess with his company. In this way unit esprit was fostered, and all felt themselves equal and united.

Gylippus outlawed drunkenness and declared it a whipping offense to neglect the marching condition of one’s feet. He made it a crime for a man to have a potbelly or appear at large with stooped shoulders. He introduced anthems of ridicule, the same as at Sparta, and recruited the
city’s children to swarm upon any slovenly fellow, rebuking him in song. These and other reforms Gylippus instituted. But supreme among all stood his own presence, the fact that he had come in person to share his comrades’ peril and to donate all to preserve their freedom.

One morning in late winter as Gylippus marshaled his battalions and we hastened to position to engage them, I noted Lion jotting notes. “Have you noticed,” he remarked, “with what discipline the Syracusans take their stations now that Gylippus has forged them in his image?”

I looked. Of the allies about us—Athenians, Argives, and Corcyreans—many knelt or squatted. Breastplates sprawled on the earth; shields canted, splayed flat or even perched upon by their owners. Squires served double-and triple-duty, their fellows hired out as laborers long since. Directly across, every Syracusan stood in full
panoplia,
shield against knee, squire at his left, taking the weight of helmet and cuirass in the Spartan manner.

They beat us that day. By late summer their counterwall had cut our wall off. With this all hope of investing Syracuse was lost. In a night attack Gylippus took Labdalum, that fort and storehouse atop Epipolae which held not only our siege gear but our paymaster’s cash. He fortified Euryalus, the Heights’ lone avenue of vulnerability, and continued his crosswall to fortify the elevation entire. Even at sea, where the skill of our mariners stood preeminent, Gylippus set his new navy on the offensive. The ingenuity of his commanders now served him. Recognizing that the fight would come not in the open sea, but in the confines of the Great Harbor, he had the prows and catheads of his triremes reinforced and built out triple-wide, to ram head-on instead of from the flank as the skilled Athenians preferred. We learned a new word from him,
boukephalos,
oxhead. With these brutes he pounded our lighter, hollow-rammed ships, chasing us back behind both breakwaters to the inner harbor. Now it was we who were sinking pilings for half-moons and manning the dredging barge to plant “hedgehogs” and “dolphins.”

By autumn’s close Gylippus’ dreadnoughts had sunk or disabled forty-three of our ships and his troops had driven us off Epipolae entire, save the Circle fort at Syce. His own fleet had suffered terribly, more than seventy vessels crippled or sunk, but these losses he made up swiftly, bringing in fresh timber through the Little Harbor and overland, protected now by the counterwall.

Gylippus was blockading us now, and his fist screwed the press tight. The Syracusans could afford to lose two men for every one of ours, two ships, two walls, and every day their position grew stronger as more Sicilian cities, smelling blood, defected from the invaders to their compatriots. Nicias ordered the upper walls abandoned. We lost lines of assault across city and harbor and, more telling, the baker’s mill, which had supplied our bread. Sutlers and camp followers, and many of our women, melted away. We hunkered, hemmed like rats south of Feverside, the marsh at the gut of the harbor. And when in another night attack Gylippus’ troops drove us from the Olympieum, he threatened this wretched toehold as well.

My old ship, the
Pandora,
had passed all summer fending the enemy off Plemmyrium, the foe’s attacks so unremitting that the ship could not be dragged up and dried out. When at last she beached for refitting, I went aboard to visit an old snoozing spot, fore of the catheads. Setting my heel on the king-beam, the timber gave like a sponge.

Our ships were rotting.

The paymaster’s reserve had run out; wages fell three months, then four in arrears. Foreign sailors began to desert, while the attendants and slaves who replaced them slid over the side at their first taste of the lash. Nicias’ infirmity worsened. Morale was in the shithouse. Mercenary officers could no longer hold their men. Telamon had lost a fifth, gone over to the foe.

At the start of the second winter came this letter from Simon. He reports Lion’s wife remarried, to a good man, a war cripple. Our cousin has encountered Eunice, harboring deep bitterness toward me, and my children, who are well.

By the time this letter arrived, four months after its posting, the fleet under Demosthenes had reached Corcyra. Another ten days and the first corvettes appeared. Seven more and here came the armada—seventy-six vessels, ten thousand men, armor and money and supplies. Gylippus’ defenders withdrew to Lardbottom and Pedagogue’s Frock, their third and fourth counterwalls; their fleet fell back behind Ortygia to the Little Harbor.

The fortunes of war had reversed again. As these fresh ships of Athens streamed into the Great Harbor, brothers and mates swept toward one another with joy. Arriving marines leapt from the vessels’ decks, embracing companions hip-deep in the sea. Others onshore stripped naked and swam to the ships, mounting the oar ports hand over hand. Lion and I found Simon, on the strand with his horseless cavalry, both of us weeping as we clasped him to our breasts.

How long it had been! Two bitter winters since the expedition sailed from home so full of hope, two summers of dilation and demoralization since its men had seen beloved friends and brothers, heard from their lips news of home, or pressed them in the flesh to their bosoms. Nor had these, our reinforcements, come an hour too soon.

Each man of the first expedition, soon as he had made certain of friends and kinsmen, must seek with his own eyes Demosthenes. Our new co-commander came ashore on foot, mounting to the strand with his helmet under his arm and his cloak trailing in the sea. Atop the palisades, the troops whooped themselves hoarse. There he stands, brothers! His flesh is not sallow like Nicias’ with illness and care, but sun-burnished with vigor and resolve. Nor does he make at once to
erect an altar seeking counsel of the gods, but strides to assess the issue with his own eyes and reason. Demosthenes, men! Now at last we have a winner, who triumphed in Aetolia and Acarnania and the Gulf, defeated and captured the Spartans at Sphacteria!

Demosthenes’ first order was to get the men paid. He marched forty thousand past the tables in an afternoon, making good all arrears in newly minted owls and virgins. That night his speech was terser than a Spartan’s.

“Men, I’ve looked this hellhole over and I don’t like it one lousy bit. We came here to pound these bastards. It’s time we started.” This was acclaimed with a riot of spearshafts clashing upon shields; the army roared its resolution and approval.

Three nights later a force of five thousand retook the Olympieum. The succeeding dawn an assault by ten thousand cleared the Syracusans from the bay. The fleet recaptured the Rock and reblockaded the city; another night attack took back a mile of our old wall.

Casualties were massive. Four days’ losses exceeded the total for the year, yet they must be borne so long as their produce was victory. Nor would Demosthenes permit momentum to flag. He harvested armor from the dead and wounded, converting auxiliary troops and even cooks to heavy infantry. My cousin’s horse unit was among those reconfigured. Simon had never fought on foot in armor. It is not a skill one acquires in a night. Nor would he or his mates of the mounted troopers be granted the luxury of breaking-in on some soft or easy target.

The next assault must be against only one place, Epipolae. The Heights must be retaken; without them no assault on the city could prevail.

Ten thousand went up at the second watch of the night, heavy infantry and marines packing four days’ rations (for we were meant to take the counterwall and hold it), with ten thousand missile troops in support. That left no force at all, except the sailors and the general crowd, to defend the perimeter against a counterattack aimed at the fleet. The game, Demosthenes believed, was worth the gamble. He massed all he had and threw it at Gylippus.

I felt confident the assault would succeed; what struck terror was concern for my cousin. He was no soldier, and anything could happen up on those rocks, particularly in the dark and in a unit of dismounted cavalry untrained in armored assault and in no shape to hump that hill. Worse, Simon’s commanding officer, Apsephion, a moron we both knew from Acharnae, had, seeking to play the hero, succeeded in getting his boys slotted in where the action would be hottest—the western approach via Euryalus, the Park Way, where the slope was most exposed and the enemy position most heavily fortified.

They would be in the third wave, my cousin’s horseless cavalry, under the general Menander. Lion and I were in the first, the left wing, behind the Argive and Messenian heavy infantry, eleven hundred in all, with four hundred light troops, darters of Thurii and Metapontum, in support. The center, once it re-formed up top, would be all-Athenian, the tribal regiments of Leontis and Aegeis, both crack units with their own peltasts and incendiaries. On their left were the mercenary troops, including Telamon’s Arcadians, supported by two hundred Corcyrean marines serving as javelineers, then another picked Athenian regiment, the Erechtheis. Linking this to our wing were four hundred Andrian, Naxian, and Etruscan marines armored as hoplites, my own among them, with a hundred Cretan archers and fifty darters
of the Messapian tribe of Iapygia. The heavy units would assault the walls, with the missile troops immediately to the rear, firing overhead to clear the ramparts.

Topside, the troops’ name for Epipolae, is several hundred feet up, crumbly white limestone with scrub oak and fireweed, sheer on three sides except the west, where it is steep but climbable. There is a racetrack called the Polyduceum at this end, the last flat space of any scale, and upon this the assault troops marshaled during the first watch of the night. A light-armed force of two hundred rangers had already started up the Heights. It was their job to rope the face and secure the precipice.

The night was hot and dark as a tomb. The troops had been awake all day, keyed-up and impatient; few had slept for fear the previous night. Each man packed fifty pounds in shield, helmet, and breastplate and another forty of ironmongery and kit, for our orders were to take the counterwall and rebuild our own. We had all our masons and carpenters with us. Now massing on the marshaling ground, men sheeted sweat, crapped out at all postures, pillowing their heads on shields, stones, and each other’s sprawling limbs. Many discarded helmets, for the heat and vision in the dark; others shed breastplates and greaves. The god Fear had made his entrance. Across the field one descried men evacuating bowels and emptying bladders. “It’s starting to smell like a battle,” Lion observed.