Tides of War (35 page)

A guard walloped me across the kidneys. He shoved me forward. Others demanded my name. I must repeat it over and over while they scoured the roll. “Polemides the son of Nicolaus of Acharnae, yes?”

Yes.

“Son of Nicolaus?”

Yes.

“Of Acharnae?”

Yes.

“This is the man. I will take him.”

A new voice spoke these last. I turned toward it and discovered a sturdy youth with a strawberry blemish, a brace of javelins across his back and a Lacedaemonian
xyele
at his hip. He was a warrior’s squire of the Spartans. He came round before me, extending a wooden bowl in which slopped a base of wine and a heel of barley. “Don’t drink it straight or you’ll pass out. Soak it with the bread.”

My wrists were unbound, pins hammered from my shackles.

“Who are you?” I prayed of the youth.

“Eat your bread,” he commanded.

I peered into his face, which I had seen before, I was certain, but could not remember. For his part the youth measured me, absent compassion, assessing what strength I yet possessed and what demands might be made upon it.

“I serve the
polemarch
Lysander of Sparta,” he pronounced. “By God’s clemency are you spared and commanded to accompany me by sea to Lacedaemon.”

It was half a year before I reached Lacedaemon. My health broke down on the crossing to Rhegium and again on the trek from Cyllene; I must be settled on a sharecroft of Endius’
kleros,
his estate, at the north end of the Eurotas valley. I did not see Sparta herself till spring.

All winter I lay abed, with my fare in my fist as the Lacedaemonians say. The skin stretched thin as paper across my breast. A skeleton stared back from the glass. From Sicily my legs bore twenty-seven unhealed wounds—punctures, undercuts, and peel-backs, including two of three fingers’-breadth above both Achilles tendons. Ribs were cracked in a dozen places, the crown of my skull so contused that when the hair was shaved to be scourged with lye, the flesh showed purple and peeled in layers like an onion. I must eat and sleep. My benefactors, an elder couple of the land, settled me in the room that had been their son’s and left me to my rest. Days I lay in the sun of the south-facing court, evenings before the fire, bundled in the borderless mantle of the countryman. There was an antique hound of the farm, Kicker by name; as strength returned I ventured at his side, forked on my staff like a fossil, upon the winter hills.

Nights were long and I dreamt often. I felt old, ancient as Cronos. Shades passed before my vision, my own among them; I saw father and sister, Lion and Simon and my wife and babe; with them I held converse nightlong of such profundity as must reform my soul forever, yet when I woke these had dispelled, gossamer as smoke. I retained nothing. Shadow and sun were one to me, as visions intruded at their will and not the widest daylight could dispel them. I saw again the wounded in the Great Harbor and the dying as the troop trekked out. Again I trudged in column to the Assinarus. A hundred nights I woke in terror, only to confront this fresh indictment: that of my own survival. By what
grant did I endure above the earth when so many better than I had been banished beneath it? The panel parted one midnight; Alcibiades arose before me. So vivid stood his apparition, down to the wolf’s-fang brooch he had won at Potidaea, that I was certain he inhabited the chamber in the flesh. He and not Lysander, I was informed, had been the agent of my preservation. I did not thank but reviled him. “Why did you save me? Why me and not my brother?”

“Your brother wouldn’t have come.”

The truth of this lanced me to the quick. I sought to lunge at my tormentor, to throttle his witness at its source; but my limbs would not obey me. Such grief wrung my heart as to strangle all speech and stir.

“I needed one at my side,” Alcibiades pronounced, “who had passed through the same portal I had.”

In daylight I could countenance my cowardice and even extenuate it. At night I sweated, as on trial. I saw myself in Phreatto at Piraeus, where one accused of homicide overseas must make his defense standing offshore in a boat, as the laws of ritual pollution forbid his feet, defiled with bloodguilt, to tread the earth of Attica. In dreams I sought to sacrifice, but always the priests debarred my offering. Nightlong I slaughtered victims and read damnation in their entrails. I had not lost fear of heaven, rather become possessed by it, or more accurately that no-man’s-land through which mortals and immortals pass and commingle and where, as Craterus testifies, the living and the dead, the unborn and the soon-to-die

Alone memory of my children seemed to vouchsafe salvation. I clung to vision of their faces as one shipwrecked to a spar. I had no right to. What endowment had I bequeathed them, not even my name? War had called and I had gone. Now I was sick of war. The farm on which I recuperated was what they call a “life-hold”; the freedman and his wife grew pears. I watched them with their graftlings and their winter boxes. With what poignancy such homely tasks wrung my heart! I longed to be woken no more by the trumpet but by the lark, to hear again the peal of children’s laughter. Let another take my place at muster, let him sing
out “Aye” as the mark tolls down the line. Of my thirty-eight years, nineteen had passed in war. It was enough.

Yet each night’s board enlarged my debt to Sparta and to Lysander. Could I run? Where? My breath could barely snuff a candle; it took the strength of both arms to turn in bed. Lysander would find me, or his agents, those who for a price track their prey to the gates of hell. I would become one of those myself before settled at my homeland again, though I did not know it then.

That spring I saw Alcibiades speak. This was in open-air assembly before the kings and ephors and the Corps of Peers. Gylippus had returned from Syracuse in glory; the scale of the calamity to Athens had been accounted. My country and her allies had lost twenty-nine thousand fighting men, two hundred prime ships of war, with merchantmen and transports too numerous to tally. The toll in talents of gold was four thousand, bankrupting the treasury of the state. More devastating to the spirit of the people was that the expedition had been lost in its entirety, every ship and man, every scrap of sail and armor.

Alcibiades began:

“Men of Sparta, you have commanded my counsel on matters today before this body and I must comply although the occasion brings me no joy. My countrymen have suffered a calamitous overthrow. Men I knew and loved have perished and much of their ordeal must be placed at my threshold. The counsel I gave you has helped bring about their ruin.”

The Spartan acropolis, the High City, is so scanty of elevation that it is called by the children the Knee-High City. The site, however, possesses extraordinary acoustics and is in its unassuming way august. The Corps of Peers, near eight thousand, had assembled in a body, with deputations present from a number of foreign nations, including Athens herself. Another ten to fifteen thousand Spartans of lesser citizenship status, and even boys and women, attended as well, along the slopes toward the playing fields and Artemis Orthia, the speakers’ words relayed by heralds.

It had been two winters since I had seen Alcibiades. I was struck with undiminished force by the beauty of his person. His years approached forty; strands of silver shone within the burnished copper of his curls. These served, however, not to diminish his comeliness, but to
enhance the gravity of his self-presentation. A becoming modesty was another gift of the plain Spartan dress. One glanced about at the warriors and athletes who compassed the speaker, attending in sober propriety. No nation rivals the Spartan for beauty. The simplicity of their diet, the rigor of their regimen, even the air and water of their unspoiled country, combine to render them supreme physical specimens. Within thirty paces could be counted a dozen of peerless athleticism, perfect in feature and symmetry. Yet to turn from these to Alcibiades was to look from moon to sun, by so much did his gifts excel theirs.

“I am grateful to you, Spartans. When you granted me sanctuary, an exile from my own country under sentence of death, I made this pledge to myself and to you: that I would speak the truth, neither more nor less, and leave it to heaven whether you would heed. I entertained no illusion that you bore affection for me, or that my presence was tolerated except as it might serve your interests.

“As to the injury my counsel might bring upon my country, I exculpated myself by the notion that she was no longer mine; that the Athens I loved had been supplanted by another, to which I owed no allegiance, and that against this Athens I may without demurral direct my energies. But I had left an element from my equation. That nation I abetted you and your allies in bringing to harm is no bloodless abstraction, but constituted of real men who bleed real blood and die real deaths. It is a stern vocation you place upon me, men of Sparta, commanding my counsel again to direct destruction upon my countrymen. Yet my lot I have cast with you. So be it. That which I proffer now is the best my reason can devise.

“First, don’t be too quick to rejoice at this calamity which has overtaken your enemy. The she-bear is never more dangerous than when penned and gored. Athens has lost a fleet, yes. Two, if you wish. But the naval might she retains is still the greatest in Greece, and her character is such as to impel her to resuscitate this power at once and by all means.

“Now at your request, I will speak to what you must do to defeat your enemy. But first, knowing your taste for concision, I beg indulgence of a digression. For the course I propose is unprecedented, and your first response will be to repudiate it. But consider, Spartans. The way of life you follow now was once without antecedent as well.

“When your ancestor Lycurgus introduced his laws, so remote in antiquity that none can say whether he was man or god, no other state had seen or even contemplated their like. Who had heard of such things: to ban money and make possession of it punishable by death; to efface all distinction by wealth or birth and declare all men Peers and Equals; to proscribe venture abroad and debar foreign custom from infecting the homeland; to forbid the practicing of all trades other than war; and countless other reforms down to forbidding your women to wear makeup or your carpenters to hew the beams of your houses square. All these measures Lycurgus instituted and you embraced, to forge your nation into an unvanquishable engine of unity. This was without precedent, my friends. But it was a response consentient to the times. Your ancestors perceived its genius and took it up. And it succeeded.

“Similarly when the threat of Persia arose in our grandfathers’ time, your kings Cleomenes and Leonidas had the vision to adopt new methods for a new kind of war. They compelled the disunited cities of Greece into a coalition to resist the external foe. More so you included the helots in your scheme, arming them and permitting them to fight at your side in numbers far exceeding your own. That prospered too. Now, if you wish to defeat Athens and end this war, you must summon the wisdom to take up another revolution.