Achilles His Armour

by Peter Green

  Nicias was up and dressed, and several of his private soothsayers were with him. As Demosthenes entered the tent he smelt the sickly reek of burning incense. One glance at Nicias’ stricken face was enough to confirm what he had already guessed. Beyond him Demosthenes saw the weaselish face of the soothsayer, who was obviously in a high state of excitement. Nicias’ favourite soothsayer Stilbides had died of a fever less than a week ago; this was a notable occasion for his successor.

  Then Nicias said what his colleague had feared. ‘It will be impossible for us now to sail tomorrow.’ He glanced to the soothsayer for confirmation.

  ‘Quite impossible, General.’ The weasel’s Adam’s apple bobbed nervously up and down. ‘Not till the Lady Moon has purified herself in her full course shall we be free from this evil omen.’

  He stared defiantly at Demosthenes. The red-headed General, his drawn sword still in his hand, exclaimed: ‘Her full course . . . A month! Do you seriously propose we should stay here a month to satisfy your damned conjurors?’

  Nicias said, helplessly, his face twitching: ‘It is a matter of religion . . . of piety.’

  Demosthenes slapped his sword back into its scabbard and said: ‘What the Goddess can bring on our heads will be little to what we shall suffer from the hands of the Syracusans if we stay. Of the two I have no doubt which I would prefer to risk. Go out and speak to them, Nicias. Tell them it’s nonsense. Tell them we’ll still sail at dawn.’

  Nicias shook his head obstinately. ‘My conscience will not allow it,’ he said. His voice was weak, but there was no mistaking its unalterable conviction.

  ‘Then I will.’ Demosthenes turned to go. ‘You will only waste your breath, General,’ said the soothsayer softly. ‘Listen.’ And indeed the sobbing and prayers, the infernal clanging of metal, the hysterical uproar of tired men strained beyond the limits of their endurance gave no promise of success. Slowly Demosthenes turned and faced the silent faces in the tent, defeat in his eyes. Fate; disease; superstition; his own colleagues. He could not fight them all. He felt the fever beginning to sing in his bones again. His head swimming, he stared hopelessly at the soothsayer; and in those veiled eyes seemed to read an expression of triumph.

  • • • • •

  When Gylippus and the men of Syracuse learnt both of the Athenian intention to withdraw, and the reason why it had been postponed, their fear of Demosthenes vanished; and they assaulted the beach from the sea with some seventy vessels. Nicias held them off till the end; but Eurymedon, trying to outflank them, was cut off and killed, and the bulk of his squadron destroyed or captured.

  Now the Syracusans could sail about the harbour as they liked, without fear of reprisals. Across the main entrance they moored old triremes, broken-down merchantmen, and any other vessels they could spare. They secured them together with iron chains, and built a bridge of planks across them. The whole operation was completed in three days; and all the time the Athenians lay with their ships drawn up along that narrow strip of beach, and watched them, and did nothing. It was not till the barrier was completed that Nicias listened, too late, to Demosthenes’ advice. They evacuated their upper lines, built a tiny stockade round the camp, leaving only enough space for their sick and the stores, and put every single man who could fight on board the triremes.

  ‘If we can break out,’ said Demosthenes, ‘we will sail to Catana. If not—’ he stared grimly at his silent colleagues—‘we will have to burn our ships and retreat by land till we find a friendly city. There is nothing else left to us.’ Each man looked at his neighbour, realising what these last words meant. Only Nicias’ soothsayer was not there to hear them. He had slipped away from the camp during the night; and when he made his report Gylippus paid him well for what he had done.

  • • • • •

  Demosthenes and his squadron stormed the harbour-mouth soon after dawn. With the force of desperation they smashed their way through the anchored merchantmen, only to be cut off and forced back by Gylippus. The cliffs echoed to the snap and crash of falling spars, the shrieks of drowning and mortally wounded men. From their camp on the shore Nicias and his weary veterans saw, in agony, their last hopes slowly destroyed.

  The sun began its slow decline towards the western marshes, and still they fought on, hoarse now and silent, their feet slipping on the bloody decks, their lips dried and cracked with salt, their wounds blackened with flies. It was not till evening that the Athenian ships engaged below the rocky heights of Ortygia finally gave way; but then the whole line crumpled while Nicias watched, broke and split and fled for the shore, and the Syracusans found their voices again in this moment of triumph, and pursued them yelling and shouting for victory, till those Athenians who still lived leapt from their ships and ran splashing through the hot sandy shallows, leaving patches of blood on the water as they came. At last the men of Syracuse drew off with their prizes, as night began to fall; and those Athenians who still lived gathered round Nicias’ tent, calling on him to leave the ships and save them.

  Demosthenes was still alive. He had survived the thickest of the fighting all day, only to stand and watch helplessly while the Syracusans towed away his finest ships and his men were speared like fish in the water. His left arm had been broken by a grappling-iron, and his scalp hung over one eye where he had had a glancing blow from a sword after losing his helmet.

  ‘If you want to save your lives,’ he observed grimly to the miserable, blood-stained, water-logged band around him, ‘there’s one way to do it, and one way only. We have sixty ships left. More than the Syracusans. The barrier’s still breached in two places. If we sail out under cover of darkness, we can get clear away.’

  ‘I agree with Demosthenes,’ said Nicias unexpectedly. There was a stubborn silence; eyes were cast down; feet shuffled uneasily in the dust. Nicias and Demosthenes looked at one another.

  A high hysterical voice called out: ‘Take us by land! Get us away by land! We won’t fight again by sea.’ In an instant the cry was taken up all round. They were weeping with fatigue and nervous exhaustion, completely demoralised, no longer an army but a rabble. There was nothing the generals could do but capitulate.

  • • • • •

  It was the morning of the second day before the Athenians were ready to set out. The dead lay piled in heaps, or casually where they had fallen. There was hardly a man who, as he waited for the signal to march, could not see some friend grinning at him from the dust. Worse than this, the wounded and dying were left to keep company with the dead. When the army finally set out, in two hollow squares, these unfortunate wretches tried to keep up with the march, dragging themselves through the dust on bleeding stumps, limping along till they fainted from the heat. When the army slowly drew away from them, shaking them off by the roadside one by one, their shrieks and curses still rang horribly in the ears of their comrades. No one looked back.

  • • • • •

  For three days they pushed on slowly, over rough and difficult country, seldom achieving more than four or five miles in a day’s marching. They destroyed two of the ambushes sent out against them; but all the time they were plagued by archers and slingers from the hills, who picked off their men almost casually, one by one, never coming within range. Their rations were running out; after the second day they began to suffer badly from thirst.

  During the third night Nicias and Demosthenes lit a large number of camp-fires to distract the enemy’s attention (Gylippus and his Spartans were by now uncomfortably close behind them) and marched before day-break: not, as hitherto, northward to Catana, but towards the south-west and the sea. The manoeuvre succeeded; but during the march the two divisions became separated. Demosthenes’ troops had got into considerable disorder in the darkness; and when day came they were about five miles behind Nicias. But the sea was in sight.

  • • • • •

  Gylippus caught up with Demosthenes just before midday. The Athenian general made his last stand in an olive-grove on a hill. He did no
t like it: there was a road on either side, and no water. But there was a high wall running all about it, and it seemed just possible that he might hold out. In any case he had no choice.

  Gylippus made no direct assault on the position. He brought up his archers and slingers; all through the afternoon the lead balls and arrows hissed down through the stippled sunlight between the olive trees, and no man knew who would be the next to die. As the daylight began to fail some of them broke from cover and ran down the hill, their hands above their heads, crying for mercy. Demosthenes watched them go, lying on his side on his good arm, sick and faint from the blow that had cracked his skull. He made no move to stop them.

  Almost immediately afterwards Gylippus sent a herald forward under a flag of truce. He stood in the road outside the grove, while the Spartans waited behind him, and offered terms of surrender. None of them, he declared, would be put to death by violence, or imprisonment, or go in need of the necessities of life. The starved and beaten men lying in the grove looked at one another questioningly. Demosthenes gave no sign. A few at first, then all of them, rose to their feet and filed out on to the road, laying down their arms as they went.

  All this Demosthenes watched from a gap in the wall to which he had dragged himself, as a spectator might watch the final scene of some tragedy on the stage. Then with a great effort he sat up, his broken arm dangling; and painfully drew his sword from its scabbard. He rose to his feet, swaying and giddy, leaning against an olive trunk for support The dying light flickered on the blade, laid dark shadows about his bloodstained face and dusty hair. He held his breath, collecting strength Slowly. Then he stretched out his arm full length. He thought of nothing; not of death, nor the defeat, nor the irony of this end among the Olive trees in a wretched skirmish. He only knew that he was tired and thirsty, that he wanted to sleep. With a convulsive effort he thrust the sword home.

  • • • • •

  The Syracusans caught up with Nicias on high ground above the River Erineus. When they sent a horseman to him to tell him of Demosthenes’ surrender, and to invite him to follow his colleague’s example, Nicias at first refused to believe them.

  ‘It is true,’ said the messenger, a bandy-legged man with an appalling squint. ‘Send for yourself and see. Demosthenes tried to kill himself; but he was too weak. A flesh wound only.’

  Nicias was silent for a moment. He looked down the brown hare hill to where the Syracusan army waited; then at his own men. They had water now; but they were half-starved, hollow-eyed with lack of sleep. A stab of pain shot through his back; he suddenly realised that unless he exercised the most violent self-control he was going to be sick. Somehow it seemed of the utmost importance that this should not happen. He held himself rigid for some seconds, the sweat breaking out on his forehead, till the spasm passed.

  ‘Tell Gylippus,’ he said at last to the squinting messenger, ‘that if he will give free passage to my army, I will undertake to pay the whole cost of the war to the men of Syracuse. More than this: I will leave with you one man as hostage for every talent of the cost. Go now, and tell him.’

  The herald shook his head. ‘You waste your breath,’ he said, and turning his back on Nicias, scrambled down the hillside. Nicias watched him conferring with Gylippus, and passed the word for the men to stand to arms.

  Five minutes later the arrows began to fall among them, not thickly, but never stopping, dropping out of the sky with a sharp ph-t-t, invisible till they struck. Nicias spread his men out in a defensive ring. But he had no archers himself; all he could do was to wait till night-fall. When it came they were once more suffering acutely from thirst; and the enemy lay between them and the river.

  • • • • •

  As dawn broke, the decimated column, still many thousands strong, moved slowly and doggedly off to the south. Less than five miles away was the Assinarus River; and water was the one thing they must have, or die. All the way the Syracusans and Spartans kept pace with them, circling them with their cavalry, pelting them with stones and javelins. The heat burned up from the ground, and the hill-tops danced in tremulous columns of hot air. Parched and gasping, they still stumbled forward, driven by a desire more powerful than the fear of death. This thin silver thread of water became for them a symbol of escape, of protection. But the Syracusans reached the river before they did, and crossed it, and lay on the opposite bank waiting for them.

  The Athenians reached the river in the afternoon, and at the sight of it the last lingering shreds of discipline vanished. They stormed down the sloping rocky banks, treading each other down in the passion to drink, to be the first across and away. But the Syracusans closed in from both flanks, at close quarters now at last, their spears advanced, pressing the struggling mass inwards upon itself; yet never quite closing the passage into the water. Some in their blind haste threw themselves on the spears, and so died; some were trodden underfoot by those who followed them, and were crushed to death, their faces in the mud. But many won through to the bed of the stream, and stooped down there and drank, careless of the arrows that rained among them, not moving even when Gylippus’ Spartan infantrymen came down into the water and slaughtered them like hogs, still gulping up the water that was now befouled with mud and blood, thickened with brains and entrails, fill they lay in heaps, some still groaning, and the water boiled around them and floated them away downstream.

  Nicias stood on the crest of the slope, powerless to act, his eyes compelled to the horror that was being enacted below him. He might have been shot a dozen times, but he remained untouched, till full realisation burst through his numbed brain, and he knew that the men lying in the river had been killed by him, as surely as if he had struck them down himself. Then he was running and stumbling through the ranks, his weapons thrown away, his head bare, careless of wounds, his, eyes seeking desperately for the one man he needed to see. And in the end he found him.

  Gylippus stared in amazement at the wild-eyed old man who crouched sobbing at his feet, his white hair matted with dust and blood, crying out that he and his Spartans could do what they would with him, but that this slaughter must stop, whatever happened this slaughter must be stopped, or the blood of the men slain would be on both their heads. Perhaps Gylippus reflected that captives were of more value than dead men, and that to have Nicias and Demosthenes return to Sparta with him as his captives would bring him great honour; perhaps even his crass soul was touched by the scene of carnage still going on before his eyes, and the terrible spectacle of his sick and half-crazed enemy writhing at his feet. Whatever his motives, he gave the order to cease the attack. But it took a long time to pass it down among the exultant butchers in the river and when they at last sheathed their swords more than eighteen thousand corpses lay in piles beside the Assinarus. But Gylippus took Nicias, and placed him that night in his own tent, under a strong guard.

  The next morning the captured arms of the generals and captains were nailed on the tall trees that lined the river, and the manes of their horses sheared, and their tails cropped. Then the victors adorned themselves, with wreaths of parsley and celandine, and began the long march back to Syracuse, driving before them the seven thousand men who still survived from the Athenian forces. The blood-lust had gone out of them; they did not stay to see how the hawks and buzzards fought, screaming and flapping, over the flesh and marrow of the dead, till only white bones lay tangled in the bed of the Assinarus River, and broken spears and helmets to rust with the winter rains.

  Chapter 31

  At Sparta, a fortnight later, Alcibiades read the copy of Gylippus’ report to the Ephors that Endius had, with a certain malicious solicitude, procured for him. Sick and cold, he pored over it at night, his imagination completing only too well the gaps in the Spartan general’s brief account.

  ‘. . . I had hoped to bring the generals Nicias and Demosthenes alive to Sparta,’ he read, ‘but this was shouted down by the men of Syracuse. After much discussion, the Syracusan Assembly voted that they should be p
ut to death; and this was done (though both were little better than dead already) and their bodies were exposed outside the State prison for the dogs and birds of prey to devour. The rest of the Athenian captives have been sentenced to imprisonment in the stone quarries outside the city, where the conditions are such that they will without doubt soon perish. This wastage of prisoners I was powerless to prevent. I confess that I am unable to understand the men of Syracuse. They act with this exemplary harshness; yet they are willing to pardon and even honour those of their captives who are able to quote them passages from the Athenian poet Euripides, who appears to be held in great esteem among them.

  ‘In the circumstances, since my mission is accomplished, I see no purpose in remaining here longer; and therefore beg the permission of the Ephors and, Council to return to Sparta forthwith . . .’

  Alcibiades crumpled the report up with a mechanical gesture and dropped it on the floor. Suddenly and irrationally, he hated himself as he had never done before, and his passion for Timaea was bound up with this hatred, and part of it.

  • • • • •

  It was a stranger who brought the news to Athens, a Sicilian merchant to whom wars were merely another subject for gossip. Sitting in a barber’s chair in the Piraeus, he began to discuss the disaster in a casual way, thinking it must long ago have become public knowledge. The barber listened open-mouthed, his razor poised in his hand, horror in his eyes. Then he threw the razor down and ran out of his shop. The merchant scratched his head in bewilderment.

  The magistrates to whom the barber panted out his story were badly frightened; and, like all frightened men, they took refuge in incredulity and anger. The barber found himself haled off to the State prison-house, where he was mercilessly tortured as an idle tale-bearer. But a week later the survivors began to straggle home, grim and emaciated; and when the full truth was known the streets echoed to the wailing of women who lamented their dead.