The Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

  Epaminondas met the Spartans on the plain at Leuctra and annihilated them. This was the overthrow Greece had awaited for centuries. At one blow, long-downtrodden Thebes became the dominant land power of Hellas and he, Epaminondas, its singular hero and genius.

  My father knew Epaminondas. At the height of Thebes’s new power, it had taken hostages of the house of Macedon. My father was one of them. He was thirteen. His period of detention at Thebes proved three years. He was treated well, and he kept his eyes open. By the time he came home, there was no wrinkle of the Theban phalanx he had not mastered.

  When he became king, Philip made over the Macedonian army in the image of the Theban. But he went Epaminondas one better. He added six feet to the two-hand pike, making it eighteen instead of twelve. This was the sarissa. Now, projecting before the army’s foremost rank came a hedge of honed iron, not just of the first three ranks but of the first five. Into this no enemy, however brave or heavily armored, could hope to advance and survive. Philip did not leave it at that, however. He transformed the army of Macedon into a full-time professional force, billeted in barracks and paid in wages, month by month. He and his great generals Parmenio and Antipater drilled the phalanx until it could deploy from column to line, turn to flank, countermarch, and execute every evolution the old-fashioned hoplite could, faster, smarter, and with absolute cohesion. The world had never seen a weapon like the sarissa phalanx of Macedonia. Bring Epaminondas back from the grave and Philip’s pike infantry will obliterate him.

  My mates and I cross the field, now, at Chaeronea. The knights of the Sacred Band are out front of their position, oiled up and performing their gymnastics like the Spartans at Thermopylae. A better-looking bunch could not be imagined. Even their squires are handsome. Their camp is laid out square as a geometer’s rule. The stacked arms dazzle in the late light.

  We rein-in at half a stone’s toss. I introduce myself and declare for all that Thebes and Macedon should not be fighting each other, but campaigning conjointly against the throne of Persia.

  The Thebans laugh. “Then tell your father to go home!”

  I indicate their camp. “Is this where your post will be tomorrow?”

  “Perhaps. Where will yours be?”

  Black Cleitus, it turns out, knows two of the fellows—wrestlers, brothers, from the games at Nemea. They swap tales and catch up on the news. In the midst of this, a striking-looking officer of between forty and fifty years comes out on foot toward me. “Can this indeed be Philip’s son?” he inquires with a smile. He was a friend to my father, he says, introducing himself as Coroneus, son of the general and statesman Pammenes. It was in Pammenes’ house that Philip passed his term as hostage at Thebes. “Your father was fourteen and I was ten,” Coroneus relates. “He used to hold my head underwater and beat my buttocks.”

  I laugh. “He did the same to me!”

  Coroneus motions a handsome lad of twenty forward. “May I present my son?” It seems overformal to remain on horseback; my mates and I dismount. Can it be that we shall be fighting these splendid fellows with the morrow’s sunrise?

  Coroneus’s son is named Pammenes, after his grandfather; a handsome lad in impeccable armor, half a head taller than his father. Sire and heir take station beside each other, fellow knights of the Sacred Band. “This is how we stand in formation,” declares the youth.

  I discover myself fighting tears. The dagger at my waist is Toth steel encrusted with gems; its worth is a talent of silver. I address Coroneus. “My friend, will you accept this from me in gratitude for your care of my father?”

  “Only,” he returns, “if you will take this.” And he gives me the lion’s crest of his breastplate—of cobalt and ivory, inlaid with gold.

  “What fine gentlemen,” says Hephaestion as we recross the field.

  Here, for your education, Itanes, I must address a question that causes all young officers consternation. I mean the experience of empathy for the foe. Never be ashamed to feel this. It is not unmanly. Indeed, I believe it the noblest demonstration of martial virtue. My father did not. One evening, succeeding the victory at Chaeronea, I chanced to speak with him of this moment with the Theban knight Coroneus. Philip attended closely. “And what, my son, did your heart say in that hour?” He meant to tease me, I could see, not from malice, but to correct my ways, which he believed overly chivalrous. “Did you feel pity for those whom it was your charge to slaughter? Or could you turn your heart to flint, as men say your father does so well?”

  We were home at Pella; the occasion was dinner with Philip’s officers. These now fell attentively silent, turning toward me.

  “I felt, Father, that since I was prepared to pay with my own life, so was I sanctioned to take the life of the foe—and that heaven took no exception to this bargain.”

  Murmurs of “Hear, hear!” approved this. “Indeed,” my father observed with a laugh, “Achilles himself could not have answered more in the ancient spirit. But tell me, my son, how will Achilles of old fare in our modern era’s corrupt and inglorious affrays?”

  “He will elevate them, Father, by his virtue and by the purity of his purpose. And where he stands, even in this degraded latter day, shall be a noble world and uncorrupted.”

  This I said, and meant it. What I did not offer aloud was something other. In that moment, as my father made trial of me before his officers, I felt my daimon, my inhering genius. It entered as a ghost enters a room. The sensation was clarity and unshakable conviction. I perceived, as never I had before, that my gift exceeded my father’s by orders of magnitude. I seemed to look straight through him. He saw it. So did Parmenio at his shoulder, and Hephaestion and Craterus at mine. It was a moment between generations, one declining, the other in ascent.

  What did my daimon offer in that instant of exchange of gifts with the knight Coroneus? He showed a sword with double edges: the first of empathy, communion, even love; the second of stern Necessity. “They are slain already”—so spoke my genius—“these gallant corpsmen of Thebes. In taking their lives, Alexander, you enact only that dance ordained before earth’s foundation. Enact it well.”

  All next day the armies jigger and rejigger. At dawn the Sacred Band is posted as a unit at the Thebans’ extreme right. Six hours later I ride out; the Three Hundred are now distributed as a fore rank across the foe’s center and left. This game is far from idle, for where the Sacred Band takes station will give away, as much as such posting can, the foe’s overall scheme. My regiments rehearse countermoves, covering every contingency. Still no dispatch from my father. He has not yet sent the courier, stripping me of half my force. My spies in his tent report that word will come around midnight. I instruct my commanders to exercise all mounts lightly; no animal to be overwatered or overfed. The horses are strung tight, like we are; I don’t want their bellies going sour. Toward dark, our outposts take two prisoners. Black Cleitus brings them in. I should pack them straightaway to Philip, and I will, but . . .

  “Let me poke these birds, Alexander. I’ll lay they’ve got a song in ’em.”

  Cleitus is a true blackguard, sixteen years my senior and as arrant a rogue as my country, homeland of knaves, can produce. Later, in Afghanistan, he and Philotas (who would come to command the Companion Cavalry) were the only crown-rankers to balk at my example to crop their beards and take the clean-shaven mode I favored. Philotas refused out of vanity, Cleitus from loyalty to Philip. I could not hold it against him. Cleitus can fight. His balls are of iron. He was my father’s First Page—and lover—when I was an infant. It was Cleitus’s honor to bear me to my naming bath; he notes this in public every chance he gets. I find this simultaneously irritating and amusing. Cleitus is an expert with dagger and garrote; the king has enlisted his services on no few occasions. Hephaestion considers him a thug; my mother has twice tried to have him poisoned. But he is so fearless, both in debate and on the field, that I find myself not only listening but genuinely liking him. Hephaestion and I will rue the casualties we must infl
ict on the Sacred Band. Cleitus suffers no such delicacy. He can’t wait to get in there and start hacking off heads. That the enemy are better men than he only enlarges his pleasure. He is, as the playwright Phrynichus remarked of Cleon of Athens,

  a villain, but our own villain.

  We interrogate the prisoners for tomorrow’s posting of the Sacred Band. Both swear that the company will hold down their extreme right, against the river. I don’t believe them. “What trade do you follow?” I grill the elder. He claims he’s a tutor of geometry, a mathematicos. “Tell us, then,” I say, “in a right triangle, what is the relation between the square of the hypotenuse and the sum of the squares of the other two sides?” A fit of coughing seizes the fellow. Cleitus prods him at sword point. “You wouldn’t be an actor, would you, mate?” The younger man’s curls look suspiciously perfect. “Give us a bit of Medea, you sons of whores!”

  The Thebans would be mad to post the Sacred Band on their extreme right. If they do, I need only refuse my left to strand them high and dry. Can they swing across to the center from this position, leading their adjacent units like a closing gate? Not if I hold back a force of foot and horse, to take them from flank and rear when they try. I review this with Antipater, whom my father has assigned to me as mentor and adviser. “The Band will be center or left, Alexander, never right. Even the Thebans are not that thick.”

  We rehearse till midnight. Afterward Hephaestion and I troop the lines. Chaeronea is famous for the herbs its farmers grow for the fragrance trade. The scent perfumes the valley, stronger with the night.

  “Can you feel it, Alexander?”

  He means the sense of something epochal.

  “Like the taste of iron on the tongue.”

  We are both thinking that this fragrant plain will, by tomorrow’s noon, reek of blood and slaughter. I realize that my friend is weeping.

  “What is wrong, Hephaestion?”

  It takes him moments to reply. “It struck me just now that this hour, which is so immaculate, will never come again. All will have altered with tomorrow, ourselves most of all.”

  I ask why that has made him weep.

  “We will be older,” he says, “and crueler. We will have entered at last into events. That is a far different state from standing, as we do now, upon the threshold.” He draws apart; I see he trembles. “That field of possibility,” he observes, “which has opened out limitlessly before us all our lives, will by tomorrow’s eve have narrowed and contracted. Options will have closed, replaced by fact and necessity. We will not be boys tomorrow, Alexander, but men.”

  I quote Solon, that

  He who would wake must cease to dream.

  “Don’t think so much, Hephaestion. Tomorrow is what we were born for. In heaven it may be different, but here, no man may gain except by losing.”

  “Indeed,” Hephaestion concedes with gravity. “And will I lose your love?”

  So this is what troubles his tender heart! Now it is I who tremble. I take his hand. “That, you can never lose, my friend. Here or in heaven.”

  Two hours before dawn the courier comes: All officers assemble for final orders.

  Philip’s tent is bedlam, crammed in the dark not only with the marshals and brigade commanders of Macedon, horse and foot, but with the captains of the allied Thessalians, Illyrians, Paeonians, Thracians, and the other half-savage tribesmen, all of them blind-sozzled, and all, despite their brass and bluster, aquake with terror. War is fear, let no man say otherwise. And even these wild boars of the north feel Death’s tread about them in the dark.

  Where is Philip? Tardy as ever. His campaign tent is a patchwork appropriated from the commissariat; heaven only knows where the real thing went. The night has turned chill and gusty; the flaps buffet with a concussion that unnerves the grooms and Pages. Outside, the couriers’ ponies balk at their pickets. Inside, cressets gutter in the gale. The generals know they are in for the fight of their lives this day, against the Thebans, who stand at their zenith, vanquishers of the Spartans, unbeaten over thirty years. At their shoulders marshals half of Greece—Athenians, Corinthians, Achaeans, Megarians, Euboeans, Corcyrians, Acarnanians, Leucadians, braced up by five thousand mercenaries recruited from as far afield as Italy—all with the main forces of their armies and all fighting to defend sacred hearth and soil. Today will change the world. This clash will decide the fate not just of Greece but of Persia and all the East, for once Philip triumphs here, he will launch out of Europe into Asia, to overturn the order of the earth. Men and beasts shudder, taut as bowstrings. All are spooked, even colonels with half a hundred campaigns, while the younger captains chatter in the chill like colts.

  At once comes the scrape of boots on the “cat step,” the portal fronting the picket lines. Into the midst strides my father. It is as if a great lion has padded into the tent. The hair stands up all over my body. At one beat, the mood catapults from trepidation to absolute assurance. Its signal is a sigh, a collective expulsion of breath. Every man knows, at once and without speech, that with Philip here, we cannot lose. My glance holds riveted to my father. What is fascinating is how little he does. He does not thrust himself forward. If anything, he holds back. The eyes of the commanders, even those of the great generals, track Philip as he works his way across the warped plank floor. He is gnawing one of those jerked-meat sticks the troops call a “dogleg.” As he enters, an aide hands him the briefing roll. He parks the dogleg between his teeth, wiping one hand on his cloak and the other on his beard. Parmenio and Socrates Redbeard, a colonel of the Companion Cavalry, move apart from the king’s campaign chair; a Page angles it outward. My father does not advance to the head of the table and seize control of the council. Instead he drops like a sack of meal into his seat, more concerned with his greasestick, it seems, than with the fight to come. It is impossible to overstate the effect this insouciance produces. Philip glances up to Parmenio and, indicating the field plots and disposition sheets, speaks only these words: “My friend . . .”—as if to say, Forgive my tardiness, please continue.

  Parmenio does. And here is another turn to note. Although the officers attend gravely upon this general’s recital of the instructions of battle, his actual words matter not at all. The captains have been briefed and rebriefed; they know their assignments, buckle and strap. All that counts at this hour is the confidence in Parmenio’s voice—and the silent presence of Philip at his shoulder.

  As for me and my orders, these are tolled with utter nonchalance. “Alexander’s squadrons,” Parmenio pronounces, “will destroy the Theban heavy infantry on the left.”

  The briefing concludes. My father invokes neither gods nor ancestors. He simply rises, tossing his greasestick to the floor, and glances to his comrades with an air of cheerful anticipation. “Now, gentlemen,” he says. “Shall we get to work?”

  Six

  CRATERUS

  THE FOLLOWING ARE THE MEN AND UNITS under my command at Chaeronea. Six squadrons of Companion Cavalry—the Apollonian, Bottiaean, Toronean, Olynthian, Anthemiot, and Amphipolitan—twelve hundred ninety-one men; with three brigades of sarissa infantry, the Foot Companions of Pieria under Meleager, of Elimeotis under Coenus, and the Argead regiment of Pella under Antipater, who is also in overall command of our infantry. Philip has taken my fourth foot brigade, of Tymphaea under Polyperchon. Of cavalry, my father has recalled to his own use the Royal Squadron and all five squadrons of Old Macedonia, about fourteen hundred, under Philotas. He retains as well for himself on the right and Parmenio in the center the Thracians, Royal Lancers, and the Paeonian Light Horse—in other words, all of the army’s light cavalry.

  Each of my squadrons of horse is at full strength, two hundred twenty-eight, except that of Torone, which is understrength at one ninety-seven, and Anthemos at one-eighty-two. Not a man has gone sick or injured. I take the Apollonian for myself, keeping its colonel, Socrates Redbeard, and combining the five others into two brigades of three and two, placing Perdiccas in command of the forward,
which will charge with me, and Hephaestion at the head of the wing, which will hold back, as a force of threat, to fix in place the Theban right.

  (Note please that the army of Macedon stood at full strength that day. We never did again. The force I embarked with for Asia was only half that in Macedonian elements, since a nearly equal force had to be left behind to garrison Greece. This day at Chaeronea, however, Philip brought the full wash. Save two squadrons of Companion Cavalry and two brigades of sarissa infantry still at Pella, we had every bat and bumper.)

  My wing is completed by six regiments of hoplite infantry, allied Greeks of the Amphictyonic League, under Nicolaus, called “Hook-Nose,” to a total of nine thousand, and skirmishers to nine hundred twenty, hired archers of Crete and Naxos, free bowmen of Illyria, and, the linchpin of our forward line, three nineties of Agrianian javelineers under their king, Langarus. Our tally of horse and foot totals just under sixteen thousand, facing between nineteen and twenty thousand comprising the Theban right. Each of my officers is well known to me and has been since I was a child. I would march into hell with any. Here is a tale of my dear mate Craterus.

  When I was sixteen my father left the Royal Seal in my care (with his senior general Antipater as regent) while he vacated the home country to prosecute sieges against Perinthus and Byzantium. At once I mounted a punitive expedition against the wild Maedi of Thrace, whom my father had brought into subjection four years prior but who, with their neighbors the Laeaei and Satrai, had seized upon this hour of his truancy to revolt. It was winter. I took six thousand under Antipater and Amyntas Andromenes. Craterus was twenty-seven. He had been charged with homicide, an affair of honor, and was, in fact, then in custody, due to face trial the day of our departure. From confinement he pleaded with me to take him. His family owned gold mines in the hills where I intended to march; he had spent summers there as a child and claimed to know the country. He would set his own neck willingly beneath the blade, he swore, if he failed to perform some exploit of valor.