Virtues of War

by Steven Pressfield

  I watch the Agrianes trek. These are my own men, hired from the north with my own purse and incorporated now into my army. For mountain fighting, javelineers are indispensable, for the enemy makes defensive stands at passes, which cannot be assaulted head-on, but the heights must be taken and, for this, heavy infantry is useless. The Agrianes travel light, with only a chlamys cloak-and-blanket like our own, and no armor or helmet. All the weight is in their weapons. Some carry as many as a dozen. The crafting of each javelin can take months, with sacrifices offered to the shaft of ash or cornel while it still grows on the tree. “Truth” is the missile weapon’s supreme virtue, meaning the absolute straightness of its line, for a warped javelin will not fly true. Each dart or spike, as the Agrianians call them, is carried in a doeskin sleeve lined with beeswax. No measure is spared to protect its truth. The javelineers sleep with their spikes; I have seen men wrap them in their cloaks while they themselves shiver, to keep the snow and wet from swelling the grain. Each man’s dart bears his sign and the sign of his clan; after a fight, he scours the field, retrieving his own and no other’s. It is death to do so. A blooded dart receives its own name, and one which has made a kill is passed down from father to son.

  The javelineer’s art is taught down generations; boys train for years before being allowed to cast a man-sized spike. In the field the Agrianes fight as pairs—father and son, older brother and younger—the senior serving as hurler and his apprentice as loader and spotter. They are like hunters; they play the wind. They know how to keep their dart’s head down upwind and in a crosswind to lead their cast like fowlers taking prey on the wing. A javelin is thrown by a sling and with spin. It takes tremendous skill to cast a spike so that it does not “top” or “sail.” To behold the perfection of flight achieved by a master, his missile neither “pluming” nor “tailing,” but “holding its head up” as it tracks in to its target—this is a thing both beautiful and terrifying, and the man who can do it is accounted of supreme consequence. I have trained a thousand hours with the javelin. It looks easy; it is impossible. The Agrianes are devastating. Their mere appearance in the field has caused valiant foes to withdraw without a fight.

  I am yarning with their prince Amalpis, on horseback at the Axius crossing, when a courier gallops up from the south:

  Thebes is risen on report of Alexander’s death in battle.

  The populace dances in the streets,

  proclaiming Greece’s dawn of freedom.

  Patriots of Thebes, the dispatch says, have surprised our garrison and murdered its commanders. The city has revolted; the whole south threatens to follow.

  Hephaestion and Craterus spur to me. I feel my daimon as I read. The sequence of experience is this: a flush of rage, succeeded immediately by a chill; then a state of pure, detached objectivity. Emotion has fled. My mind is pellucid. I am thinking the way an eagle thinks, or a lion. The route south to Thebes is lucky; from where we stand, we need not trek back through Pella, Macedon’s capital, where the army’s passage will be reported by spies. Instead we can cross the high country, touching no towns, making Pelinna in Thessaly before any but goatherds sight us. I will stand on the doorstep of Thebes before these bastards even learn I’m alive.

  The fury I experience is not, I recognize, at the Thebans for seeking their freedom; one must admire their spirit for that. Nor am I inflamed at their joy on report of my death. The distinction is subtle.

  It is that they could believe me dead. That they dare credit such a thing.

  The affront, do you see, is to my daimon.

  It is nine days to Pelinna. We make it in seven. The column drives south, impelled by anger. Our garrison commander at Thebes was a well-loved fellow, Amyntas, called Abrutes, “Eyebrows.” Here is his story. His wife Cynna bore only daughters, four without a son. The man pledged his estate to the goddess if she would send a boy child. She did, but fever carried the lad off in infancy, crushing Abrutes and, of course, impoverishing him. It chanced that he had a brother and a cousin whose wives both gave birth to sons at the same time and who had other healthy boy children. Each without the other’s knowledge came to this officer and offered their newborns. The men arrived at Abrutes’s house within minutes of each other. All were so struck by the coincidence that they dropped to their knees, worshiping heaven. Within a year Abrutes’s wife delivered triplets, all boys. So our good fellow had gone in a matter of months from a state of desolation without male issue to the father of five strapping lads. They all grew straight and strong (they were ten and eleven now) and he loved them and was proud of them, and they of him and of his post as garrison commander at Thebes. The Thebans slit his throat and hung him on a hook. His executive officer was a captain of Anthemos named Alexides. The Thebans flung him, bound, from the battlements above the Ismenian Gate and left his corpse for dogs and crows.

  The army presses south at a furious pace. You can tell when men truly rage because they are silent. Reports of wider revolt reach us on the march. Insurgents exiled by Philip have returned to Acarnania and been welcomed; our garrison in Elis has been expelled; the Arcadians annul their oaths, marching to Thebes’s aid; Argos, Ambracia, and Sparta make plans to rise. At Athens, we learn later, the demagogue Demosthenes has appeared garlanded in the Assembly; he has even produced an eyewitness who claims to have seen my dead body. The city boils over with jubilation.

  On the trek, men sign to me, thumb across the throat. They want Athens. Antigonus One-Eye cites Athens’s outrages of our country in the past—the fates of Eion, Scyros, Torone, and Scione, where all adult males were massacred and women and children sold as slaves. Athens’s fleet is three hundred, Antigonus reminds me; she cries poor but, dosed with courage, could prove the dagger in our back when we march on Persia.

  My daimon does not want Athens. Athens is Greece’s jewel. Who razes her stands with Xerxes in infamy.

  Six days past Pelinna, we strike the Boeotian frontier. Dawn fourteen, the army appears before Thebes. The city is paralyzed with terror. Our forces surround the walls, sealing off all escape from within and all reinforcement from without.

  Still the Thebans will not quit. They raid our camp under cover of truce. The men of our garrison remain in their hands, trapped in the citadel Cadmea. The foe threatens to spit them over coals if I don’t withdraw. Meanwhile he sneaks couriers out, calling on all Greece to rise, now, to shuck the yoke of Macedon.

  I parley with the enemy, hoping for accommodation. He will not give it. Next noon Perdiccas on his own makes a rush on the Electra Gate. The Thebans resist; I must send the archers and three phalanx brigades, then follow myself at the head of the Royal Guards. The foe cracks at the Cadmea. We are in the city now. One push and Thebes will fall.

  Antipater reins beside me, in the square beneath the Thebiad, with Amyntas and Antigonus One-Eye. “You are reluctant, Alexander, to order the destruction of so famous a city. You would not be remembered as the man who fired the birthplace of Heracles, native state of Oedipus and Epaminondas. That is past. Piss on it!”

  I am at war not with Thebes, I see, but with my daimon.

  “Show clemency,” Antigonus warns, “and you lose the army!”

  Hephaestion confronts him: “Command a massacre and we lose Alexander!”

  I listen.

  I will give the order.

  I will wipe Thebes from the earth.

  “Spare those citizens,” I direct, “who have taken our cause. Save the house of the poet Pindar and those of his heirs, and all shrines and altars of the gods. Take no action until I have sacrificed to Heracles and received token of his assent.”

  Thebes is forty thousand. The roundup and slaughter take all night. The Thebans fight in the squares and the alleys. When companies become too decimated to resist as units, they break apart, each man seeking to save his own. Families bolt themselves within doors. When these are broken in, the citizens punch through the party walls with axes and make their way house to house, fleeing the Phocians and Plataeans and
Orchomenians (whose cities Thebes has razed in the past) who hunt them along lanes gone to fire. From atop the walls, Hephaestion, Telamon, and I can see the dead ends where scores are trapped and butchered.

  More perish by fire than sword. Within the houses, paint catches first. Roof timbers, desiccated over decades, go up like tinder. Mud bricks shatter from the heat, sending walls crashing. Plumes shoot from flues; firestorms ignite. The inferno leaps across rooftops from quarter to quarter, while the hive of tenements that is the central city funnels the blaze like a blacksmith’s bellows, incinerating all in its path.

  Hephaestion cannot endure the holocaust. He rides out alone onto the plain. You can see the conflagration from sixty miles and smell it from twenty. At intervals throughout the night, chiefs of the pillagers come before me. Shall we spare the tomb of Antigone? The Thebiad? The Cadmea?

  Mid-second watch, I am shown the body of Coroneus, the gentle knight of Chaeronea, whose lion’s crest I wear affixed to my breastplate. He has fallen leading the attack upon our garrison, one-armed, taking two of our own.

  Spare nothing, I tell them.

  Destroy everything.

  With the dawn, Hephaestion, Telamon, and I enter the city proper. Six thousand have been slain, thirty thousand will be sold as slaves. On the Street of the Saddlers, bodies are piled as high as a man’s waist. Our horses tread upon charred flesh and step over severed limbs. Women and children have been herded into the squares, awaiting the slavers’ auction. Their captors have scrawled their names on them in their own blood, handier than paint, so the slave masters will know whom to pay. We pass corpses, burst by the inferno. Even Telamon is appalled. “This must have been,” he says, “what Troy looked like.”

  I do not believe it. “This is worse.”

  Antipater rides up. “Well, that’s that.” He claps my shoulder like a father. “Now all Greece will fear you.”

  We have not spoken all night, Hephaestion and I, beyond commands passed through him and Telamon to the colonels manning the cordon. I have directed the slave dealers to separate no mother from her children, but to hold all families intact for sale. Now with dawn, the innocents have been herded to the Five Ways outside the Proetis Gate. The slavers are collecting the best-looking women to sell as concubines. They tear the dames’ infants from their grasp, while other matrons, in compassion, take the babes among their own. “Shall I see your orders enforced?” Telamon asks.

  I meet his eyes. Well-intentioned gesture seems absurd at this point. The slave masters, compelled to keep dam and pups together, will only unload the young ones out of sight down the road, or dump them dead in a ditch. At least with proxy mothers, the infants will survive.

  “Let it pass,” I say.

  Day breaks. I peer northwest toward Chaeronea. Already packs of looters are streaming in from Phocis and Locris; they flood through the gates, mute with avarice, to pick the bones of royal Thebes. Shall I stop them? What for?

  Later Hephaestion and I scrub up in the trickle of the summer Ismenus. The grime of massacre will not wash off so easily. My mate turns back toward the ruin that is Thebes. “I would not, yesterday, have thought you capable of this.”

  “I was not capable of it,” I reply. “Yesterday.”

  Ten

  HEPHAESTION

  THE FIRST TIME I SAW HEPHAESTION, I WAS TEN YEARS OLD. He was eleven. He had just come down to Pella from his family’s estate in the highlands of Eordaea. Hephaestion’s father, Amyntor, represented the interests of Athens at my father’s court. This was a hereditary post, called proxenos, and one of great honor. However, with the abundant friction, not to say outright warfare, between our state and the Athenians’, Amyntor feared that the ire Philip sometimes felt toward him for his advocacy of Athens’s cause (though the two men had been brought up together and remained great friends) might prejudice the king against Amyntor’s young son and thus impede the lad’s career. So Hephaestion was held apart from court life until he turned eleven. It was only then that his father brought him to the capital, to prepare him for the School of Royal Pages, which he would enter, as I would, at fourteen.

  At that time I had a tutor named Leonidas. It was this man’s habit, as a means of “thickening my bark,” to wake me an hour before dawn and march me down to the river, where I must strip and plunge in, in all weathers. I hated this. The Loudias at Pella is bone-numbing even in summer; in winter its depth of cold is indescribable. I tried every trick to duck these dousings. Eventually it came to me that, rather than endure them beneath compulsion, which rendered them doubly abhorrent, I would elect to do them on my own. I began arising before my tutor, getting the chore over with while he lay yet in bed. Leonidas was much gratified by this evolution of my character, while, for my own part, the ordeal had been rendered tolerable, now that I could tell myself it was my own idea. In any event, one dawn, of a day so cold that one had to smash the ice on the river with a great stone just to get in, I was returning from my plunge, going past the Royal Riding School, when I heard hoof strikes within. I entered silently. Hephaestion was alone in the ring, mounted on a seventeen-hand chestnut, his own, named Swift, running up-and-backs, hands free, with the short lance. His teacher stood in the center of the arena, keeping up a running stream of instruction, to which Hephaestion responded with a focus that was at once keenly intense and thoroughly relaxed. I had never seen an individual, man or boy, so patient with his mount. He forced nothing, guiding the horse with legs and seat alone. He took Swift from canter to trot to canter to gallop, all the while preserving absolute straightness, even on a curved line. Advancing down the long axis of the ring, his horse was not “called to the wall” as mine was (not Bucephalus—I had not acquired him yet), and in the turns kept his legs beneath him, not lazily as my own animal, but collected, ready, with tremendous impulsion, so that when Hephaestion urged Swift to the canter and then to the gallop, the mount shot forward, dead straight and in balance, poised to respond to any command, to turn or wheel in any direction. Hephaestion himself sat the horse as if he were nailed to him. Spine erect, shoulders square, belly muscles working, he impelled the beast with a forward lean so subtle you could barely see it, and turned him with equal command, all with only his seat and legs. I flushed with shame to witness this, for it came to me, who till that moment had considered himself an accomplished rider for his age, how little of horsemanship I knew and what a complacent and ignorant brat I was. My father! Why had he set this addle-pated pedagogue Leonidas over me, to duck me in ice, when I should be learning this? But immediately my anger turned upon myself. I alone am master of my life! I vowed in that instant not only to dedicate myself to the study of horses and horsemanship, to make myself without peer as cavalryman and cavalry officer, but to educate myself in all things, to become my own tutor, selecting the subjects I needed to master and seeking instruction on my own.

  Hephaestion still had not seen me, nor could I summon the temerity to approach him. I thought him not only the handsomest youth I had ever seen but the handsomest person of any age. I vowed to myself, “That boy shall be my friend. When we are grown, we will ride together against the princes of Persia.”

  Men believe a boy’s concerns to be those of a child. Nothing could be further from the fact. At ten I apprehended the world as keenly as I do today, more so, as my instincts had not yet been dulled by schooling and the stultifying superimposition of conventional thought. I knew, there, in that ring, that this boy Hephaestion would be my lifelong companion. I loved him with all my heart and knew, as well, that he would love me. Nothing in the intervening years has altered that perception.

  I did not speak to him for another eighteen months. But I watched him. When a thing confounded me, I searched him out and observed him as he did it. He became aware of this. Yet he honored our tacit segregation, and I would not speak until the time was right.

  By the time I was twelve, we were inseparable. And let me put this plain, for those of a depraved cast of mind: The love of young men is boun
d up with dreams and shared secrets and the aspiration not only for glory but for that purity of virtue that their hearts perceive as soiled or degraded among the generation senior to themselves but that they, the youth, shall reinspirit and carry through. This love is not so different from that of young girls for each other; it has its physical element, but among those of noble mind, this is far superseded by the philosophical. Like Theseus and Pirithous, Heracles and Iolaus, like Achilles and Patrocles, young men wish to capture brides for each other; they dream not of being each other’s men, but each other’s best men.

  In my thirteenth year my father’s persuasion (and his gold) brought the philosopher Aristotle to Pella, to serve as tutor to the rabble of boys, sons of the king’s Companions, who cared for nothing but horses and hunting and running off to arms. Hephaestion and Ptolemy, Hector, Love Locks, Cassander, we were all in it. Aristotle’s brother-in-law Euphorion was our Greek instructor. It was his job to make us spit out our horrible Macedonian and speak pure Attic stuff. Have you ever sought to master a language? There is always one boy in class who cannot get it right. Ours was Marsyas, Antigonus’s son. When he tried to wrap his tongue around Athenian Greek, the rest of us blew up like puffer fish. One noon we could no longer contain ourselves. We exploded, rolling on the grass in hysterics.

  Hephaestion rose and lit into us. I had never seen him so angry. Did we think this was funny? He pointed east over the sea. “That way is Persia, my numbskull friends, the lands we dream of one day conquering. The Persians know we are coming. What do they do now? As we giggle and clown, the sons of the East are hard at training. While we sleep, they toil. While we dawdle, they sweat.” By now our mob was thoroughly chastened; even our tutor looked sheepish. “We will meet those youths of Persia soon enough upon the field of war. Will it suffice to prove ourselves the greater brutes? Never! We must excel the foe, not only as warriors but as men and as knights. They must say of us that we deserve their empire, for we surpass them in virtue and in self-command!”