Tides of War, a Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War

by Steven Pressfield

  The randomness of extinction brought out all that was worst in men, and all that was best. My sister Meri organized in our home sessions of council, clearinghouses for nurses and physicians seeking any diet, regimen, or curative that brought relief. No course was too outlandish. The fever that consumed the sick brought such torments that the sufferer could not stand on the skin the touch of even the lightest cloth. You entered a home and everyone was naked. The afflicted, on fire with fever, plunged into public fountains, then others, desperate with thirst, drank the water. Night's cool brought no surcease, as the pain merely of lying upon one's bed drove sufferers to madness. Physicians prescribed baths and diuretics; they bled some, purged others. Nothing worked.

  The doctors looked worse than the dying. My wife would feed these scarecrows, growing more gaunt each day herself. Soon the search for remedials became supplanted by the quest for drugs to blunt the pain, then, whispered, merciful means of dispatch.

  People drank bull's blood or swallowed stones. I myself became recruited to this dolorous trade. I scoured the sailors' markets for morphia and dogbane, hemlock and belladonna. My sister instructed me in the concoction of potions to carry off the dying.

  Soon these became too costly to secure.

  My infant son took ill. His cries, heart-scoring, ceased not night or day. My wife rocked the babe, crooning, as she, too, weakened.

  When their pain became unbearable, Meri dosed them with nightshade, the last she had, to bear them away.

  My cousin Simon, now a captain in the cavalry, had come to stay with us, bringing his wife Clymene and infant twins. Then his brow, too, began to burn. He fled one night, taking only his horse.

  Within days Clymene began to fail, crying for him; I scoured all his haunts, even those we shared in childhood. One midnight, despairing, I determined to seek out Alcibiades, at his town estate on the Hill of the Knights.

  The streets then, even those of the wealthy, had become corridors of horror. Neighbors had perished, abandoning their pets; others who could not feed their animals or grew too sick to care had let them loose. Now packs of dogs ranged wild. These would not go after corpses, their beasts' wisdom enjoining, but hunted the living, even indoors, clawing at shutters and pouring in over thresholds while their howls and snarls, ungodly, echoed down the vacant lanes. I ran this gauntlet for what seemed hours, at last drawing up before Alcibiades' gate.

  Lanterns blazed; no watchman attended. Gay music sounded from within. Crossing the courtyard, I saw a man of my age, unknown to me, cavorting in a dry fountain, cupping from behind the ungirdled breasts of a prostitute. Another sprawled in the shadows with a porne on her knees before him.

  I advanced into the interior. The place was torchlit and pullulating with revelers. Drums beat. A procession, chanting, jigged about the court. Upon a dais stood a congress of men and women clad as acolytes and bearing wands of willow. They enacted a burlesque of the rites of Thracian Kotyttos, the orgy goddess.

  Here arose Alcibiades, at the fore, performing in mockery the office of priest, or should I say priestess. He was dressed in women's robes, lips painted, his curls bound in lampoonish caricature of the sacred style. He was barefoot, dead drunk. I advanced before him, demanding the whereabouts of my cousin.

  Alcibiades stared. He had no idea who I was. The dancers capered wantonly about him. “Who is this intruder who dares trespass, uninitiated, within the hallowed precinct? Kneel, supplicant, and show reverence of the goddess!”

  I demanded again my cousin.

  Alcibiades recognized me now. He elevated his staff, which I saw was a cook's stirring paddle, for soup.

  “Bow, interloper. Display deference to heaven or, by my vested powers, I'll have you blown senseless.”

  Two whores twined about his knees. He directed one forward; she lurched upon all fours, clutching at my cloak, beneath which from its baldric hung a xiphos sword.

  “And comes this stranger armed as well? Impiety! What punishment for this?” Alcibiades flung his wine bowl in sham outrage. “Attend, postulants, to this party-pooping heretic! He has observed, as Menoetius says, that which no mortal, unpunished, may look upon and depart.”

  Now I saw my cousin. “Get out of here, Pommo,” he commanded me, emerging from the daisy chain of prancers.

  “Not without you,” I replied.

  “Pommo, you swine!”

  This from Alcibiades, descending from his perch and draping a merry arm about my shoulders. “Once upon a siege, my friend, you played the spoilsport and I commended you. But see, the tables have turned. It is our country now which stands embattled and immured.”

  He tugged the whore before me to her feet. “What do you think of this?” he pronounced, and tore her garment to the waist. “Not impressed? How about this?” He stripped her naked. The girl made no effort to cover herself but faced me in the eye, prideful in her beauty.

  “Let him alone, Alcibiades,” my cousin put it.

  I noted Euryptolemus advancing to intercede.

  “You're not queer, are you, Pommo?” Alcibiades declaimed. “We can address those needs as well!” He motioned to the shadows, summoning boys.

  “What of your famous mythos, Alcibiades? What will Athens think of these proceedings?”

  “Who will inform her, Pommo? Not you, I know. Nor these others, for if Euphorion speaks true, Which dare call him thief, whose fist resides within thief's purse?”

  Euro moved beside me, sheepish and ashamed. “Pommo has lost wife and child,” he informed his cousin.

  “And I mother and sons, daughter, and uncles and cousins. To say it with stone, as our friends the Spartans phrase it: 'Who hasn't?'

  “ Fury seized me. “You claimed once to be two-Alcibiades and

  'Alcibiades.' Which are you now?”

  “I am a third Alcibiades. He who cannot stand to be the other two.”

  “That Alcibiades,” I declared, “can go fuck himself.”

  Anger flared within his eyes, quelled at once and mutated into an aspect of irony and despair.

  “And can you call yourself friend to one Alcibiades and spurn the others?”

  “I was never your friend.”

  I turned upon my heel.

  “Come back, Pommo! Take your vows. Be one with us!”

  Striding out, I could hear him call after me, laughing. “The good alone die young. Haven't the Spartans taught you that? Take care, old friend. Don't tempt the gods with virtue!”

  In the courtyard I seized my cousin and pleaded with him for his children's sake to come home. He would not, but clasped me hard, brow glistening with that sheen of fever one knew only too well, and exhorted me to stay-here, where laughter and music yet obtained.

  “Go home, then!” my cousin called as I stalked clear. “Go home to death. I will stay here with life, for as long as I have to live it.”

  Here, Jason, this entry in my father's log: Male, 54. Plague. Death.

  This was his own warrant of doom, self-diagnosed.

  Within days he began to fail. My sister labored, using all her skills. Then she, too, showed the signs. She would not drug the pain with those few pharmaka we yet possessed, preserving them for others.

  My father grew desperate to release her. Twice I prevented him.

  How much longer could she last? Ten days, he said, in this hell of pain.

  I sat all night with my sister while she writhed.

  “Do you love me, Pommo?”

  I knew what she wanted.

  “You must not let Father do it.”

  Again I stalked the streets. Let her go, I prayed. But always, returning, she lingered. Her agonies redoubled.

  “You are a soldier, Pommo. Be strong like one.”

  We bore her, my father and I, to the tub. Her frame was light as a child's. “May the gods bless you,” she said. I instructed my father to seize her, hard, when I gave the nod. At this instant my edge sliced the artery.

  “May the gods bless you,” my sister repeated.
/>   She clutched my hand and my father's, his own as weak as hers.

  “May the gods bless you.”

  The man Polemides here broke off. Emotion cracked his voice. With great effort only could he continue, his phrases broken with sobs.

  How may one's tongue give voice to such utterance? “I watched my wife and child die.” Was it for this the gods gifted us with speech, to pronounce such unholy idiom? “I opened my sister's veins.”

  The man buried his face in his hands. I rose and embraced him.

  His arms clutched me, while piteous sobs convulsed his breast.

  He turned away. I understood and rose to absent myself.

  Departing, I glanced back. The man stood in his cell's corner, cheek pressed against the stone of the wall, while both arms clutched tight about his person as he broke down with this

  IX

  A CALLING ACQUIRED

  My father died that night. With this all whom I loved had been carried off save my aunt, my brother's wife and babes sent north for their safety, and Lion himself. He was absent with the fleet; I conducted the obsequies, attending upon our father's brothers and the gentlewomen of the clan. Enemy incursion had cut off access to the country, to our family tomb. We must inhume Father's and Meri's bones beside my own wife's and infant's, beneath the stones of our city house. As I voiced the terminal invocation,

  May the earth rest lightly upon you, my soul was animated by one object only: to see the remains of these I loved interred on the land, where they belonged and would find peace. That meant returning to war, to drive out the foe. I would find a vessel or infantry company and ship out.

  Waking alone several days later, I determined to empty the house and commenced before dawn to set her contents at the curb.

  Before I had stacked three items a crowd had collected. I began to laugh. “Just leave me armor and something to cook with.” The place was picked clean in five minutes. Believe it or not, the mob respected my wishes. I found my wife's kitchen intact, and my military gear. They left my bedding as well.

  A day later, or perhaps that same forenoon, I was approached by a gentleman of our country district, a friend of my father's. He looked bad. We spoke of happier seasons, of childhood games played with his sons and daughters upon the land. Would I, in remembrance of these bonds, perform now a service for him?

  “It's my wife,” he said, and spoke no more.

  Moments passed before I realized what he wanted. I was appalled and fled.

  Two nights later this countryman returned. “My wife delivered you, Pommo. By the gods, I beg you now: deliver her.”

  There are frontiers one crosses, my friend, without understanding of what he does. This was not one of them. With gravity I acceded and performed the service this man requested.

  Within days two more such assignments were set before me. I performed them as well. Why not?

  The good alone die young.

  I continued to apply for service with the fleet, but must have looked so bad the officers took me for sick. I could not find a berth.

  More haunted figures, strangers as well as acquaintances, presented themselves, requesting my abetments of mercy. I began to get good at it. It was like being a doctor, I told myself. Like my father, I delivered the afflicted from their torment. In fact my physic was superior; my cures took. No client complained. And business kept getting better.

  Another night a different rap came at the post. It was Euryptolemus, on horseback. When I stepped out I saw, also mounted, in the shadows, Alcibiades.

  “Don't worry,” I told him before he could speak. “I have said nothing about your ritual observances.”

  “Do you think that's why I came?”

  “I have no idea why you do anything.”

  In that moment I hated him.

  “And you, my friend,” he queried, perceiving. “Are you yourself so free from sin?”

  “It seems sin has become less handy of definition.”

  “Indeed.”

  Euro led a third mount. “We're going to the harbor. Come on, take a ride.”

  We proceeded at a walk through the silent lanes.

  “Pericles' spit has gone dry,” Alcibiades announced in the affectless tone of the bereaved. So the scourge had found even the Olympian. “He will stand with Theseus, Solon, and Themistocles among those who have shaped our nation, and none shall surpass him.”

  He spoke no more, nor did his cousin, all the way to Munychia.

  The naval base, when we reached there, churned with a cacophony of ships' chandlers, expeditors, and stevedores hastening to beat the tide, which was due, one of their number informed us, an hour before dawn. A fleet under Phormio was rigging out for Naupactus.

  The troop transports lay along the embarkation quays, while the triple-bankers, the men-of-war, waited like great stingered hornets, sixty in all, hull by hull in their torchlit sheds, each obscured beneath a swarming mantle of ship's joiners and riggers, sailbenders, cordwainers, and sparhandlers. Petty officers bawled orders amid a din of shoring jacks and carpenter's mawls, windlasses, winches, and cranes. The slipside catwalks, themselves a maze of hawsers and mooring cables, stem and stern stays, warp lines and every form of brace, sheet, shroud, lift, hoist, and ratline imaginable, seethed with battalions of administrators, admiralty clerks and supply secretaries, registrars of the katalogos, Council members, priests, merchants and recorders, curators of the neorion, the shipworks across whose teeming timbers now advanced the nautai themselves, packing their seabags and oars and scrambling in orchestrated chaos to “sign in, sign off, and sign over” in time to beat the apostoleis' trumpet. Stacked arms lined the quays beneath the unit guidons, with the infantrymen and their attendants crapped out in the blaze of cressets and their own spit fires, oiling their bronze against the salt and securing their shields within fleece coverts.

  At the foot of the pier Alcibiades spoke apart with Phormio and several of his captains, while Euryptolemus and I mounted the limestone steps carved with sailors' graffiti, lewd drawings, and the ubiquitous footstep-and-pussy ikon indicating the route to the nearest house of ill fame, to that open-air tavern called Ouros, Fair Wind, which overlooks the embarkation quays. Euro asked if I had ever seen a lodestone of Magnesia, a magnet; how it attracts irresistibly the filings of iron. He meant his cousin.

  Below on the dock we could see the stir Alcibiades created simply by his presence, how the infantrymen maneuvered as they had in camp at Potidaea only for a glimpse of him. Many seemed to address him as they passed; we could hear several, urging him to speak out more boldly, don't let youth hold him back, seek command and seize it. The main of the soldiers were young, our age. They had grown impatient with the dilation of their elders.

  “Lead us, son of Cleinias!” more than one cried with a raised fist and a gesture of affirmation.

  In the mariners' tavern where his cousin and I waited, anticipation of Alcibiades' arrival had electrified the colony.

  Serving girls and laundresses of the abutting lanes scurried up, pinching the flush into their cheeks and dressing their hair with their dirty fingers. Do you know that dive, Jason? It serves grub as well as wine. The proprietor is a Phoenician of Tyre; he decks his place with maritime kit and affects to give seafaring names to the plates of the day, which he now, as Alcibiades entered, rattled off to his guest while escorting him to table. Might he recommend the “Top o' the Catch”? Perhaps the “Smack 0' the Sea”?

  “I'll have that one.” Alcibiades indicated a stewpot on the flame.

  “The Twinge o' Nausea.”

  He grinned at the host; a tiara from the king of Persia could not have delighted the fellow more. Alcibiades' mood was grave, however. You could see he burned with envy of Phormio, impatient for a fleet of his own. The celebrity of his person chafed upon him; he felt the spell he produced on the masses and blazed to use it. Why had he asked his cousin and me to accompany him here? “Our friend Socrates excepted, you two alone possess the spirit to call me a hound
to my face. Tell me now and don't lie: how, and where, may I make my move?”

  Pericles' passing must create a vacuum, Alcibiades declared, which would stand the empire on its head. Subject states will revolt, would-be successors scurry from the woodwork.

  Euryptolemus cut him off, indignant. How could Alcibiades speak so coldly of his kinsman, who if the gods grant may live on another half year, or even survive as no inconsiderable number had already?

  “He won't make it,” Alcibiades pronounced. “I read it all over him. Nor am I cold, cousin, but only forethoughtful, as he was and would wish us to be. Whom do we want in his place-that truckler to the rabble, Cleon? Androcles, who couldn't mount from the gutter with a stepladder? Or Nicias, whose pious vacillation is even more malign? Listen to me. If Athens possessed leaders of imagination, I would be the first to set myself at their service. But the worst are bullies and lickspittles, skilled only at manipulating the mob. The best, as Phormio and Demosthenes, are warriors; they will not soil their hands with politics. What dies with Pericles is vision. But even he has not seen far enough. The Plague will end, we will survive it. What then?

  “Pericles ordained as indefeasible three tenets for the prosecution of this war: the preeminence of the fleet, the security of the Long Walls, and the proscription of the empire's expansion while the war goes on. The first two stand sound; the third must be repealed. We have no choice but to expand, and with unprecedented vigor. Our ships must carry conquest to Sicily and Italy, then Carthage and all of North Africa. In Asia we must not content ourselves with a toehold on the coast, but advance inland and take on all comers, including the throne of Persia.”

  Euryptolemus broke in with a laugh. “How will we conquer the world, cousin, when we can't even step down from our walls to take a piss? What myriads will we employ to accomplish this masterwork?”