“The Spartans in the end,” Alcibiades replied as if this were self-evident. “First their allies, once we have overthrown their declining generation and drawn their young men to our league.”
He was serious. “But here, friends, is the question: dare I speak in public to this effect? I am not yet twenty-five, in a nation where forty years is held the threshold of wisdom. To keep back runs counter to every impulse of my nature, but to strike prematurely may finish me before I begin. You cannot know the nights I've lain awake, tormented by this.”
Plates grew cold as the cousins examined the case.
Euryptolemus spoke. This noble, though blessed with an intellect as keen as his kinsman, had been gifted with little of his good looks.
Aged twenty-nine, he had already lost most of his hair, and his features, though not uncomely, did not conjoin to a union that one could call handsome. Perhaps because of this, he bore himself with a genial and felicitous modesty. It was impossible not to like the fellow, and to like him at once. He began by reproving his cousin for the lawlessness of his private life.
Alcibiades, if he wished to be taken seriously, must bring his appetites under control, particularly for drink and carnality. Such vices are unstatesmanlike. "If you can't keep your cock on a leash, at least be discreet about where you stick it. Don't troop about the streets with courtesans while your wife languishes heartsick at home.”
Two forces are at war for Athens' soul, Euryptolemus asserted.
“The ancient simple ways which reverence the gods and heroes of old-and the new ways which make the city herself a god. We all know which side you come down on, cousin, but you must not make it so obvious. Would it kill you to display humility, to render obeisance to heaven or at least make pretense of it? Democracy is a sword which cuts two ways. It emancipates the individual, setting him free to shine as no other scheme of governance. But that blade possesses an under-edge. Its spawn is spite and envy. This is why Pericles bore himself with modesty, remote from the multitude, for fear of their jealousy.”
“He was wrong,” Alcibiades put in.
“Was he? You occupy an Athens unknown to the commons, Alcibiades, a realm whose incandescence blinds you to the real state the rest inhabit, where mixing bowls overflow not with wine, but bile and gall. I see it every day in the law courts. Envy and spite are our city's biggest businesses and they boom in hard times or flush. Let us count the avenues the state has provided for the envious man to tear down his better. He may drag him before the Councilor the Assembly, into the people's courts or the Areopagus.
If his victim stands for office, he may test him upon application, then audit upon expiration. If the poor fellow serves with the fleet, his enemy may haul him up before the apostoleis or the Board of Naval Affairs. He may arrest him himself or have the magistrates do it, indict straight out, sue before the arbitrators, or lay information before the king archon. Nor does he lack for charges, of which the state provides a quiverful. Let him start with dereliction, peculation, malversation; bribery, larceny, extortion; malfeasance, misfeasance, nonfeasance. Do these fail? Try tax evasion, unlawful union, depletion of patrimony. Are murder and treason insufficient? Let him snatch the shaft of impiety, which carries the death penalty, and against which the accused must defend not only himself and his actions but the very content of his soul!
“You laugh, cousin. But consider Themistocles' end, our nation's savior, an exile in Persia. Peerless Aristides banished. Miltiades hounded to his grave, not two years after his victory at Marathon.
Pericles made his name prosecuting the greatest hero our city ever produced, Cimon, who chased the Persian from the sea and set the empire upon its foundations; while he, the Olympian himself, barely escaped with his neck on half a dozen occasions. And you, cousin. What a target you present! By the gods, let me get you before a jury.” He gestured to the pack of worshipers who yet loitered, gawking from the margins of the terrace. “I'll have these same idolaters howling for your blood.”
The kinsmen laughed, seconded by the spectators, who could not but overhear this mock tirade of Euryptolemus.
“I applaud your eloquence, cousin,” Alcibiades resumed. “But you're mistaken. You misapprehend the character of man. No soul seeks to bemire itself in its own base fluids but to ascend on the wings of that daimon which animates it. Look there to the marines and infantry upon the embarkation quays. They are quickened not by bile or choler, but by heart's blood. They seek glory, no less than Theseus or Achilles.”
“Half of them are draft dodgers and you know it.”
“Only for want of vision by their leaders.”
“Cousin, the days of gods and heroes are over.”
“Not to me. And not to them.”
Again Alcibiades indicated the troops below. “You censure me, cousin, insisting that I must claim a vision beyond my own fame and glory, or the same for our nation. There is nothing beyond fame and glory! They are the holiest and most exalted aspirations of the soul, for they comprise the longing for immortality, for transcendence of all inhering limits, which passion animates even the immortal gods.
“You impeach me further, Euro, of squandering my time with men of brilliance and splendid horses and hounds, rather than the commons which constitute our nation. But I have observed these same men, the ordinary and the middling-born, in the presence of such horses and dogs. They swarm, as bees to honey, about the great ones. Why? Is it not because they perceive in the nobility of these champions the intimation of that selfsame quality inchoate within their own breasts? Phrynichus has admonished, She is a wide bed who holds both democracy and empire, but he, too, stands in error. Democracy must be empire. The appetite that freedom ignites in the individual must be given an object commensurate to its greatness.”
Now it was Euro's turn to rap the table. “And who, cousin, will light this flame?”
“I will,” declared Alcibiades.
He laughed. They both did.
“Then here is the course you must steer, cousin.” Euryptolemus leaned forward, seized it seemed by heaven's inspiration. “If your countrymen will not attend you, mistrustful of your youth, take your case to other courts and other councils. Commence abroad, with our rivals and allies. The chancellors of foreign states will learn soon of Pericles' affliction. Who will lead Athens? they must ask. With whom must they treat to secure their nations' weal?”
Euryptolemus made his case swiftly and succinctly. Which foreign prince, hearing and seeing Alcibiades before him, could fail to recognize Athens' future? To spurn this champion for his youth would be folly, and none would grasp this more surely than the keen and the visionary. Remarking what must come, they would see the wisdom of aligning with it early. Among foreign courts Alcibiades could gain a foothold; securing foreign allegiances, he could forge coalitions. Who else but he could accomplish this? The fame of his lineage would open doors in scores of states, and his self-attained repute as a warrior, not to mention a breeder and racer of horses (a noble vice, shared by lords of all nations), would serve him in all others.
“You have split the stone, cousin!” Alcibiades declared. “I salute you.”
The kinsmen consulted another hour, pursuing the mandates and implications of this policy. Its fundament was war. Peace was fatal to it.
“What do you say, Pommo?” Alcibiades turned at length to me.
“We haven't caught a peep from you all night.”
When I hesitated, he clapped my shoulder. “Politics bores our friend, Euro. He is a soldier. Tell us, then, Polemides. What does a soldier say?”
Be yourself, was all I could tell him.
“Yes.” He laughed. “But which self?”
“Go to war. Fight out front. Win. Bring victories home to Athens. Let your enemies speak against that if they dare.”
We parted at dawn, Alcibiades fresh as if he'd slept all night. He was on his way to the marketplace, to hunt up other friends and continue his investigation. He thanked me for my candor. “Do you ne
ed anything, Pommo? Money? A commission at arms?”
“I'd like my cousin back, if you can spare him.”
“He goes his own way, as you or I.”
I thanked him for the thought. What I needed most was sleep.
Before my door a man was waiting. He was past thirty, brown as leather and packing arms like a mercenary. He grinned at me.
“You're putting me out of business, you know?” He had made his seat upon the stones, taking his breakfast of bread dipped in wine.
I asked his name.
“Telamon. Of Arcadia.”
I had heard of him; he was an assassin. Curious, I invited him in.
“If you're going to slice veins for a living,” he chided, “at least have the decency to charge for it. Else how may a poor man compete?”
I told him I was giving it up for the Prometheia. A penance.
“A noble gesture,” he observed. I liked him. I gave him what bread I had and he took it, stowing it in his pack alongside a brace of wrapped onions. He was shipping out in ten days, a brigade under Lamachus to raid the Peloponnese. He could get me on if I wanted. “Your work lacks subtlety, I hear. Post with me, I'll instruct you.”
“Another time perhaps.”
Rising, he left a coin upon the chest. He would not hear my protests. “I expect pay, and I offer it.”
From the doorway I watched him trek off bearing his ninety pounds of kit, then turned back to the denuded interior of my own house of death.
Perhaps something had changed. At least, I told myself, I was being offered work.
Book III:
THE FIRST MODERN WAR
X
THE JOYS OF SOLDIERING
I did not take up Alcibiades' offer of a commission or follow Telamon into mercenary service. I did heed the Arcadian's advice, however, and shipped out as an armored infantryman under Eucles to the Thracian Chersonese. That campaign concluded, discovering myself yet among the living, I enlisted upon another, equally gloryless, and another after that.
It was a new kind of war we were fighting, or so we bucks of the heavy infantry were enlightened by our elders of the Old Corps. In their day men fought battles. They armed and contended line against line, victory determined in honorable trial of arms. This was not how we did it. Our war was not just state against state, but faction against faction within states-the Few against the Many, those who had versus those who lacked.
As Athenians we sided with the democrats, or more accurately compelled all who sought our aid to become democrats, with the understanding that their democracy would be only so democratic as we permitted. Assaulting a city in this new kind of war, one contended not against heroes united in defense of their homeland, but that gang of partisans which chanced to possess the state at the moment, while one's allies were those of the exiled faction, aligned with us, the invaders, to effect their restoration.
At Mytilene I saw my first list. Our company had been assigned its exiles, those democrats of the city who had been deposed in the oligarchic revolt and now constituted a species of political
auxiliary to the Athenian troops of the assault. I had never seen such men. They were neither warriors nor patriots but zealots. The one with us was named Thersander. We called him Quill. I was a sergeant then; our captain called us in to receive the list.
The list was a death warrant. It enrostered those of Quill's countrymen whom, the city taken, it would be our company's chore to arrest and execute. Quill had made up the list; he would accompany us in the syllepsis, the roundup, to identify those upon it. You have seen such catalogs, Jason. They are written in blood.
Quill's was no impartial manifest of civil foes or political opponents; his accounted neighbors and friends, comrades and kinsmen who had in their hour wreaked ruin upon him. They had slaughtered his wife and daughters. His brother had been torn from the altar and butchered before his own children's eyes. I had never known one to hate as Quill. He was no longer a man but a vessel into which hatred had been decanted. There was no negotiating with one like him, and they were all like him.
Later when the city fell, our company held eighty-two captives of the lists, Quill's and others, including six women and two boys.
It was raining, in sheets behind a warm west wind, so you sweated amid the drenching. We herded the prisoners into stock pens.
Another Mytilenean, not Quill but a confederate, appeared with our instructions. We were to put the detainees to death.
How, I ask, are such orders to be carried out? Not philosophically but practically. Who steps forth to propose the means? Not the best, I assure you. Incinerate them, cried one of our rear rank; seal them in the barn and torch it. Another wished to butcher them like sheep. I refused the order in its entirety.
Quill's abettor confronted me. Who had bribed me? Did I know I was a traitor?
I was young; outrage overcame me. “How will I command these?” I exclaimed, indicating my men. “How may I call them to soldierly duty after they have committed such atrocities? They will be ruined!”
Quill appeared. These are the enemy, he cried, indicating the wretches in the sheepfold.
Kill them yourself, I told him.
He thrust the list in my face. “I'm putting your name on it!”
My own hot temper was all that saved me as, seizing his board and scribing the mark with my own hand, this action so maddened my antagonist as to make him assault me bodily, the ensuing uproar overthrowing momentarily the impetus to mass murder.
Yet let me not style myself deliverer. The poor devils were massacred next day by another company and I, busted to private soldier, shipped off again to the North.
The years passed as if being lived by another. I glance back upon enlistments and discharges, pay vouchers and correspondence, bronze heads extracted from my own flesh and cached as souvenirs at the bottom of my pack; I dig out trinkets and mementos, the names of men and women, lovers indeed, jotted upon the felt of my helmet cawl and scratched with a blade edge into the straps of my rucksack. I remember none.
The season transited as in a single night, that species of slumber from which one awakens at intervals, fitful and feverish, and can reclaim by morning nothing save the sour smell of his own tortured bedding. It seemed I came to myself again before Potidaea, besieging the place a second time seven years after the first. I cannot say now if it was dream or real.
For two winters after my wife's death, I felt no call to passion.
This was neither virtue nor grief, only despair. Then one night I entered the whores' camp and never left. You understand the reckoning of accounts, my friend. Tote this up for me. How much in wages, and don't fail to include mustering bonuses and dividends of discharge, may a soldier accrue who remains upon campaign, retiring not even in winter except to recover from wounds, for a decade entire? A tidy sum, I'd imagine. Enough to buy a handsome little farm, with stock and hands and even a comely wife.
I fucked away every farthing. Screwed it or drank it, and in the end could not credit even my own recall that I had once harbored aspirations for myself.
Peace came, the so-called Peace of Nicias, whereunder both sides, exhausted from years of strife, contracted to retire until they could recover breath, scratching in the interval lines beyond which each vowed not to trespass. I came home. Alcibiades was thirty now, elected to the chief executive of the state, the Board of Ten Generals, the same post his guardian Pericles had held. But his star had not yet gained preeminence. Nicias held sway, his elder and rival, who had negotiated peace with the Spartans, or been appointed by them to do so, to deprive Alcibiades, whose enterprise they feared, of the recognition and prestige. My friend employed me, at captain's wages paid from his own purse, as a sort of private envoy to the Lacedaemonians, or those individual Spartans-Xenares, Endius, Mindarus-with whom he conspired to wreck the Peace. I am no diplomat. I missed the action. I needed it.
One comes to the mercenary's calling in this way, as a criminal to crime. For war and crime are tw
in spawn of the same misbegotten litter. Why else does the magistrate present his perennial offer to errant youth: servitude or the army. Each inducts into the other, war and crime, and the more monstrous the felony, the deeper the criminal must plunge to reclaim himself, disremembering kin and country, forgetting even crime, so that in the end the only riddle the soldier kens is that most occult of all: why am I still living?
Peace for me was war under another name. I never stopped working. Absent license to soldier for my country, I hired out to others. At first only to allies, but when times got tight, well…one's former foes proved the more eager employers. Thebes had got a taste for power, whipping Athens at Delium. War had brought into her fold Plataea, Thespiae, and half the towns of the Boeotian League; she saw no profit in buying into a Spartan peace. Corinth stood equally apart and aggrieved. The treaty had restored neither Anactorium nor Sollium; she had lost her influence in the northwest, not to mention Corcyra, whose revolt had started the war in the first place. Megara chafed to behold her port of Nisaea garrisoned by Athenian troops, and Elis and Mantinea, democracies, had lost all patience with life beneath the Spartan heel. In the north, Amphipolis and the Thraceward region defied the treaty. I worked for all of them. We all did.
Under the peace, states favored mercenaries over popularly drafted troops. Such lives lost did not haunt the politician; their acts could be disavowed when inconvenient; if they rebelled, you held their pay; and if they were killed, you didn't pay them at all.
You have observed the mercenary's life, Jason. Of a year's campaign there totals what, ten days of actual fighting? Boil it down to moments when one stands within hazard's jaws and the tally condenses to minutes. All a man need do is survive that and he's earned another season. Indeed the mercenary holds more in common with the foe, to preserve their lives and livelihoods, than with his own officers, seeking glory. What is glory to the soldier for hire? He prefers survival.
Tides of War, a Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War Page 8
