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

by Steven Pressfield

  The mercenary never calls himself by that name. If he owns armor and hires out as a heavy infantryman, he is a “shield.”

  Javelineers are “lances,” archers “bows.” A broker, called a pilophoros after his felt cap, will say, “I need one hundred shields and thirty bows.”

  No shield for hire tramps alone. Peril of robbery makes him seek a mate; it's easier to hire on as a pair or even a tetras. There are sites in each city where soldiers congregate seeking employment. In Argos a taverna named the Anthem, in Astacos a brothel called Knucklebones. In Heracleion are two hiring plazas; one beside the dry spring called Opountis, the other on the rise east of the Shrine of the Amazons, called by the locals Hyssacopolis, Pussy Town.

  The countryside holds sites of custom as well. A chain of bivouacs called “coops” runs from Sounium to Pella. “Coop” serves as noun and verb. “I need a dozen shields.” “Try the Asopus, I saw a mob cooping there.” Some sites are little more than dry slopes beside streams; others-one called Tritaeia near Cleonae, another along the Peneus near Elis simply Potamou Camps is, Where the River Bends-are quite commodious, shaded copses with part-time markets, even the rude linen shelters called hourlies, where a soldier packing a woman may obtain an interval of privacy before vacating for the next pair.

  Abandoned hunting lodges are favored sites for shields overnighting on the road. One recognizes these haunts from the surrounding slopes, logged down for firewood. An informal but remarkably efficient postal service covered the country then.

  Soldiers packed letters among their kit, parcels and “sticks” thrust into their fists by wives and lovers or the odd mate encountered on the tramp. Each arrival at a coop would be encircled eagerly while he ran through his packet. If a man heard an absent mate's name called, he took the letter for him, often packing it half a year before at last completing delivery.

  Hiring notices, called show rags, were posted at coops and brothels, even upon landmark shade trees or beside favored springs. Learning of work, an entire coop will tramp off, electing their officers on the march. Mercenary rank is less formal than that of a state army. A captain is called by the number of men he brings.

  He is an “eight” or a “sixteen.” Officers are “grade-men” or

  “pennants,” after the service sashes they mount upon their spearpoints, as guidons in assembly and dressing the line. A good officer never lacks for men eager to serve under him, nor a good man for commanders keen to sign him on. You find a crew you can count on and stick with them.

  One sees the same faces in the profession. They all make the rounds. I ran into Telamon twice, on a ferry out of Patrae and at a coop on the Alpheus, before signing on with him the first fight at Trachis. Few use their real names. Nicknames and war names abound. Macedonians, “macks,” make up the main of the soldiery, hazel-eyed and orange-haired. I never served with a unit that didn't have a Big Red, a Little Red, and a gang in between.

  No man unblooded or unvouched for is taken on for pay. He must serve free, and none shares food or fire till he has held his ground in a fight. Later on the rallying square, the grade-man approaches. “When did you last draw wages?” “Never yet, sir.” The officer takes his name and slips him a coin or two. “Start tomorrow.” That's it. He's in.

  Discipline, too, is less ceremonious among the breed for hire. At Heraclea in Trachis, the first scrape under Telamon, one of our number deserted in the assault. Astonishingly this rogue was waiting in camp when we returned, wearing a shit-eater and crossing toward Telamon, spooling an alibi. Without breaking stride our captain ran him through with his nine-footer, with such force that the iron shot forth, two hands' worth, from between the man's shoulder blades. In the instant the fellow lingered, impaled upon Telamon's shaft, our chief aired his edge and hacked him off at the neck. Still without a word he stripped corpse and kit, casting its contents to the whores and sutlers' boys, leaving nothing but a naked and dishonored carcass. I chanced to be standing next to an Athenian shield we called Rabbit. He turned to me deadpan: “Point taken.”

  The rhythm of the mercenary's life is a narcotic, as the passion of the whoremonger or gambler, which careers the shield for hire, if he answers truly to that name, collaterally pursues. Its currents efface all that went before and all that will come after. First, and beyond all, fatigue. The infantryman breathes exhaustion night and day. Even in a gale at sea the soldier, returned from retching over the rail, drops to the planks and corks off with ease, beard buried in the bilges.

  Second stands boredom and third hunger. The soldier is foot-weary. He treks, ever upon the march, advancing toward some object which draws near only to be superseded by another, equally bereft of meaning. The earth endures beneath his tread, and he himself stands ready to drop upon it, if not in death, then exhaustion. The soldier never sees the landscape, only the burdened back of the man trudging in column before him.

  Fluids dominate the soldier's life. Water, which he must have or die. Sweat, which drips from his brow and drains in runnels down his rib cage. Wine, which he requires at march's end and battle's commencement. Vomit and piss. Semen. He never runs out of that.

  The penultimate, blood, and beyond that, tears.

  The soldier lives on dreams and never tires of reciting them. He yearns for sweetheart and home, yet returns to the front with joy and never narrates his time apart.

  Spear and sword, the manuals tell us, are the weapons of the infantryman. This is erroneous. Pick and shovel are his province, hoe and mattock, lever and crowbar; these and the mortarman's hod, the forester's ax, and, beyond all, the quarryman's basket, that ubiquitous artifact the rookie learns to cobble on-site of reeds or faggots. And get her to set aright, my fellow, tumpline upon the brow, bowl across the shoulders with no knot to gouge the flesh, for when she is laden with rubble and stone to the measure of half your weight, you must hump her. Up that ladder, see? To where the forms of timber await to receive the fill that will become the wall that will encircle the city, whose battlements we will scale and tear down and set up all over again.

  The soldier is a farmer. He knows how to shape the earth. He is a carpenter; he erects ramparts and palisades. A miner, he digs trenches and tunnels; a mason, he chisels a road from a sheer face of stone. The soldier is a physician who performs surgery without anesthetic, a priest who inters the dead without psalm. He is a philosopher who plumbs the mysteries of existence, a linguist who pronounces “pussy” in a dozen tongues. He is an architect and a demolition man, a fire brigadier and an incendiary. He is a beast who dwells in the dirt, a worm, owning a mouth and an anus and aught but appetite in between.

  The soldier looks upon horrors and affects to stand indifferent to them. He steps, oblivious, over corpses in the road and flops to wolf his gruel upon stones painted black with blood. He imbibes tales that would bleach the mane of Hades and tops them with his own, laughing, then turns about and donates his last obol to a displaced dame or urchin he will never see again except cursing him from a wall or rooftop, hurling down tiles and stones to cleave his skull.

  Half a dozen times with the macks of our coop we trekked through the pass at Thermopylae. Tourists, we trooped the Wall and dug for Persian bronze heads on the hillock where the Three Hundred made their immortal stand. What would they think, these knights of yore, to behold war as we fought it? Not Hellene against barbarian in defense of sacred soil, but Greek against Greek out of partisanship and zealotry. Not army to army, man to man, but party against party, father against son, and bring the kids and Mom to sling a stone or slice a throat. What would these heroes of old think of civil conflagration in the streets of Corcyra, when the democrats surrounded four hundred aristoi within the temple of Hera, lured them forth with sacred oaths, then slaughtered them before their infants' eyes? Or the massacre of six hundred in the same city, when the demos, the people, walled their foes within a hostelry, tore off the roof, and rained death with brick and stone, that the immured wretches in despair slew themselves by driving into the
ir throats the very arrows they were being shot down with and hanged themselves with the straps of the bedstands? What would they make of the fate later on of Melos or Scione, when the order came from Athens to slaughter all males and sell the women and children for slaves? How would they countenance their own countrymen's massacre of the men of Hysiae, or their conduct in the siege of Plataea, when the sons of Leonidas put to their captives one query only-“What service have you performed for Sparta?”-then butchered them to the last man?

  I had a woman in those years, of Samothrace originally, though when she was drunk she claimed to be from Troezen. Her name was Eunice, Fair Victory. She had been the camp wife of my mate, a captain-of-eight named Automedon who died, not of wounds, but a tooth of all things, infected. Eunice came into my bed that same night. “You should not be with whores.” Quick as that she became my woman.

  In what ways was she different from my bride Phoebe? Do you care, Jason? I'll tell you anyway.

  As my dear bride was a blossom grown within the cloistered court, this dame Eunice was a shoot sprung upon the storm. This flower grew wild. She was the kind of woman you could leave with a comrade and she wouldn't fuck him behind your back. You'd return and they'd be laughing together, she cooking him something, and when he took his leave, he'd tug you aside. “If you catch iron, I'll look out for her.” The supreme compliment.

  Eunice was wise. When she ploughed you, her ankles set alongside your ears and her fingers clamped you hard at the ribs.

  You felt her greed for you and your seed, and even though you knew she'd move on to the next man with as little ceremony as she'd crossed to you, you couldn't complain. There was an integrity to it.

  We were in Thrace one year under contract to Athens, raiding villages to support the fleet. The enterprise was preposterous; forty men would trek three days into the hills and come back with a single starving sheep. The wild tribes defended their flocks on horseback, with painted faces and magic symbols plastered on the flanks of their runt ponies. It was like warfare from an era antecedent to bronze, a thousand generations before Troy. To stumble back alive to camp, without even a fly for shelter, and roll atop one's woman on the steppe…this was not all bad.

  The soldier's life is primordial; surrendered to it, he reverts to a state not just pre literate but prehistoric. That is its appeal.

  I had slain my sister Meri.

  My edge had opened her throat.

  What remained for me but to wander, as far as war could bear me, to tramp upon the earth and bleed on it and dare it to enfold me beneath its mantle? Of course it didn't. Why? Had I become so without worth that I would live forever?

  In the second summer of the Peace our coop learned of work at good wages, rebuilding the walls of Argos and fortifying her port of Nauplia. This was Alcibiades' doing; he had double-crossed his Spartan friend Endius, leading a legation to Athens seeking to prevent this Argive alliance, making him out a fraud and liar before the people who, in rage, sealed the pact not alone with Argos but Elis and Mantinea as well. Alcibiades was at Argos now, with four hundred carpenters and masons brought from Athens. Here was the fruit of Euryptolemus' design that his cousin work his ambition abroad. By the force of his person and persuasion, in open assembly and private discourse with the leading men, Alcibiades had brought over to Athens the three great democracies of the Peloponnese, two of whom had been allies of Sparta.

  Our coop gaped at the scale of construction. From the citadel of the Larissa, as far as vision could carry, the city circuit stood compassed by scaffolding and construction inclines, derricks and roller sledges, road cutters, timber mills, factors' tents and teamsters' trains, with overall such a multitude at labor that men shy of hods bore mortar on their bare backs, cupping it between their arms with fingers interlocked behind them. I located Euryptolemus, seeking a berth at wages for our coop. He clapped my shoulder, welcoming, and declared he could put us to far better use.

  He signed us to train Messenian freedmen as heavy infantry, some two hundred who had been chattel at Sparta but fled to forts erected by Alcibiades and Nicias, securing their liberation. We would drill them all summer, accompanying Alcibiades to Patrae with the fall to bring that city into alliance as well. When I remonstrated with our commander, at last securing an audience, that these Messenians would never be ready to fight by fall, he only laughed. “Who said anything about fighting?”

  He would win Patrae by love.

  And he did. Here is how.

  Patrae, as you know, commands the western portal to the Gulf of Corinth. She was a democracy and neutral. Now, however, with the other great democracies of the Peloponnese-Elis, Mantinea, and Argos-brought into alliance with Athens, Patrae was a fruit ripe to fall.

  Have you spent time in Patrae, Jason? It is a most agreeable place. Her dishes are squid cooked in its own ink and baked thrush.

  One dines there not in the marketplace, but at establishments called “flags,” which are private homes, many with terraces overlooking the sea. On entering, one takes a flag, a brightly colored swatch bearing a symbol, of a dolphin or trident, say, and ties it about his shoulders. With that, he is a son of the family.

  That portion is his which he desires, or he may name a dish and the proprietress will produce it. At repast's end he folds his fare within his flag and leaves it on the bench.

  The government of Patrae consists of two houses, the Council of Elders and the Assembly of the people. Alcibiades approached first those leading men with whom he was personally acquainted, and upon assuaging their fears of his and his nation's intentions, secured permission to address the commons. He was now thirty-two years old, twice a general of Athens, and the most spectacularly ascendant of the new breed of Greece. He spoke as follows:

  “Men of Patrae, I proceed on the assumption that you, as all free Hellenes, would prefer independence and self-determination for your state, to having her affairs dictated by an alien power.

  Neutrality, you must agree, is no longer an option. Today each state of Greece must align with Athens or Sparta; no third alternative obtains.”

  The Assembly of Patrae meets in the open air on an eminence called the Collar, overlooking the gulf. Alcibiades gestured now to these straits.

  “To which element, sea or land, is your nation's future bound?

  This, I submit, is the decisive factor, for if land, her fate must stand with Sparta. This will produce the greatest security. But if one's hopes lie abroad through trade and commerce, he must recognize that that power which commands the sea cannot suffer another state to make use of this element to its advantage, if this works injury to herself.

  “Patrae is sited on the sea, my friends, and upon a most strategic promontory. This works to your nation's benefit, making her of surpassing value to Athens as a friend, but to your peril, should you elect to make our city your foe. Do not delude yourself that this Peace will endure. War will come again. You must prepare now, determining which course yields the greater security-alliance with that naval power which needs you and must protect you, whose might opens up to your use all ports and sea-lanes of the world, shielding your merchantmen wherever their ambitions bear them and providing courts of law by which their interests may be safeguarded. Or choose to ally with a land power, Sparta and her League, which cannot defend you against seaborne assault, which will recruit your young men to fight as infantry where they are least well trained and equipped, and beneath whose hegemony you must suffer isolation and impoverishment, cut off from that intercourse of commerce which brings not alone the good things of life but the surplus of resource without which security is an illusion.”

  He wanted Patrae to build long walls connecting the upper town to the port. When a Councilor resisted, narrating his fear that Athens would gobble Patrae up, Alcibiades responded, “What you say may be true, my friend. But if she does, it will be by degrees and from the feet. Sparta will take you headfirst and at one gulp.”

  But his most telling argument required no articulati
on. This was the sight of the Messenian freedmen who, fired by their hatred of Sparta, had shaped into a crack unit. Here was what freedom and Athens could do for you, their presence said. Be like them, or face them.

  Patrae did come over. With that, Alcibiades had detached from Sparta in her own backyard three powerful states and brought over a fourth from neutrality. He had fashioned a coalition whose combined armed forces rivaled that of her former master, all the while adhering to the letter of the Peace and setting not a solitary Athenian life at hazard. He would move next, or his proxies would, against a fifth state, Epidaurus, whose fall would complete that gambit by which the sixth and most crucial Spartan ally, Corinth, would find herself cut off and vulnerable as well.

  Now for the first time one began to see Spartans and Spartan agents. Their cavalry appeared across Achaea and the Argolid, followed by those surrogates in scarlet of the seventy Laconian towns, the so-called Neighbors, heavy infantry drilled to such a pitch as exceeded all save the Corps of Peers itself. Mindarus arrived, the field marshal, and Endius and Cleobulus, leaders of the war party. They and their lieutenants began showing up at coops, the first time we had seen full Spartiates recruiting shields and free lances. One excelled all in the zeal of his application. This was Lysander the son of Aristocleitus, that same Lysander whose name would toll down Athenian annals, synonymous with doom.

  Telamon took work from him and chided me for my reluctance.

  Others of our coop ran “errands” as well. They would not recount these actions, even to me. One knew only that they were performed at night and they paid well.

  With Telamon I heard Lysander address the Patraean Council.

  “Men of Patrae, the speech of the Athenian general” (meaning Alcibiades, who had addressed the Assembly some days previous)

  “is known to all and has been countered by ambassadors of my city, whose eloquence far outstrips my own. Nonetheless my regard for your nation is such that, though I come before you as a soldier only, I must add my voice to these rebuttals. Make no mistake, friends.