This was greeted with howls from the younger men. “Go back to your snooze, Grandfather,” my cousin Callicles hooted.
The patriarch responded. “Traditional generations hemmed their garments higher, to honor their origins as tillers of the soil, whose dress must not trail in the dirt and muck. But the new generation, born of the city, knows nothing of the land, so they cut their skirts to drag about, immodest and unseemly. What I fear has nothing to do with groves or vines, Callicles, but the virtues which cultivation of the land imparts: modesty, patience, reverence for the gods, of which this Alcibiades knows little and cares less. He is a product of the city and evinces all its vices: vanity, arrogance, impatience, and immodesty before heaven.”
Callicles responded with heat. “I will give you more virtues of the country, old man. Narrow-mindedness, misanthropy, skinflintedness, insularity. Good riddance to these! The virtues of the city are boldness, imagination, vision, and inclusiveness. ”
“The man of the land,” Grandfather rejoined, “is in the business of peace, he of the city in the service of war.”
“This service has done your purse no harm, Grandfather. Nor any here beneath this roof.”
A general uproar ensued.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen.” My uncle Ion restored order. It was he of all assembled who most embodied that sagacity which country men call “dirt wisdom” — the horse sense of middle years. What did he think, his kinsmen inquired, not alone of our guest's proposal but of the man himself?
“I fear him. But I fear more dismissing him. As I watched him address us tonight I could not but imagine, as he suggested, how he would appear in halls like these in Sicily, braving these foreign nobles and soliciting their alliance. Sicily is rich, yes, but she is also rude. Her princes are like ours a hundred years ago. They may be awed less by the might of Athens than by her aggressiveness and audacity-qualities which they fear, admire, and envy, and which our guest personifies more than any other. He is Athens, or that portion which indeed may overawe and win these foreign knights.
“That point made by the captain Pythiades is also well taken, that Syracuse-whose conquest, all concur, holds the key to Sicily-is a democracy. We have witnessed our young champion's appeal to the mob. Perhaps this, too, may work in the expedition's favor. And yet…”
“And yet nothing,” put in our youthful firebrand Callicles. He spoke of his service, this winter past, on the Naval Resources Board. Among his duties was to treat with the brokers who represented the foreign sailors-the islanders of Samos, Chios, Lesbos, and the other maritime nations who served for pay in the Athenian fleet. He knew these men, Callicles said.
“They are neither pirates nor grog-besotted salts, but responsible professionals, possessed in abundance of the spirit of adventure and harboring keen hopes of advancement. They know their skills' worth and hire it out cannily. Yet these foreigners serve in our fleet not for money alone, which they could get anywhere, but for a far more potent intangible.
“They are in love with Athens.”
Observe them, Callicles submitted, on any holiday. They parade in the festivals, pack the benches of the dance and chorus. In their off-hours they congregate in the Lyceum and the Leocorium, the marketplace and the Academy, and the groves and enclaves where the philosophers and their students assemble. You have seen them, cousins. They roost in the margins, attending spellbound to protagoras of Abdera, Hippias of Elis, Gorgias of Leontini, Prodicus of Cos, and the scores of sophists and rhetoricians who set up shop in the open air to vend their wares of wisdom. They cluster about Socrates. But before all, they are taken with the theater.
“On the morn of a competition one discovers them by hundreds in the forecourt, seeking shade beneath the statues of the generals, or trooping from the plane grove of the Amazoneum with their sweethearts and their picnic baskets, with their woolen sea blankets over their shoulders, employing as theater cushions the very pillows upon which they sit at oars.
“I have seen them in the gymnasia, those which admit foreigners.
The Hebrew sailors endure the pain of those copper clamps called
'mushroom caps' which stretch the circumcised flesh of their members back over the exposed foreskin, so that, naked, they may look like Greeks. Like Athenians. That is how smitten they are with our nation. Open the rolls of citizenship and the lines of applicants will lap the agora thrice over.
“But here is my point, gentlemen. In any overseas port I am approached twenty times a day by foreign seamen, crack mariners beseeching me to use my influence to gain them a berth. Many offer to serve without pay. They wish only to learn under an Athenian captain, to further their skills and advance their aspirations.
“These foreigners, I believe, will be drawn powerfully to serve under a commander like Alcibiades. The better and more ambitious they are, the more they will wish to sail with him, because they believe he will bring them victory, and because they are just like him. He is who they dream of becoming. He knows it and knows how to exploit it.
“Remember, these sailors all know each other. They frequent the same dives and cathouses; they know every officer in every fleet and which seamen sail with him. I make no brief for the man Alcibiades. But the chance of serving under him will draw to this force, I believe, the elite mariners of the world. I leave it to you to evaluate their impact, upon Sicily and our foes of the Peloponnese.”
Many of the wealthy, that winter, made warranty to lay keels.
Yet as happens with men, when spring came they discovered excuses for delay. Alcibiades and his circle pressed forward on their own. Euryptolemus and Thrasybulus commissioned Atalanta and Aphrodisia; others Vigilant, Equipoise, and Redoubtable.
Alcibiades commenced construction on Antiope and Olympia; these in addition to four he had already donated. Could he afford such an outlay? Perhaps not, but the start drew others who had hung back. The sight of these vessels rising on their timbered ways in the shipyards of Munychia and Telegoneia, the daylong thump of adzes and chisels hewing their beams, the stink of pitch and oakum being paddled into the seams of their mortise-and-tenon hulls, and the mob of technitai and architectones, carpenters and shipwrights employed upon them, created a momentum of its own, magnetic and irresistible. Soon an expanse of shoreline a mile long at the Cantharus and twice that along the Sounium Road stood chockablock with hulls under construction, not to mention those simultaneously arising on timber sites in Macedonia and the Chersonese, while the waterfront boomed with joiners' shops and chandleries, sailmakers' lofts and foundries, blacksmiths, armorers, rope weavers, and mast and spar factors. Pennants and ensigns painted the lanes with color; beneath their plumage drayage wagons lumbered night and day, bearing the materiel of construction.
The fever had caught. The city could talk of nothing but Sicily.
In the marketplace, clay models of the island were snatched up by the hundred; men and boys scratched outlines in the dirt and extolled her wonders in the barbershop and the saddlery. It was as if we had conquered already and had no more to dispute but division of the spoils.
The aristocrat Nicias addressed the Assembly one blistering forenoon, when the sun-blasted pnyx stood packed to the rearmost station.
“Athenians, I see your hearts are set upon this venture. Today departing for this congress, I could not locate my attendant; he was discovered at last among the grooms, blathering ecstatically of Sicily. What else? It is your nature, men of Athens, to count as yours already that which you have set your hopes upon and, your minds made up, you will suffer no one to quarrel counter to your whim. You will shout him down, as if he sought by his speech to take from you that which you already possessed instead of counseling you for your own good in regard to that which you may never get and the pursuit of which may bring you to ruin.
“I see before me, too, in the foremost row, that young man and his confederates whose ambition has inflamed your hearts to this folly. He is smiling, this proud breeder of horses and corrupter of the public morals,
because he knows I speak the truth. I hate to see that smile, my friends, however comely. And do you not, gentlemen, chancing to find yourselves beside this buck's henchmen, permit yourselves to be intimidated by their bluster, or feel shamed if they call you coward for demurring to underwrite this expedition. Yes, his friends heckle me now. Let them. But if these hotbloods will not attend seriously to my words, I pray that you, their elders and betters, will.
“I see there also, in that shaded precinct he favors, Socrates the philosopher, to whose counsel alone our youthful champion attends. We all know where you stand, sir. You have spoken out, resisting this Sicilian adventure as unjust, to bear war to a people who harbor no intent of bringing it to us. Speak up, my friend, if I say false. Your famous daimon, that voice which warns you of peril or folly, has enjoined this escapade, has it not? Yet I see none heeds your gray hairs or mine.
“Let me speak, then, men of Athens, not in opposition to this enterprise, for I perceive that your course is set and nothing may deflect you from it, but only to set before you from experience's locker, as they say, those concerns which must be addressed if we wish to pull off this spectacular stunt and not come a cropper in the bargain.”
Nicias spoke of the hazards of venturing far from home and resupply, across such distant and treacherous seas, at such a remove that in winter even a fast dispatch ship may require four months for the passage. In all previous overseas campaigns we had had the bulwark of allied harbors as forward bases and friendly territories from which to secure supplies. Not in Sicily. We would stand there at the ends of the earth, with not a crust to gnaw but that which we bore with us. He warned, too, that in taking on this new enemy we left another on our doorstep, the Spartans and their allies, who had very nearly laid us low before and who, though forbearing now under the Peace, would resume operations with vigor once we committed ourselves to this western front and, should we suffer a reversal there, would take fresh courage and, reinforced by new allies similarly emboldened, redouble their efforts to finish us off.
He spoke of the foreign merchants, mechanics, and sailors who manned the docks and shipyards and no minor portion of the benches of the fleet. With what confidence could we rely upon these who were not of our blood but without whom we could not hope to prevail? Were we not placing ourselves upon the same perilous perch occupied by our enemies, the Spartans, who must fight with one eye on the foe and the other on their own serfs? In war even one's own countrymen may not always be relied upon.
How much less those who serve only for pay?
“Today as I walked to the Assembly I observed numerous construction sites of houses and shops going up. This is well. But do not put from your memory, Athenians, that these very properties are those abandoned and even torched by their owners during the Plague. Have you forgotten, friends? Is your recall that fleeting of those hours when our survival hung by a whisker and no resource we possessed, neither of wealth nor power nor entreaties of the gods, proved of avail to lift this siege of heaven? Peace, which I negotiated, has brought its blessings. We may open the city's gates, ride again to our estates, repair them and replant. Children are born who have not inhaled the stink of the enemy's incendiaries or witnessed their mothers' corpses carted away in the night. You have stumbled ashore upon safe haven, my countrymen. Yet what is your first thought? The bones of your own fathers have barely found rest within their tombs and now you propose to plant your own beside them. Can you not enjoy the quiet life? Am I that old, that I find comfort in a fireside at close of day and take joy to watch my children at play within the court?
“But this is not your nature, men of Athens. Nothing is more unendurable to you than peace. Each moment at leisure is to you an interval squandered and a chance for gain cast away. The farmer has learned that fields must lie fallow, and fruit bears only in its season. But you have repudiated these quaint premises. You inhabit another realm, a fictive country which you call the future.
You dream of what will be and disdain what is. You define yourselves not as who you are, but as who you may become, and hasten over oceans to this shore you can never reach. That which you possess today you count as nothing, valuing only what you gain tomorrow. Yet as soon as your hands seize this treasure, you disown it and press on for what is new. I do not wonder that you esteem this young man, this chariot racer, for he lives further beyond his means even than yourselves.
“What want of character, my friends, compels you to seek war when you have peace? Are not our own troubles sufficient? Must we sail off pursuing others? I beg you, friends, to enjoin this injudiciousness. And I call upon you, President of the Assembly, to put the matter again to a vote.”
A number spoke following Nicias, the majority expressing views in favor of the expedition. When Alcibiades at last arose, summoned by acclamation, he confined his brief to essentials.
“I thank our schoolmaster”-he bowed toward Nicias-“for his astute and salutary sermon. Clearly our character as Athenians is riddled with imperfections. We have fallen far short of the standard to which we all aspire. But if I may speak frankly, we must be who we are.”
Tumultuous acclamation saluted this. My own position was at the epotis, the “ear” of the pnyx; I could see Nicias, among the citizens, smile darkly and shake his head.
“In fact,” Alcibiades continued, “we can be nothing else, neither as individuals nor as a nation.”
Additional clamor ascended. When Alcibiades resumed, he refuted Nicias' contentions smartly and point by point, each counterstroke mounting to this summation.
“And as to the restlessness of our nature, Athenians, in my view this is not imperfection of character, but evidence of vigor and enterprise. Our fathers did not drive back the Persian by propping their feet at the fire, or gain their empire watching their children play in the yard. Nicias says that fruits bear in their season. I say the season is now. To our friend's assertion that security is best derived from a posture of precaution and defense, that may be true for other nations, but not for us. For an active people to change her ways is fatal. It is in our nature to venture far and boldly. This, and not in defense, is where our security resides.
“Nicias speaks of foreign oarsmen: he reproves us that our fleet cannot sail without them, and cites this as a liability. It is proof, he says, that our native resources are insufficient. To me it demonstrates the opposite. In fact nothing could display with more telling measure the depth of our vitality and the magnetism of our mythos. Why do these foreigners come to us and no other nation in Hellas? Because they know that here and only here they may be free.
“And as for the derogation implicit in his assessment of these newcomers as our inferiors, I say he knows them not, and does them and us a disservice. Consider the hazard these men have undertaken, my friends, these whom Nicias devalues and demeans.
They have put behind home and family, native soil and sky; the very gods of their race they have abjured, to venture across oceans to this stranger's land where they may enjoy neither protection of law nor participation in the political process, where they are exempted and excluded, nameless, voiceless, ballotless.
Yet still they come, and no force under heaven may stop them.
Why? Because they know that life at the ends of the earth in Athens is better than life at the center of the universe at home.
Nicias is mistaken, my friends. These foreigners may not be the brick and stone of our nation, but they are the mortar. And they will stick.”
Deafening applause seconded this. Nor was it lost upon the orator's allies, and his foes, that report of his words would peal at once and echo nightlong among the foreign sailors and craftsmen, by whom he would now more than ever be acclaimed patron and champion.
Alcibiades stood, calling for order. When the tumult at last subsided, he turned, absent all rancor or vaunting, and summoned his rival to the rostrum.
“Nicias, you have been appointed senior commander, which your record of service demands and which I honor without res
ervation. I esteem your wisdom and, not less, your proven luck.
I have no wish to supplant you, sir, but to enlist you wholeheartedly in your country's cause. Help us. Don't tell us why we will fail but how we may succeed.
“I summon you now, sir, not as rival, but as compatriot, to come forward again. The reservations you have voiced are not without merit. Tell us, then, what we need to succeed. Give us hard numbers. Let us hear the stern truth. And I make you this pledge: if Athens will not grant what you believe the expedition needs to prevail, I myself will mount the stand beside you in opposition to it.
“But if she will grant you what you say we require, then I call upon you in like spirit to accede to your countrymen's decree. Do not shirk the command with which she has honored you, but seize it with vigor. We need you, Nicias. Tell us what we must have to make you feel confident of success. ”
Nicias accepted his antagonist's challenge. Mounting at once to the box, he proceeded to detail a seemingly interminable list of supplies and armament, warcraft and materiel, everything from spare masts and sail to parched barley and the bakers and ovens to make it into bread. He demanded overwhelming superiority of sea forces, one hundred men-of-war at a minimum, plus heavy infantrymen in numbers greater than any force the enemy could raise against us, reinforced by an equal number of light-armed troops, archers and slingers to neutralize the enemy's cavalry, since over these leagues of ocean we could not transport our own.
In addition the expedition would require ironworkers and masons, sappers and siege engineers, dispatch craft and troop transports. Alcibiades had asked for hard figures and Nicias gave them. A hundred talents to hire supply ships, two hundred for dumps and magazines along the way, another two hundred to purchase horses for the cavalry on-site, and if the Sicel tribesmen refused us this aid, then the same amount to fund raids to take them by force. Of course this figure did not include the infantry or their attendants, or the seamen or maintenance of the warships.
Tides of War, a Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War Page 14
