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

by Steven Pressfield

  That would be a thousand talents, with another thousand in reserve. This figure, it was understood, covered just the summer; for winter the sum would double, and if the expedition had not achieved success in the first year, Athens must mount another and send it to the aid of the first. On and on Nicias' necessities mounted. Clearly he anticipated that such massive outlay, set before his hearers in this bald and brutal form, would act as cold water in the face of a dreamer.

  But Alcibiades' grasp of his countrymen's character was shrewder than his opponent's. Far from being daunted by Nicias' demands, the citizens declared them excellent and embraced them with animation. The grander the expedition, the more certain they became that it could not fail. As Nicias completed his table of requisition, he perceived, as did every citizen of the Assembly, that he had been outgeneraled by Alcibiades, whose stock with the people mounted higher with each instant his rival sought to bring him low. Now all Athens felt that not only would she soon possess a fleet of insuperable capacity but in Alcibiades a general of spirit and cunning who could not fail to lead it to glory. At one stroke Alcibiades not only had got everything he wanted but, despite his station as junior commander, had seized control of the expedition and made it his own.

  XVI

  A SOLDIER'S DREAM

  The farm survived, thanks less to my brother's exertions and my own than to the abundantly donated counsel and assistance of various uncles and elders, not to say their liberal advances in equipment, skilled labor, and cash. We had not realized, Lion and I, how sorely missed we had been and how bereft our family, as so many others, in the aftercourse of plague and war. Nothing is so irreplaceable as youth, and none so dear as the prodigal. They could not do enough for us, our senior kinsmen, and wished only to see sons and more sons. My aunt made the trek from the city just to satisfy herself that we were well; stationed beneath the sunshade on her hired carriage's bench, she looked on Lion and me, bare-backed and dirty as dogs, digging a trench for a runoff channel. “Now I can die content.”

  I failed to present Eunice that day, nor, calling upon Aunt in town later that month, did I include my mistress. Thus initiated another of those beastly rows, between myself and her, which endure night long and leave one lacerated to the quick.

  “What do I lack, Pommo, that you won't take me past your aunt's door? Is my skin not soft enough? Perhaps you fault the shapeliness of my calves. Well, these lines would not show in my face, my friend, or sinew in my shanks, had I not humped at your side through hell and damnation, you ungrateful hound! I am not a citizen, is that it? Then by God, make me one! Pull strings. Engage your fancy friends who make white black and turn it back again!”

  Fury boiled from her, long-censored and suppressed.

  “I'll tell you why you won't present me to your aunt. Because she seeks a bride for you even now, as she found your virgin Phoebe years ago. Someone proper, of proper Athenian family, with whom you may have children whose names may be set upon the rolls, not alien brats such as a foreign bitch like me would drop, who may not vote or sacrifice or claim their education when you croak in war.”

  She discovered me one noon in reflection beside the family tomb; now the fancy took her, that I craved my dead bride and not her. I was ashamed of her, Eunice declared. She was not suitable.

  She did not fit.

  One night she bolted from our bed in a state.

  “You will put me aside now.”

  I was dead fagged and wanted none of this. “What are you talking about?”

  “You will be a gentleman. You will set me aside.”

  I ordered her back to sleep. She struck me, hard, with the flat of her hand. “There are too many in this bed, Pommo. I cannot sleep beside the ghost of your bride. One of us must go!”

  From my lips I heard: “Then go.”

  The woman struck me in fury. “I will tell you something: she is in the grave, your child bride. Your sister, too, is dead. While I live.”

  I punched her full in the face, as hard as I would a man. She crashed to the wall and dropped. I felt horror to have struck her, a woman, but at the same time I blamed her entire. Only she could drive me to such extremity.

  “You feel shame to be with me.” Eunice spat the blood from her lips. “You hold in contempt the life we have led and wish to dismiss it as if it never happened. Well, it happened, Pommo. It happened. I have been your wife in fact if not in law, and you have been my husband. You are my husband.”

  She began to sob. I knelt beside her, proffering comfort with words but in my heart wishing only to be gone, or have her so.

  “What will become of me? Will I bear a child at last, or continue to abort myself as you command?”

  She begged me to take her out of Athens, apart from family expectations and mobilization for war. There were places we had seen in our travels, safe places. Let us go! We have all we need with just our hands and hearts…

  Though I knelt so close that her knee rose between mine and her hands set upon my forearm, my heart held isolated and apart, with leagues of silence dissevering.

  “You will put me aside, Pommo. I read it in your eyes. But it is not me you part from, only yourself. What I have set before you, no woman will again. Go, then. I won't stop you. But I will make this prophecy, and it will prove true.

  “You will eat,” she declared, “but ever go hungry. You will drink and still be dry. You will fuck and find no pleasure. You will stand before the fork, but it will make no difference which pass you take.

  All will bear you nowhere, till you come to yourself and come home to me.”

  Jason, my friend. I have had greased bronze heads shot into my guts and, worse, pulled out. I have had walls of stone collapse on top of me. But never had any blow hammered me to the heart like the words of this woman.

  It would make a better story to say that she walked out then, or I. In fact we stayed together another eleven months. She bore a son and was with child again when I signed as a lieutenant of marines on the Pandora under Menestheus, the Titan squadron commanded by Chaemedemus, the Thunderbolt division under Alcibiades.

  The farm had failed that winter. Lion's wife Theonoe made her divorce. With notes overdue and children yet to support, my brother could not turn down three months' mustering bonus and a year, at least, of officer's pay. He shipped as a platoon commander under Lamachus. Telamon took a unit of fifty, Arcadian mercenaries like himself. The farm my brother and I let to our uncles; I assigned half my wages to Eunice and made over the bonus to my grandfather, a start on the debt we owed for his, and all our family's, aid.

  I could not make my living on the land. That was only a soldier's dream. Where else was there to go, for me or any of us, except back to war?

  XVII

  A DOCUMENT OF THE ADMIRALTY

  Let me show you something, my grandson. It is the Fleet Order of Sail for Sicily, or more precisely one of the hundreds of copies drawn up by the demosioi, the secretaries of the Admiralty staff. Feel the paper; it is neither reed nor pulp, but linen. It is woven.

  This was a document made to last. It was conceived of as epochal, an artifact of glory which each officer would pass to his heirs for generations. I now cede mine to you, my child, but not for the reasons its creators envisioned, such are the unknowable ways of God.

  The Office of the War Archon was responsible for the production of this instrument, a duplicate of which was distributed to every trierarch of the fleet, as well as all pilots and captains of marines, fleet patrons and syndicate officers, the Board of Generals, the hundred members of the Board of Naval Construction, and the Curators of the Yards, as well as the chief executives and corporate officers of the private construction firms, shipbuilders, suppliers, sailmakers, and armament manufacturers who had built and provisioned the fleet. I worked on this document, myself and six other officers, night and day for seven months.

  Regard the underlay. It is a pilot's chart of the Piraeus, the Grand Harbor and the Cantharus, extending from the fort and nava
l establishment of Eetioneia to the Emporium and the Still Harbor to Acte, with soundings indicated for flood and ebb, sitings for all channel markers from the Diazeugma to the Ephebium, including distances mole-to-mole and angles of triangulation among each of the four beacons and twenty-seven benches, so that a ship's master could, by striking azimuths to the various guidons, determine his position within a boat-length at any point of the harbor. This degree of precision was ordained by Nicias and Alcibiades, in concord for once, that each of the fleet's three hundred and sixty-four primary vessels could site herself upon her assigned station and the whole colossal departure come off with an order and symmetry both grand to the eye and pleasing to the gods.

  Upon the facing sheet are indicated the priests' and magistrates' stations. The squares along the fairway are the stationary barges erected for the King Archon, the Chief Priests of the Ten Tribes, and the Priestesses of Athena Poliachos, Protectress of the City, as well as the chaplains and sanctuary guardians of Agraulus, Enyalius, Ares, Zeus, Thallo, Auxo, and Hegemone. Each demarch had his own barge as well, plus privately funded viewing stands in excess of two hundred, which stretched for three miles opposite the Sounium Road. The Choma jetty was reserved to the Council members, likewise garlanded and mounted upon the tribal steps from which they looked out, across the water, upon the Temple of Aphrodite Mistress of Navigation, whose precincts held the delegations of women, the wives and mothers of the trierarchs, in white, bearing wands of yew and hyacinth. At the head of the bay stood the altar of Poseidon, upon which a bull was sacrificed to the sea.

  Sorrowful age has ravaged my sight; the document in your hand is but a blur. Yet still I see, ship for ship, that magnificent armada as she passed before my vision half a century gone.

  First in ceremonial escort rowed the state galleys, Paralus and Salaminia, the fastest ships in the world. Their sails, as all the fleet, rode reefed upon the yard awaiting the trumpeted order “Make sail!” Upon this command, each line loosed in succession, the topmen riding the fabric down, unfurling it with their feet as they plunged, so that like a pennant suddenly sprung to the breeze, the sails snapped and filled with an audible concussion. Cheers rose from the thousands massed upon the shore as each fresh sail, emblazoned with some design honoring its namesake deity or heroine, filled and drew. These were all ceremonial sails, woven for this day alone and superfluous to the point of absurdity, as all vessels made way entirely under oars. Yet they did look grand! It was remarked that the sigh of relief of the Admiralty staff would have sufficed alone to get the ships under way, so trepidatious had they stood of the ill omen of dead or contrary winds.

  Lamachus' division moved out first, though he himself and his flagship, Hegemonia, had embarked days prior with his squadron to secure the cape and alert our Corcyrean allies to the fleet's departure. Now: the fast corvettes, called “cutthroats,” in columns of two, sixteen in all, then the fifty-oared galleys, thirty-six, flanking the cargo, troop, and horse transports which advanced in a mass in the center. These, numbering a hundred and sixty-seven, took an hour to clear the reviewing stands.

  Next came the men-of-war, the triremes, in formation by squadron, ten and twelve across and four deep, with each commander on the left in the post of honor. First one-hundred-seventy-four-oared Procne, Autocles' ship, Lamachus' vice-admiral. Her squadronmates were Pompe, Ajax, Ptolemais, Gorgon, and Grampus, whose sail was crimson and bore the image of its guardian beast; then Circe, Thrush, Hippolyta,

  Theama, Ram, and Relentless.

  Under her crimson sail with griffin emblem came Pyrpnous, Fire-Breather, Pythiades' ship, the hero of Cos. Then Indomitable, Dynamis, Thraseia, Amphitrite, Euxinaia, Achilleia, Centaura, and the triplets Tisiphone, Megaera, and Alecto.

  The Nereid squadron under Aristogenes: Thetis, Pytho, Panope, Galatea, Balte, Alcyone, Euploia, Sea Eagle, Invincible, Endeavor, and Aianateia. Then Two-in-Hand, Epitome, Vigilant, Equipoise, Redoubtable, and Medusa.

  Nicias' flagship, Trident, led the Oceanus division, her sail of purple and gold and her forepeak triple-pronged in sheathed bronze. Flanking her advanced Tethys, Doris, Eurynome, Zephyr West Wind, Aias, and Antigonis, then Mentor and Bay of Marathon, the sister ships Styx and Acheron, funded by Crito, Socrates' devotee. Next Strife, Castalia, Scylla, Cecropis with its blazon half-woman, half-dragon, and Aphrodisia, whose figurehead, bare-breasted, had been crafted by Phidias himself.

  Then Typho, Medea, Hellhound, Anthesteria, Tauropolis, Clytemnestra, Fear, and Discord; Paean, Indefatigable, and Dauntless. Last Syntaxis, Hippothontis, Eleusis, Hecate, Merciless, Ostracon, and Arete.

  Now the Thunderbolt division, forty-one ships, under Alcibiades. His helmsman was Antiochus, wing commanders Chaemedemus, Menestheus, and Adeimantus. At the fore rode the flagship, Artemisia, then Atalanta and Parthenos, the Virgin, trailed by the Amazons, Antiope, Hippolyta, and Penthesilea, with Iris, Aigle, Valor, and Europa.

  Next Leaina, Lioness, flanked by Hysteria, Reckless, Olympia, Fury, Sophia, Danae, Rhea, Psyche, and Euphranousa. Then Palladium, Semele, Althaea, Nightingale, and Leopard. Hebe, Devastator, Daphne, Erebus, the three Fates, Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Last Pandora, Swift, Terror, Penelope, Owl, Corsair, Necropolis, and Calypso.

  This was the mightiest armada ever launched beneath the banner of a single city. So densely lapped rose the sails of the second and third divisions that their mass cut off the wind of the first. What open water remained stood so thick with small craft that one could have trod from Eetion to Munychia and never gotten his feet wet. There must have been a thousand boys'

  “itty-bits,” pressing so densely about the warships that the oars in their sweep overturned no small number. The boys cheered even as they foundered, clinging to the keels of their overturned pots.

  You are impatient, my grandson. You wish me to get to the notorious affair of the Herms. Here is how I learned of it: The date was twenty-one days before departure. I had been up all night at Naval Affairs, racing not only to complete this document but to pack up the office, which was being relocated to quarters in the Choma mews, at the harbor. With two other officers, my friend Orestiades, captain of the Resolute, and the younger Pericles, son of the great Pericles and the courtesan Aspasia, I emerged to the dawn from our basement space. It was the morning after Gleaning Day, the early barley harvest, when the widows and orphans had had their hours to scavenge and the stubbled fields, picked clean, had been set ablaze outside the city and across on Euboea. The haze, drifting down the channel and mingling with the sea fog, cast the city in an eerie pall. We had just started toward the marketplace when a press of women hastened past on the Street of the Weavers. They were wailing and uttering cries of distress.

  We turned the corner into Council Square. More throngs clamored in disorder. Two slaves dashed past. Pericles seized one and demanded to know what was going on. “They've knocked all the cocks off, sir!”

  “By Heracles, speak plain and clear.”

  “The herms, Captain. The whole city's dickless!”

  During the night a pack or packs of vandals, identities unknown, had rampaged through a number of quarters, defacing the stone statues of Hermes that stood with their erect phalluses as good-luck pieces before private residences and government buildings. The criminals had batted these knobs off and even smashed the statues' faces.

  Who could have committed such an outrage? No sentence shy of death could requite such an act of desecration! Here was a violation not alone of clan or tribe but of the commonwealth itself, of the divinity who shields all voyagers and sustains the very polity of our nation! Already the crowds-stricken with terror at the vengeance of heaven which such a stroke of impiety was certain to draw down, not to mention the evil luck it would pronounce upon the fleet-hissed with the names of notorious malefactors. Troops of vigilantes dashed off. The wheel and rack were readied. The square seethed in mob fury.

  I recall the look of consternation upon the face of my comrade, the younger Pericles. Of his family, so devast
ated by plague and war, none remained save himself to link Alcibiades to the elder Pericles. For this reason, and the young man's native gifts, Alcibiades had clasped him close, more as an older brother than a twice-removed cousin; Pericles esteemed his elder without reservation.

  “This is Androcles' work,” the young man declared at once. “He or the Philaidae in league with Anytus and his ilk.” He directed our attention to certain men who circulated, inflaming the mob's passion. Surely these were provocateurs, recruited to foment this unrest. “They will accuse Alcibiades. I must find him and inform him at once.”

  Charges were lodged against Alcibiades that morning.

  Witnesses were produced, slaves and freedmen, the former put to the torture, the latter granted immunity. On the wheel no few named the object their tormentors sought. In the Assembly Pythonicus, Androcles, Thessalus, and Anytus called for the penalty of death.

  Alcibiades came forward, dismissing these accusations as a ham-fisted attempt by his enemies to frame him for a crime only a madman would commit. How witless did his foes imagine him to be, that on the eve of his most passionately sought triumph he would sabotage his own cause in this preposterous manner?

  Alcibiades denied all charges and demanded to be tried at once.

  This hysteria must be put behind him before the fleet sailed. But his enemies, reinforced now by Procles, Euthydemus, Hagnon, and Myrtilus, brought forward fresh indictments, including profanation of the Mysteries. The accusers produced slaves and attendants who, under grants of immunity, described evenings in private homes when Alcibiades and others of his circle had donned mock-sacral garments and, prancing about in unholy caricature of priests and mystae, had amused themselves by presiding over sham initiations in disreverence of divine Demeter. These offenses were cited not merely as outrages against the gods, meriting death on that account alone, but as evidence of their perpetrators' contempt for the democracy itself. They were the acts of a would-be tyrant, who set himself above all law.