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

by Steven Pressfield

  “First, you must sanction empire and embrace money. You must become conversant with the use of both and no longer despise them.”

  At these words the assembly revolted. Howls of outrage compelled Alcibiades to bite his tongue. Voices cried that empire degrades, foreign ways debase, and cupidity corrupts all; commerce turns citizen against citizen and avarice makes men seek wealth instead of virtue. Protests resounded about the speaker with such an uproar that for an instant it seemed he might be in physical danger. At length the tumult subsided, quelled by the magistrates and proctors.

  “Money is not evil of itself, men of Sparta,” Alcibiades resumed,

  “but like sword and spear, whose use you understand and do not contemn, it is as good or bad as the uses to which it is put. In war money is a weapon. But since you revolt with such passion against its introduction, let me propose this: use it only overseas. Don't permit it at home. But use it you must and for this, the second alteration I counsel:

  “You must embrace power by sea. You must have a navy. Not a bathtub armada of allies and amateurs as you possess today, but a first-rate fleet capable of challenging Athens upon that element she calls her own. I do not suggest, Peers and gentlemen, that you renounce shield and spear and mount to the oarsman's bench. You would sooner cut off your right arms. But you may learn to fight as knights upon the sea. You may be officers; you may command.”

  Indignation greeted this, though characterized less by cries of outrage than murmurs of disquiet, whose text was that sea power degrades the polity, elevating the meanest and emboldening them to strike for equality with their betters. Have a navy and you have democracy-and this the commonwealth of the Spartans would never countenance. Alcibiades waited again, till this clamor had abated.

  “Already subject states of Athens have applied to you, men of Sparta, entreating your aid in throwing off the imperial yoke. Now is the time, while Athens reels beneath this Syracusan calamity.

  But how may you abet these would-be rebels, who are island states and cities of Asia Minor? Your army cannot swim there.

  You must have a navy. Remember, too, that every subject state of Athens you draw into revolt will add her call to others, for each, fearing reprisal if her insurrection fails, seeks allies to share her peril. Each state detached depletes Athens' tribute and impoverishes her treasury. The infallible maxim remains: so long as Athens commands the sea, she cannot be overthrown. The converse, however, is equally self-apparent. Defeat her fleet and you defeat Athens.

  “Now I arrive at the third and final point, and this you will find hateful tenfold beyond the first two. Therefore shout me down.

  But admit as you do so the inevitability of what I propose. For without the implementation of this third point the first two stand moot.

  “You must treat with the barbarian.

  “You must ally yourself with Persia.”

  To my astonishment, and Alcibiades' as well judging by his expression, this final proposition did not provoke the anticipated storm of outrage. Reaction stood divided, it seemed, between shock and quiescence, even acquiescence, for all must admit, if not publicly, that this policy had been in effect for years, though clandestinely convoked and ham-fistedly implemented.

  “Only the Persian possesses wealth of a scale to buy and man the ships that will defeat Athens. You must swallow hard, Spartans, and seek his alliance, not as you do now, with contempt and aversion, but sincerely and earnestly. You must find officers who can pull this off, without being outwitted by the barbarian (for the cunning of his courtiers is celebrated) and without estranging your Hellenic allies, who call you, as you yourselves proclaim, the liberators of Greece.”

  A conjoining with the Mede, Alcibiades at once qualified his counsel, did not mean crawling into bed in Persian pajamas. It signified only a confederation of convenience, to be exploited so long as it served Spartan interests and renounced the instant it ceased to.

  “Hateful as this counsel may ring to you sons of Leonidas whose heroism preserved Greece from the Median yoke, it possesses the inevitability of history. Persia has the gold. The Great King fears Athens. His treasure will purchase the fleet that will bring victory.

  All that is wanting is your will to command it.”

  Alcibiades drew up. He did not glance to the envoys of Athens, though plainly he was aware of the enormity he had just pronounced, that is, to define that course which, enacted by his hearers, must bring upon his nation vanquishment and prostration.

  A species of awe transfixed his listeners. What Alcibiades had proposed was treason of such breathtaking scale that, like tragedy on the stage, its very pronouncement evoked terror and pity. Never had I feared heaven as in that moment. I strained toward Alcibiades, to discover on his face any token of such awe or dread.

  There was none. The exile occupied a promontory upon which none but himself dared tread. “You have commanded my counsel, men of Sparta, and I have given it.”

  Two further exchanges recall that day. The first took place immediately succeeding Alcibiades' speech. He had stepped down and was withdrawing among the crowd when his way was interdicted by the knight Callicratidas, who later would distinguish himself so singularly in the cause which he now condemned. Conceding the utility of that course proposed by Alcibiades, he demanded of his compatriots if victory at all costs was their aim.

  “What will have become of us, brothers, when we, emulating this program of infamy, mount victorious to the Athenian Acropolis? What kind of men will we have become, who place ourselves in league with tyrants to enslave free men? Our guest here has taught himself to dress like us, train like us, speak like us.

  But the chameleon, they say, may turn every color but white.” He faced about toward his antagonist. “What is this new nation into which you wish to turn us, Alcibiades? I will name it in a single word: Athens!”

  Cries of endorsement seconded this. Callicratidas continued to Alcibiades: “Will we, embracing your counsel, turn ourselves into money-grubbing, pine-pulling Athenians? Will our boast be that we in our turn enslave all Greece? And who will rule this pseudo-Athens you propose-this democracy… “

  He gestured with contempt to Lysander, Endius, and a number of their fellows with whom, clearly, Alcibiades had allied himself.

  These held in silence, leaving it to their confederate to rejoin.

  “I understand and expected such from you, Callicratidas. Were I you, I might reply the same. But understand this. What I have set forth I do not for my own gain-how can it profit me? — but as one who counsels a friend for his own good. I hate the course I have placed before you. But it cries out with a god's voice and that god is Necessity. You will embrace it willingly, with wisdom and forethought, or unwillingly, compelled by events. But you will do it. You must or perish.”

  The second exchange came moments later; I chanced to overhear it as I attempted to approach Lysander, with whom I still had gained no intercourse, as he was making his way out through the crush. The ephor Antalcidas, an elder of sixty who had distinguished himself in battle at both Mantinea and Amphipolis, had closed beside the younger man and tugged him apart in debate.

  “…I wish with all my heart, old uncle,” Lysander was saying, employing that deferential and affectionate epithet proper for addressing one's senior, “that options held as clear-cut as in our grandfathers' day. But this is not Thermopylae and we are not Leonidas. Lacedaemon today is like a ship driven before a storm; she may not turn back and cannot stand still. Her only chance is to beat onward, crowding on all sail.”

  “And does all sail,” Antalcidas replied, “mean treating with despots, debasing our honor with deception and duplicity?”

  “Where the skin of the lion will not stretch, it must be pieced out with the skin of the fox.”

  “God preserve us, Lysander, when men like you ascend to dominance in Lacedaemon. You and that villain of Athens whose name, accursed, I abhor to utter. A pair spawned in hell, to rule these hell-spawned times!”

/>   “Times have changed,” Lysander replied coolly, “and what has compelled them if not God's will? Tell me, old man. Do mortals not honor heaven by altering with the alteration of the times and profane her by adhering mindlessly to antique ways?”

  "Lysander, you elevate blasphemy to a new acme.”

  “What would you have us do, Antalcidas? Cluster on the salt shore chanting hymns of glories gone, while the future speeds past us more swiftly than a racing man-of-war?”

  The elder now espied Alcibiades, crossing to Lysander's shoulder. His glance swung from one to the other, as if fixing as the foe these twain together, representative of their generation and not their several states.

  “I give thanks to the Almighty, Lysander, that I will not live to see that Sparta over which you and men like you come to rule.”

  XXVI

  AMONG THE SONS OF LEONIDAS

  Alcibiades was absent much of that summer, in Ionia and the islands, working as an agent of Sparta. As earlier during the Peace his enterprise had brought into alliance with Athens such great states as Argos, Elis, and Mantinea, now he enlisted such powers on the counter hand. He incited Chios, Erythrae, and Clazomenae to revolt from Athens, then sailed to Miletus and brought her over too. He then produced the prime prize: alliance for Sparta with the king of Persia. He induced Teas to tear down her walls, and Lebedos and Aerae to revolt. He did this alone, backed by one Spartan commander and only five ships. He directed the Chians to widen the rising to Lesbos, where they incited to insurrection the great states of Mytilene and Methymna, while Spartan land forces moved to secure Clazomenae and capture Cyme. And Alcibiades had conquered another sovereign province. This was the heart of Timaea, wife of the Spartan king Agis. She was his lover, every chambermaid and urchin of Lacedaemon told, and carried his child as well.

  As for myself, recovery came labored and tardy. As late as summer I could not hike the slopes at Therai, let alone sprint them.

  Soldiers say a man dies when more of them he loves reside beneath the earth than above it. That was my story. Yet breath is a resistless river, and dawn a reveille sore to ignore.

  Alcibiades had drawn a berth for me before he left: imparting a chest with full kit, a phoinikis cloak, and ten minae in gold, an enormous sum, all I could have saved from Sicily had the expedition succeeded. I was lodged in the guest barracks at Limnai, a room of my own, and enjoyed the status of xenos, guest-friend, the same as an ambassador. Meals I may take at Endius' mess, the Amphyction. I could train in the gymnasia or hunt if invited.

  Sacrifices I may offer at any temple save those proscribed to non-Dorians. In addition I was granted privileges to both Endius' and his brother Sphrodias' estates. This meant I could help myself to horses or dogs, as Peers do, even claim a helot as my attendant. I might take water from any spring or public well. The only rights denied were those to bear arms or take fire. My benefactor's final instructions were to keep my mouth shut till he returned.

  It was Alcibiades indeed who had compelled Lysander's intercession for me; this I learned from old friends, mates of the Upbringing with whom I now reestablished acquaintance and through whose eyes and confidences I assimilated afresh the state of the Lacedaemonians.

  The city had changed much in the years since I had seen it. I was invited on a hunt. The yeoman of snares was a Messenian serf they called Radish. As he and his seconds staked the trail, our host, a Peer named Amphiarius, called to him to speed it up. “I'm humping as fast as I can,” replied the fellow, without a breath of “sir” or “my lord.” A decade earlier such insolence would have left its utterer ekpodon, “out from underfoot.” Now it was let go with a shrug and a jest.

  The effect of the neodamodeis, the “new citizens” who had earned their freedom serving under arms, and the brasidioi, who had done likewise beneath the great general Brasidas, was everywhere. No vassal, however lowly, regarded his abasement as irremediable. “Hope is a dangerous liquor,” my savior Lysander had addressed the ephorate in a speech so notorious it had actually been written down and circulated, unheard-of in Lacedaemon.

  “War has unstoppered the flasket, and nothing may seal it again.”

  Lysander and Endius had set themselves up as patrons of the unfranchised, or at least recognized the inevitability of integrating these into the polity. Neither was an altruist, and certainly no democrat, but like Alcibiades a realist. The pair had been reconciled to him, I was informed, or embraced the wisdom of mutual exploitation. It was Endius who had procured his friend's admission within Laconian borders and Lysander, as polemarch, who stood surety for him now.

  “All great states,” the transcription of Lysander's address read,

  “found themselves upon an outrage of nature, from which springs both their vigor and their vulnerability. Athens' derangement is democracy. To the good, this species of license unleashes enterprise in the citizenry unknown in more closely governed states, and these energies may propel the nation to unprecedented prosperity. Its mischief is the envy it looses in the body politic.

  Democracy devours its young. The higher a man ascends, the more fervidly do his fellows work to procure his downfall, so that when an individual of legitimate greatness does arise, the state may make use of him a moment only before the mob lashes his limbs to the stake and fires the brands at his feet.

  “As to Lacedaemon, our aberration is the servitude we have imposed upon our helots. Our bondsmen's sweat produces, we imagine, that might by which we knuckle them under. But who rules whom? We lie down upon a carpet of those who would eat us raw in the night and wonder that we toss in our slumber. And our army, for all its vaunted invincibility, ventures afield timorously and tardily, trepidant to turn its back on the kitchen cleavers it leaves behind at home. On campaign we face our pickets inboard, more in fear of those who serve us than of the enemy. Our unemancipated masses are the sword by which we thrive or perish, and we must seize this or be slain by it.”

  Lysander wanted a navy. He wanted expansion and inclusion.

  But the ancient constitution would not permit purchase to enact reforms. Nothing could change. Nothing would. Yet it must, and these young men knew it.

  Here was the further unsettling phenomenon-the political clubs or “oil-and-dusters” as they were called after their spawning grounds, the wrestling schools. Such hives of ferment had never existed. Now they were rife and dominated all.

  Part of the genius of the ancient laws, by which the Spartan polity had maintained herself intact over six centuries, was the leavening of youth with age throughout all institutions. There were veterans everywhere; no club or clique escaped supervision by its elders. The oil-and-dusters were tearing this apart. They were young men's clubs and they were impatient. They sided with the future, and their leaders were Lysander and Endius, Chalcideus and Mindarus. Gylippus, too, was a member of “the Ring,” as the hero Brasidas before him. In short this camp comprised the most brilliant and ambitious Spartiates irrespective of fortune or birth.

  Endius was far the wealthiest. His estate in the north valley produced such exceptional wine as to be called meliades, honey-sweet, and sufficient surplus of barley, figs, and cheeses that Endius could sponsor no fewer than four score defrocked Gentleman-Rankers whose fortunes had fallen so far as to no longer support their membership in a mess. Endius advanced their dues, restoring their station as Spartiates. In addition he stood guarantor for a number of mothakes, Peers' bastard sons, funding their tuition to the Upbringing. These stood now as loyal to Endius as to the commonwealth. Accounting the helots by whom he was considered patron, it was said that Endius commanded a private army second only to the kings'.

  Championing Alcibiades had elevated his influence further.

  Each success his friend produced overseas redounded to Endius' credit at home. His horse property at Kranioi was a hundred and ten acres; on this site he had set up a headquarters in exile for his companion. There, on the eve of Alcibiades' decampment to work his mischief in the East, I found myself calle
d to attend upon him and a number of his comrades, Peers of Sparta and those Athenians who had been banished with him. A boys' equestrian competition was just finishing as I arrived; the companions, Alcibiades and Endius foremost, made a show of the awards presentation, to the delight of all. Sacrifice and feasting followed, at which no syllable of care was uttered. At last past midnight the party settled in Alcibiades' hermitage. I was summoned to the bench beside him.

  “Tell me of Sicily,” he commanded.

  The room was his office. Every surface sprawled with transcripts of Assembly proceedings, law-court records, and administrative warrants of Athens, Argos, Thebes, Corinth; the eye took in fleet documents, construction vouchers, Orders of Sail, court-martial transcripts, decoded skytalai, every species of military and political intelligence imaginable, while the floor-to-ceiling cubbies superabounded with the personal correspondence which, by a glance at its addressees, flowed to every city of Greece, the islands of the Aegean, Ionia, and mainland Asia.

  “You have heard it all already.”

  “Not from you.”

  I told him. It took all night. Endius and the others drifted in and out, or curled in corners, snoring. Alcibiades did not stir. He listened with unwavering attention, interrupting only to command further exposition when I appeared ripe to move on, to his mind prematurely, from a topic or event.

  He wanted to hear it all and hear the worst. A name arising, he pressed for particulars of the man's fate. No detail was too inconsequential. A joke the fellow had made, his woman, the way he died. Alcibiades cared nothing for topography or strategy. The contour of Epipolae, deployment of the fleet, these he passed over.