Sailors need wine when they're in action and need it more when they're not. The hardship of the seaman's life is well accounted; what is understood less is the toll of fear. The landsman thinks sailors love the sea or feel at home upon it. This is erroneous. Most are in terror of the salt element even at its mildest; in a blow they must be driven to their benches by the lash. Nor has the architect's hand crafted a vessel less seaworthy than a trireme. Her freeboard to the thalamites' port is less than a yard; in the least swell, seas are shipped without letup. The trieres is built for speed, not strength.
In a hammering sea she buckles; her planks start. In a running swell she bellies and hogbacks. Her ram ploughs under driven before a gale, her perilous trim makes her hell to handle in a wind from abeam, and her long slender profile threatens to broach her to in a blow of any kind. To survive a gale leaves the seaman less hardened to hazard than in terror of the next. Add fear of the foe to the dread of death on the featureless waste, and you manage a brew of terror that few may endure, even over the short haul, and next to none, season upon season.
Alcibiades, fleet scuttlebutt declared, was skimming loot from the plunder. His mistress Timandra, now styled by the seamen
“the Sicilian” for her birth at Hyccara, was said to have cached above five talents, which she used to secure sanctuaries in Thrace for her lover, should affairs compel him to slip the cable. The men's disgruntlement went past bitching. “That's our drink and our pussy,” they complained, and they were right.
Want of funds drove Alcibiades to recklessness. With the princes Seuthes and Medocus he raided the Thracian interior. But the tribesmen proved of such warlike disposition and so adept at concealing their goods that casualties outstripped profit ten to one.
The men refused to march a step from the ships. Alcibiades could no longer “borrow” from friendly districts or merchandise his W.C.'s. As Lysander tightened fortification of the coastal cities, it became a task of peril even to land for water or to take the midday meal.
Our squadron was dispatched to reinforce Alcibiades' at Phocaea. My log records putting in on the way at Thercale.
Villagers in the hundreds lined the landing beach; these first stoned the ships, hurling curses; then, when after much remonstrance we had disabused them of any hostile intent and were at last permitted to land, the women flocked about us weeping. Alcibiades' troops had razed four towns, they claimed, carrying off money and cattle. Pericles assured the women they must be in error; the pirates could only be Lysander's men, impersonating Athenians to sow insurrection.
We pressed north. Smoke could be seen on the hills; fishing smacks repeated the refugees' story; columns of displaced villagers, they said, were fleeing to the interior. We encountered Theama and Panegyris, triremes under Alcibiades, returning to Samos with hostages. These were children of our allies, held for ransom. Had straits become so desperate? We caught up at Cyme. You know this city, my grandson. Its flavor is Eastern and easygoing, its siting above a charming harbor called the Saucer.
Alcibiades had demanded twenty talents of the district. The inhabitants had pled poverty and begged his sufferance, citing the prodigious levies contributed heretofore, which had left them barely eking survival. He countered that the fleet's needs superseded all. When the citizens could not pay, they took the step of barring the gates to him. He attacked. It became a fiasco.
Athenian units balked at aggression against allies; several refused orders. The only corps which followed Alcibiades without qualm were his Dii, those most savage of the Thracians. In the aftermath such atrocities were revealed as could not be covered up.
The city was taken. Treasure was extorted.
Our squadron arrived in the immediate sequel. Courts-martial had concluded; four Athenian officers and sixty-one men had been convicted. The charges, arising from an action under naval command, could not be reduced to simple insubordination. This was mutiny. The penalty was death.
Alcibiades had contrived to free a number under sundry pretexts and look the other way as more escaped. But nine oarsmen, led by one Orestides of Marathon, refused to ratify their blame by such expedients. They were guiltless, they maintained. It was their orders that were criminal.
It was postnoon, blistering and sere under a fierce Etesian wind.
The accused were being held in a saddler's shop just off that common called the Square of Truth. Alcibiades was drunk, not so as to derange his reason but only, one felt, to dull the sensation of this ordeal. He sought only a measure to get these men off the hook.
He could not compromise his authority by negotiating with the mutineers in person; he dispatched Pericles instead. I accompanied my friend on my own.
We spoke with the man Orestides and his companions as they were being led out by marines and bound to execution posts. The fellow was as honorable as any I have ever known. We wept to hear him state his case, and his men's, with such conviction, so absent artifice. He was running no bluff. Such was his honest outrage at the state of the fleet that he and his mates would, in his words, “forsake our lives before our purpose.”
Alcibiades ordered the execution. The marines refused. I have never witnessed such a scene of grief and consternation. Alcibiades had two companies of Thracian tribesmen, OiL He ordered them to do it.
They did.
Such outrage now swept the fleet, that free Athenians be massacred by savages, that Alcibiades must stand offshore all night aboard Indomitable in fear for his life. Next dawn he ordered the plunder of Cyme, which had been collected in the bowls of two shields, laid out by the paymasters along the beaching strand. The men were marched past the tables. Not one would take his pay.
That night came report of Notium.
A sea battle had been fought there, two days past. Lysander's squadrons had routed ours, commanded by Antiochus, whom Lysander had slain. Fifteen Athenian ships had been sunk or captured-no great loss in numbers, but calamitous in morale.
Alcibiades raced back to Ephesus, drew the fleet up at the harbor mouth. But Lysander was too shrewd to come out. The now-completed Pteron sealed the bastion tight. Spartan and Peloponnesian troops held every foot of shore.
Sixteen days later came this report from Athens: the vote for the new year's Board of Generals had been tallied. Alcibiades had not been reelected.
Two dawns later he addressed the fleet in farewell.
He dared not return home for fear of trial; he must retire, to Thrace perhaps if the rumors of strongholds acquired by Timandra were true. He dismissed Indomitable's crew, permitting each man to seek another berth. One hundred fifty-four oarsmen and marines volunteered to share Alcibiades' fate; they would stick with him.
That night my vessel, Thyone, drilled beyond the breakwater, the Hook, conducting signal exercises with several Samian corvettes and dispatch runners. We came in late, making our reversion by cresset-light. As the craft swung stern-to, preparing to beach, we remarked a warship launch from the strand and gather way, under half-stick, against the tide.
We peered. The vessel bore neither running lights nor signal lamp; her crew rowed in silence, stroke sounded only by the tapstone. She was Indomitable.
It had been eleven months to the day from our fleet admiral's apotheosis at Athens to this skulking decampment to exile, by the dark of the moon.
Book IX
TIDES OF WAR
XLIII
BETWEEN THE EARTH AND THE SEA
The exit of Alcibiades was hailed at Athens [Grandfather continued] with a relief verging upon the ecstatic (or so my wife reported by letter received at Samos that fall), such had become the people's trepidation, not alone of that tyranny they imagined they had so serendipitously eluded but of the unaccountability of a single all-powerful commander whose conduct of the war had become at best idiosyncratic and whose style of generalship, the hallmark of which had become the conspicuousness in high places of his cronies and his lover, had begun to border upon the regal.
The Assembly replaced Alcibiades w
ith a college of ten generals, to impede any attempt at concentration of power, and sent out as well a supplementary body composed of the ten tribal taxiarchs, serving as ships' captains, to act as a further check on recurrence of excess. If these curbs were not enough, the Assembly buttressed the fleet by drafting a number of past generals to command single ships. Illustrious names now bedizened the trierarchs' roster.
Thyone made a passage in convoy to Methymna; two vessels ahead sailed Alcyone, commanded by Theramenes, while to flank rowed Indefatigable under the great Thrasybulus.
It succeeded. Command was now dispersed across the entire political spectrum; rivalry receded; order was restored. Scarcity and hardship chafed less, shared by such a company. So many crack foreign sailors had deserted to the enemy that for the first time a fleet of Athens must advance to battle inferior in seamanship to the foe. This sobered the force further. Crews trained with a will; discipline was enforced internally, by shipmates, not imposed by officers. I may say of all my overseas tours this aggregation of ships and men was, if not the most brilliant, certainly the most able.
The departure of our supreme commander had as well profound consequences for Polemides, who learned of it, he told me, while yet in hiding in the aftermath of Ephesus.
With Alcibiades out of power, Polemides could not go home.
Road's Turn would be lost if it wasn't already, and with it all means of support for his brother's children and his own. His conviction for treason would stand. He was a hunted man now, by both sides. Even to cross to Samos to join his bride and child carried grave risks. He was caught, as the poet says, between the earth and the sea.
The estate of my father-in-law, Aurore's father [Polemides recounted], comprised some twenty acres in the hill country remote from the port of Samos, on the north slope above Pillion Bay. One approached from the city side via the Heraion Road. I had chosen to land, however, at the island's most remote point, on the bay side, while it was yet dark, a headland called the Old Woman's Tit. I had got from the mainland to the islet of Tragia, then at last, a month and more past the time of my bride's term, ferried the final leg by a lad of fourteen named Sophron in his father's bumboat he had stolen. The boy asked no payment, nor even inquired my name, undertaking the hazard, he professed, purely for the adventure of it.
I mounted via the back track, steep and stony, and had worked a lather by the time the sun, and the welcome tiles of the farmhouse roof, hove into prospect above. One could see the compound from a distance: the pair of stone steadings, the hillward trace between, and the lane of camphor trees that mounted to the house itself. The family tombs were sited upon this track, and as I passed I noted, hung upon the lintel, two epikedeioi stephanoi, the wreaths of tamarisk and laurel offered in the islands to Demeter and Kore in intercession for the dead. Has the old man passed off? I wondered. Perhaps Aurore's grandfolk, who inhabited cottages of the downslope enclave. I hurried on, minding myself not to permit my own joy at this much-behindhand homecoming to obtrude upon another's grief. From the distance of a stone's sling I spied my brother-in-law Anticles, with his dog Ironhead, striding into view from the corner of the steading. Two drystone dikers waited upon him with their mawls and stringers. “Has the garden wall taken another tumble?” I called in salute. Anticles turned and saw me. Such an alteration deformed his features as to choke my greeting in midbreath. His elder brother Theodorus turned into view from the hillward trace. He took one look, bent in midstride, and seizing a stone in each fist, advanced upon me.
“You.”
This was his solitary word.
“What has happened?” I heard myself cry.
Stones screamed past my ears. “You are not welcome here.”
I let fall kit and arms and, spreading palms wide, beseeched clemency in the name of the gods.
“May hell take you,” Anticles spat, “and the evil you have brought upon our house!”
Both brothers advanced. Even the dikers rose. I could hear the dogs clamoring.
“Where is Aurore? What has happened?”
“Get quit, thou villain!”
A stone of Theodorus struck my hip.
I begged the brothers to tell me what had happened. Let me speak to Aurore. “She is my wife, and the child my own.”
“Attend them there.” Theodorus indicated the tombs.
All who have been soldiers know these, Jason: such hours when pain of flesh or spirit surpasses the heart's capacity to endure it. I shook myself, as in a nightmare. How could these, my brothers, advance upon me with such hatred? How could those wreaths be for them I so loved?
“Leave this country!” Anticles strode upon me, brandishing his staff. “By the gods, if you cross again within my sight, that hour will end your life or mine.”
I withdrew. Where the farm's limit fell away to the bay, two lads of the neighbor's were clearing brush. From them I learned that my bride had succumbed two months previous. Poisoned. The child in her womb had perished with her.
Somehow it had become post noon. I mounted the hill again. At the fence the dogs cut me off in a pack. Anticles roared down, horseback.
“What may I do, brother,” I beseeched him, “to requite this woe…
He made no answer, only wheeled his mount in place, regarding him who stood beneath with such rue as one may donate not to another of humankind, but to a wraith or specter, life-fled yet present, denied repose beneath the earth.
“You have stolen the sun from our sky, you and he who sent you.
May your days, and his, be ever as lightless as you have made ours. ”
XLIV
A WITNESS TO HOMICIDE
Polemides broke off at this point and was unable for long moments to continue. When at length he recovered himself, he declared that he had had a change of heart regarding his trial. He no longer wished to contest the indictment; he would plead guilty.
He had been deliberating upon this for some time, he acknowledged, but had not until this moment come to it as the course of honor. His lone regret was that his affairs had consumed so much of my time, proffered, he acknowledged, with such generosity and regard. He begged my pardon.
I was seized with outrage at this defection and lit into the man in fury. How dare he exploit the empathy of my heart and defame by enlisting it in his cause the memory of beloved comrades? Did he think I undertook this chore lightly? Because I admired him or deemed him worthy of deliverance? I despised him and all he had done, I declared, and had donated my advocacy only that the narration of his self-dishonorment may serve as a manifest of infamy to our countrymen. His cause had ceased to be his own the moment he sounded me to assist him; how dare he break off shy of the mark? Yes, die, I heard my voice exclaim, and good riddance! I strode to the door and pounded upon it, calling for the turnkey.
Naught but echo met my halloo. It was the hour of the man's supper, I realized; he would be across the way at the refectory. I could hear our client behind me, chuckling. “It seems you have become a prisoner as well, my friend.”
“You are a cur, Polemides.”
“I never pretended otherwise, mate.”
I turned back, already recognizing beneath wrath's receding flush how profoundly I had come to care for this villain. The veteran's features declined into a smile. He acknowledged the aptness of the verdict I had pronounced upon him, remarking that its single shortcoming was its failure to go far enough.
He continued not with words, but by withdrawing from his chest two articles of correspondence which, one could not but infer from the way he handled them, he had re-perused recently and whose contents had affected him profoundly. He passed them to me.
“Sit down, my friend. You're going nowhere for a while anyway.” The first item was a letter from him to his great-aunt Daphne, dated some months subsequent to the final destruction of the Athenian fleet at Aegospotami, that calamity which made inevitable the city's capitulation and, after twenty-seven years, her defeat at the hands of the Spartans and their Persian and Pelo
ponnesian allies.
At that time Polemides, he told me now, stood in the service of Lysander, with convictions for treason and murder imposed from his homeland. He writes to his aunt at Athens, instructing her to prepare for the siege and surrender to come:
… factions among our countrymen will nominate themselves to procure what they will call the Peace. The nation's sovereignty will be given over; her fleet destroyed; Long Walls torn down. A puppet government of collaborators will be imposed. Acts of reprisal will follow. Perhaps by my return I may mitigate, at least for you and our family, the effects of the lawlessness which is certain to ensue.
You must get out of the city, Aunt, to the land. Take Lion's children. Can you locate my own? Please, get them to safety. The seal on this letter is that of Lysander's staff. It will protect you, but don't use it unless the issue is life-and-death, for others, our countrymen, will make you pay later.
Lastly, my dear, do not be present when Lysander's squadrons enter the Piraeus or you will see that which no patriot as yourself may bear without heartbreak: the child you raised, in the scarlet of the foe. I am beyond love of country and long past shame. I act only as others will and have, to preserve my own.
His aunt replies:
Thou shameless soul! How dare you apply care for my person as pretext for your perfidy? I wish you had perished in the quarries, or in some nameless scrape where you could still be called your father's son and not the agent of infamy you have so wickedly shown yourself to be. God grant I never look upon your face again.
You no longer exist for me. I have no nephew.
I passed the correspondence back to Polemides. His aspect conveyed clearly that he shared this condemnation articulated by his aunt, and to such a depth as to preclude contravention, at least now, at this hour. I felt him slip from me as a corpse upon dark water, when the boat hook fails of purchase and one's vessel, driven by its way, passes on, to put about no more.
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