He went on, “Even if I went back to Athens, my enemies’ witnesses would say one thing, my few friends and I another. No matter how the jury finally voted, no one would ever be sure of the truth. And so I say to you, men of Athens, people of Athens, let us not rely on lies and jurymen who can be swayed by lies. Let us rest my fate on the laps of the gods.”
Nikias started. Alkibiades almost laughed out loud. Didn’t expect that, did you, you omen-mongering fool?
Aloud, he continued, “If we triumph here in Sicily under my command, will that not prove I have done no wrong in the eyes of heaven? If we triumph—as triumph we can, as triumph we shall—then I shall return to Athens with you, and let these stupid charges against me be forgotten forevermore. But if we fail here . . . If we fail here, I swear to you I shall not leave Sicily alive, but will be the offering to repay the gods for whatever sins they reckon me to have committed. That is my offer, to you and to the gods. Time will show what they say of it. But what say you, men of Athens? What say you, people of Athens?”
He waited for the decision of the Assembly he’d convened. He didn’t have to wait long. Cries of “Yes!” rang out, and “We accept!” and “Alkibiades!” A few men tossed their heads and yelled things like “No!” and “Let the decision of the Assembly in Athens stand!” But they were only a few, overwhelmed and outshouted by Alkibiades’ backers.
Turning to Herakleides and Nikias, Alkibiades bowed once more. They’d thought they would be able to address the Athenian soldiers and sailors after he finished. But the decision was already made. Herakleides looked stunned, Nikias dyspeptic.
With another bow, Alkibiades said to Herakleides, “You will take my answer and the true choice of the people of Athens back to the polis?”
The other man needed two or three tries before he managed to stammer out, “Y-Yes.”
“Good.” Alkibiades smiled. “Tell the polis also, I hope to be back there myself before too long.”
Sokrates settled his helmet on his head. The bronze and the glued-in padded lining would, with luck, keep some Syracusan from smashing in his skull. The walls of Syracuse loomed ahead. The Athenians were building their own wall around the city, to cut it off from the countryside and starve it into submission. Now the Syracusans had started a counterwall, thrust out from the fortifications of the polis. If it blocked the one the Athenians were building, Syracuse might stand. If the hoplites Alkibiades led could stop that counterwall . . . A man didn’t need to be a general to see what would happen then.
Sweat streamed down Sokrates’ face. Summer in Sicily was hotter than it ever got back home in Attica. He had a skin full of watered wine, and squirted some into his mouth. Swallowing felt good. A little of the wine splashed his face. That felt good, too.
“Pheu!” said another hoplite close by. “Only thing left of me’ll be my shadow by the time we’re done here.”
Sokrates smiled. “I like that.” He tilted back his helmet so he could drag a hairy forearm across his sweaty forehead, then let the helm fall down into place again. He tapped the nodding crimson-dyed horsehair plume with a forefinger. “This makes me seem fiercer than I am. But since all hoplites wear crested helms, and all therefore seem fiercer than they are, is it not true that the intended effect of the crest is wasted?”
Laughing, the other hoplite said, “You come up with some of the strangest things, Sokrates, Furies take me if you don’t.”
“How can the search for truth be strange?” Sokrates asked. “Do you say the truth is somehow alien to mankind, and that he has no knowledge of it from birth?”
Instead of answering, the other Athenian pointed to one of the rough little forts in which the Syracusans working on their counterwall sheltered. “Look! They’re coming out.” So they were, laborers in short chitons or loincloths, with armored hoplites to protect them while they piled stone on stone. “Doesn’t look like they’ve got very many guards out today, does it?”
“Certainly not,” Sokrates answered. “The next question to be asked is, why have they sent forth so few?”
Horns blared in the Athenian camp. “I don’t think our captain cares why,” the other hoplite said, pulling down his helmet so the cheekpieces and nasal protected his face. “Whatever the reason is, he’s going to make them sorry for being so stupid.”
“But do you not agree that why is always the most important question?” Sokrates asked. Instead of answering, the other hoplite turned to take his place in line. The horns cried out again. Sokrates picked up his shield and his spear and also joined the building phalanx. In the face of battle, all questions had to wait. Sometimes the fighting answered them without words.
The Athenian captain pointed toward the Syracusans a couple of stadia away. “They’ve goofed, boys. Let’s make ’em pay. We’ll beat their hoplites, run their workers off or else kill ’em, and we’ll tear down some of that wall they’re trying to build. We can do it. It’ll be easy. Give the war-cry good and loud so they know we’re coming. That’ll scare the shit out of ’em, just like on the comic stage.”
“How about the comic stage?” the hoplite next to Sokrates asked. “You were up there, in Aristophanes’ Clouds.”
“I wasn’t there in person, though the mask the actor wore looked so much like me, I stood up in the audience to show the resemblance,” Sokrates answered. “And it’s the Syracusans we want to do the shitting, not ourselves.”
“Forward!” the captain shouted, and pointed at the Syracusans with his spear.
Sokrates shouted, “Eleleu! Eleleu!” with the rest of the Athenians as they advanced on their foes. It wasn’t a wild charge at top speed. A phalanx, even a small one like this, would fall to pieces and lose much of its force in such a charge. What made the formation strong was each soldier protecting his neighbor’s right as well as his own left with his shield, and two or three serried ranks of spearheads projecting out beyond the front line of hoplites. No soldiers in the world could match Hellenic hoplites. The Great Kings of Persia knew as much, and hired Hellenes by the thousands as mercenaries.
The Athenians might have made short work of Persians or other barbarians. The Syracusans, though, were just as much Hellenes as they were. Though outnumbered, the soldiers guarding the men building the counterwall shouted back and forth in their drawling Doric dialect and then also formed a phalanx—only four or five rows deep, for they were short of men—and hurried to block the Athenians’ descent on the laborers. They too cried, “Eleleu!”
As a man will do on the battlefield, Sokrates tried to spot the soldier he would likely have to fight. He knew that was a foolish exercise. He marched in the third row of the Athenians, and the enemy he picked might go down or shift position before they met. But, with the universal human longing to find patterns whether they really existed or not, he did it anyway.
“Eleleu! Elel—” Crash! Both sides’ war cries were lost in what sounded like a disaster in a madman’s smithy as the two front lines collided. Spearpoints clattered off bronze corselets and bronze-faced shields. Those shields smacked together, men from each side trying to force their foes to danger. Some spearpoints struck flesh instead of bronze. Shrieks and curses rang through the metallic clangor.
Where the man on whom Sokrates had fixed went, he never knew. He thrust underhanded at another Syracusan, a young fellow with reddish streaks in his black beard. The spearpoint bit into the enemy’s thigh, below the bronze-studded leather strips he wore over his kilt and above the top of his greave. Blood spurted, red as the feathers of a spotted woodpecker’s crest. The Syracusan’s mouth opened enormously wide in a great wail of anguish. He toppled, doing his best to pull his shield over himself so he wouldn’t be trampled.
Relying on weight of numbers, the Athenians bulled their way forward, forcing their foes to give ground and spearing them down one after another. Most of the laborers the Syracusans had protected ran back toward the fort from which they’d come. Some, though, hovered on the outskirts of the battle and flung stones at th
e Athenians. One banged off Sokrates’ shield.
And if it had hit me in the face? he wondered. The answer to that was obvious enough, though not one even a lover of wisdom cared to contemplate.
A Syracusan thrust a spear at Sokrates. He turned it aside with his shield, then quickly stepped forward, using the shield as a battering ram. The enemy soldier gave ground. He was younger than Sokrates—what hoplite wasn’t?—but on the scrawny side. Broad-shouldered and thick through the chest and belly, Sokrates made the most of his weight. The Syracusan tripped over a stone and went down, arms flailing, with a cry of despair. The Athenian behind Sokrates drove a spear into the fallen man’s throat. His blood splashed Sokrates’ greaves.
Athenians went down, too, in almost equal numbers, but they still had the advantage. Before long, their foes wouldn’t be able to hold their line together. Once the Syracusans fled, all running as individuals instead of fighting together in a single unit, they would fall like barley before the scythe.
But then, only moments before that would surely happen, horns blared from the walls of Syracuse. A gate opened. Out poured more Syracusans, rank upon rank of them, the sun gleaming ruddy from their bronzen armor and reflecting in silvery sparkles off countless iron spearheads. “Eleleu!” they roared, and thundered down on the Athenians like a landslide.
“A trap!” groaned a hoplite near Sokrates. “They used those few fellows as bait to lure us in, and now they’re going to bugger us.”
“They have to have twice the men we do,” another man agreed.
“Then we shall have to fight twice as hard,” Sokrates said. “For is it not true that a man who shows he is anything but easy meat will often come out of danger safe, where one who breaks and runs is surely lost? I have seen both victory and defeat, and so it seems to me.”
The more worried he was himself, the more he wanted to keep his comrades steady. The Syracusans out here by the counterwall had hung together well, waiting for their rescuers. Now the Athenians had to do the same. Sokrates looked around. He saw no rescuers. He shrugged inside his corselet. If the Syracusans wanted him, they would have to drag him down.
“Eleleu!” they cried. “Eleleu!”
Screaming like men gone mad, Athenian officers swung their men to face the new onslaught. Nothing was more hopeless, more defenseless, than a phalanx struck in the flank. This way, at least, they would make the enemy earn whatever he got. “Come on, boys!” a captain shouted. “They’re only Syracusans. We can beat them.”
Sokrates wanted to ask him how he knew. No chance for that. The two phalanxes smashed together. Now it was the Athenians who were outnumbered. They fought to keep from being driven back, and to keep the Syracusans from breaking through or sliding around their front. As men in the first few ranks went down, others shoved forward to take their places.
He found himself facing a Syracusan whose spear had broken. The enemy hoplite had thrown away the shaft and drawn his sword—a good enough emergency weapon, but only an emergency weapon when facing a man with a pike. Sokrates could reach him, but he had no chance to reach Sokrates.
He had no chance, that is, till he hacked at Sokrates’ spearshaft just below the head and watched the iron point fly free and thump down on the ground. “Papai!” Sokrates exclaimed in dismay. The Syracusan let out a triumphant whoop. A sword might not be much against a spear, but against a spearshaft . . .
A sword proved not so much. In the front line, Sokrates had more room to wield what was left of his weapon than he would have farther back. He swung the beheaded shaft as if it were a club. It thudded against the Syracusan’s shield. The next blow would have caved in his skull, helm or no helm, if he hadn’t brought the shield up in a hurry. And the third stroke smacked into the side of his knee—he hadn’t got the shield down again fast enough. No greave could protect him against a blow like that. Down he went, clutching his leg. In a scene straight from the Iliad, the hoplite behind him sprang forward to ward him with shield and armored body till comrades farther back could drag him out of the fight.
Sokrates used the moment’s respite to throw down the ruined spear and snatch up one that somebody else had dropped. He dipped his head to the Syracusan across from him. “Bravely done, my friend.”
“Same to you, old man,” the other soldier answered. “A lot of hoplites would have cut and run when they lost their pikes.” He gathered himself. “Brave or not, though, Athenian, I’ll kill you if I can.” Fast as a striking snake, his spearhead darted for Sokrates’ face.
Ducking away from the thrust, Sokrates answered with one of his own. The Syracusan turned it on his shield. They both stepped forward to struggle shield to shield. The Syracusan kept up a steady stream of curses. Panting, winded, Sokrates needed all his breath to fight.
He drew back a couple of paces, not because the enemy hoplite was getting the better of him but because the rest of the Athenians had had to retreat. “Should have stayed, old man,” the Syracusan jeered. “I’d have had you then, or my pals would if I didn’t.”
“If you want me, come and fight me,” Sokrates said. “You won’t kill me with words.” I might fall dead over of my own accord, though. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been so worn. Maybe—probably—he’d never been so worn before. Maybe my friends back in Athens were right, and I should have stayed in the city. War is a young man’s sport. Am I young? He laughed. The Syracusan hoplite who’d been trying to kill him knew the answer to that.
“What’s funny, old man?” the Syracusan demanded.
“What’s funny, young man? That you are what I wish I were,” Sokrates replied.
In the shadowed space between his nasal and cheekpieces, the other man’s eyes widened slightly. “You talk like a sophist.”
“So my enemies have always—Ha!” Sokrates fended off a sudden spearthrust with his shield. “Thought you’d take me unawares, did you?”
“I am your enemy. I—” Now the Syracusan was the one who broke off. He turned his head this way and that to look about. With his helmet on, a hoplite couldn’t move only his eyes. Sokrates looked, too, with quick, wary flicks of the head. He saw nothing. For a moment, he also heard nothing. Then his ears—an old man’s ears, sure enough, he thought—caught the trumpet notes the Syracusan hoplite must have heard a few heartbeats sooner.
Sokrates looked around again. This time, when he looked . . . he saw. Over the crest of a nearby hill came men on horseback, peltasts—light-armed foot soldiers—and a solid column of hoplites. No possible way to doubt which side they belonged to, either. At the head of the column rode Alkibiades, his bright hair shining in the sun, a chiton all of purple—an outrageous, and outrageously expensive, garment—marking him out from every other man.
Shouting out their war cry, the Athenian newcomers roared down on the Syracusans. “We are undone!” one of the Syracusan hoplites cried. They broke ranks and ran back toward their polis. Some of them threw away spears and even shields to flee the faster.
Other Syracusans—perhaps a quarter of their number—tried to go on against the Athenian phalanx they’d been fighting. One of those was the hoplite who’d tussled so long against Sokrates. “Yield,” Sokrates urged. “Yield to me, and I will see to it that you suffer no evil.”
“I serve my polis no less than you serve yours, Athenian,” the man answered, and hurled himself at Sokrates once more. Now, though, with the Syracusan line melting away like rotting ice, he fought not Sokrates alone but three or four Athenians. He fought bravely, but he didn’t last long.
“Forward!” an Athenian officer cried. “Forward, and they break. Eleleu!”
Forward the Athenians went. Hoplites in a body had a chance, often a good chance, against peltasts and horsemen, even if they moved more slowly than their foes. Peltasts could only use their bows and slings and fling javelins from a distance. Likewise, cavalry had trouble closing because the riders would pop off over their horses’ tails if they drove him a charge with the lance. But the panicked, running
Syracusans, also hard-pressed by the Athenian hoplites, went down like trees under carpenters’ axes.
Alkibiades at their head, the Athenian horsemen got in amongst the Syracusans. They speared some and felled others with slashes from their long cavalrymen’s swords. The peltasts tormented the foe with arrows and leaden sling bullets and javelins. And, now roaring “Eleleu!” like men seized by Furies, the Athenian hoplites rolled over the slower and more stubborn Syracusans.
The whole enemy host might have fallen there in front of their polis. But the defenders on the walls saw what was happening to them. The gate from which the Syracusan phalanx had marched forth flew open again. The Syracusans ran for their salvation. The Athenians ran after them—and with them.
Like a lot of veterans, Sokrates saw what that might mean. No matter how winded, no matter how parched, he was, he shouted, “As fast as we can now, men of Athens! If we get into Syracuse among them, the city is ours!” He made his stubby legs twinkle over the ground.
Up ahead, Alkibiades heard his voice. He waved and made his horse rear, clinging to the animal with his knees and with one hand clutching its mane. Then he, too, pointed toward that open gate. The horse came down onto all fours. It galloped forward, bounding past the Syracusans on foot. Other riders saw what was toward and followed.
The first Syracusan hoplites were already inside the polis. In stormed the horsemen. They turned on the gate crew, killing some and scattering others. Some of the Syracusan hoplites tried to haul the gates closed. The cavalrymen fought them, delayed them. Athenian peltasts rushed up to the horsemen’s aid. Madness reigned around the gate.
What is madness, Sokrates thought, save the absence of order? Still in good order, the Athenian phalanx hammered its way through the chaos—through the chaos, through the gate, and into Syracuse. The Syracusan women and children and old men wailed in horror. The Athenian hoplites roared in triumph.
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