The Ten Thousand
Michael Curtis Ford
Michael Curtis Ford
The Ten Thousand
HISTORICAL NOTE
The late fifth century B.C. brought bloodshed and upheaval to the Western World. During the previous hundred years Athens had been experiencing a Golden Age, a magnificent flowering of culture and thought culminating in the establishment of the world's first functioning democracy under Pericles, the vast literary achievements of Sophocles and Euripides, and the construction of the Parthenon. Enormous maritime fleets brought untold wealth from every corner of the Mediterranean, and Greek military prowess had become the envy and dread of the ancient world, through two important innovations: the heavily armed and highly trained citizen-soldier known as the hoplite, and the impenetrable massed block of charging infantry known as the phalanx. Athens had become the very center of Greek culture and the greatest imperial power in the Mediterranean-yet all was brought to a shattering halt in 404 B.C. when the city was disastrously defeated by Sparta in the twenty-seven-year Peloponnesian War.
Now the monumental city of marble had been brought to its knees-its massive fortifications toppled, the powerful navy by which it had ruled the seas destroyed, its fields burnt and poisoned, its population impoverished and plague-ridden. A murderous and vindictive puppet government remembered as the Thirty Tyrants was installed by the victors to rule the defeated city, prompting cycles of rebellion and reprisal and further complicating an already chaotic political landscape. Thousands of battle-hardened soldiers from both sides in the conflict simply remained abroad after their discharge, seeking to satisfy their lingering taste for blood and plunder by hiring themselves out to the highest bidder for mercenary assignments. The rest of Greece, indeed the entire Western World, looked no longer to the vanquished Athens for political leadership-but rather to the secretive, xenophobic military state of Sparta.
The upheaval had shaken the moral foundations of society, and new leaders were needed, ones who could put the horrors of the internecine war behind them and look to rebuild Athens and restore Greece's preeminence in the world. Other centers of power, however, would not let Athens rise again so easily. Persia, in particular, an enormous empire sprawling from India to Egypt, had much to gain. Twice in the past century its plans for world domination had been thwarted by humiliating defeat in Greece-yet its ambitions continued to smolder, and it bankrolled the Spartans in the final years of the Peloponnesian War in an effort to prolong the fighting and prevent the Greeks from recovering their unity. Nevertheless, Persia was beset by difficulties of its own, not the least of which was the power struggle between the Great King Artaxerxes and the pretender to the throne, his young half-brother Cyrus.
The Greek city-states of Thebes and Corinth also had legitimate claims to leadership, and Syracuse, which in alliance with Sparta had destroyed Athens' formidable navy, remained a powerful force as well. Even the Spartans, though nominally the rulers of the eastern Mediterranean, were only reluctant leaders at best, fearing the sea and unwilling to open their own society and economy to the corrosive influences of the outside world. The various competing forces had effectively neutralized each other, creating a balance of impotence.
Within this milieu of chaos, oppression, and past glory following the Peloponnesian War, Greece would be unable to regain its position of political leadership and greatness for another five decades. During the intervening period, which was haunted by moral and economic devastation, when the humble philosopher Socrates was developing his marketplace ruminations that would soon form the very pillars of Western thought, a young man named Xenophon came of age. He was a member of the first generation of a new, post-Golden Age Greece, one that, though brilliant in many ways, would struggle mightily to overcome the destructive legacy it had inherited. It was a task that would cost much bloodshed and many lives-but in the end, it would also create heroes as great as any that have come down to us from antiquity.
Give me but a little leave, and I will set before your eyes in brief a stupend, vast, infinite Ocean of incredible madness and folly; a Sea full of shelves and rocks, sands, gulfs, Euripuses, and contrary tides, full of fearful monsters, uncouth shapes, roaring waves, tempests, and Siren calms, Halcyonian Seas, unspeakable misery, such Comedies and Tragedies, such absurd and ridiculous, feral and lamentable fits, that I know not whether they are more to be pitied or derided, or may be believed, but that we daily see the same still practiced in our days, fresh examples, new news, fresh objects of misery and madness in this kind, that are still represented to us, abroad, at home, in the midst of us, in our bosoms.
-DEMOCRITUS MINOR
PROLOGUE
It was the dragons of Phyle that defeated us in the end.
They and Thrasybulus, that rebel, that madman. As a general he had dined at our own table in Athens more times than I could count, but after running afoul of the wrong politicians, he had been banished to Thebes. There he had smoldered and fumed, his hate and contempt festering like a boil, and he had gathered about him a small band of like-minded men, Athenian exiles and mercenaries, each with his own debts to collect. Now, in an act of unbelievable gall, he had led his force of seventy picked warriors silently through the gorge, cut the throats of the outposts in the dead of night, and captured the fortress of Phyle that guarded the mountain pass a mere fifteen miles from Athens. To be sure, in the confusion after the city's surrender to Sparta, circumstances had practically invited him to do it-the fort's garrison had been undermanned and demoralized for months. It is of no use to cast blame on the stupidity of others, however, for that is the last refuge of losers. Now that Thrasybulus had taken Phyle, it fell to us to remove him.
Critias was charged with assembling the army and leading us in the assault, but Critias was no soldier; he was a politician, the leader of the extreme faction of the Thirty, precisely the sort of man Thrasybulus most despised. A fine show he made even in the pouring rain, all bombast and bluff, ordering his foot soldiers here and his archers there, posing with a new sword while his fine Carthaginian charger pranced beneath him. Admittedly, the fact that he kept himself surrounded by a squad of silent, scarlet-cloaked Spartans lent him a certain authority. But the canny Thrasybulus had blocked our main road to the fortress with huge rocks, forcing us to ascend through the torrential rain along a winding goat path that at one point veered perilously close to the fortress's outer walls. When iron met iron and leather met mud, this would not be Critias' assault to make; even cavalry was useless on that rock-strewn mountainside, and his own parade horse soon snapped its forelimb, toppling him ignominiously into the mud. Climbing the path up the gorge was a task for soldiers, pure and simple, and while Critias in his bespattered finery railed at us from below, Xenophon dismounted with the rest of his cavalry company, threw aside his cloak, and began slogging up the mountain on foot. Our force was three thousand strong and pissed as hell that we were out there. We would rout Thrasybulus' pitiful gang before nightfall and return home by the next morning, for the war was over now, it was beginning to freeze, and we were weary.
Our first assault was repelled with losses. The ancient fortress's barbican, the single narrow entry passage through the outer wall, was barely wide enough for three men to pass abreast, flanked as it was by two thick towers with sloping bases, squatting toadlike and malevolent on either side of the access. Window slits pierced the stone walls of the towers fifteen feet above the ground, through which the defenders emitted a murderous hail of arrows across the entry, point-blank into our faces. Grinning and hooting rebels up on the ramparts, backlit by the iron gray sky of the premature twilight and shimmering in the driving rain, heaved bricks and building stones onto our heads, from which we could not protect oursel
ves because of the arrows sweeping our lines from the front. Even after we turtled up with our shields and rushed between the towers in a box formation, the huge oak and bronze-sheathed door barring the passage stopped us cold, and we retreated in disarray, leaving behind wounded and dead.
Still, we were not discouraged, because we had anticipated such obstacles. On our climb through the driving rain up that miserable mountain path, we laboriously hauled a dozen thick planks of oak, each cunningly worked with a tongue-and-groove joint on the sides and fitted with wrought-iron handles and strap slots. In the shelter of a retaining wall on a slope in front of the fort, the last protected area before emerging into the hell of arrow fire under the towers, the men now assembled the boards with their frozen hands and hurriedly lashed and braced them together into a tight, peaked roof. It had a rain-soaked weight that would stagger five men, but which ten could easily carry when arranged beneath in two columns of five, gripping the iron handles and support braces. Thick wicker screens were hung from the sides to complete the shelter. The structure would protect not only those hoplites actually carrying it, whom we jokingly referred to as "pallbearers," but also several in the center between them, who rolled the battering ram.
The ram itself was not of cunning manufacture, and in fact was almost comically crude. It would have been impossible, though, to haul the usual bronze-sheathed logs up that tortuous pathway. We improvised with the material at hand-a rounded boulder six feet across which had been blocking the road near the top. With mason's chisels and axe heads we roughly chipped away its irregular corners and outcroppings, then bored two deep holes into its opposite sides. Into these we inserted stout iron bars to be used as handles, like an axle on an enormous, spherical wheel. This crude contraption we humped up the last few feet of the rise to the retaining wall, and set it on the path that would lead directly to the massive oaken door. Fortunately, the approach to the door was level, even sloping slightly downward. We calculated that with four strong men pushing the boulder from the axles, sheltered from the missiles by the sturdy plank roof overhead, it would attain enough speed to weaken the bar and hinges when it collided-with luck it might even bring down the entire door.
The first pass was made without the ram, as the ten pallbearers dashed out with the roof while another six "pickers" scurried beneath, slipping in the mud and the frozen slush to clear away rocks and obstacles in the path to the door. On their return run, they picked up the dead from our previous attack, whose bodies had been almost torn apart from the arrows and rocks raining down on them. Strangely, the rebels above did not impede us in this task-a few desultory arrows landed on the planks and skittered harmlessly off to the side, but otherwise they limited themselves to shouting out obscene taunts.
This we accomplished by dusk, leaving us time for only one more pass. The rain had now become a driving sleet, and the gloom of the weather and darkness of the approaching night made it impossible to see more than a few yards ahead. As the pushers took their position under the roof, the army massed behind, stretching out far down the hill because of the narrow confines of the space. The stone was given a slight shove from the top of the rise; it tipped ponderously forward, and the hands of the four pushers lent it strength, until it reached the speed of a slow walk, then of a trot. The men carrying the heavy shelter eyed it nervously, lest it veer to the side and crush them beneath its implacable course, but the slope was true and the boulder well rounded. Sweating and cursing, the pushers bent their backs and thighs into the iron rods, relentlessly gaining in speed. The army behind trotted, then ran, then sprinted toward the towers, their voices mounting in a roar that resounded off the approaching walls in a rising chorus of encouragement and anticipation. By the time the boulder neared the gate the pushers were struggling to keep up with it as it leaped and bounded over the path in a fury. Fifteen yards from the gate the pushers released their grip on the axle. The pallbearers skidded to a stop and the boulder shot out from beneath the roof. Behind them stormed the lead phalanx, a crack tribal regiment of Hippothontis who had fought and bullied rival companies for the honor of leading the charge, shields raised above their heads for protection and bellowing the battle cry. The huge stone surged forward, sending sprays of frozen water and mud to the sides, and at the last, just before reaching its target, it hit a small rise and flew into the air, slamming into the door dead in the middle with a huge crash.
The stout bar inside snapped with the force of the direct hit, and the enormous slab of oak was knocked askew on its hinges, opening a gap of a foot on the top and sides, with the outer corner leaning drunkenly against the ground. The impact splintered the wood across the waist of the door and sent an enormous crack running its length from top to bottom, threatening to fold it inward like a caved shield. The collision caused a tremor that dislodged stones from the battlements above, a groan in the walls that could be felt even in the ground beneath our feet. The Athenians emitted a roar of triumph, and the pallbearers tossed away the heavy roof and rushed to seize their shields and weapons that had been stowed in the framing beneath. Howling the battle cry, the phalanx surged forward to throw itself against the weakened door and force it wide before the rebels had a chance to barricade themselves again.
But closing the door was not the rebels' intent. Even before the hoplites reached the entry, the door shuddered and lurched, and with great and ponderous effort creaked open as if of its own accord. The defenders on top of the towers stood silent and unmoving, peering down at us through the sheets of thickened rain, and the cheer from the Athenians rose up even more fiercely at this sign of the rebels' surrender. We raced up to the entrance, half blinded by the sleet and the spattering mud thrown by the thrusting feet of the men in front of us, and the huge door swung wide inward, revealing the shadowy blackness of the vault within the ten-foot-thick walls of the Fortress of Phyle. As we rushed into the gap, the dragons came to life.
Horrendous balls of flame leaped out from the darkness, the stench of sulfur overpowering us as the black, stinking liquid blasted onto the men's faces and bodies, setting them afire and sending them screaming and stumbling in blindness. Murderous streams of flame roared out thirty feet, forty feet or more, three in succession across the width of the opening; each paused momentarily in turn like creatures drawing their breath, and then they again resumed their hellish blowing. In the darkness behind we could see the faces of Thrasybulus' rebels, gleaming and ghastly in the light of the flames, their eyes empty black holes in the pits of their helmets, their teeth gleaming yellow and fierce as they threw back their heads and grimaced at the strain of their terrible task.
Screams of agony and the stench of burning meat filled the air as men fell flaming beneath the onslaught, and those foremost in the charge were roasted alive in their very armor, charring black and writhing where they fell. Their hands curled into fingerless claws and their limbs contracted as they fell dead and shriveled at our feet like spiders dropped into the flame of a lamp. Farther back, my throat constricted and I choked and gasped on the sour black smoke produced by the burning of my comrades' flesh. I could feel the heat of the deadly blasts on my face like a furnace suddenly opened, and the thought of what a terrible death lay waiting behind that splintered and broken door was overwhelming. The troops panicked.
The narrow path behind us prevented a clean retreat. The men hurled themselves and forced their way through three or four at a time, as the inferno at their backs threatened a hellish death. Still-flaming victims raced crazily through the ranks, screaming at us to put out their fires, which we were unable to do as the burning substance ravaged without regard to water or dirt thrown upon it. The men were terrified, toppling and trampling one another in their haste to escape, and Thrasybulus' archers on the towers rained arrows down upon us, wounding dozens, further blocking our retreat. I peered back over my shoulder at the towers behind us, and saw the flames abate as the massive oaken door was slid and heaved back into position, the ghastly remnants of the dead and wounded
left behind us in writhing, shrieking mounds.
The descent down the mountainside from the barbican was hellish, for the path which earlier we had navigated with difficulty even in daylight was now nearly impossible for troops injured and panicked, fighting downpour and dusk. The men clambered and dropped hand over hand, blundering their way down the rock-strewn hillside made all the more dangerous by the darkness of the shadows and of their own souls. The dead and injured were dragged and pushed, their heads and limbs bouncing over the rocks, while behind them disordered, confused troops bunched in terror. Men clubbed each other with fists and swords to push their way through faster. One terrified wretch leaped onto my shoulders and scrambled forward over the helmets of the soldiers ahead of me. He gained only a few yards before an enraged hoplite cracked him across the ribs with the rolled bronze edge of his shield, leaving him retching in the mud at our feet to be kicked and carried along with the mob. Speed was impossible, and not merely on account of the darkness; the switchbacks were so steep that one misstep in the dark would send a man crashing down onto the helmets, or spear points, of those creeping down the face below. The route led around the fortress, passing over a shelf wedged between the outer walls and the steep gorge, where we were vulnerable to arrow fire from the ramparts above. Xenophon had been ordered to take over a company of archers whose captain had been lost in the assault, and here he deployed them to cover the army's descent by keeping up a steady barrage of arrow fire on any rebels that attempted to shoot or hurl stones on the retreating troops below. In so doing we killed several of Thrasybulus' men, who toppled from their positions on the rampart to land in a sodden steaming mass at our feet. Before we were able to clamber down the narrow path ourselves, however, Thrasybulus sent a detachment to barricade itself at the narrowest point between the outer walls and the gorge cliff, blocking our retreat and preventing reinforcements from coming to our assistance from below. Our hopes of threading our way past just before sunset were dashed when an enormous rebel wearing flame-painted Boeotian armor leaped out at our lead man from behind a boulder. With a powerful stroke of his long sword the rebel split through the man's helmet to the base of the neck, bursting his skull in a shower of brains and leaving the two halves of his head hanging by the neck tendons onto both shoulders. Xenophon thrust a spear into the throat of the rebel, who seized the shaft and attempted to wrench it out before toppling backward against the wall, cursing silently and spitting blood. He was immediately replaced by a swarm of enraged comrades, who flew at us from behind their barricade, driving us back with spears and rocks. We retreated to the shelter of the retaining wall hard by the towers, where we crouched, sodden and miserable, in the now complete darkness between the two enemy forces. We were perhaps fifty in number, and we gazed in frustration at the passage in front of the barbican whence we had been routed only a short time before. The path was illuminated by dwindling flames still hissing in the sticky, noxious fluid that pooled among the bodies. So sudden had the initial blasts of fire been that the first victims were clustered in a single heap, some remaining upright and leaning against the mound of their comrades without room to fall, a phalanx still, even in death. One soldier in plain view, his charred head having fallen cleanly off his crispened neck like a withered grape off a vine, stood guard in the rain against a heap of his comrades, his corpse stiffened like a stump in his armor. Those in the ghastly stack who still lived peered at us desperately in their agony, imploring us with weakening voices to drag them from among the broken and bloodied limbs of their comrades before they suffocated or froze to death. There was nothing we could do.
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