At first light the Hymn to Demeter and Kore was sung; the parties moved out by tribes. Alcibiades wore dust sandals and a white chiton without emblem of rank. He was grave but not downcast. He took up the dead in silence, working beside soldiers’ squires and even slaves.
Where the Tegeans and lesser Lacedaemonians had won their victory, the bodies of the allied slain had been stripped naked. Armor and weapons were plundered; the foe had looted even the shoes.
Where the Corps of Peers had triumphed, however, no corpses had been violated. Each lay where he had fallen, intact of shield and armor. The Spartans had granted them honor to forbear this indignity. Many wept, my brother included, to behold such greatness of heart.
Midday found Alcibiades stopping with the party in which my brother and I labored. “Is it true, Pommo, that you dashed about the field at battle’s close, seeking to preserve me?” A number had told him as much; this seemed to delight him enormously. “I did not know you loved me so.”
I advanced some jest that we of the infantry needed him; he knew how to pay. He did not laugh at this poor joke; rather glanced soberly, first to my brother, then me. “Of payment I know this, my friends—how to requite those whose hearts are true.”
Earlier in the forenoon, Lion and I were told later, Alcibiades had chanced to be at the extreme right of the field, that quarter where we had been when the Mantineans routed the Spartan Sciritae. He was speaking with several Mantinean officers when a captain of Spartan cavalry rode up and reined in.
It was Lysander. The rivals spoke at ease, strife forsworn beneath the truce. Lysander remarked the scale of the allied victory in this quarter. Had such prevailed across even another fifth of the field, the outcome had been catastrophe for Sparta.
“You came this close, Alcibiades,” Lysander is said to have spoken.
In response his adversary quoted the proverb “Close captures no crowns.”
To which Lysander replied, “God grant that be your epitaph,” and, turning, spurred away.
When the shadows began to lengthen, the Spartan Corps of Peers moved out for home. We could see them emerge round the shoulder of the wood and trek in column toward the Tegea Road. Agis strode at the fore, flanked by the Knights, with the seven regiments in order in the train. Lion pointed. There was Lysander; he had insinuated his cavalry into a role as royal guard. These trooped adjacent the fore polemarchs, the war leaders, and the pythioi, the priests of Apollo. The main body trailed, to the skirling of the pipes.
They were eight thousand, all in scarlet, spears at the slope, with squires, one to a man, trooping at their shoulders, bearing their shields, slung and burnished to a mirror’s sheen. Where we stood in the dust of the field, all squatted in shadow. The victors strode in sun.
They were singing. A cadence chant, “Hemorrhoids, Hangnails, and Hell,” which to a beat bespeaks a profane disdain for death. Their spearpoints were sheathed, but their helmets, bossed, flashed like gold in the sun.
A sound broke from Alcibiades. When I turned, his brow stood flushed; tears pooled in the well of his eyes. At first I apprehended this as grief, at the overthrow of all his enterprise. Examination, however, discovered this affect barren of regret. He was moved, as we all, by the splendor of the enemy’s discipline and will.
“Magnificent-looking bastards, aren’t they?”
XII
A COMPANION OF THE FLEE
Upon termination of this day’s session with the assassin Polemides [my grandfather continued], as he and I took leave of one another, the man requested of me a service.
His sea chest, he declared, lay now in storage at the officers’ commissary at Munychia naval base, in care of the porter. Would I retrieve it for him? There were documents in it he wished to show me. More, he added, would I keep this chest after his execution?
I urged the man not to get ahead of himself. Acquittal was possible, perhaps even probable, given Socrates’ conviction and the powerful association in the public mind between the philosopher and Alcibiades. Alcibiades’ repute stood now at its ebb; this did not augur inauspiciously for any in faction of opposition to him.
“Yes, of course.” Polemides smiled. “I forgot.”
Passing out of the prison, a violent thundershower detained me at the portal. As I waited on the storm’s passage a boy approached, dashing from the victualer’s shop across the way and, confirming my identity, bade me abide a few moments longer. An older man could be seen, a cripple, hobbling into the lane from the same shop. The fellow shambled across, presenting himself before me in the posture of a panhandler. I retreated, set to step into the downpour rather than endure the assault of this unkempt and aggressive mute. “You don’t recognize me, do you, sir?”
The man’s voice struck me through.
“It’s Eumelus of Oa, Cap’n. ‘Bruise.’ From the old Europa.”
“Bruise? By the Holy Twain, can it be you?”
This man had served with me at Abydos and Bitch’s Tomb under Alcibiades, twenty years into the war and eleven prior to this day. He had been a toxotes, a marine archer, and something of a personal batman to me. A game but inexpert boxer, hence his nickname, he possessed the courage of an eagle and harbored ambitions to rise in service. At Abydos he had borne me from Europa’s quarterdeck when my leg had been sheared in the action.
Bruise had remained in service to the bitter end: Aegospotami. He was captured by Lysander and sentenced to death but was reprieved to the slavers’ block by the lie that his mother was Megarian and he thus not an Athenian citizen. “Soon as they burned me, I skipped. I was home in time to watch Lysander sail in and take our surrender.”
He led me across to the victualry. The shop was his; the lad his grandson. Through his daughter-in-law, he testified, he had secured a contract under the Eleven Administrators; his mart provisioned the warders and inmates, since the refectory’s shuttering in the latest crackdown. He, Bruise, had noted my passing in and out of the prison, but this day was the first, he said, that he had summoned the temerity to approach.
We spoke of vanished comrades and departed times. He remarked the case of Socrates. Bruise had been among the five hundred and one jurors; he had voted to condemn. “A man come up to me by the Anaceum, told me if I liked my contract I’d toss the black pebble.”
Parting, my old shipmate drew me aside to confide this caution: certain unscrupulous turnkeys may approach me or others of the philosopher’s party, proposing for a fee to spirit the prisoner to freedom. This was a drama he, Bruise, had witnessed no few times: the midnight horse, the dash for the frontier, the double cross. “First peep you hear, Cap’n, come to me. I know these blackguards. I’ll spring your friend myself before I’ll let ’em turn the left hand upon him.” I took this intelligence seriously and thanked him from the heart.
The storm had abated; I stood upon the point of taking leave. I must inquire of my old mate if he had acquaintance of Polemides. Indeed. “A good marine; none better.” What about Polemides’ part in Alcibiades’ assassination, I probed, for I knew that Bruise, as so many of the Samos fleet, revered their old commander and upheld his memory with passion. To my surprise Bruise harbored no rancor toward the assassin.
“But he betrayed Alcibiades,” I pressed.
Bruise shrugged. “Who didn’t?”
At home that night, prompted perhaps by Polemides’ request for retrieval of his sea chest, I mounted to the loft in search of my own. To this day sea fighters mark their coffers in the time-honored manner, carving into the pine the stations upon which they have served and tacking beside each a coin of that province. I brought my chest into the library. When the porter delivered Polemides’ next day, no other site seemed apt, so I had him set it down, side by side with my own.
How different were we, the assassin and myself, who had served our country, both, down thrice nine years of war? Who could tell, remarking our baggage?
I opened my own. At once arose the smells of campaigns, and campaigners, past. I must sit, over
come, and wept for those companions upon whom eternal night had closed, and these, philosopher and assassin, who must tread that same dark passage soon.
My wife, your grandmother, chanced to pass at that moment and, discovering her husband in this case, crossed to me and in kindness inquired of my state. I had made a decision, I told her—just now, this instant.
By all the gods I would toil for Polemides’ exoneration, nor stay at any measure within the law to see him freed.
XIII
THREE TIMES THE VICTOR’S NAME
The Games of the Olympiad following Mantinea [Polemides resumed] were those in which Alcibiades’ teams took first, second, and third in the four-horse. Not triumph at Troy nor the apparition of Apollo himself in a winged chariot could have effected a grander sensation. Twice a hundred thousand ringed the hippodrome. Do you recall the victory ode Euripides composed? How did it go? “Son of Cleinias…something something…this glory
…must be the height of fame,
to hear the herald cry three times
the selfsame victor’s name.”
I missed the race. Our coop arrived late, only ferrying from Naupactus for the free feed. Alcibiades appeared, we heard, with all three teams at a banquet in his honor thrown by the city of Byzantium, whose citadel he took by storm less than a decade later. Agis the Spartan king was there with forty of his knights. The mob abandoned him just to glimpse Alcibiades’ drivers. Ephesus, Chios, Lesbos, and Samothrace erected pavilions in his honor. The Samians sent a barge full of hymn-chanting virgins, which ran aground, and all the wrestlers went out, in their garlands, to save them. The river was about a handsbreadth deep, if I recall.
Exainetos of Sicily took the crown in the stadion race, that Olympiad; no one even gave the fellow a sniff. The throng had eyes for Alcibiades only or, failing him, his horses. They were battling over the turds. It’s true; I saw it. No sooner would one of these champions elevate its tail than half a dozen had thrust their caps beneath it, as if this equine asshole were a fountain disgorging nuggets of gold. They even made away with the hoofprints, cutting them out of the sand and boxing them like mason’s impresses. I have never seen so many drunk, or been so myself, without putting out an iron spit. The incidence of public fornication was spectacular.
As for Alcibiades, you couldn’t get within bowshot. At age thirty-four he had vaulted to the firmament, champion of champions, the cardinal celebrity not alone of Greece but of Macedonia and Thrace, Sicily, Italy, which was to say, save Persia, the most famous individual in the world.
The Games themselves were epochal in a further sense. The prior Olympiad, recall, was the one from which the Spartans had been debarred, owing to their dispute with the Elean priests of Zeus. Without the Lacedaemonians, every crown was tarnished. Now they were here. Polydorus the boxer, Sthenelaides the pentathlete, plus two teams in the four-horse, neither of which had ever been beaten except by the other. Mantinea had restored their pride. Their mythos was back, Alcibiades would say, and they gloried in it.
For myself the Spartans’ presence bore significance in a keener sense. At every turn, it seemed, I encountered mates from the Upbringing and officers and boy-captains who had trained us. Outside the Pavilion of the Champions I ran into Phoebidas, my old commander, with his brother Gylippus, who would later scourge the forces of Athens so pitilessly before Syracuse. Endius I chanced upon as well, the boyhood friend and, some said, lover of Alcibiades. He was Captain of the Knights, in line for an ephorship with the new year.
There were many like myself, standing not in the colors of their nation, but the blistered leather of the expatriate, the shield for hire. The seasons flow so without seam into one another that a man cannot account the alterations of his person till he beholds them reflected in the aspect of a comrade unencountered in the intervening years. Here came Alcaeus, tent companion of Socrates, the merry actor of Aspasia Three. He was a trainer now. His charge Pandion had fallen that forenoon, tethered to his stone, preferring death to second place—Pandion of Acharnae, who had taken his ephebic oath at the shoulder of my brother, what seemed only a summer gone. So it continued. Each man encountered mates of his school years, whiskerless lads when last met. How could such gray stand in this friend’s beard, such scars on that comrade’s limbs? Inquiries after sister or mother, wife or babe, elicited the same wordless reply. Soon all query ceased. Each looked into his mate’s eye and read in that glass the loss that stood, unseen by himself, within his own.
On the third dawn Eunice shook me awake in our bivouac along the Alpheus. “Rise up, Sleepy-bones! And try to look the gentleman.”
Above on the bank stood Lion. I had not seen him since Mantinea, two summers past, or replied to the fistful of his letters I yet bore within my kit.
He was decked out, sleek and prosperous, a civilian. I clapped him with pleasure. No more the reckless runaway of Potidaea, my brother was a pillar of thirty years, with children in their second decade and our father’s farm, now his alone, beneath his stewardship. We hiked to town down the traffic-clotted road.
He reproved me for yet following the trade of war.
“The money’s good,” was my defense.
“Then buy me dinner.”
We both laughed.
“You couldn’t prize an obol out of your ass, could you?”
Aunt Daphne had taken ill, he said. Did I know I was still her golden youth? “She worries about you, brother. I do too.” He wanted me to come home with him, work the land. He would put us in co-ownership, fifty-fifty. “The place is more than I can pack alone, Pommo. But together we could make her pay.”
We spent the day, my brother and I, neither capable till the instant of parting to raise that matter which burned foremost in both our hearts.
“Have you planted their bones?”
I meant those of my wife and child, and Father’s and Meri’s, in the tomb at Acharnae where they belonged.
“You’re the elder, Pommo. You know it must be you.”
With that, all joy left the Games for me. I must get home. I packed next noon to depart, which provoked a prodigious row with Eunice, for whom it was an article of faith that one day I would “put on gentleman’s airs” and quit her. I detest such scenes with women. My kit stood already shouldered when a man-at-arms entered our camp, a squire of the Spartans, seeking me. He was Endius’ man, called Forehand for his skill with the throwing ax. He wished to extend an invitation from his master to join him at table this evening. The bid included my mates and our women.
The knight’s party was quartered not in the host pavilion, but on a private estate at Harpine outside Olympia town. Forehand came for us and took us over. I was then thirty-four; Endius in his mid-forties. As a boy my station had stood so far beneath his that even now I found myself addressing him as “lord” and stationing myself on his shield side in deference. “Relent, Pommo. We may be mates now.”
The knight was gracious to our women, even charming, permitting them to dine unsegregated beside himself and his companions, a familiarity unheard-of in Lacedaemon. “Is it true,” Eunice’s brazen tongue ventured, “that Spartan women appear in the festivals stark naked?”
“We don’t call it naked,” our host replied, “but blessed.”
“And what if they’re fat?”
“That’s why they don’t get fat.”
Eunice absorbed this with amusement. “And are Spartan women indeed the most beautiful in Greece?”
“So Homer attests,” Endius replied, citing the daughters of Tyndareus—Helen of yore and Clytemnestra, and their cousin Penelope, whom Odysseus had borne away to Ithaca, his queen.
Toward close of the meal, another Spartiate appeared. This was Lysander. He had made the leap to colonel since Mantinea—and of heavy infantry, not horse. He took the place beside Endius. When the Hymn of Thanksgiving had been sung and the party adjourned, this pair made motion to Telamon and me to linger. It was late, but there was a moon. Would we accompany them into the countryside fo
r a breath of air? Mounts had been drawn for us; the Peers’ squires would trot ahead bearing brands.
What could this be? Talk at dinner had eschewed all mention of Alcibiades, no mean exploit in this hour with his name upon the lips of all. Endius himself had spoken only two words of his friend, those in response to an observation by our captain Telamon that the most magnificent of the pavilions erected in the victor’s honor was that of Argos, which, since Mantinea, had made herself a democracy a second time, and among whose men of influence Alcibiades numbered scores of allies and friends. Could he be exploiting this occasion politically? “Nothing he does,” remarked Endius, “is absent politics.”
We had advanced several miles along the Alpheus. The countryside sprawled, rich in olives and barley. Endius observed that these lands, specifically the estate we now overlooked, were the property of Anacreon of Elis, his wife’s kinsman, who stood gravely in his, Endius’, debt. At a nod the Spartans’ squires drew up. Our party reined in on the bluff above the river.
“What my comrade and I speak now,” the knight began, “comes neither from the kings nor the magistrates of Lacedaemon, but alone ourselves, as private individuals. Will you attend and repeat nothing?”
The hair stood up on my neck.
“We’ll ride back on shoe leather,” I replied, dismounting. Telamon’s hand drew me up.
“These gentlemen wish to speak of business, Pommo. I for one am in business.” He rapped my knee to cool me. It obliged nothing to give ear to a proposition of employment.
“Would you call yourself a patriot?” Endius resumed, addressing me.
I would return to Athens with the dawn, if that was what he meant.
“I mean would you defend your city against her foes? Would you count your life as nothing, if expending it preserved your country’s freedom?”
Trusting the gods, I replied, I would hope to save both.
He smiled, glancing to Telamon. My mate held silent. Lysander spoke, addressing me.