The Syracusans are beaten, though. It is only a matter of raising our wall, harbor to sea, and completing the investment of the city. That done, Syracuse is cooked.
The architect in charge was Callimachus son of Callicrates, who had built the third Long Wall for Pericles. He had six plants producing bricks and twenty forges fabricating fittings. Nicias had taken the point called Plemmyrium, renamed the Rock for its want of water, across the harbor mouth from the city. Syracuse was now blockaded by sea. The enemy no longer ventured out to fight.
…the broken ground east of the city had been, before we arrived, a pleasant suburb of temples and promenades. There was a boys’ school, residential blocks, a ball field. Now it’s all rubble. Every house, wall, and road has been demolished. The stones are now part of the wall. All trees have been felled for timber for forms, inclines, and stockades; not a blade of grass remains for miles. The only edifice spared is a mill for the bakers’ ovens. The army and its followers are a hundred thousand. The tent city is big as Syracuse; it has not lanes but boulevards. Latrines are numbered; otherwise one loses his way taking a crap.
Across the plain, piles of stone are set along the line where the wall will advance. Before these are spiked ditches, with palisades atop. At night the two and a half miles from harbor to sea are lit solid with bonfires and torches. It is spectacular. This of course does not account the fleet, at anchor in the harbor or visible running drills at sea. It is literally one city besieging another.
Lion and I trekked down to visit Telamon, whose Arcadians were stationed at the southern end of the wall, a pretty park area called the Olympieum. The mercenary commended his comrade’s literary undertakings but with a wry amusement that exasperated the aspiring historian. Lion wanted Telamon’s views. Our mentor regarded him as if he had gone balmy.
Lion offered pay. This turned the trick. The topic was heroism. Was the valor of men in mass as worthy of note as that of the solitary champion?
“We have a proverb in my country,” Telamon declared:
Heroism makes good song but poor soup.
This means steer wide of champions. Passion is their coin. Lion has chosen his hero well in Alcibiades, for this creature breathes passion and arouses it. He will end badly.”
Lion pressed our mate to elaborate.
“In Arcadia we build no cities; this is how we like it. The city is the spawning ground of passion and the hero. Who is more consummately a man of the city than Alcibiades?”
“Are you saying, Telamon, that heroism has no place for you, a professional soldier?”
“Heroes are recognized by their tombs.”
At this I protested. Telamon himself was a hero!
“You confound prudence with valor, Pommo. If I fight up front, it’s because I find it safer. And if I fight to win, well…the dead line up before no paymaster.”
Telamon had said all he wished; he stood to depart. Lion pressed. “What about pay, my friend? Surely you feel passion for this.”
“I use money but never permit money to use me. To serve for pay sets one at a remove from the object of his or his commander’s desire. This is money’s proper use; it renders service in its name a virtue. Love of country or glory, on the other hand, unites one to the object of his desire. This makes it a vice. The patriot and the fool serve without pay.”
“The patriot because he loves his country,” proposed Lion.
“Because he loves himself. For what is a man’s country but the multiplied reflection of himself, and what is this but vanity? Again your choice of champion is surpassing, my friend, for who of all men loves himself more than Alcibiades? And who more personifies love of country?”
“And is love of country a vice?”
“Less a vice than a folly. But then all love is folly, if by love one means that which one clasps to his heart, rendering no distinction between it and himself.”
“Then Alcibiades by your measure is a slave to Athens?”
“None surpasses him in abjection.”
“Even as he works with might and main against her?”
“Same coin, obverse side.”
“Then we ourselves,” Lion suggested, indicating the soldiers and marines attending within the tent, “are fools and slaves?”
“You serve that which you value.”
“And what do you serve, Telamon? Other than money.”
Indignation informed Lion’s tone. He was offended. Telamon smiled.
“I serve the gods,” he declared.
“Wait…”
“The gods, I said. Them I serve.”
And he exited.
Construction continued on the wall. The expedition had ceased to be war, if it ever had been. It had become public works. There was a defect to this. Men ceasing to act as warriors cease to be warriors.
By midsummer it began to show. Soldiers now paid others to stand their watches and bought their way out of labor on the wall. They hired Sicels, the non-Greek natives, or employed camp followers, setting themselves at idleness. Even sailors began enlisting surrogates. When their officers sought to check this, the men voted them out and replaced them with commanders who knew, like the kit of the marble fox,
from which tit flowed milk and which water.
Inaction spawned discontent and discontent bred insurrection. Men dozed brazenly on watch; they lounged about the barbers’ tents and packed the closets of the whores’ camp, presenting themselves in every quarter except the drill field. Discipline could not be enforced by the newly minted officers, who owed their very station to their men’s contempt for them. Malingering grew epidemic. Soldiers went absent without leave and on return did not deign even to offer excuse. At night units no longer stuck together, but individuals scattered to their own, with no object nobler than hunting trouble. Theft grew rampant. Vigilantism rose in response. A man would open another’s guts over a stolen shoe or jealousy of a woman or boy.
Where was Nicias, our commander? Ill in his tent, with nephritis. His sixty-second birthday had come and gone. The men laughed at him and the seers and soothsayers who winged about his tent like gulls above the refuse dump.
That current of enterprise which properly conducted by wise and effective officers produces a disciplined army now, turned from its proper course, flowed into more malignant channels. Those who had bought themselves out of work turned this leisure to commerce, in women and contraband and even legitimate matériel. Who would stop them? They were businessmen and traders, who knew how to hold out a palm and how to grease one. Good men, witnessing this corruption and observing their commanders impotent to impede it, lost all incentive to keep their own order. Soldiers’ kits looked like trash. Hygiene went to hell. There were more men down sick than at work on the wall. Even I succumbed to this swell of misfeasance. My protests had long since got me busted to private soldier. I took to hunting. I had dogs and beaters, a regular racket going. I fled camp ten days at a time and was never missed. Pandora’s marines had scattered, some back to the ship, thinking sea duty easier than hod-humping, others ducking work in obscure wards of the camp. With Lion I vacated as well, to the Olympieum, adjacent Telamon’s Arcadians.
One evening we took a ramble up the heights called Epipolae. Lion brooded, seeking the deficiency that had turned the army so sour. Telamon was taking a piss and didn’t even look up.
“No Alcibiades, no empire.”
Night fell; that fort called the Circle was lit up beneath cressets. We walked, looking out over the city and harbor. “Nicias has had his career,” Telamon continued. “He’s like an old ploughhorse who wishes only to get back to the barn.”
The mercenary gestured to the ant colony that sprawled beneath us, harbor to sea. “Look at this hell. Why would any man cross an ocean to besiege a nation no threat to his own? Fear won’t make him, nor even greed. Only one force will call him. A dream! That dream is gone. It defected with your friend Alcibiades.”
We were on the wrong side, Telamon declared. We were going to lo
se. Lion and I laughed. How could we lose? Syracuse is cut off. The native cities flock to our side. No armies are coming to preserve the Syracusans, and they certainly can’t save themselves. Who will teach them?
“The Spartans,” testified Telamon, as if it were patent. “Once Alcibiades dispatches them, schoolmasters to their fellow Dorians of Syracuse.”
XX
SCHOOLMASTERS OF WAR
Among the ways the Spartans differ from other peoples is this. When an ally in distress applies to them for aid, they alone dispatch neither troops nor treasure but a solitary commander, a general. This officer alone, assuming charge of the beleaguered forces, is sufficient, they feel, to turn affairs about and produce victory.
This as the world knows is what happened at Syracuse. The general’s name was Gylippus. I knew this man from my schooling at Sparta. A true story:
When he was a boy, Gylippus was an exceptionally fast runner. At ten he won the boys’ Hyacinthiad over the Long Course, a cross-country trial in excess of ten miles. The ordeal of the event is as follows: each entrant must fill his cheeks with water, preserving this unswallowed, then produce it entire at race’s end into a receptacle, a bronze of Apollo Crabwise holding out his cupped hands. If you swallow, you’re out. Almost all do. Sometimes one simply trips and gulps his cargo by reflex.
Gylippus had contrived a ruse. Beyond sight of the judges, he swallowed and raced all out. He had secreted a portion of water in a hollow stone about a mile from the finish. Beating the other boys to this, he was able to fill his mouth again and hold it to the pole. In this way he won at ten and again at eleven. But one night, sleeping beside his elder brother Phoebidas, he boasted of his secret. Phoebidas determined to teach a lesson. At next year’s race he dashed out to the stone and overturned it. When Gylippus reached the site, in the lead, he found no means of refilling his cheek—and the other boys were bearing down fast from behind.
Gylippus sprinted to the finish, first again. Now the judges commanded him to fill the god’s hands, that is to spit, deliver his water. Gylippus obeyed. He had bitten his tongue through, filling his mouth with blood.
In his twenties Gylippus, serving as a brigade commander under Brasidas in Thrace, not only distinguished himself repeatedly for personal valor but achieved signal successes commanding inferior troops, helot conscripts without adequate armor and with minimal training. He seemed to possess an affinity for these roughshod rogues and a genius for whipping them into crack troops. This faculty held no small bearing, it is certain, upon his election by the ephors as commander for Syracuse.
This same Gylippus, now a polemarch, a war leader, of thirty-six years, holder of three prizes of valor including Mantinea, arrived in Sicily with only four ships, two secretaries, one junior lieutenant, and a handful of freed helots serving as marines. Within twelve months he had overturned all. Commencing with the Syracusan Admiralty, which prior to his arrival had bedazzled with a peacock’s array of robes of rank, he banned all colors but white and burned the offending rags in public, inaugurating the Festival of Naked Poseidon, Gymnopotideia in Doric. To roust his cohorts from the sack, he instituted a predawn sacrifice and required attendance by all commanders. Headgear at sea he prohibited, partly to efface all distinctions of vanity but primarily to make his men dark and vigorous from the sun.
The Little Harbor, whose shipyards had lain open to Athenian depredation, Gylippus fortified with seawalls and palisades. Behind these he set his charges to work. Naval architects and shipwrights had heretofore been deemed artisans, among the meaner orders. Gylippus overturned this, granting to these trades brooches of honor and acclaiming them poleos soteres, Saviors of the City. Prior to his reformations, lads under eighteen might not inscribe their names upon the citizen rolls, while those past sixty, regardless of skill or vigor, suffered mandatory retirement. Gylippus repealed these ordinances, attracting to his corps of shipbuilders the brightest youths as prentices and the most practiced elders as masters. By winter’s end the navy of Syracuse possessed nearly as many warcraft as her besiegers, and her commanders had acquired such temerity as to challenge the invaders ship for ship at sea.
Gylippus likewise refashioned the army. He made trials to discover which men craved most neither riches nor power but honor. These he appointed captains. All who had secured their stations through wealth or influence must reapply, with no eye on them save Gylippus’ and his new commanders’. The army itself he reorganized into companies mobilized not by tribe, but by precinct within the city. He set side by side those wards which bore a natural rivalry, offering prizes for competitions between them. In this way the battalion of the Geloan quarter roused itself to excellence against their adversaries of the Andethusia. Then he pitted these as allies against others. By such exercises each unit gained confidence in itself and the army as a whole developed faith in each division.
Discovering weapons and armor to be lacking, Gylippus ordered all who possessed shield and breastplate to present themselves in the central square. The rich, showing off, produced armor gilded to its most dazzling. When these had been erected in prideful display, Gylippus set his own plain panoplia alongside. All excess was stripped and sold, proceeds applied to acquire arms for the commons.
To raise revenue, Gylippus employed the following stratagem. Fearing that direct levy might turn the aristocratic element against him, he induced the Assembly instead to require each citizen to come forward on a specific day and render a public accounting of his wealth. Now each could behold with his own eyes the extent of treasure his fellows had hoarded. At once the privileged felt shame not to have contributed more, while the humble who had served with honor were esteemed as better men than the rich. Contributions flooded in. The cavalry grew flush with mounts, while the vaults overflowed with treasure.
Exploiting the linguistic bonds of the Doric Spartans and Syracusans, Gylippus enlisted words, too, to the cause. Armored infantrymen he now called homoioi, Peers or Equals. Regiments were designated lochoi, divisions morai. Among other Spartan usages he compelled each member of a military unit to discontinue the practice of dining at home or with friends and to take his meals in the common mess with his company. In this way unit esprit was fostered, and all felt themselves equal and united.
Gylippus outlawed drunkenness and declared it a whipping offense to neglect the marching condition of one’s feet. He made it a crime for a man to have a potbelly or appear at large with stooped shoulders. He introduced anthems of ridicule, the same as at Sparta, and recruited the city’s children to swarm upon any slovenly fellow, rebuking him in song. These and other reforms Gylippus instituted. But supreme among all stood his own presence, the fact that he had come in person to share his comrades’ peril and to donate all to preserve their freedom.
One morning in late winter as Gylippus marshaled his battalions and we hastened to position to engage them, I noted Lion jotting notes. “Have you noticed,” he remarked, “with what discipline the Syracusans take their stations now that Gylippus has forged them in his image?”
I looked. Of the allies about us—Athenians, Argives, and Corcyreans—many knelt or squatted. Breastplates sprawled on the earth; shields canted, splayed flat or even perched upon by their owners. Squires served double-and triple-duty, their fellows hired out as laborers long since. Directly across, every Syracusan stood in full panoplia, shield against knee, squire at his left, taking the weight of helmet and cuirass in the Spartan manner.
They beat us that day. By late summer their counterwall had cut our wall off. With this all hope of investing Syracuse was lost. In a night attack Gylippus took Labdalum, that fort and storehouse atop Epipolae which held not only our siege gear but our paymaster’s cash. He fortified Euryalus, the Heights’ lone avenue of vulnerability, and continued his crosswall to fortify the elevation entire. Even at sea, where the skill of our mariners stood preeminent, Gylippus set his new navy on the offensive. The ingenuity of his commanders now served him. Recognizing that the fight would come not i
n the open sea, but in the confines of the Great Harbor, he had the prows and catheads of his triremes reinforced and built out triple-wide, to ram head-on instead of from the flank as the skilled Athenians preferred. We learned a new word from him, boukephalos, oxhead. With these brutes he pounded our lighter, hollow-rammed ships, chasing us back behind both breakwaters to the inner harbor. Now it was we who were sinking pilings for half-moons and manning the dredging barge to plant “hedgehogs” and “dolphins.”
By autumn’s close Gylippus’ dreadnoughts had sunk or disabled forty-three of our ships and his troops had driven us off Epipolae entire, save the Circle fort at Syce. His own fleet had suffered terribly, more than seventy vessels crippled or sunk, but these losses he made up swiftly, bringing in fresh timber through the Little Harbor and overland, protected now by the counterwall.
Gylippus was blockading us now, and his fist screwed the press tight. The Syracusans could afford to lose two men for every one of ours, two ships, two walls, and every day their position grew stronger as more Sicilian cities, smelling blood, defected from the invaders to their compatriots. Nicias ordered the upper walls abandoned. We lost lines of assault across city and harbor and, more telling, the baker’s mill, which had supplied our bread. Sutlers and camp followers, and many of our women, melted away. We hunkered, hemmed like rats south of Feverside, the marsh at the gut of the harbor. And when in another night attack Gylippus’ troops drove us from the Olympieum, he threatened this wretched toehold as well.