A professional assassin, Telamon of Arcadia, accompanied the party, along with some half dozen henchmen of his selection, to plan and execute the action. His confederate was the Athenian Polemides.
Polemides had been a friend of Alcibiades. He had served as captain of marines throughout Alcibiades’ spectacular sequence of victories in the Hellespontine War, had acted as his bodyguard when the conqueror returned in glory to Athens, and had stood upon his right hand when Alcibiades restored the procession by land in celebration of the Eleusinian Mysteries. I recall vividly his appearance, at Samos, upon Alcibiades’ recall from exile to the fleet. The moment was incendiary, with twenty thousand sailors, marines, and heavy infantry, distraught for their own fate and the survival of their country, enveloping the mole they called Little Choma as the longboat touched and Polemides stepped off, shielding his charge from the mob which seemed as ripe to stone as salute him. I studied Alcibiades’ expression; nothing could have been clearer than that he trusted the man at his shoulder absolutely with his life.
It was this Polemides’ duty now, some seven years subsequent, to draw the victim out and with his cohort, the assassin Telamon, perform the slaughter. For this his fee was a talent of silver from the treasury of Persia.
Of all this the man informed me, concealing nothing, within the first minutes of our initial interview. He did so, he stated, to ensure that I—whose family shared bonds of marriage with the Alcmaeonids, Alcibiades’ family on his mother’s side, and myself through my devotion to Socrates, whose link to Alcibiades was well known—would know the worst at once and could pull out, if I wished.
The actual indictment against the man made no citation of Alcibiades.
Polemides was charged in the death of a boatswain of the fleet named Philemon, who had been murdered some few years prior in a brothel brawl at Samos. A second impeachment was preferred against him, that of treason. It was under this rubric, clearly, that the jurors would read that more consequential slaying. Such obliquity was not uncommon in those days; yet its indirection was compounded by the specific statute under which his accusers had brought him to trial.
Polemides had been arraigned neither under a writ of eisangelia, the standard indictment for treason, nor a dike phonou, a straight charge of homicide, both of which would have permitted him to elect voluntary exile, sparing his life. Rather he had been denounced (by a pair of known rogues, brothers and stooges of acknowledged foes of the democracy) under an endeixis kakourgias, a far more general category of “wrongdoing.” This struck one at first as preposterous, the issue of prosecutors ignorant of the law. Further reflection, however, revealed its cunning. Under this category of indictment, the accused may not only be imprisoned before and throughout trial, without option of voluntary exile, but denied bail as well. The death penalty still obtained, and the trial would take place, not before the Council or Areopagus, but a common people’s court, where such terms as “traitor” and “friend of Sparta” could be counted upon to inflame the jurors’ ire. Clearly Polemides’ accusers wanted him dead, by the right hand or the left. As far as one could predict, they would get their wish. For all those who hated Alcibiades and blamed him for the fall of our nation, yet many still loved him. These would raise no remonstrance to the execution of the man who had betrayed and slain their champion. Still, Polemides observed, his accusers were, he was certain, of the opposite party—those who had conspired with their country’s enemies, seeking to purchase their own preservation at the price of their nation’s ruin.
As to the man Polemides himself, his appearance was both striking and singular, dark-eyed, of slightly less than average height, extremely thick-muscled, and, though well past forty years, as lean through the middle as a schoolboy. His beard was the color of iron, and his skin despite imprisonment retained the dark copper of one who has spent much of his life at sea. Scars of fire, spear, and sword crisscrossed the flesh of his arms, legs, and back. Upon his brow, though bleached by exposure to the elements, stood vivid the koppa slave brand of the Syracusans, token of that captivity endured by survivors of the Sicilian calamity and emblematic of unspeakable suffering.
Did I abhor him? I was prepared to. Yet in the flesh his clarity of thought and expression, his candor and utter want of self-exoneration, disarmed my prejudice. His crimes notwithstanding, the man appeared to my imagination much as might have Odysseus, stepping forth from the songs of Homer. Nor did he comport himself in the brutish or insolent manner of the soldier for hire; on the contrary his demeanor and self-presentation were those of a gentleman. What wine he had, he proffered at once and insisted upon vacating for his guest the solitary stool his cell possessed, pillowing it for my comfort with the fleece he used to bundle the chamber’s single bare pallet.
Throughout that initial interview he performed as we spoke various calisthenics intended to maintain fitness despite confinement. He could place his heel upon the wall above his head and, standing flat on the other sole, set his forehead with ease upon his elevated shin. Once when I brought him some eggs, he placed one within the cage of his fist and, extending his arm, challenged me either to prize his fingers apart or crush the egg. I tried, employing all my strength, and failed, as he grinned at me mischievously the while.
I never felt afraid with the man or of him. In fact as the days progressed I came to embrace a profound sympathy for the fellow, despite his numerous criminal deeds and lack of repentance therefor. His name, Polemides, as you know, means “child of war.” But he was not a child of just any war, rather one unprecedented in scale and duration and distinguished beyond all previous conflicts by its debasement of that code of honor, justice, and voluntary restraint by whose tenets all prior strife among Hellenes had been conducted. It was indeed this war, the first modern war, which forged our narrator’s destiny and directed it to its end. He began as a soldier and ended as an assassin. How was I any different? Who may disaffirm that I or any other did not enact in the shadows of our private hearts, by commission or omission, that same dark history played out in daylight by our countryman Polemides?
He was, like me, a product of our time. As to the harbor, high road and low follow their several courses along the shore, so his path had paralleled my own and that of the main of our contemporaries, only passing through different country.
III
IN POLEMIDES’ CELL
You ask, Jason [the prisoner Polemides spoke], which aspect is most distasteful of the assassin’s art. Knowing you as the paragon of probity you are, you no doubt anticipate some response involving bloodguilt or ritual pollution, perhaps some physical difficulty of the kill. It is neither. The hardest part is bringing back the head.
You have to, to get paid.
Telamon of Arcadia, my mentor in the profession of manslaughter, taught me to pack it in olive oil and bring it home in a jar. In the early days of the war such proof was not required. A ring might do, or an amulet, or so my tutor apprised me later, as at that time I had not yet commenced employment in the “silent art,” but served as a common soldier like everyone else. The assassin’s requirements grew sterner as the war dragged on. Those victims who got the chance invariably pleaded, some quite eloquently, for their lives. For my part I considered it dishonorable, not to say bad business, to yield to such blandishments. I honored my commitments.
I see you smile, Jason. You must remember I was not always a villain. My family counted among its ancestors the hero Philaeus, Ajax’ son, forebear of Miltiades and Cimon, he to whom the rights of the city were granted with his brother Eurysaces, from whom Alcibiades claimed descent. My father was a Knight of Meleager and bred racers, a number of exceptional lineage, including the mare Briareia, who was the pole horse on Alcibiades’ team when it won the crown at Olympia, the year of his magnificent triple, when Euripides himself sang the victory ode. We were good people. People of quality.
That said, I make no pretense to innocence of Alcibiades’ assassination or any other charge. But these scoundrels aren’t
after me for that, are they? They’re still too happy to see him dead. Men hate nothing worse than that mirror held before them whose reflection displays their own failure to prove worthy of themselves. This likewise is your master’s crime, Socrates the philosopher. He will suck hemlock for it. My own transgressions, I fear, remain unsullied by such aspirations to honor.
This murder charge, I say, the one of that luckless fellow Philemon…of this I’m innocent. It was an accident! Ask anyone who saw it.
But listen to me beg for my life! I sound like every other lying swine in here. [Laughs.] If I had gold in the yard, I’d dig it up. Yes, and have your way with my wife and daughters as well! [Laughs again.]
But hear me, Jason. I appreciate your coming. I am aware of the demands upon you from other quarters and grateful for your time. I know you despise, if not me, then my transgressions. As for my chances of acquittal, the betting man will long since have purchased the shovel to dig my grave. Yet remain, I beseech you. Track with me the course of this man I am said to have slain and our intertwined fates—yours, mine, and our nation’s.
If I am guilty, Athens is too. What did I perform, save what she desired? As the city loved him, so did I. As she hated him, I did too. Let us tell that story, of the spell he cast over our state and how that bewitchment led us to ruin, all in the same basket. As I plead for my life like the dog I am, perhaps we may dig up some gold in the yard, the treasure of insight and illumination. What do you say, Jason? Will you assist me? Will you help a villain explore the provenance of his villainy?
IV
ORDEAL AND COMMISSION
When I was ten, my father sent me for my schooling to Sparta. This was far from unheard-of in the decades before the war, when fellow feeling still prevailed between the two great states by whose allied exertions Greece had been preserved from the Persian yoke. Periodic clashes and conflicts notwithstanding, the dominant disposition toward Sparta among the Athenian gentry was respect. Many of the older landed families, not alone of our city but of Greece entire, shared bonds of guest-friendship with clans at Sparta; such gentlefolk often felt keener kinship for their kind across borders than for the commons of their own states, whose increasing stridency and self-assertion threatened not only to overturn the old courtly ways but to coarsen and corrupt the rising generation of youth. What more satisfactory inoculation for these striplings, their fathers reasoned, than a turn or two in the Spartan agoge, the Upbringing, where a lad learned the old-fashioned virtues of silence, continence, and obedience?
Among my father’s forebears were the Athenian heroes Miltiades and Cimon, the latter esteemed by the Spartans little less than their own kings, which affection Cimon returned in abundance, naming his eldest son Lacedaemonius, who himself trained at Sparta, though only to age sixteen. Through such ties and by his own exertions my father succeeded in enrolling his firstborn among that handful of foreigners permitted to “stand, steal, and starve” beside their Lacedaemonian counterparts. Some twenty or thirty of us anepsioi, “cousins,” trekked in each year from all Greece, taking our places among the seven hundred homegrowns. Alcibiades himself, though he did not train at Lacedaemon, was xenos, guest-friend, of the Spartan knight Endius (who would stand present in Asia to oversee his friend’s assassination). Endius’ father was named Alcibiades, a Lacedaemonian name which alternated in both families. My own father’s name, Nicolaus, is Laconian, as was mine at birth, Polemidas, but whose pronunciation and spelling I Atticized upon enlistment.
I was nineteen when war began, at Sparta, one season shy of that commencement called O and C, Ordeal and Commission, the accession granted to non-Lacedaemonians, equivalent to initiation into the Corps of Peers for citizens, the Spartiatai, and their “stepbrother” comrades, the mothakes.
Few believed then that the war would last more than a season. True, Athenian troops were in action, besieging Potidaea, but this was strictly an internal affair between Athens and one of her subject states, however vocally the latter might squeal, and did not violate the Peace. It was not Sparta’s ox being gored. The Spartan army, egged on by her allies, had indeed invaded Attica in retaliation, yet so lightly was this regarded that I without demurral participated in the pack-out of the two line divisions, to be reinforced by twenty thousand heavy infantry of Sparta’s Peloponnesian allies, which comprised the invasion brigades. All the foreign boys helped too. We thought nothing of it. The army would march in, raise hell, and march out, to be succeeded by some form of negotiated settlement by fall or winter. The idea that we lads in schooling might be sent home was never even broached.
It was on the eve of the Gymnopaedia, the Festival of the Naked Boys, that I learned my father’s estate had been burned. I had been elected an eirenos, a youth-captain, and this night took charge for the first time of my own platoon of boys. We were at choral practice, just setting up, when one of the lads, a particularly bright youth named Philoteles, advanced in the scrupulous manner prescribed by the laws, eyes down, hands beneath his cloak, and sought permission to address me. His father, Cleander, was with the army in Attica and had sent a message home. He knew our farm. We had welcomed him as a guest more than once.
“Please convey to Polemidas my extreme regret,” Cleander’s letter stated, employing my Laconian name. “I exerted all influence I possessed to prevent this action, but the district had been selected by Archidamus, prompted by the omens. One farm could not be spared when all others were torched.”
I applied at once for an interview with my commander Phoebidas, the brother of Gylippus, whose leadership in Sicily, scores of thousands of deaths later, was to prove of such calamitous effect against our forces. Should I return or complete my passage to initiation? Phoebidas was a gentleman of virtue, a throwback to a nobler age. After much deliberation, including taking of the dream omens at Oeum, it was decided that duty to the gods of hearth and fatherland superseded all conflicting obligations. I must go home.
I trekked to Acharnae, a hundred and forty miles in four days, without even a dog to accompany my steps, oblivious to the sequence of sorrows of which this blow was the precursor. I expected to find vines and groves blackened by fire, walls toppled, crops laid waste. This, as you know, Jason, is no calamity. The grapes and olives spring back, and nothing can kill the land.
I arrived at my father’s farm, Road’s Turn, during the hours of darkness. It looked bad, but nothing could prepare me for the devastation which greeted my eyes at daybreak. Archidamus’ men had not simply scorched vineyard and grove but sheared the living plants to the nub. They had poured lime into the open stumps and spread this brew across every square yard of field. The house was ashes, and the cottages and barns. All stock had been slaughtered. They had even killed the cats.
What kind of war was this? What manner of king was Archidamus to countenance such depredation? I was enraged; more so my younger brother Demades, whom we called Little Lion, when at last I located him in the city. Eluding our father by whose command he was to maintain his study of music and mathematics, he had enlisted in the regiment of Aegeis, outside our tribe and under false papers. My two younger uncles and all six cousins had joined their companies. I signed as well.
The war had begun. In the far north the Potidaeans, emboldened by the vigorousness of the Spartan incursion into Attica, had enlarged their revolt from our empire. A hundred ships and ninety-five hundred Athenian and Macedonian troops held them besieged. Alcibiades, the most illustrious youth of our generation, had mustered already. Too impatient to wait for his twentieth birthday and the cavalry trials, he had shipped as a common infantryman with the Second Eurysaces, that company which his guardian, Pericles, had claimed as his first command. When weather and the close of sailing season threatened to strand the last of our unembarked Acharnian companies, we were piggybacked onto the penteconters of this unit. We sailed on the eighth of Pyanopsion, Theseus day, into a howling norther.
Of the hundreds of passages I have endured in subsequent seasons, this was the worst. No m
ast was even stepped; sail was broken out only as weather-cover, pitifully inadequate, against the seas which pounded over the bows daylong onto the exposed backs and shoulders of us, serving as oarsmen as well as infantry, bereft of refuge in the undecked galleys. It took eighteen days to get to Torone, whereupon our Acharnian companies and those of Scambonidae were conjoined under the Athenian general Paches and, reinforced by two troops of Macedonian cavalry, sent back the way we had come, by sea, with orders to capture and occupy the Perrhaebian fortresses at Colydon and Madrete.
These sites were unknown to me, as was the region entire; I felt as one washed up at the extremities of earth. Surely such weather could prevail only at the verges of Tartarus. We made south, twenty-two ships—among whose companies now stood my brother, “making the skip” from his original regiment—packed with puking neophytes greener even than ourselves, while enemy cavalry tracked the flotilla’s progress from shore, barring all attempts at landing. Alcibiades was aboard our ship, the Hygeia. He had made a nasty name for himself by assigning his turn at oars to his attendant (when none other younger than twenty-five even dreamt of such extravagance) while he himself monitored the convoy’s passage more like a fleet commander than an untried shield-humper like the rest. About his shoulders he wore a black woolen cloak with the design of an eagle in silver, of such superb workmanship that its worth could be no less than a year’s pay for a colonel. Every item of his kit was the finest, and his looks…well, you know these as well as I. One was torn between jealousy, for all knew well of his wealth and lovers, and awe, that any of flesh could be so spectacularly gifted by heaven. For three days the squadron alternately ran before, then beat into, a gale which the locals described as “moderate” but which to me was indistinguishable from the hoarblast of hell. At last at the third sunset a storm of homicidal ferocity struck. Paches’ flagship signaled all vessels to make for shore, enemy be damned.