My cousin narrated for me later how this spectacle had appeared from the vantage of shore. The wounded had pleaded with their physicians to bear them down to the sea. Each man’s fate hung on battle’s outcome; they could not bear to loiter in ignorance. The soldiers, too, had pressed down to the water’s edge, even wading into the sea, as did the Syracusans along their shore, straining across the smoke-obscured main for any index of victory or defeat.
In the offing, my cousin said, the wall of ships could not be made out, only the smoke, black at the base and gray as it rose, ascending in thunderheads so dense it seemed the entire firmament was ablaze. In quarters about the harbor battles were being fought of such scale and savagery that, taken apart from this holocaust, would have been called epochal, yet which, accounted here within the context of such numbers of men and vessels in conflict, appeared as sideshows or afterwords. Of ships fighting in open water, my cousin reported, tactics and maneuver had long since been abandoned. Instead vessels grappled one to another and slugged it out, belly-to-belly. The surface of the harbor seemed sown with islands and archipelagoes of ships, four, six, and even ten fused, while the men on deck fought it out hand-to-hand, do or die.
About the ships in uncountable numbers swarmed the small craft of the Syracusans, dinghies and coracles, catboats and even rafts, manned by every urchin and pensioner who could hurl a firepot or bash a sailor’s brains with bat or brick. You could tell which ships were Athenian by the clouds of mosquito boats about them, piking at the steersmen’s blades, slinging missiles or driving into the banks, seeking to foul the oars.
As the tide of battle alternated, the consternation produced upon the men witnessing from shore became excruciating. Directly one beheld comrades embracing in elation, my cousin recounted, as the warcraft of their nation drove the foe in flight. Now the men’s gaze bent to another quadrant where the opposite state prevailed. Despair at once repossessed their hearts; with dreadful dirges the spectators bewailed their doom, crying to heaven those lamentations as men are wont to make in such hours.
As if this audience may not suffice, a supplemental took station in the summit seats. These were the wives and daughters of the Syracusans, looking on from the city battlements which directly overstood the arena, so proximate that the dames’ cries could be heard by their champions below. Whose ship boldly struck at an Athenian was requited with acclamation resounding, while he, beleaguered, who sought to withdraw retreated into cataracts of scorn.
On the wall of ships, our side was winning.
The enemy had strung together above two hundred vessels, merchantmen and barges, scows and galleys as well as men-of-war, the line bound by rope and timber so that their front presented a solid rampart broadside to the attackers. Against this the ships of Athens hurled themselves. The fight differed from all others in my experience in this particular: nowhere upon the field could one discover vessel or man holding back. So possessed was each side by the passion to prevail, the Athenians to escape extinction, the Syracusans and their allies to wreak vengeance upon those who had made war to enslave them and, more so, to wrest the deathless renown of driving them down to ruin, that none gave thought to saving his skin but each sought to outdo the other in skill and valor. Midway through the forenoon I fell, hamstrung by that hyperextension called a “bonebreaker,” plummeting from the deck of a barge into its belly, which was awash chest-deep and into whose depths I sank like a stone. Chowder hauled me topside, where we discovered a pocket of haven, and he went to work on my leg. “Look there, Pommo”—my mate pointed down the line of strife—“have you ever seen the like of it?”
I stared. As far as sight could carry, the sea stood curtained with smoke and paved with warcraft. Immediately left, a battleship had rammed one of the vessels in the wall; all three of her banks were backing water furiously, to extract and ram again, while across the breach screamed storms of stones, darts, and brands of such density that the air appeared solid with steel and flame. As the Athenian’s ram sucked free, rending the foe’s guts, a second battleship materialized, hurtling upon the same vessel. Her ram took the enemy’s stern, lifting her entire after-section clear. Men topside spilled like pegs. As the struck ship hung impaled, her elevated weight forcing the ramming vessel’s prow into the sea, while yet denser fusillades screamed between the antagonists, the first ship, having backed clear to a boat-length, rammed the same ship anew. To the opposite hand, three Athenian galleys had grapneled to vessels in the wall. So intervolved were the marines of both sides that there were more Syracusans on the decks of the Athenian ships and the contrary upon the Syracusan. Out beyond the attackers, three more cruisers of Athens passed with murderous slowness, archers unleashing broadsides of tow and pitch over their own and into the enemy. As one vessel in the wall caught, flame leapt to its consort, borne by the wind or men who pitched or hurled or shot it. By sun’s zenith a dozen breaches had been punched in the palisade. At one point, Lion told me later, he saw three battleships of Athens pass abreast through the wall, led by Demosthenes’ Implacable, making signal “Follow me.”
We had won. And yet…
The enemy still held both jaws of the vise, the city promontory of Ortygia and Plemmyrium, the Rock, the southern mandible of the harbor mouth, between which the wall of ships extended. He had fifty thousand at one end, twenty at the other, and they kept pouring out onto the wall. Where the line of ships had been breached, the foe’s small craft flooded in and sealed the rupture. Flea boats ferried replacements across the breaks, while others hauled themselves over the timber and chain bindings which yet anchored the embattled wall. Morning had gone; we were slaughtering the enemy in such numbers that he could not, it was certain, hold out much longer.
There is an error in densely packed fighting committed by those lacking experience of war, even brave men, as the Syracusans and their allies were, and this is called in Sparta “downstreaming” or “rat-holing.” A man dueling in this fashion will stand against the individual facing him, receive or deliver a blow or several, and then, he and his antagonist unhurt, roll or shift laterally to the next of the enemy, to commence a second bashing match and in turn sideslip again. Fear makes him do this. He seeks a closet of refuge, a “rat hole” amid the slaughter. In Sparta boys are beaten who evince this habit. They are schooled instead to fight “upfield,” to seize one man and battle him alone until one or the other falls. This the Lacedaemonians call monopale, “singling up.” The Syracusans had not learned this art, for all Gylippus’ direction. Now on the wall of ships the superior experience of the Athenians began to tell. It came to this: fighting topside, twenty against twenty, forty on forty, a parataxis, pitched battle, in miniature. Or brawling belowdecks man upon man, in water thigh-and hip-deep, the walls, often afire, pinning friend and foe in the cylinder of slaughter. The Athenians had the hang of it. And they possessed a further advantage. Defenders on the sea must of necessity kill men, never an easy business. But attackers need only destroy things. The marines of Athens went after the wall with fire and the ax. Ship after ship had its belly gutted, hull torched; along the rampart hulks settled, sizzling, to the waterline.
I had found Lion and Telamon. Reunited, we were hacking through a jacket of timbers, eight logs bound with belts of iron, that yoked one section of enemy line to another. Too exhausted to stand, Lion and I straddled the timber, bashing with blades blunt as butter knives. Here came the foe. Flea boats bearing slingers hauled upon us from another smoking hulk. There were ten in our party. Telamon, Lion, and Chowder were the only ones I knew; the others had collected by ones and twos; I never learned their names. One with a red beard trumpeted to a cruiser, calling for fire. As he shouted, a bullet tore his throat out; he dropped like a gunny of rocks. The shooter vaunted, already reloaded with his sling whistling overhead. I heard an alarm from behind. Somehow another score of enemy had got onto the hulk we had just crossed from. Two more slinger boats closed from seaward. We had no helmets; all shields had been ditched. We were sitting
ducks. Lead bullets screamed past. Telamon yelled go; we hit the drink. An hour later we were on another hulk, hacking through another sheaf of timbers, each man with only a pilos cap and whatever rags still clung to his body.
The enemy kept coming. They flooded in hundreds from Ortygia and the Rock. There was no end to them. They were strong and rested, they had food in their bellies and fresh legs beneath them. They were not slashed or beaten or concussed. The shafts of their weapons had not been shivered by blows daylong struck and fended. They did not bear bone-weary, as we did, the third and fourth shield of the hour, snatched from the discards of comrades dead and dying. They breathed with lungs unchoked by smoke and unseared by fire; their guts held fresh water; they could still sweat.
Yet with all this, our men would still have prevailed if not for wind and tide. The sun had transited now, dropping hard toward shore; now the breeze got up. The tide turned in evil conjunction. There is a channel called the Race, abutting the isle of Ortygia, through which the current, compressed by the configuration of shoreline and sea bottom, streams at tide’s turn with unwonted velocity. Now the foe opened a break in his ships’ wall. The race shot through, driving our vessels back. Worse, twenty warships of the Corinthians now appeared, rounding the point from the north. Driven by the stiffening breeze and emboldened by this impetus of heaven, they fell upon the vessels of Athens engaged at sea, including Implacable, putting them to flight.
Our oarsmen could not drive into this rising gale. Broken with exhaustion, rowers “caught crabs,” fouling their mates’ oars. The wind struck their slewed surfaces and began to head them. The tidal race heightened their way. Those vessels which managed to come bows-on to the gust, which they must merely to hold position, discovered themselves vulnerable to attack from the flank, by the inrushing Corinthians with their fresh crews and by those others of the Syracusans now rallying behind the cry that the gods had answered their prayers, by sending this gale to rout the foe. I was on the cruiser Aristeia now, the fifth or sixth ship of the day, when her commander turned to ram one of the oncoming Corinthians. Our ship was literally moving backward, so stout was the gale. The Corinthian slipped her with ease, put her helm over, and wheeled, outboard banks pulling while inboard backed, to ram us amidships. The cruiser fled stern-first, backing water amid fresh broadsides of missiles. The Corinthian, hampered herself by the wind as it struck her now from abeam, managed only a glancing blow upon Aristeia’s prow, but this was sufficient to open a tear broad enough for a man and boy to pass through abreast. The sea flooded in. A mile still remained to shore.
The oarsmen pulled with the desperation of men who know they have been vanquished and that their conquerors, falling on them, will grant no quarter. They could hear Gylippus’ men along the foreshore, ravening for blood. Men groaned in despair; limbs quaked as if palsied. The ship fled into the shadows thrown by Epipolae, across the dark water which now extended hundreds of yards out from the shore. It was cold, like the morning.
Aristeia ran afoul at the Athenian palisade. Earlier vessels, jamming up in flight, had beaten the stakes from alignment, or ripped out their own bellies rushing upon them. Marines and sailors now ganged the surface by hundreds, laboring to restore the front. I glimpsed Lion and Chowder, striving in this chore. Why did they have to be so noble? With a cry I plunged in to aid them. I had no weapon, shoes, nothing. My flesh had been wrung to enervation. So had everyone’s. We could feel death, not alone in the cold and dark but in our bones.
I could see the battleships of Corinth and Syracuse sweeping down upon our rampart like great winged creatures of prey. They advanced as in a dream. By the gods, they were beautiful! Divers strove in the water beside me, seeking to rig to a float of timbers the chain that yoked two submerged hedgehogs. The weight kept dragging the float under; the men struggled to hurl its monkey fist to the marines astraddle the platform, but the strength of their arms failed; the rope flopped to the surface with a slapping sound, again and again short of the mark. Two ships of the foe had centered on our gap; they were closing so fast the first ironheads flung by their toxotai were already ripping the water at our elbows. More men thrashed to our aid from shore. After ungodly exertions, the chain was at the last seated in its notch and drawn taut.
With titanic impact the foremost battleship flung herself upon the palisade. I saw Chowder, fouled among the lines. A pike drove through the gristle of his neck. Diving for our lives, Lion and I could hear the rampart’s submerged stakes, massive as trees, plunge into the foe’s guts and the hedgehog’s spikes rend her belly. Still the Corinthian’s oarsmen heaved, seeking to tear a breach through which her sisters would pour, bringing fire to those vessels of Athens battered and broken behind the barricade.
The maddest melee of the day now ensued. Athenians like ants swarmed upon the impaled dreadnought. The dead made a carpet upon the sea. Our men hauled themselves bare-handed up the shafts of the enemy’s oars, hacking at her bankers through the hide-defended ports, while the foe’s marines piked in return from topside and their archers rained fire point-blank. Pitch bolts which the enemy’s bowmen had flung into the beached craft of Athens, our men now plucked still blazing and slung again upon the assailants. The Corinthian was going down now, adding her hulk to the fragile bastion which yet preserved us. Out beyond the stakes another dozen men-of-war had drawn up broadside, deep in shadow, archers launching their tow shafts upon us while their oarsmen sang the paean in triumph and joy.
I found Lion in the wash of bodies. Chowder was dead, Splinter slain earlier with an ax. The waves, barely enough to topple an infant, buffeted us to our knees; we must crab in on hips and elbows, shuddering with such violence as to no longer command our own limbs.
Our cousin Simon hauled us from the soup. He got wine into us, clasping me in his cloaked embrace; others swathed Lion, abrading his flesh to restore the warmth of blood. Despair rang from every quarter, such chagrin more acute among those unable this day to fight, the army and the wounded who could only look on without striking a blow. I glanced up the strand and thought, This is what hell must look like.
Above us a knot of seamen labored to resuscitate a comrade. No hope. At last the final man yielded and pitched. Night was on us. Across the darkening field the warships of the foe quartered, piking the last of our seamen bereft upon the swell and calling that we would not tarry long to join them. Beside Lion and my cousin, the clutch of sailors peered hollow-eyed on this tableau.
“Did you see him out there?” one uttered in awe and dread. “He was on the ships, fighting for the enemy.”
“He was there when they broke us, leading them.”
“No one could stand before him.”
What nonsense was this? Would these morons claim to have descried Poseidon, or Zeus himself, among the champions of the foe?
“Who the hell are you talking about?” I demanded. “What phantom do you madmen think you saw?”
The sailor turned as if I were the madman.
“Alcibiades,” he declared.
XXIV
THE ISSUE OF DEFEA
Later, in the quarries, one of our number inquired of a Syracu-san warden if Alcibiades had in fact been present at the battle of the harbor.
The keeper laughed in his face. “You can concoct handier fictions than that, Athenians. Or can you still not believe you could be beaten other than by one of your own?”
There is a crime in Sicily which the non-Greek natives call demortificare. It means to occasion someone to experience shame or, equally blameworthy, to be aware of such distress and take no action to relieve it. Among the Syracusans, who have embraced the concept as their own, this is an offense graver than murder, which they regard as an act of passion or honor and thus sanctioned or at least condoned by the gods. Demortificare is different. I once witnessed a boy, one of our laundry urchins, beaten half-senseless by his father for permitting his female cousin to sit alone at a dance.
The Syracusans hated us for a thousand causes, but beyond a
ll for having surrendered to them. It was Lion who remarked this, in the branding kennels, compiling observations for his historia, which he kept now in his head and recited aloud to keep his mates from cracking. “The Syracusans can absolve us for bringing war upon them. They may abide even the despoliation of their city and the slaughter of their sons. But they will never forgive us for our shame.”
You are a gentleman, Jason, but you are also a warrior. And you call yourself a philosopher. I believe you are. Do you know why I sought you out to aid me in my defense? Not because I believed you could help. None can; my grave is dug. Rather I imposed on you out of self-interest. I wanted to meet you. I have admired you since Potidaea. Will it surprise you to learn that I have followed your career, as much as one may at the remove at which I found myself from the city of my birth? I know of the death, or murder, of your two dear sons at the hands of the Thirty. I know the ruin brought upon the family of your second wife. I am aware of the peril in which you placed yourself and your kin, defending the younger Pericles before the Assembly; I have read your speech and admire it greatly. To own to honor lifelong is no mean feat.
Yet I flatter myself that I share with a man such as yourself, if not qualities of honor, then of perception. Here is my crime, and to account it I haul all Greece into the dock beside me: to save my skin I abandoned my fellows, both on the field and within my heart. But let us plumb this unbosoming. I abandoned not only my brothers but myself. To save myself, I abandoned myself.