Now one longed no more for Alcibiades for his leadership. Now one hated him for his absence. It was he who had sent this scourge upon us, out of his own pride and from the foe’s embrace; he who, set upon that balance point between his country and himself, chose his own survival and directed hell on us, his brothers. God preserve me, a man cried to heaven, to see him paid out! Let me live, if only long enough to deal him death.
Two days later, mad with thirst, the column reached the Assinarus. We were at the rear and heard the story later.
The enemy had not dammed this river. Instead he was drawn up on the far side, two thousand across and ten deep, with five thousand cavalry on the flanks, funneling our column as it approached toward the massed armor and missile troops of their comrades. The Syracusan archers and slingers had been drawn up in the fore, on the opposite bank, less than a hundred feet away. They began firing while our troops were still two hundred feet from the river. Nicias and the commanders sought to hold our men back. But the soldiers stampeded into the river, even as the enemy poured volley after volley upon them. Men were shot through and dying, yet still battling one another for drink. Thousands fell in the water; thousands more, fleeing, were run down or rounded up for slaves. Behind us, Demosthenes’ division had been overrun by fifty thousand, the columns we had spotted from the summit of Gylippus’ wall. Our force was tatters. Forty thousand had set out; under six remained.
Nicias surrendered next morning. Two nights later we were in the quarries.
Here is how they branded us. They had chutes, four of them, like a farmer’s for sheep. We were driven forward in lines. At the end was a stanchion. This captured your skull. At my station the man with the brand was instructing a prentice. “Not like an ox, boy! This is man skin, not cowhide. Kiss the flesh…just a sweetheart’s kiss, like that!”
I remember rising to my feet, seeking a reflecting surface to behold my new slave self who bore the koppa brand. This was not necessary. One glance at your mates told all.
In the quarries men clung to the frailest vessels of hope. Many reasoned that because the Syracusans had not put us to death, they must eventually make us work or sell us. Others held out the hope of ransom. Lion made it his task to dash such expectations, the harboring of which, he felt, served only to demoralize us further. We must make up our minds to die like men. Those we had abandoned at the Great Harbor, he recalled to us, had already done so.
There were sixty-eight hundred in the quarries, all Athenians, Argives, and free allies. Fifteen thousand had been killed on the roads; perhaps five thousand had been rounded up by private soldiers and hidden from their officers for slaves. Of the remaining thirteen thousand—mercenaries, mechanics, camp followers—great numbers had been slaughtered; the rest had been sold.
The quarries were limestone defined by that cleft—the infamous spelaion, the cavern—which split the cliffside; the rest exposed, varying in depth from thirty feet to above a hundred. The site was immediately outside the city, abutting the sector of Temenites. Our captors let us down by ladders, then pulled the ladders up. When a man died he may not be buried, but the corpses collected in piles, emitting an unendurable stench. Those summoned by their captors for punishment, or fun, would be hauled out feet-first, elbows pressed tight for protection to their skulls, which banged into the stone at each heave on the tackle.
Rations were a pint of grain a day, uncooked slop, and a half-pint of water, both lowered in vats contrived to be too cumbersome for a man or even two to receive without spilling, and roped down at sites of such precipitousness as to make those who received them risk their necks from a fall. Our captors routinely urinated in our water; we plucked turds from our dinner every day.
The warders called us “ponies,” for the horse brand on our brows. Their officers took a census the first day by unit; we must count out eight times each day subsequent. All must be on our feet before dawn and not sit till dark. A man caught would be stoned or roped topside for a “pony ride.” Those who returned alive from these sessions did not remain so for long.
The Syracusans moved to crush our spirits by eliminating officers. Those whose identities they had obtained were hoisted to the pit rim, there to endure within earshot of their men below sieges of barbarity as long as two and three days. Beneath this torture, the names of other officers were extracted and these hauled up to undergo like atrocities. The dead were pitched back over the brink. Any who attempted to honor them by burial were shot down or stoned. This ordeal continued until no commander above the rank of subaltern remained.
This was not the finish, however. By some misintelligence, or inspired by malice alone, our captors pronounced their conviction that three officers remained yet unsurrendered. The foe commanded that this trio be produced. It went without saying that, absent immediate compliance, the enemy would commence butchering at random.
At once three stepped forward. These were Pythodorus the son of Lycophron of Anaphlystus, Nicagoras the son of Mnesicles of Pallene, and Philon the son of Philoxenos of Oa. Their monument, the Three Officers, stands at Athens now, on the slope opposite the Eleusinium. As the Syracusans bound and hauled these up feet-first, none of whom had held rank beyond squad commander, our men unprompted commenced the Hymn to Victory.
Goddess, born of bitter labor,
Joy-bringer, Truth-revealer,
Long-sought Nike, our voices
We lift in song to thee.
Sternest of immortals,
Yet clement to the brave,
For him who endures
Thou effaceth all evil.
So fierce was the emotion produced by these stanzas that it seemed to fill the great bowl like a liquid, echoing stone-amplified about the quarry face.
Thunderer’s fickle daughter,
Enter we thy precincts of agon.
To thee, Brightling, or to Death
Do we our souls consign.
In Sicily summer’s end produces days of blistering heat, succeeded by nights of bitter cold. We were permitted no bedding or fire; the site was open to the elements. Many bore wounds of battle, others suffered with disease; now under sharpening exposure these failed. That state called aphydatosis set in, in which the organs, for want of liquid, cease to function. The brain cooks in its skull. One cannot draw piss. Vision fails; limbs go racked by palsy.
Tours were conducted from the city, children in school uniforms attended by their pedagogues, to look upon those who had sailed to enslave them and been brought low by the valor of their fathers. Captives would be hauled forth and the children would break their teeth out with hammers. In the quarries men were melting away by scores every night. Yet such is the nature of existence that any site, hell itself, becomes with time home. The men had got to know the place. One knoll became the Pnyx; a hollow the theatron. There was an agora and a Lyceum, an Acropolis and an Academy. The day was given shape by this fanciful geography, as men assembled in “the marketplace” and passed on to “the wrestling schools.” To pass the time they taught one another. One skilled in smithing would impart the principles of his practice; others shared instruction of joinery, mathematics, music. Lion taught boxing. He could not demonstrate; this would draw attention from the sentinels. So he lectured beneath his breath to students under the pitiless sun.
They caught one teacher, a choirmaster, and cut his tongue out. That put a crimp in our college. But the despair which succeeded could not be endured. Lion resumed. He taught gymnastics and isometrics, concentration exercises and endurance drills. He lectured on the humors of the blood and that saturation of the tissue that must be sustained over time for the athlete to build the stamina for the Games. This is what road drills are about, and rowing, and the Long Course. Its landscape, he taught, is what trainers call the precinct of pain.
“I was taught as a boy that a goddess resides there, silent, in that sanctuary at the pinnacle of pain. This goddess’s name is Victory. Look around you, cousins. We reside in that precinct now. And she is with us, this god
dess. Even here, my friends, we may give ourselves to her and be lifted by her wings.”
Someone informed. We never knew who. The Syracusans roped Lion topside and tortured him three days. What they did to him I will never repeat, except to say that it was not as evil as what they performed later.
They dumped him back down. I held him all night, while others kept him warm with their bodies. Five days later he began teaching again. No one would come. “I will instruct the air, then!” And he did. I took station before him, the only act of my life in which I truly take pride. Others stood too, knowing they were signing his death warrant and their own.
The Syracusans hauled Lion topside again. When they dumped him again, I was certain he was dead. I held him against the cold, swathed in every rag our mates could muster. Sometime after midnight he stirred. “What a thing of trouble this body is. It will be a relief to shuck it.”
He slept an hour, then came to with a start.
“You must carry on my historia, Pommo. You’re the only one I trust.”
I fell asleep, cradling him. When I woke he was cold.
Once when we were boys our pack had played bowl hockey on that field called the Aspis which runs outside the walls adjacent the sanctuary of Athena Tritogeneia. Do you know the place, Jason? There is a downgrade on the Carriage Road where the carters allow their wagons to gather way, building momentum for the ascent west of the gate. I was nine then, as were my mates, but Lion, only six, had beseeched us so passionately as to be permitted to join our game. Suddenly a ball, struck loose, bounded for the freighters’ track. Lion took after it. I spotted his dash from across the field. He was not oblivious, as another boy might be, sprinting into the path of a teamster’s rig whose massive oak wheels rumbled in their unchecked rush. He was simply without fear. I flew across the turf, tackling him at the terminal instant. Amid the carter’s curses I hauled my brother to his feet and slapped him bloody, adding my own invective, coarser than the teamster’s, for scaring me so to death. When Father interrogated the lad that night on the origin of his blackened eye, he would give up nothing. I received a thrashing nonetheless and a second next evening when from my brother’s innocent lips sprang a brilliant replication of my tirade of the previous day.
Here in the quarries, however, I could not preserve him from his own valor.
I buried him, such as one could, in the deepest precinct, where the goddess dwelt. All speech is superfluous to his elegy, save a plain recital of his deeds. He was, excepting none, the bravest soldier and finest man I ever knew.
Next morning my name was called. They hauled me up by the tackle. Death still held terror for me, I am ashamed to confess. Yet what grieved me most was that I would not survive to pay out Alcibiades. “God preserve me, let me cry out no names.”
The swing arm hauled me over the quarry’s lip. Men’s teeth littered the ground by hundreds. It was hot. Flies swarmed in masses atop patches on the earth, blood doubtless, or fragments of flesh, fingers, and toes. I could see benches, upon which several men were strapped, disemboweled yet still alive. Rude tables sat beside these, upon which implements were spread as at a dentist’s or physician’s. I recognized cleavers and bonebreakers. The uses of the other tools I could not surmise. Across a space stood a colony of execution posts. All were vacant at the moment, their sides and the limestone at their bases black and swarming with flies. Behind this stood tents and a circle of stone where the guards took their meals. There was a miniature slaughter area to the side, for pullets and doves for their grub. The adjacency of these charnel tracks for men and fowl struck me ludicrous. I laughed aloud.
A guard walloped me across the kidneys. He shoved me forward. Others demanded my name. I must repeat it over and over while they scoured the roll. “Polemides the son of Nicolaus of Acharnae, yes?”
Yes.
“Son of Nicolaus?”
Yes.
“Of Acharnae?”
Yes.
“This is the man. I will take him.”
A new voice spoke these last. I turned toward it and discovered a sturdy youth with a strawberry blemish, a brace of javelins across his back and a Lacedaemonian xyele at his hip. He was a warrior’s squire of the Spartans. He came round before me, extending a wooden bowl in which slopped a base of wine and a heel of barley. “Don’t drink it straight or you’ll pass out. Soak it with the bread.”
My wrists were unbound, pins hammered from my shackles.
“Who are you?” I prayed of the youth.
“Eat your bread,” he commanded.
I peered into his face, which I had seen before, I was certain, but could not remember. For his part the youth measured me, absent compassion, assessing what strength I yet possessed and what demands might be made upon it.
“I serve the polemarch Lysander of Sparta,” he pronounced. “By God’s clemency are you spared and commanded to accompany me by sea to Lacedaemon.”
Book V
ALCIBIADES IN SPARTA
XXV
THE SOLDIER IN WINTER
It was half a year before I reached Lacedaemon. My health broke down on the crossing to Rhegium and again on the trek from Cyllene; I must be settled on a sharecroft of Endius’ kleros, his estate, at the north end of the Eurotas valley. I did not see Sparta herself till spring.
All winter I lay abed, with my fare in my fist as the Lacedaemonians say. The skin stretched thin as paper across my breast. A skeleton stared back from the glass. From Sicily my legs bore twenty-seven unhealed wounds—punctures, undercuts, and peel-backs, including two of three fingers’-breadth above both Achilles tendons. Ribs were cracked in a dozen places, the crown of my skull so contused that when the hair was shaved to be scourged with lye, the flesh showed purple and peeled in layers like an onion. I must eat and sleep. My benefactors, an elder couple of the land, settled me in the room that had been their son’s and left me to my rest. Days I lay in the sun of the south-facing court, evenings before the fire, bundled in the borderless mantle of the countryman. There was an antique hound of the farm, Kicker by name; as strength returned I ventured at his side, forked on my staff like a fossil, upon the winter hills.
Nights were long and I dreamt often. I felt old, ancient as Cronos. Shades passed before my vision, my own among them; I saw father and sister, Lion and Simon and my wife and babe; with them I held converse nightlong of such profundity as must reform my soul forever, yet when I woke these had dispelled, gossamer as smoke. I retained nothing. Shadow and sun were one to me, as visions intruded at their will and not the widest daylight could dispel them. I saw again the wounded in the Great Harbor and the dying as the troop trekked out. Again I trudged in column to the Assinarus. A hundred nights I woke in terror, only to confront this fresh indictment: that of my own survival. By what grant did I endure above the earth when so many better than I had been banished beneath it? The panel parted one midnight; Alcibiades arose before me. So vivid stood his apparition, down to the wolf’s-fang brooch he had won at Potidaea, that I was certain he inhabited the chamber in the flesh. He and not Lysander, I was informed, had been the agent of my preservation. I did not thank but reviled him. “Why did you save me? Why me and not my brother?”
“Your brother wouldn’t have come.”
The truth of this lanced me to the quick. I sought to lunge at my tormentor, to throttle his witness at its source; but my limbs would not obey me. Such grief wrung my heart as to strangle all speech and stir.
“I needed one at my side,” Alcibiades pronounced, “who had passed through the same portal I had.”
In daylight I could countenance my cowardice and even extenuate it. At night I sweated, as on trial. I saw myself in Phreatto at Piraeus, where one accused of homicide overseas must make his defense standing offshore in a boat, as the laws of ritual pollution forbid his feet, defiled with bloodguilt, to tread the earth of Attica. In dreams I sought to sacrifice, but always the priests debarred my offering. Nightlong I slaughtered victims and read damnation in their ent
rails. I had not lost fear of heaven, rather become possessed by it, or more accurately that no-man’s-land through which mortals and immortals pass and commingle and where, as Craterus testifies, the living and the dead, the unborn and the soon-to-die
share song and society at the same table.
Alone memory of my children seemed to vouchsafe salvation. I clung to vision of their faces as one shipwrecked to a spar. I had no right to. What endowment had I bequeathed them, not even my name? War had called and I had gone. Now I was sick of war. The farm on which I recuperated was what they call a “life-hold”; the freedman and his wife grew pears. I watched them with their graftlings and their winter boxes. With what poignancy such homely tasks wrung my heart! I longed to be woken no more by the trumpet but by the lark, to hear again the peal of children’s laughter. Let another take my place at muster, let him sing out “Aye” as the mark tolls down the line. Of my thirty-eight years, nineteen had passed in war. It was enough.
Yet each night’s board enlarged my debt to Sparta and to Lysander. Could I run? Where? My breath could barely snuff a candle; it took the strength of both arms to turn in bed. Lysander would find me, or his agents, those who for a price track their prey to the gates of hell. I would become one of those myself before settled at my homeland again, though I did not know it then.
That spring I saw Alcibiades speak. This was in open-air assembly before the kings and ephors and the Corps of Peers. Gylippus had returned from Syracuse in glory; the scale of the calamity to Athens had been accounted. My country and her allies had lost twenty-nine thousand fighting men, two hundred prime ships of war, with merchantmen and transports too numerous to tally. The toll in talents of gold was four thousand, bankrupting the treasury of the state. More devastating to the spirit of the people was that the expedition had been lost in its entirety, every ship and man, every scrap of sail and armor.