I had participated in several actions with the younger Pericles, a squadron commander then and already preeminent among the corps. He was thrallbound by his commander. “It’s mediocrity, do you see, Pommo? Alcibiades has debarred it altogether. One would rather die than fall short of the mark. Remember the night we made a hash of the soundings off Elaeus? I was making my report, trying to put the best face on it. He didn’t utter a syllable. Just gave me a look. By the gods, I would sooner be flogged through the fleet than stand in its path again. It was a look that said, ‘I expected so much of you, Pericles, and you have let me down.’”
Corollary to the principle of minimal force was that of minimal supervision. When Alcibiades issued a combat assignment, he imparted the objective only, leaving the means to the officer himself. The more daunting the chore, the more informally he commanded it. I never saw him issue an order from behind a desk.
Always assign a man more than he believes himself capable of. Make him rise to the occasion. In this way you compel him to discover fresh resources, both in himself and others of his command, thus enlarging the capacity of each, while binding all beneath the exigencies of risk and glory.
Another to Adeimantus:
As we seek to make our enemies own their defeats at our hands, so we must make our friends own their victories. The less you give a man, and have him succeed, the more he draws his achievement to his heart. Remember we may elevate the fleet in two ways only. By acquiring better men or making those we have better. Even were the former practicable I would disdain it, for a hired man may hire out to another master but a man who makes himself master stays loyal forever.
There was an oarsman of the Mnemosyne named Lysicles, who could not swim. His mates had exhausted all remedies. Alcibiades, learning of this, walked the man out into the sea one evening, some fifty yards from the fellow’s vessel anchored offshore. Such a sight was extraordinary to say the least; hundreds congregated, looking on. Alcibiades spoke to the man quietly for a number of moments. At once the fellow screwed his eyes shut and plunged into the foam. When he made it, the entire strand erupted.
What had Alcibiades said to the man?
“He told me I could do it, and made me believe him.”
When Panegyris and Atalanta were mauled at Nine-Mile Cove and their trierarchs blaming themselves had made their spirits disconsolate, he called the pair to his tent and, stripping before them, commanded them to regard the many wounds upon his body. “I’d rather have a man who has closed with the foe and bears the scars than all the bronze-and-brightwork of the regatta. I can find unscathed captains anywhere. But where will I get brave men like you and your crews?”
This to the younger Pericles and his officers, when they had made plea for additional vessels:
Never forget, gentlemen, that you command Athenians and that those elements which make our countrymen great are intangible. Daring and intelligence, adaptability and esprit. Put these in the bank for me and I will get you all the ships you need.
As he chastened men with banishment from himself, so he rewarded them with access. He loved to have his officers about him, particularly late at night as he worked. “Bear in mind, my friends, that access to your person is a mighty incentive to those in station beneath you. A smile, a kind word, a nickname spoken with affection. Recall how we as boys gloried in the moments at our father’s knee, or how even now an invitation to dine with our commanders makes light of many a long pull into a hard wind. Don’t hoard your person, gentlemen. Money cannot buy the prize of your attention, and the men know it.”
He schooled his captains to think in terms of squadrons and wings, never single ships, and to bear in mind ever the fleet as a whole, which squadrons were where and how quickly they could be brought up, how swiftly one’s own may withdraw to their aid. He would react with fury to the report of vessels advancing out of formation. The phrase “in support of” permeated his orders. To any scheme his first question was “Who sails in support?”
In the advance he demanded ships “blade-to-blade,” that each draw courage from her mates’ proximity. At sea he maintained signal traffic night and day, to link all vessels as a unit. Casualties he refused to segregate, but the wounded must be borne home with their shipmates, no matter if the deck sprawl with litters and blood trail onto the oarsmen’s backs. Each must know he would never be abandoned, but his mates would bear him off. “None fears death more than the sea fighter, for the infantryman, falling, cedes his bones to the earth from which they may be recovered, but the sailor to the barren and pitiless main.”
This to the younger Pericles, when he heard he had lost his temper at one of his oarsmen:
The infantryman may fight without his captain and take to flight without him. But the sailor advances to battle yoked to his commander, with naught dissevering him from hell but his faith in you and a thumb’s-breadth of pine.
Alcibiades drilled the fleet tirelessly in self-presentation, to make few look like many and many like few. He practiced the exploitation of headlands and promontories to conceal our presence and numbers. He accustomed the men to launching at all weathers, for storms and squalls not only offered concealment but magnified the theater of terror with which to overawe the foe. In the great victory at Cyzicus he obscured the fleet in a downpour he had anticipated for months, intelligence of the terrain having determined that at that hour at that season such weather could be counted upon.
Before he came, the men had tended to break up by specialties, marines and infantry disdaining the nautai, topside oarsmen despising holdsmen, and cavalry styling themselves superior to all. Alcibiades effaced these distinctions not with chastisement, but with glory. Later, when Thrasyllus came out from Athens with a thousand heavy infantry and five thousand sailors trained as javelineers, but suffered defeat at Ephesus, Alcibiades’ men would not let them enter the camp; they who had never been beaten disdaining their countrymen who had let the enemy erect a trophy to their shame. Alcibiades broke this up by pitting them side by side against main-force Spartans. Victory again effaced all distinctions.
He sought to keep fresh those squadrons not on campaign or pillage by employing them to bewitch the civil populace. The report of Athenian men-of-war, even two or three anchoring in a cove, would draw the locals from miles. Far from spurning these gawkers, Alcibiades ordered them haled aboard. Let them see what battleship and battle crew look like. Lads he sought especially to beguile, for their youth makes them seek heroes and models of emulation. They will tell us everything. Intelligence of tides, currents, and weather he prized above silver. Fishermen, whom the Spartans despised, he ordained favorites. No dinner lacked at least one of these characters, debriefed later for quirks of tide and channel, storm and season.
Under fire I cannot read the chart, but a pilot at my shoulder who says steer there where the rip runs.
Often he led raids himself, materializing from the darkness to strike a harbor with ax and brand, or sailing in in broad daylight, compelling the populace to fear him more than the garrison who occupied them. He loved to snatch from their beds mayors and magistrates. These he often interrogated in person, restoring them to home with gifts, his object to abash them with the might of the fleet,
for one snatched in the night will behold all he sees with eyes widened by terror and magnify reports of the invincibility of his captors.
He sought not to drill the fleet to dull uniformity, but to enliven it with individuality and self-enterprise.
…each wing, and squadron within a wing, must be encouraged to forward its own identity, some skill or talent at which it exceeds all and in which it may take pride. Let one wing carry double complement of marines; let them train with the grapnel and the flying outrigger. Let another build out its catheads Corinthian-style and call itself Hammerhead or Ram. When sailors from different divisions meet in a tavern, I want insults to fly. I want fistfights. The more the better, for in their aftercourse the men are bound yet more tightly together.
He
re is how he went about acquiring cavalry.
From raiding to support the fleet he had become acquainted with Thrace, their hordes of horsemen and the spirit of their savage princes—two in particular, Seuthes the son of Maisades, and Medocus, lords of the Odrysians. Thrasybulus and Theramenes pressed him to pay court to these. The army could acquire cavalry nowhere else. But Alcibiades understood the hearts of these wild knights. One may not approach them giftless, nor may the friendship offering be less than spectacular or presented in any manner other than the grand.
Now Alcibiades had two trierarchs he favored, brothers, Damon and Nestorides, of his home district, Scambonidae. They were the youngest of the fleet, the one twenty-three, the other a year younger. Do you recall the scandal at Athens, Jason, of the chorus of boys? This was ten years earlier, before Syracuse. Alcibiades’ uncle Axiochus had sponsored a chorus of beardless lads at the Panathenaea; in the celebration of their victory Alcibiades had contrived to have the youths overnight at his estate rather than return home with their fathers. Lubricating his charges with their first noseful of the grape, he then produced a cohort of glamorous (and full-grown) hetairai.
He got the boys laid.
This touched off a terrific hubbub. Suit was brought for outrage, hybris. That was when Meletus issued his famous indictment, “Cite not the whores but the whoremaster!” Alcibiades of course had judged the prize worth the hazard. He recognized in these lads the flower of the city, commanders and generals of the future. He sought by orchestration of this passage to manhood, the most indelible of their young lives, to bind them to him with chains of adamant.
Now the brothers, Damon and Nestorides, had arrived from Athens. Alcibiades had brought them out as armored infantry, they being far too callow to be given command at sea without causing a mutiny among the senior captains. Here is how he got them ships. He dispatched the lads first as marines, in a series of reconnaissances of the Spartan shipworks at Abydos. They went in, ten nights in all, mapping the yard and its approaches. They reported four vessels under repair, nearly seaworthy. “Bring one back,” Alcibiades pledged, “and you’ll command her.”
A rainy night, the boys landed with thirty men, Antiochus lying offshore with four fast triremes. They towed off not one ship but two, naming them Panther and Lynx. These kits became holy terrors. They pitched their hulls black and painted cat’s eyes on their prows. They ran the night missions that struck every other skipper with dread. It was these, lads not yet twenty-four, who severed the chain at Abydos, laying the harbor open to the raid that burned half the wharf district, assassinated a score of mayors and administrators, and kidnapped out of his mistress’s bed Pharnabazus’ secretary and all his notes. But their chief athlon, the exploit that brought the fleet its cavalry, was the carrying off of the three hundred women.
These were two slave parties, a hundred and fifty in each, whose movements the lads had detected and whom Alcibiades had ordered held under observation up and down the coast beneath Mount Coppias. The women were captives, Odrysian Thracians, digging irrigation works. He sent the brothers in at dusk with twelve ships. The lasses ran out to them, into the sea, shrieking with joy, while their Persian masters lobbed ironheads at the raiders, then scooted like hell up the Caicos Valley. The “Cat’s Eyes” brought the maidens back to Sestos, thinking Alcibiades meant to sell them to the whoremasters. Instead the commander had them bathed and oiled, with orders to the fleet that they be treated as gentlewomen.
Here was the gift for the Thracian princes.
He sent the lads first, to inform the savage nobles that Alcibiades wished to meet with them and appointing time and place. He himself took the women in four galleys escorted by a dozen men-of-war, the girls themselves garlanded as brides, to efface all shame of captivity and render them legitimate consorts for the princes to bestow upon their favorites, to the wild strand of Salmydessos, where he presented them to Medocus, Bisanthes, and Seuthes, the great princes of the plains.
By the twin gods, those whores’ sons knew how to say thanks. They set up Antiochus and the lads with brides on the spot, brooking no protest, and brought down five hundred horses out of the hills, a gift for Alcibiades and the cavalry. Have you ever seen five hundred horses, Jason? It is a sight. We of the support party wished only to corral the beasts and make our exit before these savages changed their minds.
Except now comes the bolt. Alcibiades turns the princes down. He will not accept the horses. Worse, he informs Seuthes, the prince has insulted him by offering these animals instead of what he knows his guest really wants. The hour is deep past midnight. A hundred bonfires blaze; our ships wait, shored on the strand with tribesmen cavorting all over, men and women drunk as coots, while an army a thousand times our party swells out of sight across the plain. More ominous yet, our host lord Seuthes is a mad buck, blind soused, as all habitually in that country; they don’t trust decisions unless they make them drunk. And, as all Thracians, recipient of boons, he is honor bound to outdo them in generosity first; if he cannot come up with a better gift than he has received, what looms but a bloodbath? Alcibiades repeats that the prince has offered offense by his present and turns to us, the two score of his escort, commanding that we launch and begone.
Seuthes won’t let us. He orders the horses brought forward and commences haranguing his guests, and his own tribesmen, on the magnificent qualities of these beasts, which all know the Athenians need desperately, possessing few cavalry of their own and at the mercy of Pharnabazus’ Royal Persian Horse every time they advance inland out of sight of their ships. The prince has worked himself into a lather of incendiary dudgeon. What kind of a man, he demands of Alcibiades, what kind of commander turns down wealth like this, if not for his own use and glory, then for that of the gallant warriors entrusted to his charge?
Alcibiades weaves to his feet, as assholed as his host, and proclaims that he would in fact be the wealthiest man in the East if the prince will give him what he wishes instead of the horses. And what is that? the buck demands.
“Your friendship.”
At one breath Alcibiades is sober, so cold and composed you realize he has not misplaced his wits for an instant, and the look on his face snaps-to every bandit round the blaze. If I take these horses now, he declares, I sail with a splendid gift but I myself remain poor. If on the other hand I leave the horses with you, their masters, and depart with your friendship—and now he crosses before Seuthes, who has gone as sober as he—then I count among my wealth not only these valiant mounts, for I may call upon them from my friend anytime I wish, but mighty warriors to fight from upon their backs. For my friend will not send me his horses and leave me to face my enemies empty-handed.
Now, Seuthes is no fool. He knows this man across from him has rigged it all from the instant he first saw the women. He recognizes the genius of it and recognizes that Alcibiades knew before and knows now that he would recognize it. He wants this genius, does Seuthes, and knows he’s got a mentor now if he’ll make him his friend, to counsel and instruct him in the acquisition of it. The kid embraces Alcibiades. Ten thousand tribesmen whoop. Our party goes limp with relief.
And he did come with his horses, Prince Seuthes. Not five hundred but two thousand, when the fleet and army took Chalcedon and Byzantium, bottled up the straits, and drove the Spartans to their blackest ebb of the war. But I have gotten ahead of myself and overshot a tale, and a turning point, which must be recounted.
Passing down the straits, a month after the great victory at Cyzicus, the flag party was met by a dispatch cutter from Samos. The night was moonlit and she signaled by flare; the vessels hove to in midchannel. The state galley Paralus, the cutter reported, had this day arrived from Athens with news that a Spartan legation had approached the Assembly, seeking peace. A great cheer erupted from the men, clamoring to learn the terms proposed, which were an armistice in place, each side to withdraw from the other’s territories, repatriating all prisoners. Another cheer, and a cry from the crews that they wo
uld soon go home.
“The Spartans are at Athens now?” Alcibiades called across to the cutter.
“Aye, sir.”
“Who leads the embassy?”
“Endius, sir.”
Fresh cheers arose.
“The Lacedaemonians have singled you out for honor, Alcibiades. Why else send Endius, your friend?” This from Antiochus, Alcibiades’ helmsman and among the exiles who had shared his seasons at Sparta. “It shows they see you, even technically an exile, as foremost among the Athenians.”
Thrasybulus’ Endeavor had come up to leeward and now hove-to within earshot. Her steersman called across. Did this indeed mean we could go home? Alcibiades made no answer, only held motionless in the moonshadow of the sternpeak.
“Here is no offer of peace,” he spoke soberly to the officers on the quarterdeck and the stern oarsmen close beneath at their benches, “but a ploy to sever you and me from the people of Athens and ruin us all.”
He turned to his quartermaster: “Make signal to all, continue to Samos, and to Thrasybulus, follow us alone.”
Then to Antiochus at the helm: “Take us in now, there, to Achilleum.”
XXX
BESIDE THE TOMB OF ACHILLES
The plain of the Scamander sprawls as sere and wind-scored today as it did seven hundred years past, when Troy fell beneath Achilles’ spear. On the strand where Homer’s Achaeans beached their undecked fifties, Athenians and Samians now made shore in their bronze-rammed two-hundreds. That stream of “whirling Xanthos” still flows, where Achilles in his valor drove the Trojans to flight. Our parties had overnighted on the site a dozen times, transiting in and out of the Hellespont, but never till this eve had our commander directed us inland to the mounds.
There are eighteen in all, seven great ones for the nations of the Achaeans, Mycenaeans, Thessalians, Argives, Lacedaemonians, Arcadians, and Phocians and eleven lesser for the individual heroes, and the final pair, conjoined, Patrocles and Achilles.