Another night a different rap came at the post. It was Euryptolemus, on horseback. When I stepped out I saw, also mounted, in the shadows, Alcibiades.
“Don’t worry,” I told him before he could speak. “I have said nothing about your ritual observances.”
“Do you think that’s why I came?”
“I have no idea why you do anything.”
In that moment I hated him.
“And you, my friend,” he queried, perceiving. “Are you yourself so free from sin?”
“It seems sin has become less handy of definition.”
“Indeed.”
Euro led a third mount. “We’re going to the harbor. Come on, take a ride.”
We proceeded at a walk through the silent lanes.
“Pericles’ spit has gone dry,” Alcibiades announced in the affectless tone of the bereaved. So the scourge had found even the Olympian. “He will stand with Theseus, Solon, and Themistocles among those who have shaped our nation, and none shall surpass him.”
He spoke no more, nor did his cousin, all the way to Munychia. The naval base, when we reached there, churned with a cacophony of ships’ chandlers, expeditors, and stevedores hastening to beat the tide, which was due, one of their number informed us, an hour before dawn. A fleet under Phormio was rigging out for Naupactus. The troop transports lay along the embarkation quays, while the triple-bankers, the men-of-war, waited like great stingered hornets, sixty in all, hull by hull in their torchlit sheds, each obscured beneath a swarming mantle of ship’s joiners and riggers, sailbenders, cordwainers, and sparhandlers. Petty officers bawled orders amid a din of shoring jacks and carpenter’s mawls, windlasses, winches, and cranes. The slipside catwalks, themselves a maze of hawsers and mooring cables, stem and stern stays, warp lines and every form of brace, sheet, shroud, lift, hoist, and ratline imaginable, seethed with battalions of administrators, admiralty clerks and supply secretaries, registrars of the katalogos, Council members, priests, merchants and recorders, curators of the neorion, the shipworks across whose teeming timbers now advanced the nautai themselves, packing their seabags and oars and scrambling in orchestrated chaos to “sign in, sign off, and sign over” in time to beat the apostoleis’ trumpet. Stacked arms lined the quays beneath the unit guidons, with the infantrymen and their attendants crapped out in the blaze of cressets and their own spit fires, oiling their bronze against the salt and securing their shields within fleece coverts.
At the foot of the pier Alcibiades spoke apart with Phormio and several of his captains, while Euryptolemus and I mounted the limestone steps carved with sailors’ graffiti, lewd drawings, and the ubiquitous footstep-and-pussy ikon indicating the route to the nearest house of ill fame, to that open-air tavern called Ouros, Fair Wind, which overlooks the embarkation quays. Euro asked if I had ever seen a lodestone of Magnesia, a magnet; how it attracts irresistibly the filings of iron. He meant his cousin.
Below on the dock we could see the stir Alcibiades created simply by his presence, how the infantrymen maneuvered as they had in camp at Potidaea only for a glimpse of him. Many seemed to address him as they passed; we could hear several, urging him to speak out more boldly, don’t let youth hold him back, seek command and seize it. The main of the soldiers were young, our age. They had grown impatient with the dilation of their elders. “Lead us, son of Cleinias!” more than one cried with a raised fist and a gesture of affirmation.
In the mariners’ tavern where his cousin and I waited, anticipation of Alcibiades’ arrival had electrified the colony. Serving girls and laundresses of the abutting lanes scurried up, pinching the flush into their cheeks and dressing their hair with their dirty fingers. Do you know that dive, Jason? It serves grub as well as wine. The proprietor is a Phoenician of Tyre; he decks his place with maritime kit and affects to give seafaring names to the plates of the day, which he now, as Alcibiades entered, rattled off to his guest while escorting him to table. Might he recommend the “Top o’ the Catch”? Perhaps the “Smack o’ the Sea”?
“I’ll have that one.” Alcibiades indicated a stewpot on the flame. “The Twinge o’ Nausea.”
He grinned at the host; a tiara from the king of Persia could not have delighted the fellow more. Alcibiades’ mood was grave, however. You could see he burned with envy of Phormio, impatient for a fleet of his own. The celebrity of his person chafed upon him; he felt the spell he produced on the masses and blazed to use it. Why had he asked his cousin and me to accompany him here? “Our friend Socrates excepted, you two alone possess the spirit to call me a hound to my face. Tell me now and don’t lie: how, and where, may I make my move?”
Pericles’ passing must create a vacuum, Alcibiades declared, which would stand the empire on its head. Subject states will revolt, would-be successors scurry from the woodwork. Euryptolemus cut him off, indignant. How could Alcibiades speak so coldly of his kinsman, who if the gods grant may live on another half year, or even survive as no inconsiderable number had already?
“He won’t make it,” Alcibiades pronounced. “I read it all over him. Nor am I cold, cousin, but only forethoughtful, as he was and would wish us to be. Whom do we want in his place—that truckler to the rabble, Cleon? Androcles, who couldn’t mount from the gutter with a stepladder? Or Nicias, whose pious vacillation is even more malign? Listen to me. If Athens possessed leaders of imagination, I would be the first to set myself at their service. But the worst are bullies and lickspittles, skilled only at manipulating the mob. The best, as Phormio and Demosthenes, are warriors; they will not soil their hands with politics. What dies with Pericles is vision. But even he has not seen far enough. The Plague will end, we will survive it. What then?
“Pericles ordained as indefeasible three tenets for the prosecution of this war: the preeminence of the fleet, the security of the Long Walls, and the proscription of the empire’s expansion while the war goes on. The first two stand sound; the third must be repealed. We have no choice but to expand, and with unprecedented vigor. Our ships must carry conquest to Sicily and Italy, then Carthage and all of North Africa. In Asia we must not content ourselves with a toehold on the coast, but advance inland and take on all comers, including the throne of Persia.”
Euryptolemus broke in with a laugh. “How will we conquer the world, cousin, when we can’t even step down from our walls to take a piss? What myriads will we employ to accomplish this masterwork?”
“The Spartans in the end,” Alcibiades replied as if this were self-evident. “First their allies, once we have overthrown their declining generation and drawn their young men to our league.” He was serious. “But here, friends, is the question: dare I speak in public to this effect? I am not yet twenty-five, in a nation where forty years is held the threshold of wisdom. To keep back runs counter to every impulse of my nature, but to strike prematurely may finish me before I begin. You cannot know the nights I’ve lain awake, tormented by this.”
Plates grew cold as the cousins examined the case. Euryptolemus spoke. This noble, though blessed with an intellect as keen as his kinsman, had been gifted with little of his good looks. Aged twenty-nine, he had already lost most of his hair, and his features, though not uncomely, did not conjoin to a union that one could call handsome. Perhaps because of this, he bore himself with a genial and felicitous modesty. It was impossible not to like the fellow, and to like him at once. He began by reproving his cousin for the lawlessness of his private life.
Alcibiades, if he wished to be taken seriously, must bring his appetites under control, particularly for drink and carnality. Such vices are unstatesmanlike. “If you can’t keep your cock on a leash, at least be discreet about where you stick it. Don’t troop about the streets with courtesans while your wife languishes heartsick at home.”
Two forces are at war for Athens’ soul, Euryptolemus asserted. “The ancient simple ways which reverence the gods and heroes of old—and the new ways which make the city herself a god. We all know which side you come down on, cousin, but you must
not make it so obvious. Would it kill you to display humility, to render obeisance to heaven or at least make pretense of it? Democracy is a sword which cuts two ways. It emancipates the individual, setting him free to shine as no other scheme of governance. But that blade possesses an under-edge. Its spawn is spite and envy. This is why Pericles bore himself with modesty, remote from the multitude, for fear of their jealousy.”
“He was wrong,” Alcibiades put in.
“Was he? You occupy an Athens unknown to the commons, Alcibiades, a realm whose incandescence blinds you to the real state the rest inhabit, where mixing bowls overflow not with wine, but bile and gall. I see it every day in the law courts. Envy and spite are our city’s biggest businesses and they boom in hard times or flush. Let us count the avenues the state has provided for the envious man to tear down his better. He may drag him before the Council or the Assembly, into the people’s courts or the Areopagus. If his victim stands for office, he may test him upon application, then audit upon expiration. If the poor fellow serves with the fleet, his enemy may haul him up before the apostoleis or the Board of Naval Affairs. He may arrest him himself or have the magistrates do it, indict straight out, sue before the arbitrators, or lay information before the king archon. Nor does he lack for charges, of which the state provides a quiverful. Let him start with dereliction, peculation, malversation; bribery, larceny, extortion; malfeasance, misfeasance, nonfeasance. Do these fail? Try tax evasion, unlawful union, depletion of patrimony. Are murder and treason insufficient? Let him snatch the shaft of impiety, which carries the death penalty, and against which the accused must defend not only himself and his actions but the very content of his soul!
“You laugh, cousin. But consider Themistocles’ end, our nation’s savior, an exile in Persia. Peerless Aristides banished. Miltiades hounded to his grave, not two years after his victory at Marathon. Pericles made his name prosecuting the greatest hero our city ever produced, Cimon, who chased the Persian from the sea and set the empire upon its foundations; while he, the Olympian himself, barely escaped with his neck on half a dozen occasions. And you, cousin. What a target you present! By the gods, let me get you before a jury.” He gestured to the pack of worshipers who yet loitered, gawking from the margins of the terrace. “I’ll have these same idolaters howling for your blood.”
The kinsmen laughed, seconded by the spectators, who could not but overhear this mock tirade of Euryptolemus.
“I applaud your eloquence, cousin,” Alcibiades resumed. “But you’re mistaken. You misapprehend the character of man. No soul seeks to bemire itself in its own base fluids but to ascend on the wings of that daimon which animates it. Look there to the marines and infantry upon the embarkation quays. They are quickened not by bile or choler, but by heart’s blood. They seek glory, no less than Theseus or Achilles.”
“Half of them are draft dodgers and you know it.”
“Only for want of vision by their leaders.”
“Cousin, the days of gods and heroes are over.”
“Not to me. And not to them.”
Again Alcibiades indicated the troops below. “You censure me, cousin, insisting that I must claim a vision beyond my own fame and glory, or the same for our nation. There is nothing beyond fame and glory! They are the holiest and most exalted aspirations of the soul, for they comprise the longing for immortality, for transcendence of all inhering limits, which passion animates even the immortal gods.
“You impeach me further, Euro, of squandering my time with men of brilliance and splendid horses and hounds, rather than the commons which constitute our nation. But I have observed these same men, the ordinary and the middling-born, in the presence of such horses and dogs. They swarm, as bees to honey, about the great ones. Why? Is it not because they perceive in the nobility of these champions the intimation of that selfsame quality inchoate within their own breasts? Phrynichus has admonished,
She is a wide bed
who holds both democracy and empire,
but he, too, stands in error. Democracy must be empire. The appetite that freedom ignites in the individual must be given an object commensurate to its greatness.”
Now it was Euro’s turn to rap the table. “And who, cousin, will light this flame?”
“I will,” declared Alcibiades.
He laughed. They both did.
“Then here is the course you must steer, cousin.” Euryptolemus leaned forward, seized it seemed by heaven’s inspiration. “If your countrymen will not attend you, mistrustful of your youth, take your case to other courts and other councils. Commence abroad, with our rivals and allies. The chancellors of foreign states will learn soon of Pericles’ affliction. Who will lead Athens? they must ask. With whom must they treat to secure their nations’ weal?”
Euryptolemus made his case swiftly and succinctly. Which foreign prince, hearing and seeing Alcibiades before him, could fail to recognize Athens’ future? To spurn this champion for his youth would be folly, and none would grasp this more surely than the keen and the visionary. Remarking what must come, they would see the wisdom of aligning with it early. Among foreign courts Alcibiades could gain a foothold; securing foreign allegiances, he could forge coalitions. Who else but he could accomplish this? The fame of his lineage would open doors in scores of states, and his self-attained repute as a warrior, not to mention a breeder and racer of horses (a noble vice, shared by lords of all nations), would serve him in all others.
“You have split the stone, cousin!” Alcibiades declared. “I salute you.”
The kinsmen consulted another hour, pursuing the mandates and implications of this policy. Its fundament was war. Peace was fatal to it.
“What do you say, Pommo?” Alcibiades turned at length to me. “We haven’t caught a peep from you all night.”
When I hesitated, he clapped my shoulder. “Politics bores our friend, Euro. He is a soldier. Tell us, then, Polemides. What does a soldier say?”
Be yourself, was all I could tell him.
“Yes.” He laughed. “But which self?”
“Go to war. Fight out front. Win. Bring victories home to Athens. Let your enemies speak against that if they dare.”
We parted at dawn, Alcibiades fresh as if he’d slept all night. He was on his way to the marketplace, to hunt up other friends and continue his investigation. He thanked me for my candor. “Do you need anything, Pommo? Money? A commission at arms?”
“I’d like my cousin back, if you can spare him.”
“He goes his own way, as you or I.”
I thanked him for the thought. What I needed most was sleep.
Before my door a man was waiting. He was past thirty, brown as leather and packing arms like a mercenary. He grinned at me. “You’re putting me out of business, you know?” He had made his seat upon the stones, taking his breakfast of bread dipped in wine. I asked his name.
“Telamon. Of Arcadia.”
I had heard of him; he was an assassin. Curious, I invited him in. “If you’re going to slice veins for a living,” he chided, “at least have the decency to charge for it. Else how may a poor man compete?”
I told him I was giving it up for the Prometheia. A penance.
“A noble gesture,” he observed. I liked him. I gave him what bread I had and he took it, stowing it in his pack alongside a brace of wrapped onions. He was shipping out in ten days, a brigade under Lamachus to raid the Peloponnese. He could get me on if I wanted. “Your work lacks subtlety, I hear. Post with me, I’ll instruct you.”
“Another time perhaps.”
Rising, he left a coin upon the chest. He would not hear my protests. “I expect pay, and I offer it.”
From the doorway I watched him trek off bearing his ninety pounds of kit, then turned back to the denuded interior of my own house of death.
Perhaps something had changed. At least, I told myself, I was being offered work.
Book III
THE FIRS MODERN WAR
X
THE JOY
S OF SOLDIERING
I did not take up Alcibiades’ offer of a commission or follow Telamon into mercenary service. I did heed the Arcadian’s advice, however, and shipped out as an armored infantryman under Eucles to the Thracian Chersonese. That campaign concluded, discovering myself yet among the living, I enlisted upon another, equally gloryless, and another after that.
It was a new kind of war we were fighting, or so we bucks of the heavy infantry were enlightened by our elders of the Old Corps. In their day men fought battles. They armed and contended line against line, victory determined in honorable trial of arms. This was not how we did it. Our war was not just state against state, but faction against faction within states—the Few against the Many, those who had versus those who lacked.
As Athenians we sided with the democrats, or more accurately compelled all who sought our aid to become democrats, with the understanding that their democracy would be only so democratic as we permitted. Assaulting a city in this new kind of war, one contended not against heroes united in defense of their homeland, but that gang of partisans which chanced to possess the state at the moment, while one’s allies were those of the exiled faction, aligned with us, the invaders, to effect their restoration.
At Mytilene I saw my first list. Our company had been assigned its exiles, those democrats of the city who had been deposed in the oligarchic revolt and now constituted a species of political auxiliary to the Athenian troops of the assault. I had never seen such men. They were neither warriors nor patriots but zealots. The one with us was named Thersander. We called him Quill. I was a sergeant then; our captain called us in to receive the list.
The list was a death warrant. It enrostered those of Quill’s countrymen whom, the city taken, it would be our company’s chore to arrest and execute. Quill had made up the list; he would accompany us in the syllepsis, the roundup, to identify those upon it. You have seen such catalogs, Jason. They are written in blood. Quill’s was no impartial manifest of civil foes or political opponents; his accounted neighbors and friends, comrades and kinsmen who had in their hour wreaked ruin upon him. They had slaughtered his wife and daughters. His brother had been torn from the altar and butchered before his own children’s eyes. I had never known one to hate as Quill. He was no longer a man but a vessel into which hatred had been decanted. There was no negotiating with one like him, and they were all like him.