A rower’s life is not a bad one, when he gets his pay and enough shore leave to spend it, in dolphin weather when the sails do most of the work. I saw the world as a rower. I’ve been luckier than poor old Timotheus tied at home by his game leg to run his father’s shop. But there was always that one moment going into battle when I held it against my father that he died in debt and I could not furnish my weapons as a marine. I never learned to like going into battle backwards.
But it was soon over. We had made the Sacrifice, before dawn, knowing that there would be no time when the fighting was upon us; but we drove down upon the enemy, the Trirarch, standing above us in the stern, raised the Paean, catching it up from the flagship, and it swept away down the line of the squadron; even we rowers, who seldom bothered, sang it that day, as well as our bursting hearts would let us. And we were still singing when the first shock of the impact came, all but hurling us forward, each upon the next bank of rowers.
I remember the crash, the grinding and shouting that drowned the Paean, and the shudder of the Halkyone as we backed water to shake the Spartan off our ram, knowing that we had made a kill.
I remember the sudden loom of a trireme bearing down on us, and the Trirarch’s shouted order, ‘Starboard oars in!’ The steersman bringing her round, and the light grinding as the other ship swept past us after her missed stroke, her oars also hauled in-board.
Two ships we rammed in the first break through, but the order was to capture not sink; and so for us rowers — but indeed that is true of most of our fights — the battle was two things: the sheer physical stress of handling the oars in quick manoeuvre, and feet. Feet that came and went trampling the deck, as the fighting men strove to board or repel boarders. The occasional dead or wounded man pitched down all arms and legs among the rowing benches. Sometimes one of ours, sometimes a Spartan. We flung them all off alike, to be rid of their weight clogging the oar looms. There were glimpses of galleys all about us, a great churning and threshing of water; and then I knew vaguely that we were through, and the Spartan line was breached and flung back on itself and the thing had become a dog-fight with Theramenes and Thrassylus’ squadrons joining in. One ship we closed-hauled, and coming about and shipping over our oars in the last instant, before she could do the same, swept down her starboard side, slicing them off like radishes. That’s generally accounted the most skilled and daring of all sea-fight manoeuvres, only to be attempted by the Trirarch who has complete confidence in his pilot and in the perfect discipline of his rowers. But few rowers like it; it cuts too near to our own quick. If it succeeds, it leaves a red mush on the enemy’s benches, that heaves and struggles somewhat, and moans a little, and cries out like a woman; and one has to get very drunk at the next possible opportunity before one can quite forget it.
So I remember it, now and then, as I remember also, my own oar mate taking a stray javelin in the belly and retching up his life blood mixed with black vomit over my feet, while one of our reliefs clambered into his place beside me.
We suffered a fair amount of damage before all was over; so did most of Alkibiades’ squadron, which had taken the forefront of the fighting.
But at the end of the day we had captured the whole enemy fleet, save for those that were rammed and sunk. And Cyzicus had surrendered to the troops we had landed the night before. The Spartan Admiral was killed in the sea fighting, and all the coastwise towns of the Hellespont and Propontis lay at Athens’ mercy.
All this I heard later, in a wine-shop near the harbour, through a red triumphal haze of drink; but at the time, as I say, it was only feet, and noise, and fighting the oar-loom, and the occasional dead man.
The wine-shop girl had full brown breasts that showed when she stooped to pour the wine, and stank of musk and jasmine and warm dirt, like a she-cat flying the signal that she is in rut. But I was too tired even to regret that I could not afford her.
I believe the bos’n had her instead.
Mindarus’ Staff Trirarch, to the Government of Sparta
‘Our ships are lost; Mindarus is killed; our men are starving; we know not what to do.’
The Soldier
There was a rumour that spring that Sparta had sent an embassy to Athens, offering peace. I remember discussing the likelihood of its being true with Ariston, one evening sitting in his quarters at Sestos, with the lights of Abydos shining across the water and in at the open door. He said, ‘It’s no great matter whether they have or not; there’s not a thing Athens can do about it, either way.’
I looked at him, not at once catching his meaning, and he added, ‘They have no power to make peace or war. The will of the Athenian people is no longer in the city, it’s here with the fleet.’
I must have known it all along, but I had not realised it until that moment. ‘Of course! If the Spartans want peace, it’s here to our blue-eyed boy they’ll have to come for it!’ Delight woke in us, at the irony of the situation, and something that was like awe, and because of the almost-awe we turned to laughter as young men will, and laughed until we were weak.
If it were given to me to choose for the young men of sad grey future generations, some good, some splendour from the great days, I suppose that I should choose, if there were any wisdom in me, that they should have been friends of Socrates. But we are what we are, and not wiser than our own hearts. I would wish for them the three years that followed Cyzicus.
Those three years in the Northern Aegean, in the Propontis and the Hellespont; in which Alkibiades won back for Athens her empire in the north. I do not think any man ever ran up greater debts than Alkibiades, and certainly no man ever paid them more magnificently. At the beginning of those three years, Athens was at her lowest ebb; at the end she was at full tide again. And make no mistake, oh you of lesser generations, it was Alkibiades and Alkibiades alone who did it. So far as we knew (and a fleet knows most things) no order ever came to him from home. Theramenes and Thrassylus, and later Thrasybulus, who were officially his equals, were in fact no more than his staff officers, and at least in Theramens’ case, a damned inefficient staff officer at that.
Those were years for young men. Alkibiades was always a young man’s Commander, as I have said before. He had the fire and the wicked daring that calls to young men following. And in some odd way, despite the hideous discomfort of the campaign, the bitter winters when the fleet never went into winter quarters, the unrelenting sheer hard work, there was something in those years that the older men among us feel the sap rise again. I have heard more than one of them say so, when the years were over. And at the time you could see it in their eyes.
After Cyzicus, we waited only to raise the usual trophy of captured arms, and then we were off about the next job that came to hand.
With Dekalia still in Spartan hands and Euboa in revolt, Athens depended entirely upon the Black Sea corn ships, and so above and before all else, the Propontis and the Hellespont must be made safe for their passage. Alkibiades divided us into three fleets, and sent one of them, under Theramenes, to deal with Chalcedon a few miles inland at the southern entrance to the Black Sea Straits, which had revolted the year before. The Spartan Governor called on Pharnobazus for help, and it seemed that Theramenes was likely to be kept busy there a good while. Meantime, we of the first fleet — the Admiral’s fleet, we called it, which can hardly have pleased the other two — were off with Alkibiades to blockade Perinthos, far up on the Thracian side of Propontis, then swept on to show our teeth to Selymbria. But it was drawing toward autumn by then, time for the grain ships to be coming through; and when Selymbria had paid up the year’s tribute, we left them alone for that year, and became escort ships, save for one squadron detached to see how Theramenes was getting on with his siege. Broadly speaking, he wasn’t. I think there must have been some plain speaking between him and Alkibiades, and after it he was relieved of that particular command. But it was too late in the year to start afresh in that direction, and at any rate with our troops on the spot and the fleet guarding
the approaches, Chalcedon was powerless — a boar with his thicket ringed by the hounds — and we took over the little seaport town of Chrysopolis, fortified the place in something of a hurry, with a stockade of green timber, strengthened by piled rocks in the harbour area, the local men standing by and spitting at us while we worked; dumb-sullen but not desperate enough to do anything about it; and left Theramenes there with a squadron of thirty ships to keep the straits open, and exact the one-tenth toll from each of the corn fleet passing through (it came in useful for feeding our own troops) while the rest of us sailed south to pick up the second squadron, already patrolling the Hellespont. That autumn, for the first time in a long while, the Black Sea corn fleet went through complete and unmolested to Piraeus.
We had all of us learned by then to be sailor and soldier in one, and that winter and the next, we turned our hands to the building trade. While a few squadrons were kept at sea for cruising and scout work (they managed to collect quite a bit of most useful tribute, too, from cities that had revolted in the past few years but were suddenly only too glad to return to the Empire), we built forts along the Propontis shore. We strengthened Chrysopolis into a proper stone fort, and raised two more, one at Bisanthe some thirty miles south of Perinthos, and one at Pactye at the northern end of the Hellespont. Good strong places to secure the coast and link up the Athenian settlements of the Hellespont with those of Propontis.
Later, men said that he had built them for purposes of piracy if the luck went against him in the end; but not the men who spent those winters with him in the snow-scurried North of Helles Straits.
At some time in the past, he had made contacts among the Thracian tribes, and a few of those big, rough-riding men in their fox-skin caps came down from the inland hills to work with us. They showed us the best places to quarry the stone we needed — it was odd, the quarrying scarcely brought any memories back, even of Astur, and yet I was not faithless — and helped us fell the iron-hard winter timber. But for the most part we did the work with our own hands, and had the blisters to show for it; spear-butt and rope stay do not harden the hands in quite the same places; I think the rowers had the best of it, when it came to man-handling the rough-cut stone.
Alkibiades himself was like a marsh light, always on the move and never where you last heard of him. He would be with one of the sea-going squadrons, and then we would hear that he was taking life easy in his own house in Sestos with the Bithynian girl he kept there — a fox-haired, fierce little piece with crooked front teeth, and beautiful eyes, who went about as freely as a boy, instead of biding decently in the women’s quarters, as often as not in tight breeks and a goatskin jacket, which I know now is not disgraceful among her people, whose girls dress like the young men for riding and in their spring and autumn migrations. And then, while so far as we knew he was still at Sestos, we would be standing to warm ourselves by a brushwood fire in the lee of a half-built wall, and somebody would feel a hand on his shoulder, and the voice with the lisp that was known by every man in the fleet, would ask, ‘Room for one more?’ And there he would be in our midst again. Maybe followed by a slave carrying a wine jar, maybe just himself, muffled as most of us were in a goatskin jacket, under his great cloak, getting more ragged every time we saw it, where he always dragged that corner along the ground.
Just at the time that our first building-winter turned toward spring, two things happened. The first was that Athens took fresh heart and scraped together a new fleet of fifty ships with a thousands troops on board, and sent them out under Thrasybulus to operate with the Samos fleet. They turned aside on their own account to attack Ephesus. They were driven back to their ships, and came limping north to join us. They got a very cool reception; for the Samos fleet (we still thought of ourselves as that) was drunk with victory. We felt that we did not tread the earth like mortal men, certainly not like men who had known defeat. We would not mess with them nor train with them. I have sometimes wondered whether in his heart of hearts Alkibiades was pleased. But as our Admiral, he could not tolerate such a state of things. He dealt with it beautifully. He ordered out Thrasybulus and his marines to raid the country round Abydos, and when, inevitably, Pharnobazus brought out his troops against them, sent a huge contingent of the Samos men to Thrasybulus’ aid. Together we hunted them till dusk, and then returned to camp in perfect good fellowship.
The second thing, happening about the same time, was that a squadron of the Spartan League, only fifteen ships, small but admittedly valiant, came up from Megara (King Agis, back in Dekalia can’t have liked the sight of the grain ships coming through). They gave our patrols the slip in one of the four-day sea fogs that brew up in spring, and were in Byzantium before we knew it, with troops to strengthen the Spartan garrison. So, once again, for the first time since Cyzicus a year before, there was an enemy squadron in our waters, and the strengthening of Byzantium to make it still more urgent that we should re-take Chalcedon.
There hadn’t been much happening in that direction. So to help matters along, the Admiral ordered a stockade to be built from the straits to the Propontis, cutting off the corner of land on which the city stood, and set us to guarding it, so that nothing could pass in or out. It was the same device as Nikias had started at Syracuse. Only this time we had the Commander who had been taken from us then; no dawdling, no gaps left; and when Pharnobazus came up to the relief of the city, he could not get through our lines. It was hot work all the same, for by that time summer had dried out the water course; the one place where the shifting gravel-bed made a secure stockade impossible; and the Spartan Commander made a sally up the dry river-bed at the same time as the Persians came on us from the hills inland. However, we took up back-to-back formation at that point, to face the double attack, and drove the Persians off into Bithynia, while the Spartans retreated — it was a good fighting retreat — back into the town.
After that it was only a matter of time before Chalcedon must fall; and we left Thrassylus to sit there like a terrier at a rathole, and made westward along the Thracian coast to finish with Selymbria.
There’s something about the capture of Selymbria, I’ve never known quite what it is, that makes it stand more clearly shaped and coloured in my memory even than the splendour of Byzantium. And yet it was quite a small affair. Alkibiades had been in touch with the pro-Athenian party in the town; and it had been fixed that on a certain night, if all had gone well with their side of the plan, they were to show a light above the seaward wall as a signal that they were ready to open one of the lesser gates to us. There were some among us, a few who remembered Messana, but we were careful not to speak the memory or to read it in each other’s faces. It was past and best forgotten. The whole fleet of course knew that there would be a signal, but only the senior officers and Trirarchs knew the full details. I had become Trirarch of the Pegasus by that time. Promotion comes quickly in war, and the old qualification of having to be able to fit out one’s ship cannot apply when men die and others must be found to take their places at a moment’s notice.
On the appointed night we drew up the ships, and made camp, as we had done often enough before in our comings and goings along the Propontis shores, in the curve of a shallow bay some miles eastward of the town. It was an obvious choice, with a good firm stranding-beach and clean water available, and for that reason we always kept a strong guard when we were there. That night I saw the feathery tops of the tamarisk scrub, and the soft hollows of the dunes in the light of the cooking fires all more clearly and intensely, almost painfully, than usual, as though my body had one less skin than usual and my eyes had shed some shadow cast by habit and familiarity. I do not know how to say it, I am not good at finding words for such things. I think most men have it, in one way or another, this heightened awareness of sight and sound and smell on the eve of battle; I suppose it is partly because we know that it may be for the last time; but also I think it is because the Gods know what battle demands of a man, and if he is lucky, string him in advance to a high
er pitch, that he may meet the demands when they come. I remember the lap of the water round the dark stems of the galleys drawn up on the beach, the scattered glow of the spent cooking fires between the tamarisk bushes; the ordered coming and going, the quietly spoken order, where men who had eaten and rested were beginning to arm. I was armed already, as most of the Trirarchs and marine officers were, so that we were free of our own preparations to see to the men. But there was more than an hour to go to midnight, and a knot of us lingered for a few moments round the remains of the fire where we had eaten earlier. It was a still hot night, but the brushwood smoke helped to keep the mosquitoes away. There was a good deal of noise coming from one quarter of the camp; it sounded like a war-dance going on, and someone said, ‘Listen to those cursed Thracians — I hope to the Gods that hellish noise can’t be heard from Selymbria; it will give the whole game away.’