Tides of War

  “What want of character, my friends, compels you to seek war when you have peace? Are not our own troubles sufficient? Must we sail off pursuing others? I beg you, friends, to enjoin this injudiciousness. And I call upon you, President of the Assembly, to put the matter again to a vote.”

  A number spoke following Nicias, the majority expressing views in favor of the expedition. When Alcibiades at last arose, summoned by acclamation, he confined his brief to essentials.

  “I thank our schoolmaster”—he bowed toward Nicias—“for his astute and salutary sermon. Clearly our character as Athenians is riddled with imperfections. We have fallen far short of the standard to which we all aspire. But if I may speak frankly, we must be who we are.”

  Tumultuous acclamation saluted this. My own position was at the epotis, the “ear” of the Pnyx; I could see Nicias, among the citizens, smile darkly and shake his head.

  “In fact,” Alcibiades continued, “we can be nothing else, neither as individuals nor as a nation.”

  Additional clamor ascended. When Alcibiades resumed, he refuted Nicias’ contentions smartly and point by point, each counterstroke mounting to this summation.

  “And as to the restlessness of our nature, Athenians, in my view this is not imperfection of character, but evidence of vigor and enterprise. Our fathers did not drive back the Persian by propping their feet at the fire, or gain their empire watching their children play in the yard. Nicias says that fruits bear in their season. I say the season is now. To our friend’s assertion that security is best derived from a posture of precaution and defense, that may be true for other nations, but not for us. For an active people to change her ways is fatal. It is in our nature to venture far and boldly. This, and not in defense, is where our security resides.

  “Nicias speaks of foreign oarsmen: he reproves us that our fleet cannot sail without them, and cites this as a liability. It is proof, he says, that our native resources are insufficient. To me it demonstrates the opposite. In fact nothing could display with more telling measure the depth of our vitality and the magnetism of our mythos. Why do these foreigners come to us and no other nation in Hellas? Because they know that here and only here they may be free.

  “And as for the derogation implicit in his assessment of these newcomers as our inferiors, I say he knows them not, and does them and us a disservice. Consider the hazard these men have undertaken, my friends, these whom Nicias devalues and demeans. They have put behind home and family, native soil and sky; the very gods of their race they have abjured, to venture across oceans to this stranger’s land where they may enjoy neither protection of law nor participation in the political process, where they are exempted and excluded, nameless, voiceless, ballotless. Yet still they come, and no force under heaven may stop them. Why? Because they know that life at the ends of the earth in Athens is better than life at the center of the universe at home. Nicias is mistaken, my friends. These foreigners may not be the brick and stone of our nation, but they are the mortar. And they will stick.”

  Deafening applause seconded this. Nor was it lost upon the orator’s allies, and his foes, that report of his words would peal at once and echo nightlong among the foreign sailors and craftsmen, by whom he would now more than ever be acclaimed patron and champion.

  Alcibiades stood, calling for order. When the tumult at last subsided, he turned, absent all rancor or vaunting, and summoned his rival to the rostrum.

  “Nicias, you have been appointed senior commander, which your record of service demands and which I honor without reservation. I esteem your wisdom and, not less, your proven luck. I have no wish to supplant you, sir, but to enlist you wholeheartedly in your country’s cause. Help us. Don’t tell us why we will fail but how we may succeed.

  “I summon you now, sir, not as rival, but as compatriot, to come forward again. The reservations you have voiced are not without merit. Tell us, then, what we need to succeed. Give us hard numbers. Let us hear the stern truth. And I make you this pledge: if Athens will not grant what you believe the expedition needs to prevail, I myself will mount the stand beside you in opposition to it.

  “But if she will grant you what you say we require, then I call upon you in like spirit to accede to your countrymen’s decree. Do not shirk the command with which she has honored you, but seize it with vigor. We need you, Nicias. Tell us what we must have to make you feel confident of success.”

  Nicias accepted his antagonist’s challenge. Mounting at once to the box, he proceeded to detail a seemingly interminable list of supplies and armament, warcraft and matériel, everything from spare masts and sail to parched barley and the bakers and ovens to make it into bread. He demanded overwhelming superiority of sea forces, one hundred men-of-war at a minimum, plus heavy infantrymen in numbers greater than any force the enemy could raise against us, reinforced by an equal number of light-armed troops, archers and slingers to neutralize the enemy’s cavalry, since over these leagues of ocean we could not transport our own.

  In addition the expedition would require ironworkers and masons, sappers and siege engineers, dispatch craft and troop transports. Alcibiades had asked for hard figures and Nicias gave them. A hundred talents to hire supply ships, two hundred for dumps and magazines along the way, another two hundred to purchase horses for the cavalry on-site, and if the Sicel tribesmen refused us this aid, then the same amount to fund raids to take them by force. Of course this figure did not include the infantry or their attendants, or the seamen or maintenance of the warships. That would be a thousand talents, with another thousand in reserve. This figure, it was understood, covered just the summer; for winter the sum would double, and if the expedition had not achieved success in the first year, Athens must mount another and send it to the aid of the first. On and on Nicias’ necessities mounted. Clearly he anticipated that such massive outlay, set before his hearers in this bald and brutal form, would act as cold water in the face of a dreamer.

  But Alcibiades’ grasp of his countrymen’s character was shrewder than his opponent’s. Far from being daunted by Nicias’ demands, the citizens declared them excellent and embraced them with animation. The grander the expedition, the more certain they became that it could not fail. As Nicias completed his table of requisition, he perceived, as did every citizen of the Assembly, that he had been outgeneraled by Alcibiades, whose stock with the people mounted higher with each instant his rival sought to bring him low. Now all Athens felt that not only would she soon possess a fleet of insuperable capacity but in Alcibiades a general of spirit and cunning who could not fail to lead it to glory. At one stroke Alcibiades not only had got everything he wanted but, despite his station as junior commander, had seized control of the expedition and made it his own.

  XVI

  A SOLDIER’S DREAM

  The farm survived, thanks less to my brother’s exertions and my own than to the abundantly donated counsel and assistance of various uncles and elders, not to say their liberal advances in equipment, skilled labor, and cash. We had not realized, Lion and I, how sorely missed we had been and how bereft our family, as so many others, in the aftercourse of plague and war. Nothing is so irreplaceable as youth, and none so dear as the prodigal. They could not do enough for us, our senior kinsmen, and wished only to see sons and more sons. My aunt made the trek from the city just to satisfy herself that we were well; stationed beneath the sunshade on her hired carriage’s bench, she looked on Lion and me, bare-backed and dirty as dogs, digging a trench for a runoff channel. “Now I can die content.”

  I failed to present Eunice that day, nor, calling upon Aunt in town later that month, did I include my mistress. Thus initiated another of those beastly rows, between myself and her, which endure nightlong and leave one lacerated to the quick.

  “What do I lack, Pommo, that you won’t take me past your aunt’s door? Is my skin not soft enough? Perhaps you fault the shapeliness of my calves. Well, these lines would not show in my face, my friend, or sinew in my shanks, had I not humped
at your side through hell and damnation, you ungrateful hound! I am not a citizen, is that it? Then by God, make me one! Pull strings. Engage your fancy friends who make white black and turn it back again!”

  Fury boiled from her, long-censored and suppressed.

  “I’ll tell you why you won’t present me to your aunt. Because she seeks a bride for you even now, as she found your virgin Phoebe years ago. Someone proper, of proper Athenian family, with whom you may have children whose names may be set upon the rolls, not alien brats such as a foreign bitch like me would drop, who may not vote or sacrifice or claim their education when you croak in war.”

  She discovered me one noon in reflection beside the family tomb; now the fancy took her, that I craved my dead bride and not her. I was ashamed of her, Eunice declared. She was not suitable. She did not fit.

  One night she bolted from our bed in a state.

  “You will put me aside now.”

  I was dead fagged and wanted none of this. “What are you talking about?”

  “You will be a gentleman. You will set me aside.”

  I ordered her back to sleep. She struck me, hard, with the flat of her hand. “There are too many in this bed, Pommo. I cannot sleep beside the ghost of your bride. One of us must go!”

  From my lips I heard: “Then go.”

  The woman struck me in fury. “I will tell you something: she is in the grave, your child bride. Your sister, too, is dead. While I live.”

  I punched her full in the face, as hard as I would a man. She crashed to the wall and dropped. I felt horror to have struck her, a woman, but at the same time I blamed her entire. Only she could drive me to such extremity.

  “You feel shame to be with me.” Eunice spat the blood from her lips. “You hold in contempt the life we have led and wish to dismiss it as if it never happened. Well, it happened, Pommo. It happened. I have been your wife in fact if not in law, and you have been my husband. You are my husband.”

  She began to sob. I knelt beside her, proffering comfort with words but in my heart wishing only to be gone, or have her so.

  “What will become of me? Will I bear a child at last, or continue to abort myself as you command?”

  She begged me to take her out of Athens, apart from family expectations and mobilization for war. There were places we had seen in our travels, safe places. Let us go! We have all we need with just our hands and hearts….

  Though I knelt so close that her knee rose between mine and her hands set upon my forearm, my heart held isolated and apart, with leagues of silence dissevering.

  “You will put me aside, Pommo. I read it in your eyes. But it is not me you part from, only yourself. What I have set before you, no woman will again. Go, then. I won’t stop you. But I will make this prophecy, and it will prove true.

  “You will eat,” she declared, “but ever go hungry. You will drink and still be dry. You will fuck and find no pleasure. You will stand before the fork, but it will make no difference which pass you take. All will bear you nowhere, till you come to yourself and come home to me.”

  Jason, my friend. I have had greased bronzeheads shot into my guts and, worse, pulled out. I have had walls of stone collapse on top of me. But never had any blow hammered me to the heart like the words of this woman.

  It would make a better story to say that she walked out then, or I. In fact we stayed together another eleven months. She bore a son and was with child again when I signed as a lieutenant of marines on the Pandora under Menestheus, the Titan squadron commanded by Chaemedemus, the Thunderbolt division under Alcibiades.

  The farm had failed that winter. Lion’s wife Theonoe made her divorce. With notes overdue and children yet to support, my brother could not turn down three months’ mustering bonus and a year, at least, of officer’s pay. He shipped as a platoon commander under Lamachus. Telamon took a unit of fifty, Arcadian mercenaries like himself. The farm my brother and I let to our uncles; I assigned half my wages to Eunice and made over the bonus to my grandfather, a start on the debt we owed for his, and all our family’s, aid.

  I could not make my living on the land. That was only a soldier’s dream. Where else was there to go, for me or any of us, except back to war?

  XVII

  A DOCUMEN OF THE ADMIRALTY

  Let me show you something, my grandson. It is the Fleet Order of Sail for Sicily, or more precisely one of the hundreds of copies drawn up by the demosioi, the secretaries of the Admiralty staff. Feel the paper; it is neither reed nor pulp, but linen. It is woven.

  This was a document made to last. It was conceived of as epochal, an artifact of glory which each officer would pass to his heirs for generations. I now cede mine to you, my child, but not for the reasons its creators envisioned, such are the unknowable ways of God.

  The Office of the War Archon was responsible for the production of this instrument, a duplicate of which was distributed to every trierarch of the fleet, as well as all pilots and captains of marines, fleet patrons and syndicate officers, the Board of Generals, the hundred members of the Board of Naval Construction, and the Curators of the Yards, as well as the chief executives and corporate officers of the private construction firms, shipbuilders, suppliers, sailmakers, and armament manufacturers who had built and provisioned the fleet. I worked on this document, myself and six other officers, night and day for seven months.

  Regard the underlay. It is a pilot’s chart of the Piraeus, the Grand Harbor and the Cantharus, extending from the fort and naval establishment of Eetioneia to the Emporium and the Still Harbor to Acte, with soundings indicated for flood and ebb, sitings for all channel markers from the Diazeugma to the Ephebium, including distances mole-to-mole and angles of triangulation among each of the four beacons and twenty-seven benches, so that a ship’s master could, by striking azimuths to the various guidons, determine his position within a boat-length at any point of the harbor. This degree of precision was ordained by Nicias and Alcibiades, in concord for once, that each of the fleet’s three hundred and sixty-four primary vessels could site herself upon her assigned station and the whole colossal departure come off with an order and symmetry both grand to the eye and pleasing to the gods.

  Upon the facing sheet are indicated the priests’ and magistrates’ stations. The squares along the fairway are the stationary barges erected for the King Archon, the Chief Priests of the Ten Tribes, and the Priestesses of Athena Poliachos, Protectress of the City, as well as the chaplains and sanctuary guardians of Agraulus, Enyalius, Ares, Zeus, Thallo, Auxo, and Hegemone. Each demarch had his own barge as well, plus privately funded viewing stands in excess of two hundred, which stretched for three miles opposite the Sounium Road. The Choma jetty was reserved to the Council members, likewise garlanded and mounted upon the tribal steps from which they looked out, across the water, upon the Temple of Aphrodite Mistress of Navigation, whose precincts held the delegations of women, the wives and mothers of the trierarchs, in white, bearing wands of yew and hyacinth. At the head of the bay stood the altar of Poseidon, upon which a bull was sacrificed to the sea.

  Sorrowful age has ravaged my sight; the document in your hand is but a blur. Yet still I see, ship for ship, that magnificent armada as she passed before my vision half a century gone.

  First in ceremonial escort rowed the state galleys, Paralus and Salaminia, the fastest ships in the world. Their sails, as all the fleet, rode reefed upon the yard awaiting the trumpeted order “Make sail!” Upon this command, each line loosed in succession, the topmen riding the fabric down, unfurling it with their feet as they plunged, so that like a pennant suddenly sprung to the breeze, the sails snapped and filled with an audible concussion. Cheers rose from the thousands massed upon the shore as each fresh sail, emblazoned with some design honoring its namesake deity or heroine, filled and drew. These were all ceremonial sails, woven for this day alone and superfluous to the point of absurdity, as all vessels made way entirely under oars. Yet they did look grand! It was remarked that the sigh of relief o
f the Admiralty staff would have sufficed alone to get the ships under way, so trepidatious had they stood of the ill omen of dead or contrary winds.

  Lamachus’ division moved out first, though he himself and his flagship, Hegemonia, had embarked days prior with his squadron to secure the cape and alert our Corcyrean allies to the fleet’s departure. Now: the fast corvettes, called “cutthroats,” in columns of two, sixteen in all, then the fifty-oared galleys, thirty-six, flanking the cargo, troop, and horse transports which advanced in a mass in the center. These, numbering a hundred and sixty-seven, took an hour to clear the reviewing stands.

  Next came the men-of-war, the triremes, in formation by squadron, ten and twelve across and four deep, with each commander on the left in the post of honor. First one-hundred-seventy-four-oared Procne, Autocles’ ship, Lamachus’ vice-admiral. Her squadronmates were Pompe, Ajax, Ptolemais, Gorgon, and Grampus, whose sail was crimson and bore the image of its guardian beast; then Circe, Thrush, Hippolyta, Theama, Ram, and Relentless.

  Under her crimson sail with griffin emblem came Pyrpnous, Fire-Breather, Pythiades’ ship, the hero of Cos. Then Indomitable, Dynamis, Thraseia, Amphitrite, Euxinaia, Achilleia, Centaura, and the triplets Tisiphone, Megaera, and Alecto.

  The Nereid squadron under Aristogenes: Thetis, Pytho, Panope, Galatea, Balte, Alcyone, Euploia, Sea Eagle, Invincible, Endeavor, and Aianateia. Then Two-in-Hand, Epitome, Vigilant, Equipoise, Redoubtable, and Medusa.

  Nicias’ flagship, Trident, led the Oceanus division, her sail of purple and gold and her forepeak triple-pronged in sheathed bronze. Flanking her advanced Tethys, Doris, Eurynome, Zephyr West Wind, Aias, and Antigonis, then Mentor and Bay of Marathon, the sister ships Styx and Acheron, funded by Crito, Socrates’ devotee. Next Strife, Castalia, Scylla, Cecropis with its blazon half-woman, half-dragon, and Aphrodisia, whose figurehead, bare-breasted, had been crafted by Phidias himself.