Tides of War

  Three and a half years later, before Byzantium, I attended a nightlong drinking bout. Someone had put the query “How does one lead free men?” “By being better than they,” Alcibiades responded at once.

  The symposiasts laughed at this, even Thrasybulus and Theramenes, our generals.

  “By being better,” Alcibiades continued, “and thus commanding their emulation.” He was drunk, but on him it accounted nothing, save to liberate those holdings nearest to his heart. “When I was not yet twenty, I served in the infantry. Among my mates was Socrates the son of Sophroniscus. In a fight the enemy had routed us and were swarming upon our position. I was terrified and loading up to flee. Yet when I beheld him, my friend with gray in his beard, plant his feet on the earth and seat his shoulder within the great bowl of his shield, a species of eros, life-will, arose within me like a tide. I discovered myself compelled, absent all prudence, to stand beside him.

  “A commander’s role is to model arete, excellence, before his men. One need not thrash them to greatness; only hold it out before them. They will be compelled by their own nature to emulate it.”

  Along the length of the strand Athenians bore cable and iron upon the foe. Alcibiades dragged the first ship off, and another and another. Mindarus’ troops held as only the Spartan-commanded can, in the face of Athenian reinforcements under Theramenes and more, including cavalry, driven on by Thrasybulus, the Brick. Alcibiades fell three times, seeking the Spartan commander. At last Mindarus’ own wounds took him down. When the enemy broke and fled, Alcibiades ravened upon their backs and every other followed, and when he dropped they dashed to his side and lifted him, in terror that some fatal dart had found their champion. But it was exhaustion only. And I, too, who had so few seasons past pledged to bear hell’s bane to this man, could no longer recall his crimes, even my own brother’s murder. All were eclipsed in that flame which he bore for our country and by which he conducted her to triumph.

  I cite a moment from the sea fight earlier that day, not to panegyrize him, for all testimony is superfluous in that cause, but as exemplar of this beast, this form of courage he evinced which one glimpses in a lifetime as frequently as a griffin or a centaur.

  The sea trap had been sprung: Alcibiades’ forty triremes emerging as he had planned out of the squall line had lured the enemy’s sixty to pursue, thinking ours the whole of the Athenian force. These crews of Athens, the Samos fleet, were so good that when they fled, or even pretended, they maintained such order that the helmsmen must cry across to row more sloppily and make better feint of terror. Antiochus was Alcibiades’ helmsman. At his signal the lines came-about employing the Samian anastrophe, or “countermarch,” where the ships do not put about simultaneously, making rearmost foremost, but wheel in sequence of line-ahead, as chariots round the turning post. Alcibiades ordered this, the more demanding maneuver, to unnerve the enemy, to let him know he had been suckered and must pay.

  Now Thrasybulus’ triples fell on the Spartans from astern. From concealment behind the promontory they emerged in four columns of twelve, pulling, as the chanty goes, with every shaft including the skipper’s wooden dick. They cut Mindarus off from the harbor. From the shoulder of the squall Theramenes’ thirty-six materialized, blocking all flight to the north. Alcibiades was shouting for Mindarus’ ensign and vowing a talent to the lookout who found it for him.

  The Spartans fled for the shore two thousand yards distant. Alcibiades’ division pursued from the flank, picking a line to overhaul the foremost vessel. This was a squadron commander’s and she, sighting Antiope’s admiral’s ensign, made to make it a fight. At two hundred yards the foe wheeled to port, executed a cutback around two of her own ships whose oars had fouled, and came back at us. Antiochus slipped her rush, passing with such swiftness across her bows that her helm, hard over seeking to strike, put her onto her sisters, each furiously backing water to clear. Antiochus holed two almost at leisure, but striking the third amidships as she fled, Antiope’s ram became embedded; the momentum of the fleeing craft levered us against her flank-to-flank, snapping oars like kindling. As the ships crunched together, Spartan marines let fly with everything they had. Our men plunged for cover as the fusillade swept Antiope’s deck. I heard a bellow of rage and glanced up. Alone and exposed stood Alcibiades amid the storm of steel, scouring the sea for his rival in flight. “Mindarus!” he cried. “Mindarus!”

  There is a causeway on the Macestos plain, just a farm dike, to which the Spartans had fled from the rout on the strand. There in the dusk their infantry were making a stand of spectacular stubbornness, supported by Pharnabazus’ satrapal guard, which had dashed up from Dascylium. The clash funneled to a neck a wagon-width wide, while round this the fight slogged on in the muck, flax fields which the foe had flooded to impede the Athenian advance. Horses of both sides sank to their barrels; cavalrymen slugged it out atop mounts dying and already dead, which beasts remained upright, marooned in the mire.

  Alcibiades galloped upon this impasse, fresh from the shore. Ahead squatted the bottleneck. Three squadrons of our cavalry and above a thousand infantry hung up where levees conjoined. A furlong ahead could be seen enemy horse advancing, with clouds of light troops and militia, farmers wielding pitchforks and muckrakes, driven by their masters’ whips. If we couldn’t break through we’d be overrun. You could get round by dikes east and west but there was no time, and if even a dozen of the foe beat the party to a juncture, there would be no breaking through.

  Alcibiades rode a mare named Mustard, which had been Agasicles’, Thrasybulus’ adjutant, who had been slain by the ships. A horse, uncoerced by its rider, knows how to make its way through mire. Alcibiades slung the beast’s bridle and, taking about forty cavalry and two hundred infantry, set off through the slough. Mustard cut a thousand yards off the go-round, mounting muck-slathered up a dikeway in the foe’s rear. From there Alcibiades led the assault on the Spartan infantry, slaying their commander, Amompharetus the son of Polydamos, a knight and victor at Nemea. If you go even now to the Eurysacium at Athens you will see, on the left as you enter, a matchless bronze of a warhorse, no taller than a man’s hand, with this dedication:

  I led, Victory followed.

  That afternoon Mindarus was slain, the Spartans’ peerless general. Of the foe’s total ninety ships, fifty-eight were sunk and twenty-nine captured. His brigades of Lacedaemon and the Peloponnese were routed on the plain of the Macestos by Thrasybulus and Alcibiades, along with the mercenaries and Persian cavalry supporting them. Next night found Alcibiades master of Cyzicus, calling in the carters to load up contributions in cash, and within twenty days before Perinthus and Selymbria as well, raising more money, and fortifying Chrysopolis to bind the straits and exact a tenth from all passing, to fund the fleet. This dispatch, intercepted, from the remnant Spartans to their home:

  Ships sunk, Mindarus slain, men starving. We know not what to do.

  I need not recite for you, Jason, the litany of Alcibiades’ victories. You were there. You won your prize of valor at Abydos and earned it too. Did you know I forwarded the text of your commendation? That was one of my duties in those days. I see you flush; I’ll embarrass you no further, though I recall the citation, word for word.

  To the young soldiers and sailors of the fleet, they for whom these victories under Thrasybulus and Alcibiades were all they had known, such bounty seemed no more than the merited produce of their preeminence, their birthright as Athenians. But for those of our generation, who had cut our teeth on plague and calamity, the experience of such ascendancy, each conquest succeeding so swiftly upon its predecessor, arose as if within a dream. No pharmakon like victory, the proverb says. And though we who bore the scars of Syracuse could not bring ourselves to trust them at first, when the wins kept coming, Bitch’s Tomb, Abydos, Methymna, Fool’s Cap Bay, Clazomenae, the Hollows, Chios, and Nine-Mile Cove, then second Chios and Erythrae, both on the same day, at last we, too, began to believe, as the youths from the start, that this run w
as neither fluke nor fortune but that at last conjoined upon one field Athens possessed such ships, crews, and commanders as to render her, barring the sons of Earth themselves ascending from Tartarus, invincible.

  History was being made. A blind man could see it. Honoring Lion’s wish of the quarries, I set about enlarging his chronicle, or at least preserving within my sea chest such documents as I imagined one day in retirement editing and publishing in my brother’s name. I went so far as to record notes and even sketch terrain. Only later did I grasp that a recounting of actions or tactics was not what interested me, or anyone.

  What held us all was not what our commander did, but how he did it. It was clear that he manipulated some force to which others commanded no access. Though he possessed on occasion superiority of might, he never needed it to best the foe. He was always clement to the vanquished, nor was it in him to pursue vengeance against those who had worked him harm. He acted thus, not out of sentiment or altruism, but because he reckoned such actions ignoble and inelegant. Here, a communication to Tissaphernes, whom he called friend despite the notorious arrest at Sardis and after the Persian had bid ten thousand darics for his head.

  …it is not possession of force which produces victory, but its apparition. A commander of ability manipulates not armies but perceptions.

  From the succeeding paragraph:

  …the function of disciplined movement in battle is to produce in the mind of the friend the conviction that he cannot lose and the mind of the foe that he cannot win. Order is indispensable for these considerations beyond all others.

  Alcibiades was an abominable speller. When he worked late, he got worse and would shake awake anyone to hand. “Brick, sit up. How do you spell epiteichismos?” His bane was inversion of letters; his secretaries teased that he even wrote with a lisp. Thus many half-composed missives found their way to trash and from there to my chest.

  In this note, addressed to his great enemy Anytus at Athens, but intended for circulation among the political clubs beneath his sway, Alcibiades seeks to allay the fears of those who had brought the indictments which led to his exile—fears, that is, that he, returning at the head of an all-conquering fleet, would exact vengeance upon them.

  …my enemies accuse me of seeking to impose my will upon events, either for glory or fortune or, those who admit me a patriot, for the weal of my country. This is erroneous. I do not believe in personal will, and haven’t since I was a boy. What I have tried to do is to follow the dictates of Necessity. This is the solitary god I revere and in my opinion the only god that exists. Man’s predicament is that he dwells at the intersection of Necessity and free will. What distinguishes statesmen, as Themistocles and Pericles, is their gift to perceive Necessity’s dictates in advance of others—as Themistocles saw that Athens must become a sea power and Pericles that naval supremacy prefigures empire. That course of individual or nation aligned with Necessity must prove irresistible. The trick is that each moment contains three or four necessities. Necessity moreover is like a board game. As one option closes, a new necessity obtains. What has disfigured my career is that I have perceived Necessity but been unable to persuade my countrymen to act upon its dictates. My hope with you now, sir, is that we may act as mature men of politics…

  From Thrasybulus to his fellow general Theramenes, the latter impatient at his star’s overshadowing beside the sun of Alcibiades.

  …I have found it of great utility to regard him less as a man and more a force of nature. My concern alone is for Athens. I brought him back from exile, and stuck my neck on the block thereby, the way one confronting an insuperable enemy at sea calls down a great storm, or facing the foe on land enlists a mighty earthquake.

  From the same letter:

  …remember, my friend, that Alcibiades himself does not comprehend his gift and is ruled by it as much as ruling. His immodesty, however galling you may find it, is to him objectivity. He is superior. Why conceal it? To a mind such as his this course would be hypocrisy, and he is nothing if not the most frank of men.

  Another:

  …though his enemies style him a great double-crosser, in fact he is incapable of duplicity, and of all he has ever done, he has warned foe and friend long in advance.

  The men loved Thrasybulus and feared and respected Theramenes, but Alcibiades they clasped to their hearts with a fierce solicitousness, as a magical child. Had he eaten? Had he slept? Fifty times a day sailors and marines approached me to inquire of their general’s well-being, as if he were a sorcerer’s lamp whose flame they feared would by heaven’s jealousy be snuffed. The security party’s charge now turned upon its head, shielding our commander no longer from harm but the excessive affection of his own men and the relentless importunities of those trucklers and petition-pleaders who dogged his circuit day and night.

  Then there were the women. They descended in clouds, not alone hetairai, courtesans, and pornai, common whores, but free women, maids and widows, sisters presented by their own brothers. More than once I must chase a lad pimping his mother. The dame’s response? “How ’bout you, then, mate?” Buck lieutenants screwed themselves witless, just on their commander’s castoffs.

  As for Alcibiades himself, the allure of the debauch had abated. He didn’t need fornication; he had victory. He had changed. A becoming modesty settled about his shoulders like the plain marine’s cloak he wore, albeit clasped at the throat with a brooch of gold. He had become a new Alcibiades and he liked it. I never saw a man so revel in the triumphs of his comrades, absent envy, even and especially those who might be called his rivals, Thrasybulus and Theramenes. When a villa was vacated for him on Pennon Point at Sestos, he declined, not wishing to displace its occupants, and continued to bunk in the tent beside his ship, refusing even a floor till the carpenters framed it on their own while he was absent with the fleet. He became if not cheap, then frugal. Every spit went for the men, and every moment.

  Correspondence. He posted a hundred letters a day. Entire watches were consumed with this, amid rotating shifts of secretaries, often through night and morn and into the next night. This was the grind of coalition-building, the day-by-day extension of influence and persuasion. “How can you stand this?” I asked him once. “Stand what?” he replied. He loved it. To him these letters were not chores but men; it was a symphony to him and at last he held the conductor’s stand.

  There were other missives, the main in truth, whose lines he dictated late or scrawled in his own hand. These were the widow letters, the commendations of the maimed and fallen—ten, twenty, thirty a day. He directed these personally to the recipient himself if he were still alive, but often, as well, he had the rolls dispatched to father or mother or wife without the honored man’s knowledge. Can you imagine, Jason, the pride and relief such communications brought to those at home sick with fear for husbands and sons? I have met no few in subsequent seasons; they hold these artifacts yet in vaults, extracted with reverence, to be read aloud to children and grandchildren of the valor of their fathers.

  When he wished to honor a man of the fleet, he dispatched meat or wine with his compliments to that officer’s mess. He distinguished others by inclusion at his table. But to those he wished most to esteem, he sent not boons but trials. He singled them out for the most perilous duties, for in these, he said, he sent out lieutenants and got back captains. “Nothing he does,” as Endius had remarked, “is absent politics.”

  He led not by edict but example. Rather than direct the commanders to intensify their training, he took his own wing to sea and commenced. Those drills he wished the fleet to master, his own squadrons practiced first. That mark he meant them to exceed, he drove his own ships to surpass. He did not command the fleet to embark before dawn; the captains simply arose to discover his ships gone, already at their exercise.

  To his friend Adeimantus, a squadron commander:

  …if force must be employed with a subordinate, take care that it be minimal. If I command you, “Pick up that bowl,” and
set a swordpoint to your back, you will obey but no part will own the action. You will exculpate yourself, accounting, “He made me do it, I had no choice.” But if I only suggest and you comply, then you must own your compliance and, owning it, stand by it.

  Later, when he took Byzantium, the tenor of the siege was, if such a word may be applied, cheerful. The men set to with a will, absent malingering and disgruntlement, and even the foe, in capitulation, appeared not downcast but sanguine, optimistic of the future.

  The proper manner of investing a city is to present to the foe a choice of alternatives so constellated as to compel him to elect surrender or alliance, not as imposed upon him by force, but of his own will. A decision made in this way may not be disowned later, when we need our new ally to stand by us in future peril.

  In the planning before Cyzicus, when Theramenes had presented to the commanders the brilliant scheme of bait-and-wheel, so that in his scenario the foe was cut off on all sides, Alcibiades approved it with this alteration: the leaving to the enemy of an avenue of egress. “Not that he get away, but that he know he played the coward. And we not only destroy his forces on that day but break his spirit to face us again.”

  In like manner he applied discipline to the fleet. He never ordered a man beaten but only banished from his mates’ company. Such correction, he believed, spared the offender’s spirit while spurring him to return with renewed vigor and will. If a man committed the same offense twice, he was exiled to the rear with the baggage and the cowards. By this measure and others Alcibiades made such posts pillories of shame.