Tides of War

  “A beggar?” Alcibiades laughed. “That is because he scorns to profit from that which he pursues out of love. He would pay if he could; he considers himself not a teacher but a student. And I will tell you something else. My crown of valor…did you notice this night that I never set it, as one decorated ought, upon my head? This is because the prize rightly belongs to him, to our own coarsecloth master of discourse.”

  Alcibiades related that at the height of the battle for which he had been honored he had fallen, wounded and cut off, assailed on all sides by the enemy. “Socrates alone came to my defense, dashing from safety to shelter me beneath his shield, until our comrades could rally and return with reinforcements. I argued vehemently that the prize belonged to him, but he convinced the generals to award it to me, no doubt seeking to school my heart to aspire to forms of glory nobler than those of politics.”

  We traversed the remainder of the crossing in silence. Beyond the battlements of the besieged city one discerned cookfire smoke.

  “Do you mark that smell, Pommo?”

  It was horseflesh.

  “They’re cooking their cavalry,” Alcibiades observed. “By spring they will be done for, and they know it.”

  At the foresters’ camp Alcibiades made a show of his arrival, without words putting it clear to all that I stood in his esteem, and any who crossed me must deal with him. Sure enough, within ten days my commander received orders rotating him back to Athens, his replacement an officer with instructions to leave me free to run my platoon as I wished.

  I dismounted now and handed the reins back up to my friend. “What will you do with the rest of your evening?” he inquired.

  I would write a letter to my sister. “And you? Will you return to continue your discussions of philosophy?”

  He laughed. “What else?”

  I watched him depart, trailing the companion horse. His track in the snow bore him back, however, not along the picket line toward Aspasia Three, but in ascent upon the slope called Asclepium to that cabin of spruce wherein awaited the lady Cleonice, she of the violet eyes.

  Book II

  THE LONG WALLS

  VI

  A YOUNG MAN’S SPORT

  Thus [Grandfather resumed] concluded my initial interview with the assassin Polemides. I left him and made haste to Socrates. It occurred to me crossing the Iron Court, which conjoined the wings of the prison, that mention of this evening thirty years past might summon a smile from our friend. In addition I was curious. Did Socrates recollect the young soldier called Pommo? I decided against this, however, not wishing to further burden one with so much already upon his mind. Also I imagined the crush of friends and followers would prevent me from securing a moment apart with our master.

  When I arrived at his cell, however, I discovered him alone. The mode of his execution had been established that day by the Eleven Administrators of Justice: he must take hemlock. Though this method mercifully spared the flesh from mutilation, its pronouncement this day, bringing home as it did the imminence of our master’s end, had cast his friends into such a state that Socrates had been constrained to banish them, only to secure an interval of peace. Of this the warder informed me on my approach. I anticipated a similar dismissal and was relieved to see Socrates rising, motioning me warmly within. “So, Jason, are you coming from your other client?”

  He knew all about Polemides. Indeed he recalled the youth, he confirmed, not alone from that evening of the siege but from subsequent service with the infantry, and by report from Alcibiades’ days of triumph in the East, in which Polemides had served as captain of marines. Our master remarked upon the conjunction of these two defendants, the philosopher sentenced for schooling Alcibiades and the assassin awaiting trial for slaying him. “It would seem that a jury possessed of consistency must, having convicted the one, acquit the other. This bodes well,” he observed, “for your client Polemides.”

  At that time Socrates’ summers had passed seventy, yet he appeared save his beard gone white and the noble amplitude of his girth much as Polemides described during the siege of Potidaea. His limbs stood hale and sturdy, his carriage vigorous and purposeful; it required scant imagination to picture the veteran snatching up shield and armor to advance once again into the fray.

  Not surprisingly the philosopher evinced curiosity about his fellow inmate and even advanced counsel upon how best to defend him. “It is too late to file a countersuit, a paragraphe, declaring his indictment unlawful, which of course it is. Perhaps a dike pseudomartyriou, a suit for false witness, which may be invoked up to the moment of the jury’s vote.” He laughed. “You see, my own ordeal has rendered me something of a jailhouse lawyer.”

  We discussed the Amnesty, in place since the restoration of the democracy, which exempted all citizens from prosecution for crimes committed theretofore. “Polemides’ enemies have gotten around this cleverly, Socrates, by charging him with ‘wrongdoing.’ That rakes a lot of mud, and, as he admits, there is more than enough with which to tar him.” I narrated an abridged version of Polemides’ story, what he had told me thus far.

  “I knew several of his family,” Socrates remarked when this chronicle concluded. “His father, Nicolaus, was a man of exceptional integrity, who perished in attendance upon the stricken during the Plague. And I enjoyed a cordial if chaste acquaintance with his great-aunt Daphne, who effectively ran the Board of Naval Governors through her second and third husbands. She was the first of the aristocratic dames, in her widowhood, to conduct her affairs entirely on her own, with no male as kyrios or guardian, and not even a servant about the house.”

  Our master expressed concern for Polemides’ comfort. “The heat is stifling on that side of the court, I hear. Please, Jason, take him this fruit, and that wine; I may imbibe no more, as they say it spoils the savor of hemlock.”

  When the others returned with the evening, some measure of amusement was wrung from the coincident confinement of the murderer and the philosopher. Crito, Socrates’ wealthiest and most devoted follower, spoke. In the days prior to our master’s trial, he had hired detectives and set about acquiring intelligence of the philosopher’s accusers, seeking to bring to light their private crimes and thus discredit them and their indictments. It occurred to me now that I might do the same for Polemides.

  I had then in my employ a married couple of middle years, Myron and Lado. They were incorrigible snoops, both, who delighted in nothing more than digging up dirt on the high and mighty. I decided to set these bloodhounds to work. What had become of Polemides’ family? What motivated his accusers? Had someone put them up to this, and if so, who? What covert agenda did they seek to promote?

  Meanwhile, my grandson, I sense your assimilation of this tale wanting. You need more background. Polemides and I were contemporaries; he knew as he spoke that I understood the times and required no exposition as to their feel and flavor. You of a later generation, however, may benefit by a brief historical digression.

  In the years before the War, that period of my own and our narrator’s boyhood, Athens stood not in the state of faded glory within which she currently resides. Her best days were not behind her, but present, to hand, dazzling and incandescent. Her navy had routed the Empire of Asia and driven the Persian from the sea. Tribute flowed to her from two hundred states. She was a conqueror, an empire, the cultural and commercial capital of the world.

  The Spartan War lay years in the future, yet already Pericles’ vision had inspired him to prepare for it. He fortified the harbors at Munychia and Zea, reinforced the Long Walls along their entire length, and built the Southern Wall, the “Third Leg,” that, should the Northern or Phalerian Wall fall, the city would remain impregnable.

  You, my grandson, who have known these adamant marvels or their restored rendition all your life, take their existence for granted. But at that time they were a feat of engineering such as no city of Greece had ever dreamt, let alone dared. To extend the city’s battlements, four and a half miles on one side,
nearly the same on the other, yoking the upper city to the harbors at Piraeus, bounding these as well on all sides save the sea, thus turning Athens into an island of invincible fortification…this was considered folly by most and madness by many.

  My own father and the main of the equestrian class had stood in violent opposition to this enterprise, opposing first Themistocles, then Pericles implementing the former’s policy. They discerned clearly, the landholders of Attica, that the Olympian, as Pericles was called, intended when war came to leave defenseless before the invader, and in fact abandon, our estates, farms, and vineyards, including this one above whose fields you and I now sit. Pericles’ strategy would be to withdraw the citizenry behind the Long Walls, permitting the foe to ravage our farmsteads at will. Let them deplete their warrior spirit in the slave’s tasks of chopping vines and torching garners. When they got bored enough, they would go home. Meanwhile Athens, which controlled the sea and could procure its needs from the states of its empire, would peer down contemptuously upon the invader, secure behind her impregnable battlements.

  All revolved about the navy.

  The great houses of Athens, the nobles of the Cecropidae, Alcmaeonidae, and Peisistratidae, the Lycomidae, Eumolpidae, and Philaidae, all prided themselves as knights and hoplites. Their ancestors and they themselves had defended the nation as cavalrymen or gentleman warriors of the armored infantry. Now Athens had devolved into a nation of oar pullers. The fleet employed and emboldened the commons, and the commons packed the Assembly. They hated it, the aristocracy, but were powerless to resist the tide of change. Besides, the navy was making them rich. Reforms initiated by Pericles and others established pay for public service, appointing officials by lot rather than ballot, thus stacking the magistracies and the courts with hoi polloi, the many. To those of the “Party of the Good and True” who expressed revulsion at the spectacle of our city’s champions slouching down harbor lanes bearing their oars and cushions, Pericles responded that it was not his policies that had made Athens a naval power and an empire. History had done it. It was our fleet, manned by our citizen crews, which had defeated Xerxes at Salamis; our fleet which had chased the Persian from the seas; our fleet which had restored freedom to the islands and the Greek cities of Asia. And our fleet that was hauling in, and enriching us all with, the wealth of the world.

  The construction of the Long Walls was no gauntlet flung into the teeth of history, Pericles argued, but recognition plain and simple of the reality of the time. We would never beat the Spartans on land. Their army was invincible and always would be. Athens’ destiny lay at sea, as Apollo himself had decreed, declaring,

  the wooden wall alone shall not fail you,

  and as Themistocles and Aristides had proved at Salamis, and Cimon and all our conquering generals in the succeeding generation, including Pericles himself, had confirmed again and again.

  Others inveighed against this policy of “walls and ships,” declaring that imperial expansionism would inflame, and had inflamed, mistrust of us among the Spartans. Leave them in peace and they will leave us. But push them into a corner, show up their pride by our ever-enlarging power, and they will be compelled to respond in kind.

  This was true and Pericles never refuted it. Yet such was the brass, the crust, the arrogance of those years that Athens’ citizenry disdained accommodation of other states as her tradesmen and even her whores scorned to vacate for their betters the public way. Why should they? They who had defeated the mightiest army and navy on earth, who had made the Aegean their millpond, by what dereliction should they leave their city vulnerable for fear of offending Spartan delicacy? Does not the husbandman secure his garden with a palisade of stone? Do not the Spartans themselves ring their camps with pickets and sentries at arms? Let them live with the navy and the Long Walls. And if they could not, then let come what may.

  And come, war did. I served the first seasons as a sail lieutenant but was reassigned with the second winter to the northern siege, the same described by our client, of Potidaea. The hardship, if anything, was greater than he told. Plague had begun; fully a fourth of the infantry were carried off. We bore their ashes home in clay pots beneath the benches of our oarsmen and nested their shields and armor beneath weather-cover on our decks.

  With the third spring Potidaea fell. The wider war was now two years old. Clearly it would not soon end. The Greek states had been split between Athens and Sparta, each compelled to side with one or the other.

  Corcyra with her fleet had entered the lists, allied with Athens. Argos held aloof. Save Plataea, Acarnania, Thessaly, and Messenian Naupactus, every state of the mainland stood with Sparta—Corinth with her wealth and navy; Sicyon and the cities of the Argolid; Elis and Mantinea, the great democracies of the Peloponnese; north of the Isthmus, Ambracia, Leucas, Anactoria; Megara, Thebes, and all Boeotia with her mighty armies; and Phocis and Locris with their matchless horse.

  The islands of the Aegean and all Ionia stood within Athens’ hegemony; our warships still ruled the sea. But revolts flared in Thrace and Chalcidice, vital to Athens for her timber, copper, and cattle, and the indispensable Hellespont, the city’s lifeline for barley and wheat.

  Attica had become a Spartan playground. The foe rolled across the frontier at Eleusis, laying the Thriasian plain waste for the second time, then doubled Mount Aegaleus to scorch again the districts of Acharnae, Cephisia, Leuconoe, and Colonus. Spartan troops devastated the Paralian district as far as Laurium, ravaging first the side that looks toward the Peloponnese, then that facing Euboea and Andros. From atop their Long Walls the citizens of Athens peered toward the shoulders of Mounts Parnes and Brilessus, beyond which rose the smoke of our last estates succumbing to the torch. At the city’s threshold the invaders broke apart the shops and tenements of the suburbs, tearing up even the paving stones of the Academy. Polemides served under Phormio in the Corinthian Gulf, first at Naupactus, then in Amphilochian Argos. In Aetolia he suffered among other wounds one of the skull, which rendered him sightless for an interval and required confinement at home for most of a year. This my bloodhounds reported, produce of their scourings. No member of Polemides’ family could be located. His brother Lion’s two daughters, now grown, had married and vanished into the sequestration of their husbands’ households. Polemides had a son and daughter of his own, though my ferrets could discover no more than their names. These were the issue of an apparent second marriage, to one Eunice of Samothrace; though no registration of this union could be found.

  Polemides had been married once, for certain, during the interval of his recuperation after Aetolia, to the daughter of a colleague of his father’s. The bride was named Phoebe, “Bright.” As many in that reign of war, Polemides married young, just twenty-two. The maiden was fifteen.

  When I attempted during our next visitation to query him on this subject, he demurred, politely but with emphasis. I respected this and forswore further interrogation. My importunity had, however, recalled to our client’s mind the matriarch of his clan who had arranged this union, for whom the prisoner clearly felt profound affection and to whose memory his thoughts now returned. He recalled an interview in her apartments upon his return after these campaigns. “How odd,” he remarked. “I have not thought of that day in twenty years. Yet much of its content may have bearing upon our tale, and at this very juncture.” I held my tongue; after several moments Polemides began:

  I didn’t get back to Athens for two and a half years after Potidaea, serving in one campaign and another. You know how it was. The wound that packed me home didn’t even come in action; I plunged from a scaffold and split my skull. I was blind with it for a while. My dear comrades in hospital rifled every item of kit I owned except three silver tetradrachms I kept up my ass; they’d have got shield and breastplate too if I didn’t pillow my head on one with an elbow crooked round the other. The letters to my sister Meri that one crony wrote for me never made it back to Athens, so that when I tramped down the gangplank at Munychia, ther
e was no one to greet me, and I couldn’t even pluck a spit to hire a jitney up to town. I hiked alone, humping arms and armor, while the flaming poker inside my skull threatened at every step to drop me faint.

  The Plague had begun. I could not believe the alteration it had wrought. The Circuit Road, whose breadth at my departure twenty-six months earlier had yawned so amply that young bloods used to race horses on it at midnight, now stood narrowed to a wagon-width, shoulders solid with stalls and shanties butted flush to the Long Walls, the hovels of refugees driven in from the country. In town, alleys teemed with the dispossessed. Civility had fled. Even the sight of one as myself, a young soldier suffering, elicited neither a kind word nor a hand to help one up a curb. Upon familiar lanes one glimpsed only strangers, thumbing their few damp obols, borne not in purses, but, like bumpkins, in their cheeks.

  In town again I rested a day, doted upon by my sweet sister. Meri had saved stone cherries for me, the year’s last, against this homecoming her heart feared might never come. Her love was like sunshine to me; I wished to bask all day. For Meri’s part, merely to look upon her brother was not enough. She must touch my face and hair and sit pressed to my side for hours. “I must be sure it’s really you.”

  She and our father insisted that I visit, as soon as strength permitted, our aunt Daphne, in whose care I had passed my early years and who languished now alone and embattled, in her sixty-second winter. Meri sent a boy ahead and at the third noon I went over.

  Daphne was really our great-aunt. She had been a celebrated beauty in her day. As a maiden she had led the basket girls of the Greater Panathenaea and borne to the Serpent of the Acropolis the sacred bowl of milk. Now five decades on, she yet set at the city’s service all she possessed. Uncoerced she had let her lower floors to a family of the countryside. These had in turn opened their doors to others in straits and these likewise, so that the court when I entered shocked me with the mob of its tenants and the state of disrepair their privation had produced. Upstairs, however, my aunt’s sphere remained unaltered, including my own boy’s room exactly as I had left it. The old dame’s looks survived as well, and bidding me sit in that chamber which had been her fourth husband’s drawing room and now doubled as cupboard and kitchen, she yet projected the self-assurance of one to whom attention has been paid and who commands it still.