Tides of War
Let me show you something, Jason. It is my father’s casebook; I have kept it all these years.
Female, 30, fever, nausea, abdominal convulsions. Prescriptives: foxglove and valerian, purge of strychnine in wine. Prognosis: poor.
Infant, 6 months, fever, abdominal convulsions. Prescriptives: tea of willow bark, astringent of comfrey and hellebore in beeswax suppository. Prognosis: poor.
In the margins my father notes his fees. Those circled are the ones who paid. One may scan twenty and thirty cases without finding a mark. But skip down. The months pass. Economy now informs the notes.
Male, 50. Plague. Death.
Child, 2. Plague. Death.
I was twenty-three then. I was not ready to die, or to stand idly by while those I loved succumbed. Yet what could one do? The helplessness ate your guts. My mother’s father took his own life, yet uninfected by the scourge; the patriarch could not endure to outlive yet another generation of those he loved. My father and I bore his bones away in a child’s phaeton, out through that gate called Lionheart heretofore, now the Gate of Tears, to our tomb in the country. Half a hundred parties of the bereaved trekked with us; the queue stretched to the Anaceum. The Spartans, the season’s ravagement completed, had withdrawn, save the odd cavalry patrol. One tracked us along the Acharnae Road. Their lieutenant called to us to see reason and seek peace. “This is not war,” he cried, his knight’s heart outraged at such horrors visited upon children and women. “It is hell.”
For myself I had witnessed little of the nobility of war so eloquently advertised by this officer’s countrymen, my schoolmasters. In Aetolia we burned villages and poisoned wells. In Acarnania our blades were employed to slaughter sheep, not staying even to strip the beasts of hide or fleece, but dumping them throat-slit into the sea. The only real battle I had seen was at Mytilene under Laches, the ablest amphibious commander of the war, save only the Spartan Brasidas and Alcibiades.
The latter had won his second prize of valor, in the raid on the Spartan harbor at Gytheium, and was to collect another at Delium, saving the life of your master Socrates, this time as a cavalryman—all in all a “triple,” on land, sea, and horseback. By then, too, he had entered his first chariot at Olympia, though his driver had spilled and failed to finish.
I saw none of Alcibiades during those days. The Plague had hit his household hard. In addition to Pericles, whom rumors reported stricken, he had lost his mother, Deinomache, an infant daughter of his wife Hipparete, and both sons of his lover Cleonice, who herself had perished not long after. His cousins, Pericles’ sons Paralus and Xanthippus, had fallen, and Amycla, the Spartan nurse who had remained loyal, even when her country called her home.
Without the walls awaited war; within, pestilence. Now arose a third scourge: one’s own countrymen, made desperate by the first two. The poor cracked first. Driven by want, they took to plundering the homes of those of middling wealth, which stood vulnerable owing to their banishment of watchmen and stewards, all save the most trustworthy, who themselves took to crime to pay a physician or an undertaker, which professions amounted to the same thing. What good was money if you would not live to spend it? A gentleman would perish, bequeathing his treasure to his sons; these, anticipating their own imminent extinction, ran through their patrimony as fast as their fists could scatter it, abetted by every species of parasite and bloodsucker, seeking the juice as it spilled. You saw it, Jason. Disease would carry off a man’s wife and children; bereft of hope, he sets his own flat alight, then lingers in numb katalepsis, nor disclaims his offense to the brigadiers hastening onto the scene as the blaze consumes the tenancies of his neighbors. Near the Leocorium I saw a man hacked to pieces for this felony. Others set fires purely out of malice. After dark, flame-spotting became a spectator sport.
My brother served then with the infantry under Nicias in Megara; he and others shuttled regularly with dispatches. Again and again he urged me to get out. Enlist as a marine, take oars on a freighter, anything to vacate this antechamber of hell, the besieged city. He had sent his wife Theonoe and their babes to her kinsmen in the north; my own bride and child remained in Athens.
“They’re dead already,” Lion addressed me with passion. “Their graves are dug. Father and Meri too, and us with them if we’re mad enough to stay.” This upon an evening when he and I drank alone, not for pleasure, but shamelessly, to render ourselves insensate. “Listen to me, brother. You’re not one of those pious nincompoops who see this scourge as a curse from heaven. You’re a soldier. You know one does not make camp in a swamp or drink downstream from a shithouse. Look around you, man! We’re kenneled like rats, ten crammed in space for two, the very air we breathe contaminated as a terminal ward.”
This was how one spoke then. You remember, Jason. One tolled the truth with the candor of the condemned. Civility rode the greased sluice into the gutter, succeeded by scruple and self-restraint. Why obey the laws when you were already sentenced to death? Why honor the gods when their worst was nothing beside what you already bore? As for the future, to turn to it with hope was madness, to contemplate it with dread only made your present plight more unbearable. What object was served by virtue? To conduct oneself with patience and thrift was folly; heedlessness and pursuit of pleasure, common sense. To defer desire was absurd; to succor the afflicted, the fastest way to bring on your own end.
Despair begat boldness, slow death the courting of extinction. Gangs roamed the streets, armed with paving stones and wagon staves, weapons they could cast aside or claim harmless when the constables collared them, which they never did. These thugs scrawled insults on the public halls, defacing even the sanctuaries of the dead, and none stood up to them. With each act of insolence uncondemned, this scum grew more brazen. They hunted foreigners, the weaker the better, and beat them with a barbarity unprecedented. More than once my father and sister, hastening to one in need, were compelled to tend some fellow bludgeoned in the gutter and left to die. The white robe of the sisters of mercy lent protection on their rounds, yet there arose those who donned this garment to gain access to a home, to ransack it even as the occupants cried out to them, dying. I saw one female stoned on the very threshold she had plundered, the mob making off with the villainess’s loot while her blood yet ran upon the pavement. Arms had been outlawed, and all firebrands, even courtesy torches to light one’s way home. The penalty was death for those caught bearing firesticks and tinder.
The randomness of extinction brought out all that was worst in men, and all that was best. My sister Meri organized in our home sessions of council, clearinghouses for nurses and physicians seeking any diet, regimen, or curative that brought relief. No course was too outlandish. The fever that consumed the sick brought such torments that the sufferer could not stand on the skin the touch of even the lightest cloth. You entered a home and everyone was naked. The afflicted, on fire with fever, plunged into public fountains, then others, desperate with thirst, drank the water. Night’s cool brought no surcease, as the pain merely of lying upon one’s bed drove sufferers to madness. Physicians prescribed baths and diuretics; they bled some, purged others. Nothing worked.
The doctors looked worse than the dying. My wife would feed these scarecrows, growing more gaunt each day herself. Soon the search for remedials became supplanted by the quest for drugs to blunt the pain, then, whispered, merciful means of dispatch. People drank bull’s blood or swallowed stones. I myself became recruited to this dolorous trade. I scoured the sailors’ markets for morphia and dogbane, hemlock and belladonna. My sister instructed me in the concoction of potions to carry off the dying. Soon these became too costly to secure.
My infant son took ill. His cries, heart-scoring, ceased not night or day. My wife rocked the babe, crooning, as she, too, weakened. When their pain became unbearable, Meri dosed them with nightshade, the last she had, to bear them away.
My cousin Simon, now a captain in the cavalry, had come to stay with us, bringing his wife Clymene and infant twins. The
n his brow, too, began to burn. He fled one night, taking only his horse. Within days Clymene began to fail, crying for him; I scoured all his haunts, even those we shared in childhood. One midnight, despairing, I determined to seek out Alcibiades, at his town estate on the Hill of the Knights.
The streets then, even those of the wealthy, had become corridors of horror. Neighbors had perished, abandoning their pets; others who could not feed their animals or grew too sick to care had let them loose. Now packs of dogs ranged wild. These would not go after corpses, their beasts’ wisdom enjoining, but hunted the living, even indoors, clawing at shutters and pouring in over thresholds while their howls and snarls, ungodly, echoed down the vacant lanes. I ran this gauntlet for what seemed hours, at last drawing up before Alcibiades’ gate.
Lanterns blazed; no watchman attended. Gay music sounded from within. Crossing the courtyard, I saw a man of my age, unknown to me, cavorting in a dry fountain, cupping from behind the ungirdled breasts of a prostitute. Another sprawled in the shadows with a porne on her knees before him.
I advanced into the interior. The place was torchlit and pullulating with revelers. Drums beat. A procession, chanting, jigged about the court. Upon a dais stood a congress of men and women clad as acolytes and bearing wands of willow. They enacted a burlesque of the rites of Thracian Kotyttos, the orgy goddess.
Here arose Alcibiades, at the fore, performing in mockery the office of priest, or should I say priestess. He was dressed in women’s robes, lips painted, his curls bound in lampoonish caricature of the sacred style. He was barefoot, dead drunk. I advanced before him, demanding the whereabouts of my cousin.
Alcibiades stared. He had no idea who I was. The dancers capered wantonly about him. “Who is this intruder who dares trespass, uninitiated, within the hallowed precinct? Kneel, supplicant, and show reverence of the goddess!”
I demanded again my cousin.
Alcibiades recognized me now. He elevated his staff, which I saw was a cook’s stirring paddle, for soup.
“Bow, interloper. Display deference to heaven or, by my vested powers, I’ll have you blown senseless.”
Two whores twined about his knees. He directed one forward; she lurched upon all fours, clutching at my cloak, beneath which from its baldric hung a xiphos sword.
“And comes this stranger armed as well? Impiety! What punishment for this?” Alcibiades flung his wine bowl in sham outrage. “Attend, postulants, to this party-pooping heretic! He has observed, as Menoetius says,
that which no mortal, unpunished,
may look upon and depart.”
Now I saw my cousin. “Get out of here, Pommo,” he commanded me, emerging from the daisy chain of prancers.
“Not without you,” I replied.
“Pommo, you swine!”
This from Alcibiades, descending from his perch and draping a merry arm about my shoulders. “Once upon a siege, my friend, you played the spoilsport and I commended you. But see, the tables have turned. It is our country now which stands embattled and immured.”
He tugged the whore before me to her feet. “What do you think of this?” he pronounced, and tore her garment to the waist. “Not impressed? How about this?” He stripped her naked. The girl made no effort to cover herself but faced me in the eye, prideful in her beauty.
“Let him alone, Alcibiades,” my cousin put it.
I noted Euryptolemus advancing to intercede.
“You’re not queer, are you, Pommo?” Alcibiades declaimed. “We can address those needs as well!” He motioned to the shadows, summoning boys.
“What of your famous mythos, Alcibiades? What will Athens think of these proceedings?”
“Who will inform her, Pommo? Not you, I know. Nor these others, for if Euphorion speaks true,
Which dare call him thief,
whose fist resides within thief’s purse?”
Euro moved beside me, sheepish and ashamed. “Pommo has lost wife and child,” he informed his cousin.
“And I mother and sons, daughter, and uncles and cousins. To say it with stone, as our friends the Spartans phrase it: ‘Who hasn’t?’”
Fury seized me. “You claimed once to be two—Alcibiades and ‘Alcibiades.’ Which are you now?”
“I am a third Alcibiades. He who cannot stand to be the other two.”
“That Alcibiades,” I declared, “can go fuck himself.”
Anger flared within his eyes, quelled at once and mutated into an aspect of irony and despair.
“And can you call yourself friend to one Alcibiades and spurn the others?”
“I was never your friend.”
I turned upon my heel.
“Come back, Pommo! Take your vows. Be one with us!”
Striding out, I could hear him call after me, laughing. “The good alone die young. Haven’t the Spartans taught you that? Take care, old friend. Don’t tempt the gods with virtue!”
In the courtyard I seized my cousin and pleaded with him for his children’s sake to come home. He would not, but clasped me hard, brow glistening with that sheen of fever one knew only too well, and exhorted me to stay—here, where laughter and music yet obtained.
“Go home, then!” my cousin called as I stalked clear. “Go home to death. I will stay here with life, for as long as I have to live it.”
Here, Jason, this entry in my father’s log:
Male, 54. Plague. Death.
This was his own warrant of doom, self-diagnosed.
Within days he began to fail. My sister labored, using all her skills. Then she, too, showed the signs. She would not drug the pain with those few pharmaka we yet possessed, preserving them for others.
My father grew desperate to release her. Twice I prevented him. How much longer could she last? Ten days, he said, in this hell of pain.
I sat all night with my sister while she writhed.
“Do you love me, Pommo?”
I knew what she wanted.
“You must not let Father do it.”
Again I stalked the streets. Let her go, I prayed. But always, returning, she lingered. Her agonies redoubled.
“You are a soldier, Pommo. Be strong like one.”
We bore her, my father and I, to the tub. Her frame was light as a child’s. “May the gods bless you,” she said. I instructed my father to seize her, hard, when I gave the nod. At this instant my edge sliced the artery.
“May the gods bless you,” my sister repeated.
She clutched my hand and my father’s, his own as weak as hers.
“May the gods bless you.”
[The man Polemides here broke off. Emotion cracked his voice. With great effort only could he continue, his phrases broken with sobs.]
How may one’s tongue give voice to such utterance? “I watched my wife and child die.” Was it for this the gods gifted us with speech, to pronounce such unholy idiom? “I opened my sister’s veins.”
[The man buried his face in his hands. I rose and embraced him. His arms clutched me, while piteous sobs convulsed his breast.
[He turned away. I understood and rose to absent myself.
[Departing, I glanced back. The man stood in his cell’s corner, cheek pressed against the stone of the wall, while both arms clutched tight about his person as he broke down with this remembered grief.]
IX
A CALLING ACQUIRED
My father died that night. With this all whom I loved had been carried off save my aunt, my brother’s wife and babes sent north for their safety, and Lion himself. He was absent with the fleet; I conducted the obsequies, attending upon our father’s brothers and the gentlewomen of the clan. Enemy incursion had cut off access to the country, to our family tomb. We must inhume Father’s and Meri’s bones beside my own wife’s and infant’s, beneath the stones of our city house. As I voiced the terminal invocation,
May the earth rest lightly upon you,
my soul was animated by one object only: to see the remains of these I loved interred on the land, where t
hey belonged and would find peace. That meant returning to war, to drive out the foe. I would find a vessel or infantry company and ship out.
Waking alone several days later, I determined to empty the house and commenced before dawn to set her contents at the curb. Before I had stacked three items a crowd had collected. I began to laugh. “Just leave me armor and something to cook with.” The place was picked clean in five minutes. Believe it or not, the mob respected my wishes. I found my wife’s kitchen intact, and my military gear. They left my bedding as well.
A day later, or perhaps that same forenoon, I was approached by a gentleman of our country district, a friend of my father’s. He looked bad. We spoke of happier seasons, of childhood games played with his sons and daughters upon the land. Would I, in remembrance of these bonds, perform now a service for him?
“It’s my wife,” he said, and spoke no more.
Moments passed before I realized what he wanted. I was appalled and fled.
Two nights later this countryman returned. “My wife delivered you, Pommo. By the gods, I beg you now: deliver her.”
There are frontiers one crosses, my friend, without understanding of what he does. This was not one of them. With gravity I acceded and performed the service this man requested.
Within days two more such assignments were set before me. I performed them as well. Why not?
The good alone die young.
I continued to apply for service with the fleet, but must have looked so bad the officers took me for sick. I could not find a berth.
More haunted figures, strangers as well as acquaintances, presented themselves, requesting my abetments of mercy. I began to get good at it. It was like being a doctor, I told myself. Like my father, I delivered the afflicted from their torment. In fact my physic was superior; my cures took. No client complained. And business kept getting better.