A Captain of Thebes

by Mark G McLaughlin

  A light breeze raised some dust and caused Alexander’s cloak to flap, but for many painful moments no other sound could be heard on the field. No soldier so much as coughed, nor did the king’s mount snort or scuff with a hoof, in such control of him was Alexander.

  “Well?” asked Alexander again, “surely there must be some reason for all of this rage, and murder, and rebellion? Or have the men of Thebes become so phlegmatic that they are moved to slaughter by whim?”

  The Thebans remained silent, yet there was some movement in the ranks as a soldier from the middle files pushed his way to the front.

  “We have good cause to be in arms, you murdering bastard,” came a voice from the ranks. “We fight for that most sacred right of all Greeks – freedom!”

  “Freedom? Freedom from what? To do what?” scoffed Alexander.

  “From foreign rule, your honor,” came the reply, “from the rule you and your late father imposed upon us against our will.”

  The reply seemed to perplex the Macedonian king, causing even his great dark mount, Bucephalus, to fidget briefly. “Our rule is not foreign, Theban. It is the necessary joining of all Greeks under one banner, to stop fighting among ourselves so we may march forward, together, for a greater cause!”

  “And what cause is that” came another voice from the Theban ranks. “To enrich Macedonia at our expense? To be slaves to you and your nation of shepherds and pig-keepers?”

  A roar of approval mixed with nervous laughter sprung from the phalanx, its sound rushing toward Alexander and breaking upon him, as a wave crashes into a rock on the shore. Some hoplites banged spear on shield in approval; others stamped their spear butts into the ground, or hooted in agreement with their comrade’s brave response.

  Alexander, only made more resolute by this outburst, gripped the reigns of his war horse, clicked his heels and made the mighty Bucephalus rear up, its hooves but a hair’s breadth from the shields of the front rankers. “Are you so small-minded and so lacking in vision that you cannot see beyond the boundaries of your tiny city?” screeched the young ruler, his composure gone and his blood rising. “Ours is a holy cause, a righteous path to punish the Persians for the desecration of our temples, the murder of our citizens, the burning of our cities! Greeks! We have 150 years of Persian wrongdoing to avenge!”

  Alexander paused to see if his words took root among the Theban band, but sensing only confusion, indifference or scorn, quickly changed his tack. “Or perhaps I am speaking to the wrong people. Perhaps you are no longer Greek. Perhaps that Persian gold your fathers and their forefathers took was not merely a hiring price for mercenaries, but was solicited as your neighbors say by a people so enamored and in awe of Persia as to be more Medes than Greeks? Are you indeed the traitors in our midst, the vipers in our beds that the Phoceans and Plateans tell me you are? By the gods, seeing you before me, I half believe that you truly have been seduced by the Medes – or at least their gold!”

  “Better Persian gold than Macedonian iron!” came the retort from the phalanx.

  “I see, I see,” huffed Alexander, visibly angered and struggling to control his temper. “If I believed that, I would order my men to cut you down where you stand, to so disfigure your corpses that even Hades himself would not recognize your shade when it passed over the river into his realm. But I will not act in haste, or in the heat of the moment. Thebans!” shouted Alexander, his voice as thunder, “I give you your lives – and one day! March back to your city. Call your elders together! I give them until tomorrow at dawn to surrender the leaders of this traitorous conspiracy – Phoenix and Prothytes I believe they are called. Surrender these murderers and instigators to murder to me! Tear down the palisade opposite the Cadmea, open your gates, and raise the siege of the citadel! Do this, and all shall be forgiven – for what is a king if he cannot show mercy to his children?”

  Alexander made Bucephalus rear up again, this time noisily striking the shield of a front ranker with his mighty hooves. The king then spoke once more, and with no hint of charity in his voice.

  “Do as I ask, or I shall do it for you. And if I do, look to your city. Look to your wives, to your mothers, and to your fathers, and to your sons and daughters. For by night fall tomorrow they will submit or their bodies will be skewered on pikes and your homes will be naught but ashes.”

  The march back to Thebes seemed to take ten times as long as the march from the city. The smoke from the wild fires that burned in the turf islands in the swamps of Lake Copais seemed to foreshadow the impending fate Alexander had promised for Thebes. Despite the threatening cloud of Thessalian horsemen hovering about, the hoplites kept a measured, steady, and unhurried pace, not giving their escort the satisfaction of believing the men of Thebes to be unduly concerned. Still, Alexander’s words and the earlier rout of the Theban cavalry and light troops made most of the soldiers uneasy, and when soldiers are uneasy they grumble.

  “Who does he think he is, some god to stand in judgment of us like that!” spat one old veteran.

  “Actually, I think he does believe himself a god, or at least the son of one, or so I hear,” jibed another. That drew a round of mumbled laughter from his fellows.

  “Should have just skewered him where he stood, him and that big lumbering mountain of his he calls a horse,” mumbled another. “One quick thrust and our worries would all be over.”

  “Yeah, well, who was stopping you?” came the reply from the back ranks.

  “That’ll be enough!” shouted the captain. “Silence in the ranks! You are hoplites of Thebes, men of the phalanx! Not a bunch of whimpering stable boys or churlish layabouts! Be quiet! There are too many foreign ears about!”

  The captain’s command, however, was quickly ignored.

  “We should have fought, I tell you!” grumbled one old warrior. “What will they think of us back home, marching back like this, with hardly a shield shattered or a spear bloodied!”

  “Aye, and being herded home, like goats, by the likes of them on their shaggy ponies!” commented another soldier, pointing his spear for effect at the Thessalian escort. “It is humiliating, I tell you! By the gods, so humiliating!”

  “Enough, I said!” commanded Captain Dimitrios, far more emphatically than the last time, but still ignored by his soldiers, just as before.

  “And what’s this about turning over our elders?” remarked another soldier. “He thinks they’re just going to say ‘oops, sorry my King,’ tug at their forelocks, bow down like some Persian boy to his master, and give themselves over to his vengeance? For that is what it’ll be, mind you, vengeance – bloody vengeance! And then to tear down the palisade and throw open the gates? I suppose he’ll expect us all to turn around, bend over, and pull up our…”

  “I said enough!” boomed Dimitrios. “Next man who so much as coughs I’ll put my foot down his throat! I said silence and I mean silence! We march on, steady and proper, and without a grumble! There’ll be time enough for talk when we get back. The assembly is going to want a full report, and what we do next is up to them!”

  “You don’t mean you think we’re actually going to surrender to that little piss…”

  Before the soldier could finish his sentence, the captain, true to his word, swept his spear across the man’s knees, brought him to the ground, and kicked him in the teeth.

  “I said ‘silence!’” shouted Dimitrios, red with exertion and rage. “I will have discipline in the ranks, or so help me by all the gods I will split the next man who crosses me from throat to balls! I’m in a killing mood, lads, a real killing mood, and Hades take me if I’m not as good as my word on this!”

  Their discipline restored, as much by their captain's fury as by knowing he felt the same as they, the column of spearmen marched on. Steadily, quietly and with men holding their gear close so as not to make any undue sound, the hoplites reached the palisade by the southern gate. Their Thessalian escorts peeled off as the column marched past the Temple of Heracles, but watched menacingl
y as the Theban guards moved the barrier that blocked the road toward the Elektrian Gate. Dimitrios and his men marched proudly into the city, just beneath the watchful gaze of the guards on the towers on either side of the gate. Other eyes were on them as well from the citadel. From those walls, what remained of the Macedonian garrison could be heard jeering, taunting, and hurling all manner of crude insults at the returning hoplites.

  Those jeers turned to cheers soon enough, however, for from their high vantage point the garrison could spy the tips of the forest of sarissas, the 18-foot-tall pikes of the Macedonian infantry, as Alexander's army came within sight of the city.

  Succor – and revenge – were at hand.

  6

  The House of Pindar

  Thebes

  The pain in Aristophanes’ leg, though crippling, was slight when compared to the pain he felt for his city. Hobbling back from the shores of Lake Copais after he had been wounded had not helped. The wound festered, just as did that left by the incomplete revolt begun but two weeks past – that particular open sore being the decimated yet grimly determined Macedonian garrison holed up atop the acropolis in the Cadmea. Two weeks of siege had weakened the dwindling defenders of the citadel, but now the besiegers were themselves besieged: Alexander had come, and with him, the hosts of Macedonia.

  While Captain Dimitrios and the remaining able men of the company stood to arms on the walls, Ari was being cared for by the captain's family. A descendant of the lyric poet, Pindar, Captain Dimitrios and his family were treated as literary royalty – or at least as royal as those of the demos who ruled the city would allow. The House of Pindar, as it was known, was better appointed than almost any other in the city, for it was part home, part library, and part shrine to the famed poet, dead now for just over a century.

  While no one in the family had taken up the stylus (for how could they dare compete with their ancestor), all of the men, and even most of the women, were well learned – a rare and quite scandalous situation as the education of women was thought to be folly, or worse, throughout most of Greece. The captain was no poet either, but a canny merchant when not called to duty. His brother, Klemes, fortunately for Ari, was one of the most respected physicians in the city. It was he who attended the wounded soldier, whom Dimitrios had brought to the House of Pindar rather than leave him to the tender mercies of some itinerant medicine man in Ari's home neighborhood in the Ampheion section of town.

  “Why should we bow to a mere boy, Philip’s son though he be?” sputtered Klemes, spit flying from his angry mouth barely missing dripping onto the wound he was dressing. “Um, sorry about that,” apologized the physician, dabbing away the spittle. “I was taught to irrigate a wound, but not in such a manner” he added in a rare attempt at humor.

  “Perhaps because he is a king – and a soldier,” replied Aristophanes, grimacing as Klemes poked, and prodded, and squeezed, and sniffed about the oozing gash in his leg. “Of that last your brother and I know firsthand. He stood in the ranks at Chaeronea when the young Macedonian lion came down upon us. I was out on the flank with the rest of the slingers and javelin boys when Alexander charged. I never would have thought cavalry could be used like that – to crack a phalanx like a mason’s wedge splits stone. And he almost did it again to us out by Lake Copais.”

  “Aye, I recall Chaeronea. I was there, too,” mumbled Klemes, “but not in the line of battle like my brother. Yet I saw plenty of Alexander’s handiwork, back in the tents treating the wounded. Even our Sacred Band, our finest of the fine, could not withstand his charge.”

  “Yes,” interrupted Dimitrios, as he entered the room, noisily tossing his helmet onto its stand. “Wheat has more chance against the whirlwind than our spearmen had that sad day. And here we are again,” sighed the captain to his brother, “again the wheat, again the whirlwind.”

  “But this time we have our walls – the strongest and thickest in all the Greek lands – if not the world!” replied the physician. “Oh, 'Seven-gated Thebes,' the jewel of 'Solid Greece,' with walls of solid rock...”

  “They're not quite all that solid, brother,” corrected Dimitrios. “The base is solid enough, and too deep for anyone to tunnel under without hitting bedrock, but the walls themselves are made up of two thinner layers of stone blocks, faced with brick and with rubble in between.”

  “God damnit, Dimitrios, I'm a physician, not an engineer. I only know what I've read and what I can see for myself,” said Klemes, annoyed at being corrected by his brother.

  “Don't worry, doc,” said Ari, through gritted teeth, “we'll defend those walls and the seven gates, just like the seven champions...”

  “Which is only half of the Thebiad, as you should well know,” Dimitrios interjected. “A generation later the city was destroyed...”

  “...but rebuilt, and even stronger than ever, isn't that right, doc?”

  “Ari has you there, brother,” said Klemes, very pleased at having his know-it-all brother taken down a peg.

  “That's right,” continued Ari. “And we will beat this king just as Epaminondas turned back the king of Sparta – and then maybe follow the Macedonians back to their lair, just as we did to the Spartans!”

  “Things are a little different now, my friend,” said Dimitrios as he poured himself some wine mixed with water, and nibbled on a bowl of olives. “The Spartans were poor horsemen, and ours were better. Alexander's, however, are better still, as you saw at Chareonea a few years ago, and again out at Lake Copais...”

  “Let Alexander try to break stone with horse!” shouted Ari, his passion almost letting him forget the pain in his leg as Klemes worked away. “I’d like to see him try!”

  “Oh, Ari, he will try. Of that I am certain. He’s a hot head, that son of Macedonia.”

  “I hear he believes himself the son of Zeus…” noted Ari with a disapproving snort.

  “So I suppose he’ll call down thunderbolts from daddy to shatter our walls, is that it?” harrumphed the physician. “Or perhaps change himself into a swan, or an eagle, or a wisp of smoke and fly over the battlements, and take us in the night like the great seducer himself? That’s how Zeus impregnated Alexander's mother Olympias, or so goes the tale, plowing Philip’s queen after some Dionysian bacchanal.”

  “He came to her with a clap of thunder and a bolt of lightning as I heard it – and you’re mixing up your gods again, Klemes – Dionysus or Bacchus, which is it?”

  “Sorry, it’s from those years I spent across the western sea. Those fellows from Rome call the god of wine by that later name. Half-barbarians yet, those lads from the Tiber, afraid they won’t much amount to anything. Now the Syracusans and the Tarentines – those are proper Greeks all, even if most were born on the wrong side of the sea.”

  “Klemes,” sighed the wounded soldier, “I envy you your travels.”

  “Oh, you will see enough of the world someday, even if you have to limp your way through it,” said the physician, trying to lighten his patient’s anxiety while his medicines and skills did their work.

  “Not as long as Alexander’s army surrounds the city, my dear brother,” said Dimitrios . “There must be 20,000 men out there. They waste no time, and already have dug in deep outside each of the city's seven gates. That is not all; they have started on another even longer line opposite the palisade – the wall we built to seal off the outer gates of the citadel, around the temple of Heracles.”

  “Well, let the Macedonians dig. A little honest work in the dirt will do those northern sheepherders some good,” quipped the physician. “May their hands blister and their backs ache, and may they all burn to a crisp in the summer sun. Serves them right for coming down to Boetia. This is our land, Theban land, and the sooner they realize they can’t pry it from us, the sooner they’ll give up and go back to their miserable cold mountains!”

  The fervor with which Klemes spoke translated to his hands, unfortunately for his patient. Try as he might, Aristophanes could not hold back his scream of agony
as the physician squeezed the wound in his leg.

  “Ahhhh!” sighed Klemes with evident satisfaction, despite Ari's scream. “That’s it! Look at that pus! Good, good – and now blood! Clean, honest blood! Perhaps now this leg of yours will heal. I’m going to let my maggots munch on the dead flesh, set my leeches to clear the wound, and then I can stitch it. Or perhaps you’d prefer I cauterize it? Depends on what kind of scar you’d like on your thigh.”

  “Scars are all the rage with the ladies these days,” quipped Dimitrios, as he poured himself some cool water to swish about the bottom of his wine cup. “You know, especially those ladies who loll about the temples. They give special discounts for war heroes, especially those that can show where they’ve been cut.”

  “Really?” said Ari hopefully as he sat up, the pain forgotten as his thoughts turned to more amorous musings.

  “You should be more concerned about being able to walk again,” scolded Klemes, “than about getting a bargain from some flowery tart because you have an especially ugly scratch.”

  “How long before I can put some real weight on this leg, before I can get back into the ranks and take my place in the line?” asked Ari. “When Alexander tries to come through or over our walls, Thebes will need every one of her sons, and I don't want to miss out on the fun!”

  Klemes did not respond immediately – he did not have to; his eyes and his breathing said it all.

  “My friend,” began the physician in that tone a father takes to tell a son a beloved pet has been run over by a cart in the street, “the wound was very deep, very deep. It severed muscle, scraped bone, and tore flesh going in and coming out. There are splinters from the shaft of that spear floating about that may never come out – and digging at them is beyond my skill, and will do more damage than good. And my oath as a physician, you recall…”