by Peter Green
• • • • •
For half an hour Demosthenes’ messenger held the Assembly’s attention with a clear and precise account of the situation at Pylos, omitting nothing When he sat down it was plain to everyone that immediate action was imperative. To everyone, that is, except Cleon, who, surprisingly, stood up and declared that this was a mere excuse for lamentable incompetence. Such a gambit was well known in the Assembly; but for once it fell on unreceptive ears. The messenger replied with some asperity that if Cleon did not believe him, he should send commissioners to find out for themselves.
Alcibiades, watching Cleon’s face closely, saw that the tanner was showing unmistakable signs of nervousness. As well he might, he thought. They’re out for blood. They’ll have him to Pylos one way or another, and he doesn’t like the idea at all. If he goes as a commissioner, he’ll either have to bring back the same tale as this messenger, or be proved a liar. And if he goes as a general, the Gods alone know what may happen. I don’t think he’s ever handled a sword or shield in his life.
Furiously, and stumbling in his words, Cleon cried out: ‘We want deeds, not words. What use is it wasting time with commissions and such-like folly? If you believe what you’ve just heard, what are you waiting for? Send out a fleet. Capture this miserable handful of men.’ There was a dead silence. Then, dramatically, he stretched out his arm and pointed at Nicias. ‘If we had men for generals,’ he sneered, ‘it would be easily done.’
He drew himself up and shouted triumphantly: ‘And if I were in command, I would do it tomorrow!’
Then Nicias, the contemptible Nicias, rose up among his fellow-generals, and remarked scathingly that for all he or his colleagues cared, Cleon was welcome to do whatever he liked. All heads turned in the old man’s direction, and the laughter became general.
Cleon was too experienced a mob orator not to recognise when his grip on an audience was lost. One look at Nicias’ face convinced him of the seriousness of the offer. Stammering, he tried to draw back, his forehead prickling with cold sweat, protesting that he had merely used a figure of speech. But Nicias would have none of it, and called the Assembly to witness that he resigned his command against Pylos in Cleon’s favour. The crowd was by now thoroughly aroused. Fists were shaken; angry voices shouted to Cleon to keep his word. It was clear he would have to go. Yet, he thought, collecting his scattered wits, why not? The troops Demosthenes had demanded were ready and waiting. Demosthenes could take charge of the operation itself.
Calm again, he took a pace forward and raised his arms for silence. ‘I am not afraid of the Spartans,’ he proclaimed. Laughter and jeers. ‘Yes, you may laugh. I will undertake this expedition. What is more, I shall take no troops except the Lemnian and Imbrian islanders at present in Athens, and a few archers. With these and the force we already have at Pylos, I will either bring these Spartans back alive or kill them to the last man.’ A roar of laughter arose. This was really a good joke. The Assembly rocked. ‘What’s more,’ Cleon shouted at the top of his voice, ‘I’ll do it within twenty days! Within twenty days!’
• • • • •
Demosthenes sent two men, sworn to secrecy, to fire the southern end of Sphacteria as soon as Cleon’s fleet appeared over the horizon. When the demagogue sailed in to Pylos, late in the afternoon, flames were raging through the undergrowth and a heavy black pall of smoke hung in the autumn sky. Cleon came ashore rubbing his hands, resplendent in chased bronze armour richly decorated with gold, a great scarlet plume of horsehair nodding above his helmet. ‘You give me a good omen of welcome,’ he said. The smell of burning wood was strong in the air.
Demosthenes greeted him formally, with a thin smile. ‘I suggest we waste no time,’ he said. ‘If you would care to hear my plan . . .?’ The two generals retired to Demosthenes’ tent.
• • • • •
The scrub had by now practically burnt itself out; and the main body of the Spartans was easily visible as Demosthenes spread out his troops on a wide front and began to advance slowly over the rough ground. For a while it looked as if there would be a normal engagement, and men looked uneasily at each other. None cared to face the renowned Spartan hoplites on an open field, let alone when they were surrounded and fighting for their very lives. But Demosthenes kept them moving forward, kicking up a great, cloud of dust and ash as they went.
Then with cheers and wild whooping Demosthenes’ half-savage archers and slingers, in small groups, scaled the rocks on either side and began to pick off the Spartans, darting about just out of range. At once Demosthenes brought his main column to a halt. In silence they watched the unequal battle. The Spartans again and again plunged after their assailants; but they were weighted down by their heavy armour, and those who did not fall to stone or arrow quickly grew tired of vainly pursuing this elusive enemy among the crags. As they became more weary, so the targeteers closed in on them, pouring in arrows and javelins among their ranks, even pelting them with the stones that lay thick on the ground all about. Spartan discipline and valour were of no avail against such tactics. The dust was by now so thick that they could see nothing except the missiles that flew out of it at them; and their armour was no protection against the whistling, bronze-tipped Lemnian arrows.
Slowly they gathered their shattered ranks together and began to retreat northwards to the fort, still plagued by the ceaseless fire of the mountaineers, who skipped along the ridge above them. The air was full of the whirr of sling-stones and the strange battlecries which had heralded the first attack. Only the Spartans fought grimly in silence, leaving their dead and wounded as they fell, their bodies feathered with arrows.
‘See where the jackals are pulling down the old lion,’ said Demosthenes to Cleon. He was exultant; but there was a kind of wonder in his voice. ‘I have never yet seen the back of a Spartan in battle. This will be a day to remember.’ Cleon made no reply. He was white and shaking; and Demosthenes suddenly realised that this fiery fanatic was about to be sick at his first sight of blood. With a snort of laughter he gave the order to advance again. Looking back he saw the scarlet plume hanging upside down over a gully.
• • • • •
As the sun began to dip towards the horizon Demosthenes was at his wits’ end. The Spartans had fought their way with dogged courage to the old fort on the north promontory, and here they turned at bay. They could no longer be surrounded. For six weary hours they held off all frontal attacks. Their linked shields protected them from arrows. And all the while a merciless sun blazed down on attackers and defenders alike, till throats were parched and voices hoarse, and the very sweat dried up on their exhausted bodies.
It was the commander of Demosthenes’ faithful Messenian brigade, which had borne the heaviest part of the fighting all day, who solved the problem. He had been knocked out by a glancing arrow early in the afternoon, and had only just recovered. Now he stumbled up to the little knoll where Demosthenes and Cleon stood directing operations. He was a tall, wild, raw-boned man; and with his matted dusty hair, his goatskin coat, and the filthy bloodstained rag tied round his head, he looked more like a Cretan pirate than the leader of a thousand tried men. Ignoring Cleon in his finery, he said brusquely:
‘General, you’re wasting your time. If I hadn’t had a crack on the skull I could have saved you all this.’ He pointed towards the almost vertical wall of the headland. ‘There’s a cliff path round to the back of the fort. Give me some archers and a handful of your yelling islanders, and I’ll get on the rear of these Spartans. Then we’ll see how they defend themselves.’
Demosthenes did not waste time on idle questions. He barked out a couple of orders; and a moment later the Messenian and his men were working their way round the cliff-face under cover of the rocks. When they were out of sight Demosthenes said to Cleon: ‘History repeats itself. The Spartan commander here today will be known as a second Leonidas.’ He stared at the rock-like Spartan line, still swaying in a desperate struggle with his own heavy troops. The batt
le was fought in complete silence now; from thirst and utter weariness no one had the strength to utter a word. Only the metallic clink of sword on sword, the panting of laboured breath, the scrabbling of feet seeking a hold on the sliding shale, and the occasional clash of a man dropping in his armour could be heard from the knoll.
The sun was below the horizon before the Messenian and his troop suddenly appeared from behind the fort, exhausted but triumphant. A ragged cheer burst out from the Athenian ranks. Before the Spartans knew what had happened, a murderous volley of stones and sling bolts tore into them; and a dozen men pitched forward, arrows protruding from their backs. Those that were left formed up into a close circle, their spears pointing outwards, to make their last stand. The battle was over.
Cleon said urgently: ‘Call off your Messenians. Offer the Spartans quarter. If we’re not careful we shall have nothing to take back to Athens but dead men. We can’t bargain with them.’
‘Give what orders you wish,’ said Demosthenes. Now it was finished a great weariness and reaction had descended on him. He took off his helmet and sat down, the sweat running down his grimed face, ploughing tiny furrows through the dust with which it was caked. His task was done. Now let the politicians take over, the world of civilian intrigue wrangle among the dead, smooth words make play with the spoils his sword had won them. As if from a great distance he heard Cleon’s voice, domineering and confident once more, calling the Spartans to surrender at discretion. He did not want to see the end of his work. Slowly he got up and walked away among the rocks and blackened treestumps, where the dead lay in heaps, each wound ringed with a rosette of flies, and the dust still eddied in the fading sunlight.
• • • • •
The Spartan general and his second-in-command were both dead. It was the senior surviving captain who sent to the mainland, asking what he should do. The answer came: ‘The Spartans command you to decide for yourself. Do nothing dishonourable.’ Then he surrendered himself and his men to the ailing Cleon. A third of the garrison had been killed; there was not one who did not bear marks of the encounter. Cleon split them up into small batches and distributed them under heavy guard among the commanders of his galleys. The following morning he sailed away to Athens, leaving the Messenians to guard the blackened and bloodstained island, and the fortress of Pylos. He had kept his promise to the Assembly.
Chapter 19
When Hipponicus, the son of that Callias whom Alcibiades dimly remembered as a visitor at his mother’s house, reached the age of fifty, he married for the second time. He had then been a widower for some five years; and being both rich and childless, he sought both companionship for his old age and the opportunity to preserve his line, which was one of the most respected in Athens. His first marriage had been to Telesippe, the wife whom Pericles divorced in order to continue his liaison with Aspasia; and Hipponicus had gained some credit for thus upholding the honour of the Athenian aristocracy, which limited its marriages to a close circle of consanguinity and had little love of divorce. Telesippe had borne two sons to her first husband, and now yet another to her second. But those who knew Xanthippus and Paralus whispered that this child, who had been named Callias after his grandfather, was of the same brutish and witless breed; and as the boy grew, the saying was proved true, and his father longed for another heir.
So Hipponicus was married again, soon after Telesippe’s death; this time to a second cousin, who within the year bore him a child and died of fever a week later. To Hipponicus this was a double loss; to the death of his wife must be added the fact that the child was a girl. He might have married for the third time; but approaching old age dulled the edge of his resolution, and not even the hope of another son could bring him to it. Surprisingly, he kept the child in his own house instead of sending her to one of his many female relatives, bringing back to care for her the old Thracian Pyrrha, who had been his own nurse many years before. It was at her suggestion that he called the girl Hipparete: she recollected that it had been the name of his great-grandfather’s wife.
So Hipparete grew up in the rich house by the river, far away from the clamour and bustle of the Market or the Assembly. Being a free-born woman of high rank she seldom went out; and then only with Pyrrha and a slave. For many years all she knew of the world outside was what the old Pyrrha told her. In the women’s quarters on winter evenings, when the work of the household had been done for the day, and the two of them sat by the fire, each with their distaff, a great basket of yarn between them, Pyrrha would tell her legends of gods and goddesses, of the great battles that had been fought by the heroes. Like many very old people, Pyrrha lived entirely in the past; and as time went on, fact and legend blurred and intermingled in her mind, till she half-believed she herself remembered the mustering of the great fleet that sailed against Troy, or had seen Agamemnon and Achilles.
Achilles was her greatest hero; time and again she told the listening girl the story of his great wrath, his unconquerable pride, his matchless valour in battles, how he had stood on the ramparts before Troy, sheathed in living flame, and with three great shouts driven the host of Trojans back, some of them dying of terror at the very sight and sound of him. But she did not tell how Achilles after Hector’s death had pierced his fallen enemy’s ankles, and put thongs through them, and dragged him in the dust behind his chariot.
So for the young girl, moving between her weaving and cooking, learning the thousand small duties of the mistress of a rich household, the deeds and sayings of gods and heroes became (because she knew no other) the very stuff of that mysterious world outside of which she knew only by report.
One day, unexpectedly, Pyrrha said: ‘Do you know how old I am, child? Well, I’m old enough to remember the battle of Salamis. I was only a girl; but that day we went down to the Piraeus with garlands, and crowned the crews as they came ashore. We shall never see such men again.’ And when the war came, she spoke scornfully of Pericles, saying it was shameful that such a man should shut the folk up in the City instead of leading them out to fight like men. But when the plague came she said nothing; and for the first time Hipparete saw her afraid.
Hipparete was thirteen when the Plague broke out. She had no real knowledge of what it meant. Looking back afterwards she remembered being more closely closeted indoors than ever before; the barring of shutters, the burning of sulphur and strange herbs in every room. Her mind told her she was very close to death; but her inner being could not comprehend the fact. The year of crisis manifested itself in other ways: the steward could only get poor corn, slaves died and were hard to replace, all the assured things of her circumscribed life seemed to be breaking up. Sometimes she would ask her father to tell her what he saw daily in the streets of the City; but Hipponicus, white-faced, would only shake his head and say it was no sight for children. At this her imagination ran wild, and pictured Athens as crawling in broad daylight with all the bogies and lamias and monsters that Pyrrha had told her about; monsters that still, the old woman assured her, ran wild in her native Thrace. Could these be the things this endless war was against?
When she was eighteen Hipponicus formally entrusted the keys of the household into her charge. He also took a most unusual step; when he had no company in the house Hipparete dined with him, the two of them alone. Hipponicus was a lonely man. Callias now maintained his own establishment, where he could indulge his taste for debauch more freely; for several years he seldom visited his father, and when he did they invariably quarrelled. Hipponicus had, besides, a great affection for his youngest child. There was no one to tell Hipparete how unprecedented it was that a woman in Athens should dine with a man except old Pyrrha; and she said nothing.
It was now that the girl, began to put together a new and different picture of the war. Hipponicus would talk endlessly of battles and raids, illustrating his points with breadcrumbs and smearing the tablecloth with streaks of wine to show a river or a ravine. Hipparete had no head for following these demonstrations: the names confused
her, the motives seemed hopelessly obscure. To her war was a glorious battle in which the strongest won: stratagems or political intrigue were not in her scheme of things.
When she tried to say what she felt Hipponicus would observe testily that this was not the War against Troy and she must rid her head of such foolish nonsense. Then he would be off again, complaining of the greed and folly of the common people, who would destroy them all by their insensate ambition. When Hipparete asked, surprised, ‘But are not such common folk bound to obey the nobility?’ he laughed somewhat grimly and talked of Cleon, who seemed to have great power in the City, and to use it for very ill ends. But when he told her Cleon was a tanner, she flushed and said he was mocking her; then, to hide her confusion, complained that he had spoilt the cloth with his spilling of wine.
• • • • •
It had been one of those days when nothing would go right, and Hipparete was both exhausted and irritated. The figs had been mouldy, and when she had berated the steward for not picking them more carefully, he had replied that with a Spartan army campaigning near the Hellespont, Athens was lucky to get figs at all. A dust-storm had blown up and ruined all the clothes spread out to dry, while the slave-girl who should have been watching them was gossiping in the kitchen. Hipparete, fetching them in herself, had caught her new gown on a nail and torn a great rent in it. Now it was time for her father to come home, and the lazy scullions had hardly begun to cook dinner.