The wisdom of the captain’s preparations paid off during their very first battle. In the third summer of the war, Phormio based his little fleet at Naupactus, on the Crisaean Gulf athwart the shipping lanes of Sparta’s ally, Corinth. The Peloponnesians had sent a fleet of forty-seven ships under their admiral Machaon to support an attack on Athens’ allies in Acarnania. Though he had fewer than half Machaon’s force, Phormio shadowed the Corinthians. Supposing that they would try to slip by him in the predawn darkness, he then positioned his fleet to catch them on open water.
The enemy, having more troop carriers than triremes, adopted a defensive circle with their rams facing out. If Machaon’s men had been Athenians, there would have been little chance of breaking into their formation. But the Corinthian crews were not nearly so disciplined. Phormio’s ships encouraged their disorder by rowing around them in a circle, sometimes passing close enough to brush against their rams. As the sun rose and the wind freshened, the enemy ring became a lozenge, then a confused tangle of prows and oars. Judging that moment to be most opportune, Phormio released his fleet to attack.
Sphaerus had by this time done as little steering as necessary. At the captain’s signal, the old man worked the rudders to make a sharp portside turn, then shot into a gap between two Corinthians with their oar-blades ensnared. In that single maneuver, the Terror sheared off the oars of both ships, then went on to ram Machaon’s ship beyond them. Witnesses in the other Athenian ships cheered; the men of the Terror endured a few breathless moments as Xeuthes ordered them to extend their oars back into the water and row for their lives in reverse. But Sphaerus had not doomed them by planting their ram in an irretrievable spot. Their ram pulled away easily, opening a hole in the enemy flagship that sank it to its top rails in minutes.
By the battle’s end the Athenians scattered a superior fleet and captured twelve vessels. The Terror, having disabled three vessels all on her own, distinguished herself most of all. In the seasons that followed she was not always on the winning side; on a number of occasions she survived only by running away. But there was no doubting her value on difficult voyages far from home—including, in the war’s seventh summer, blockade duty around a desert island, with a precarious base of supply and no end in sight.
2.
When Demosthenes presented the Athenians with an opportunity to entrap hundreds of Spartiates, his superiors could hardly deny him. Yet Eurymedon still wouldn’t give up his plans to sail on for Corcyra. He subsequently left with half the fleet, leaving Demosthenes in command with barely enough ships to blockade the island and defend the straits into the bay. Just two ships were enough to keep watch on the enemy during daylight. But after dark, and particularly on the moonless nights toward the beginning of the siege, there was danger that the Lacedaemonians would send small boats or swimmers to help their countrymen, or that the members of the garrison would try to swim for shore. This made it necessary for Demosthenes’ entire fleet to anchor at even intervals around the circumference of Sphacteria. The oarsmen, who were already hungry, overworked, and bored, were forced to take whatever rest they could sitting upright on their benches. Falling over each other in their exhaustion, most gave up sleep altogether. On the Terror, the nocturnal watch therefore became an occasion for lively discussion, whispered but lively over the lap of nighttime swells against the wales.
“Just for your information, you little sprats, do you know why you’re all here, breaking your health in this miserable tub?” asked Patronices.
Dicaearchus, a beam man, had removed the sheepskin cover from his seat and folded it against a bulwark for a pillow. “Of course. It’s because someone decided that the Athenians must have an empire, but did not think of the jealousy it would cause among the Peloponnesians.”
“Wrong! That it exactly what certain people want you to believe, but it isn’t the real truth. . . .”
“It’s a matter of geopolitics, idiot. Nothing more and nothing less.”
“I have heard,” chimed Cleinias from the deck, “that it had to do with the Corinthians encouraging one of our allies to revolt.”
“No, the war is over the way we helped Corcyra in their war with Corinth,” said someone else from the shadows.
“Again, all wrong. What a sad thing it is, to see citizens of Athens giving up their lives for a cause they don’t understand!” declared Patronices.
“All right, slick,” Dicaearchus said as he closed his eyes. “Why don’t you tell us why we’re all here?”
Patronices wiped his face with his oarcloth, for they were stuck in the lee of the island on as stifling a night as he had known in thirty years afloat. “We’re here,” he began, “because of whores. To be more accurate, because of whores of whores. Have any of you spent any time in Megara, among the lovely ladies behind the Temple of Asclepius?”
“All right now, don’t show off. . . .”
“If you’d been there not very long ago, you might have met a girl named Anyte. She plied her trade right at the gate. She was a good-looking girl for that business—I mean soft, plump thighs, hair black and long as the night, tits like scoops of cream. Maybe too good-looking: she had the kind of face you could fall in love with if you forgot yourself. Best of all, she didn’t stink of garlic like every other Megarian, or try to steal your money. For two obols she’d make an honest go of sucking your balls straight out the end of your cock. For three you’d get acquainted with her pink piggy. . . .”
“And nine months later you popped out—end of story!” shouted Cleinias.
“Not hardly! Yes, Anyte hung out with Asclepius, and like him she was good for what ailed you! She was so good at her job, really, that she fell in with some operators who put her into the high-end trade—entertaining rich pricks at their wine parties, if you know what I mean. It was around this time that she changed her name to the exotic, the erotic, the untouchable—Simaétha! Now does that ring any bells?”
Dicaearchus jerked awake. “By Zeus, it does! He’s not kidding, boys: that girl’s legs cut papyrus.”
“I see our friend Dicaearchus is a fan of good flute playing! And so we get to the truly interesting part of our story: seven years ago two purple-faced ne’er-do-wells from Muses Hill, let’s call ’em Frick and Frack, decide to do a little slumming in Megara. They ride over there with their tender rumps on horses, and after throwing their silver around, they get the best room at the inn and order out for some entertainment. . . .”
“Is that the best you can do, ‘Frick and Frack’?”
“Shut up and learn something!” Patronices went on, waving his arms in the constricted space of his station. “So, after a little drinking, a little fish relish without bread, they bring in Simaétha for dessert. And she really wows ’em, friends—by the end of the strip-down they’re sitting with their tongues out, and when she gets down to business Frack is so taken with her that he won’t let Frick get his share! I mean, can you imagine? Frick objects, and Frack tells him to go to his mother in Hades. So the friends get to fighting with knives, with Simaétha screaming, but nobody comes to break it up because they’re thinking there’s nothing wrong, it’s just a lively party.
“When it’s over, Frick’s on the floor, cut up, and Frack is so out of his mind he believes he can’t live without his dear Simaétha. So what does he do? He smuggles her back to Athens wrapped in a blanket! And how do the Megarians react? Like their kind always does, of course—they figure, as the aggrieved party, they might as well take advantage of the situation to . . . what’s the expression? . . . trade up. So instead of tracking down the man who stole their property, they head straight to the cathouse run by Pericles’ chippy, Aspasia. Next day her squeeze, old squinchhead, the captain of all our fates, Lord High Pericles Himself is running around the Council House with his hair on fire, denouncing the treachery of Megarians. It seems that not one, but two of Aspasia’s best girls were smuggled off during the night!
“Now not even Pericles, with that honeyed voice of his, can qu
ite convince the whole city to go to war over this. What he proposes instead is a boycott of all Megarian goods within the boundaries of Attica. And so much are the people willing to be fools for him, they actually go for it. Megara, naturally, protests—first to the Assembly, which is useless, and then to the Peloponnesians, who are just waiting for any excuse to clip Pericles’ wings. And the rest, dear friends, we all know, to our sorrow.”
Dicaearchus shook his head. “I may have heard of your Simaétha, but that story is a pack of lies! You’ve been humping an oar too long if you think all this is over a bunch of stolen whores. . . .”
“I disagree! All the really important wars have been over girls, have they not? Remember your Homer.”
“The Romans have a story about how their ancestors stole women from their neighbors, the Sabines,” Cleinias volunteered.
“Romans? Never heard of them.”
“Oh shut up, Timon.”
“Shut up yourself!”
“Oreus, punish him for me.”
Cleinias’ friend Oreus, who had the deck seat over Timon, slapped the latter on top of his head.
“On my father’s name I swear you’ll pay for that, Oreus . . . !”
“All of you, keep quiet down there!” growled the bosun, Stilbides, through the hatch in the topdeck.
“Just your fellow citizens discussing matters of state . . .” said Patronices.
“If I have to come down there, fellow citizen, you’ll spend the next three months up to your balls in bilgewater!”
3.
It was the Terror’s turn on roving blockade the next day. After a four hour rest and a breakfast of tired, cankered onions, the crew was prepared to go out for a clockwise round. As they set oars to water, Xeuthes was surprised to hear Demosthenes request permission to come aboard.
“Thank you, Captain. . . .” the general said as he wove a zigzag course on the unstable deck. Xeuthes extended a hand to steady him.
“If you’ll take my seat at the center, General, I think you’ll be more comfortable.”
“Of course,” replied Demosthenes, who made his career campaigning overseas but resented every minute he was forced to spend afloat. He looked at Sphaerus, the old pilot, and inclined his head at him, but got no response as the old man stared ahead.
Xeuthes settled in a crouching position at the ladderway just above Stilbiades. For the next four hours, as the piper sounded a cruising cadence and the swallows bowed and flitted in the cliffs, he had an opportunity to inspect the general as the general inspected the island.
Demosthenes spared few words as they circled that blasted shore. Instead, his sharp-beaked, birdlike features seemed to respond to every cut and thrust of Sphacteria’s profile. What he would never say, but what Xeuthes might have suspected, is that the disaster at Aetolia had taught the general how topography itself could be turned against him. Here, the island was a prison for the Lacedaemonians, but it was also a kind of fortress protecting them.
He scowled at the island’s highest ground to the north—a gray eminence of bare, deeply incised stone, as high as the crag of old Pylos across the strait. The enemy, however numerous they were, would adopt that mount as their defensive strong-hold. As the ship proceeded, there seemed precious few safe places to land troops: the shoreline was either too steep, or full of rocks worn by the swirling water into a riot of bowls, arches, ruts, and crags. The water seemed to leap out of the bay to lash the stone, traceries of silver-white filling the runnels in the backwash. Near the southeast flank the ground set down into a low, pebbly strand before sweeping up toward the flat-topped southern headland. That spot seemed a serviceable landing place, but as the island’s only real beach it would undoubtedly be guarded, and require his men to clamber over the scree to reach the interior.
The Terror threaded through the strait between the big island and Little Sphacteria. The general perked up as a towering cleft appeared in the island’s mass. It was not deep enough to count as a cavern, but it cut some distance inward, and the higher reaches of the cleft rose near to ground level above.
Demosthenes turned to Xeuthes for the first time in an hour. “If there’s a way to reach the surface through there, we could land without being seen.”
“The crews lie in that hollow to rest or make repairs,” said Xeuthes. “I’ve looked at the roof of it myself—there doesn’t seem to be any way up.”
“Take me closer.”
They were now pushing up the seaward side of the island. Prospects for a landing seemed even worse there, with swells from the Ionian Sea rolling in broadside against the rocks. The trireme rocked sickeningly from beam to beam, the leather oar sleeves of the lowest bank disappearing under the surface with each pitch. Xeuthes thought nothing of it, but Demosthenes had not been on open water since he first arrived at Pylos.
“If you focus your eyes on the horizon, sir, or on the island.”
“Yes, Captain, I know. . . .”
His voice trailed off as he saw something appear on the heights. Following his gaze, Xeuthes saw what he did: a solitary figure standing above them, silhouetted against the ascending sun. He was carrying a spear and a shield, the insignia and the color of his cloak concealed in shadow. The face of the Lacedaemonian lookout was too far away to see, but Xeuthes could feel him staring down on the Terror, impassive, as stolidly immobile as a natural feature of the landscape.
“We see them like that sometimes,” said Xeuthes. “They come out to eye us, those fearless Spartans—but never within bow range.”
Demosthenes kept his eyes on the Lacedaemonian until he was hidden behind the brow of rising ground to the north.
“If you might, I’d like you to drop me off at the stockade before you make your second round.”
4.
Spartan warriors were among the best amateur podiatrists in Greece. This was because, notwithstanding Napoleon’s famous dictum, an army marched on its feet, not its stomach. Lacedaemonians therefore lavished a quantity of time on their soles and toes that was second only to that spent on their hair.
In this regard the topography of Sphacteria presented special problems. The Lacedaemonians had landed on the island with the bare minimum: spears, shields, and the clothes on their backs. The expectation had been that there would be plenty of time to supply them later. But when the Athenians turned the tables, the lack of certain equipment, such as nail files, became urgent. The island bristled with bramble fields and rocks that were either cracked or sculpted into razorlike corrugations. Slashed arches and bloody heels were epidemic; the irritation of broken, overgrown nails drove the soldiers to carve away at them with their sword points, causing as much damage as they relieved. Feet everywhere were caked with suppurating cuts that never had a chance to close; by night, their toes were covered with gnats that feasted on the blood.
The Lacedaemonians signaled their predicament by flashing messages on a polished shield to their superiors on the coast. Though little was getting through the Athenian blockade, Antalcidas pressed his brother to add a request for buskins. Epitadas refused; such a request would only disgrace him in the eyes of the generals. His estimate of Spartan empathy turned out to be dismally accurate: when the first helot swimmer got through from the mainland on the eighth day, he bore nothing—no food, no spare flints for fire-making—except a coded message. These dispatches, which looked like random marks at the edge of strips of parchment, were decoded by winding them around a wooden rod of a standard size. In this case Epitadas found the marks aligned into an aphorism: “Enemy skins make good buskins.”
If it ever rained on Sphacteria, Antalcidas saw no evidence of it. Dry leaves shed like the molt of reptiles from buckthorn and cistus; the grasses growing between the eruptions of rock bristled like broom heads. The only tolerable opportunity to chew thyme leaves was just after dawn, when the proportion of dew and salt spray was on the sweeter side. There were brambles in the hollows, and arbutus on the heights, and pine trees where the soil would take them. Here a
nd there were a few spiny, spindly oaks, but these were dwarfed by the constant wind and offered little shade. And everywhere wafted the tendrils of broken spiderwebs, finding their way inevitably into eyes and mouths and beards. The spiders themselves seemed to have decamped for better quarters.
There were 420 Lacedaemonians on the island, including more than 200 Spartiates and an equal number of Nigh-Dwellers chosen by lot from all the battalions of the army. Helot retainers came to attend the citizens. This temporary population of more than six hundred made their base at an ancient redoubt on the northern summit. The fort lay in a shambles, the outline of its square tower barely discernible, its blocks stacked nowhere higher than six courses. Once, in the time of warlords and charioteers, it must have served as old King Nestor’s outpost against pirates. Now it barely cast a useful shadow.
There was a single source of water on Sphacteria, down on the flats in the center of the island. With the intervention of the Athenian fleet, Epitadas cut the water ration by half, and then halved it again as the surface of the water receded into the depths of the well. The food situation was dire: with no grain getting through and no significant game on the island, the troops were reduced to throwing rocks at birds, or scaling down the cliffs to collect eggs. The rocky soil begrudged them only a few insects.
The extreme exposure of their position, on a sunblasted rock with no heavy timber available and little soil to dig into, took its toll. A wet wind from the sea beset them at night; Epitadas forbade the setting of campfires lest the Athenians use them to guess their numbers. The men were forced to take what shelter they could on the lee sides of boulders, under shrubs, or curled up in shallow nests with their cloaks thrown over them. The sea spray reversed years of patient work on the Spartiates’ glossy locks, with the strands becoming so caked with salt that they refused to take the comb. The proud crimson of their uniforms began to fade to mottled gray.
The Isle of Stone Page 14