4.
For the conclusion of his speech Cleon had gradually moderated his volume, bringing the Assembly down from frenzy to merely a heightened state of apprehension. A motion was put forth to approve Cleon’s demands for presentation to the envoys. It passed by acclamation, with massive support from the right and the middle, and sullen acquiescence on the left.
The envoys were escorted back to hear the terms of the Athenians. These were read by the herald in the same order that Cleon proposed them. Isidas, impassive, looked at neither Cleon nor Nicias, and didn’t take the wreath when the herald offered it. Instead, a parade of irate speakers took the rostrum, demanding that the Lacedaemonians not withdraw to confer, but make their reply right away. The clamor rose steadily, until Isidas looked at his colleagues with resignation: though the terms were impossible, they would have to say something or risk failure by their silence.
Isidas called for the myrtle.
“Gentlemen, you place us in a difficult position today. We would like nothing better than to reach some agreement, but we were not prepared for an offer of such . . . comprehensiveness. Allow us therefore to suggest that representatives of the Athenians be appointed to discuss terms with us. You have my pledge as a Spartiate that we will give each point due consideration.”
At which Cleon charged the rostrum again and snatched the floor. “Can you see now the machinations of tyranny?” he cried. “Instead of discussing the peace in the open, before the People, our friends ask to scurry away to collude in secret! Is this your good faith, Isidas? If the Lacedaemonians are sincere in their desire for peace, let them prove it now, in front of the Assembly! We will agree to hear them out. . . .”
The crowd agreed with a thunderous roar that drowned out the rest of Cleon’s statement. Holding out the wreath to the Spartiate seated on the far end of the dais, he then turned to the foreigners, a determined smile on his lips. When the envoy turned it down, he proceeded to the next one, and finally, as the roar mounted, to Isidas. The old man looked forward without lifting a finger; Cleon offered the myrtle again. Isidas tossed his head. A third time, with the people in a frenzy behind him, Cleon dangled the wreath until Isidas raised a hand to refuse it. The gesture—the Spartan warding off the myrtle—became frozen in the minds of the onlookers, destined to be described and redescribed up and down the drinking halls and alleys and fountainhouses of Athens.
VII
Cyclops’ Spectacles
1.
The Athenians kept up their double patrols around the island during the period of the truce. By this time, forty days into the siege, the constant sound of the pipes playing the cadence for the oarsmen had worked its way into the blood of the Spartans. It became the unconscious rhythm in their breathing and walking. They heard the sound in their dreams, and after the deliveries of food resumed—when they felt the need to squat again—they moved their bowels in time to it.
With the peace, Epitadas excused the Spartiates from guard duty. The under-thirties continued to stand their posts, while the helots were put to work looking for a new source of sweet water. The first problem—where to dig—was solved by a helot farmer with some experience as a dowser. Instead of a divining rod, he used a round pebble dropped in the back of a shield. He spent a morning pacing, plow-ox style, up and down the center of the island, as he propelled the pebble around the shield’s cave with gentle swirling movements. When the pebble at last lodged in the center, the helot declared that water lay beneath his feet. He was standing virtually at the top of the island’s highest peak, near the remains of Nestor’s fort.
“How far down?” Epitadas asked as he eyed the beaten soil.
“That, only the gods know.”
A gang of twenty helots were assigned to the digging, with Doulos taking it upon himself to lead them. As none of the Spartiates would risk blunting a sword among the rocks, the workers went at it with spear butts and bare hands. Pebbles and soil were hauled away in rucksacks and dumped on the cesspit. The Lacedaemonians, meanwhile, indulged their birthright to sit around and watch the helots work, all the while believing that they could do a superior job if their station didn’t preclude soiling their hands with anything but blood.
By the terms of the truce, the Peloponnesians were allowed to dispatch one unarmed vessel to the island each day. An Athenian warship could accompany it, but could carry no archers and had to remain offshore while the food and water were off-loaded on the little beach on the southeast quarter of the island. The Lacedaemonians could not come down to claim the supplies until the sailors who delivered them had returned to their ship. This no-contact condition had been hatched by Demosthenes, who realized that the Lacedaemonians might try to escape by secretly switching places with the supply crew. In truth, the notion that they would save their skins by impersonating seamen was so distasteful to the Spartiates that it was never entertained.
The menu was designed to discourage hoarding; the grain, usually barley, was sifted in advance so it spoiled if not used right away. Each Lacedaemonian also received a single piece of goat or lamb, which was delivered just at the edge of turning foul. The Athenians, anticipating that the enemy might try to use their rations of wine to preserve the meat, had their jars severely watered down. Despite these measures Epitadas ordered his men to put aside half their rations. To eat cankered, maggot-ridden meat and fungal grain every other day was a small price to pay to stretch their resources.
To aid preservation, one of the helots, a cook, suggested they obtain salt by evaporating seawater in the soldiers’ upturned shields. Epitadas and Frog, in a rare show of concord, agreed that using a hundred Lacedaemonian shields as salt pans had a vague unseemliness. Still, they did nothing to prevent it. It took days to collect enough salt to be useful.
After a full day of digging, Doulos’ team penetrated Sphacteria’s tough hide to a depth of three feet. Antalcidas squatted at the edge of the pit to watch the work: he saw that the shaft was oblong and irregular, having been dug around immovable boulders. The soil looked different the deeper they went, appearing darker, richer, like the loam of a proper garden.
“The dirt may appear that way,” said Doulos, scooping up a handful, “but it is an illusion due to the moisture in it. Look here as it is exposed. . . .”
True enough, the little pile gave off a curl of steam as it lay in the sun. In a few moments it dried to the color of straw, as powdery and lifeless as the contents of a funeral jar.
“Does that mean water is close?” asked Antalcidas.
“It may.”
Soon they began to find things made by human hands: bronze dressing pins, broken and corroded; shattered terra-cotta roof tiles; tiny clay figures of women, rudely wrought, with profiles that resembled the letters Φ and Ψ. When the dirt was rubbed off, the figures showed fine incised ponytails, breasts, priestly sashes. As the workmen handed them over, Doulos laid them on the ground with a care that promised he would rebury them all in due course. This reverence did not satisfy Frog.
“This mucking around is going to offend somebody,” he warned.
“Our ancestors are pleased to sacrifice in their children’s emergency,” replied Epitadas.
“The ancestors of helots?”
“The makers of these things,” Doulos interjected, “were born the brothers and sons of old King Nestor, in the time when Messenians and Lacedaemonians joined as partners to topple the city of Troy.”
“Who asked you, you little shit?” cried Frog. “Stone, you’d better shut your shieldbearer’s mouth or he’ll end up buried in that hole!”
Antalcidas smiled. “What he will say, I can no more predict than what comes out of you.”
Frog waved him off and clambered down the slope. Antalcidas, meanwhile, caught a gratified gleam in Epitadas’ eye as he turned away. It was the first hint of good humor he had seen on his brother in many weeks.
The next morning Antalcidas perched on an oblique ledge on the east side of the island. Sphacteria’s bay side, bein
g more sheltered from the sea wind, supported a variety of weeds common in the mountains of Laconia: grayish asphodel in tiny phalanxes, bristling acanthus, a patch or two of wild garlic at his elbow. Looking at the bay, he was surprised at the water’s changeability—at the way it reflected the mood of the sky, at how he could anticipate a shift in the wind by watching the pattern of ripples in the distance. Like most natives of landlocked Sparta, he was naïve to the attractions of the sea. When the breeze was in his face he could hear seals barking on the little island in the center of the bay. Dolphins paced the Athenian triremes as they made their rounds, breaching just ahead of the metal rams as if fascinated by their gleam.
He was startled to perceive Doulos crouching beside him.
“What is it?”
“We’ve found something you should see,” said the helot in a soft voice.
“Water?”
“Come and look.”
The helot work crew was above ground when Antalcidas arrived. All of them—and the few Spartiates who had bothered to come—stood around in pensive silence, looking down at something in the pit. Not a few seemed genuinely disturbed, as if some dire portent had manifested.
Antalcidas pushed his way to the front, grumbling at Doulos and his taste for trivialities. “What is it you’ve found now? More hairpins and tiny princesses . . . ?”
His voice trailed off as he looked over the edge.
2.
They had unearthed a skull. Still only half-exposed, it was of titanic proportions, stretching as far from chin to crown as a man could reach with outstretched arms. Unlike any other skull Antalcidas had seen, it lacked forward-facing holes for the nose, but instead had two widely spaced, downward-facing nostrils at its base. What was most remarkable, though, was the creature’s single, cavernous eyehole, set right in the center of its flat face.
“By the gods . . .” he muttered.
“Other giants have been discovered this way,” explained Doulos. “There was the sea monster that washed up at Sounion in the time of Solon, and the griffin dug up near the mines at Laurion, and Pelops’ shoulder from the Trojan straits. But this is the first cyclops.”
“No, Cleomenes once spoke of giant’s bones he had seen in a dried-up riverbed in Achaea,” said Epitadas.
“A cyclops was once born to a sheep on a farm in Amyclae, though it didn’t live long,” ventured Frog. “Its remains are in the sanctuary there.”
Doulos shook his head. “I think we should make a distinction between those creatures who are meant to be titans, and those who only resemble them by some accident.”
Though Doulos had contradicted Frog, the latter was too distracted by the spectacle below to object. In this the Spartiates and the helots were united, for they were confronted here by a vestige of a superior world, peopled by gods and giants, that had passed away long before the age of ordinary men.
More remains turned up. There were upper arm bones the length of men’s legs, and ribs like the beams of roofs, and a line of vertebrae that, when fitted together, described the line of the cyclops’ great, humped back. To Doulos, the latrinelike odor of the soil that entombed the titan suggested that he must have perished feet-down in some dismal pit. Pieces of chopped vegetation, like the stems of hard reeds, were scattered through the viscid mass. The titan’s weapons—a pair of great, curved horns, possibly from some long-vanished line of colossal stags—were embedded in the mud nearby.
A further discovery suggested that the cyclops had died in battle. The tar-colored pelvis, wide enough for an armored man to wriggle through, was misshapen but intact; buried in its winglike extremity Doulos found a small, fine, flared point hewn from flawless, cream-colored flint. The point still had a bud of mastic stuck to its flat end, and to the mastic, the blackened stub of a wooden arrow shaft.
Frog extracted the point and held it up for the Lacedaemonians to see. Examining it solely as a piece of craft, Antalcidas recognized good work: the knapping scars were precise, symmetrical parabolas, all confidently struck; the surface of the flint still held a sheen that made it seem permanently wet. Yet what the find portended was troubling. The Lacedaemonians passed the arrowhead around, admiring the shining thing as they turned it over in their chapped hands, yet their faces showed no pleasure at all. For them, as for all Greeks, nothing appeared just by accident.
Frog said what the rest were thinking. “So we are not the first to fight on this island. And it seems that the bow decided the issue last time.”
“Maybe for this one it did,” replied Epitadas. “How can you be sure his comrades didn’t win the battle?”
“Because the body was left to rot.”
“Perhaps,” said Doulos. “But can we presume on how his kind treated their dead? Some people bury their dead in pits, with their weapons. The Scythians, for example.”
“Listen to him! When have you ever laid eyes on a Scythian grave, you dog?”
“Better to be a dog than a neckless serpent,” Antalcidas interjected.
“So you take a helot’s part against an Equal . . . ?” bristled Frog, his hand resting on the hilt of his sword.
“Calm yourselves, now,” said Epitadas. “We can all agree that these are the remains of some ancient giant—there is no doubt of that. But what its fate means for us is not as clear. I say, then, that we not assume the worst.”
“And how do we know that, elder? Stuck here like pets of the Athenians—with not a single goat or sheep—nothing to offer the gods except milled flour and bugs! How do you say we ascertain their will?”
“Maybe Frog will offer himself on our behalf,” said Antalcidas.
There were subdued chuckles from somewhere deep in the crowd.
Frog drew himself up to his unimposing fullness of height. “How easy it is to joke when you hide behind your younger brother, Stone! But mark my words: we will all pay a price for ignoring this sign.”
It took the rest of that day and part of the next to finish extracting the giant’s bones. As the sun set on the second day Doulos was seen dragging the remains around the heights of Sphacteria, arranging them in their living order. All together they constituted a skeleton four times larger than a man’s. That such a creature could be brought down by arrows seemed incredible. Then again, such people as the Indians and the Carthaginians were reputed to hunt wild elephants with spear and bow. Antalcidas tried to imagine the scene—the cyclops wading across the narrow channel to the north end of the island, the sea only wetting him to its knees, its great, solitary eye sweeping the heights as it brandished those enormous ivory scimitars. Maddened by blood fever, the giant tops the crest in pursuit—and meets a hail of missiles from its painted, feathered prey. Dauntless, it rushes forward until, like Polyphemus in the caves of Acis, it is rendered helpless by a bolt to the eye. . . .
Epitadas indulged Doulos’ curiosity for a while, but soon ordered him to get on with digging the well. For the moment the Athenians were still allowing food and water to get through. The air around the deliveries, though, had lately chilled: the warships were pressing within bow shot of the beach, and the enemy hoplites were more than watchful. Their purpose, it appeared, was to count the number of jars put ashore, in order to estimate the number of Lacedaemonians on the island. The truce was not made to last.
3.
A letter from Nicias reached Demosthenes. Withdrawing at once to his tent, the general broke the seal and scanned the lines, his expression darkening with each word:
To Demosthenes, son of Alcisthenes, deme Colonus Agoraeus, General-select Ægeides, etc. etc., from his friend Nicias, son of Niceratus. The peace negotiations are over. The proposals of the Lacedaemonian envoys were not only rejected, but they were denied fair consideration by certain wrong-headed people. The emissaries themselves were most poorly treated. As they were escorted to the gates our mutual acquaintance—you know who—had them taken through one of the affected quarters of the city. While the plague itself has subsided for the present, the Spartans were given a good
look at the looted houses. Meanwhile, they were jeered by the masses of exiled souls who have been forced by crowding to follow in death’s wake—
So the fools meant to ruin him. For if there was anything that could end a career faster than losing a battle outright, it was squandering the promise of an easy victory. Nicias was an honorable fellow, Demosthenes thought, but he had no head for Assembly politics; of course “certain wrong-headed people” had opposed the peace! If Demosthenes took the island, Cleon would share the glory of advocating the decisive stroke. If, on the other hand, the siege failed, Demosthenes would be finished and Cleon would still benefit, having forced a rival into retirement. It was rather a beautiful piece of gamesmanship, in fact; he would almost have believed that Cleon had a future as a strategist.
Demosthenes again felt that heaviness in his legs. Bending one at the knee, the tendons seemed as brittle as desiccated sticks. No, he thought, he would not be hobbled in the very hour of his greatest test! He began to pound his thigh with his clenched fist, declaring, “Just flesh! Just flesh!”
A dispatch from the archons arrived on the next supply ship. The war must continue, they wrote, because of the intransigence of the Spartans. All deliveries of food would henceforth stop, and hostilities against the troops on the island commence at the commander’s discretion. As for the matter of the ships captured by the Peloponnesians and returned to the Athenians as part of the truce—there was a peculiar sentence that might have been dictated by Cleon himself. It read: The general is advised to release the ships in his custody back to the enemy if, in his judgment, they have adhered to the truce in spirit and in letter. The implication could not have been clearer to him: it would be up to Demosthenes to find a pretext to keep the ships.
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