The course you elect now must bear profound consequences. I beg you resist the impulse to haste. The hare may leap into the pot, they say, but not back out once the lid is made fast.
“Let me speak to the distinction between the Athenian character and the Spartan. Perhaps you have not considered this.
What kind of nation are the Spartans? We are not a seafaring people, nor is it in our nature to covet empire. Our portion of the Peloponnese we hold, content, never seeking its aggrandizement.
Our alliances are defensive. Even when we strike overseas at our foes, our object is not to conquer, only to quell potential peril.
Those states which border upon us we hold fast; this is true. As distance increases, however, the reins slacken.
“Your state stands at a remove from ours, men of Patrae. What do we want of you? Only that you remain free, independent, and strong. In this, we believe, resides our security, for a free state will resist incursion with all her might. Do you fear we shall harm you?
On the contrary, Sparta will aid in every way to preserve your independence, so long as you do not turn such strength against us.
“Now consider the Athenians. They are a sea power. They are empire builders. Already they hold two hundred states in subjection. Patrae will make two hundred and one. This speechmaker who has come before you, this general of Athens, has dispensed honeyed words and reassurance. You must see through these, my friends, for by just such blandishments have other states been seduced from their liberty. Ask yourselves if you will find this man so charming when he returns with warships to exact tribute of your treasury, when he drafts your young men for his fleet and imposes upon your nation Athenian codes and laws. How equitable will this so-called alliance feel when you must turn in the very coins of your purse and take 'owls' of Athens in return?
Your guest has promised protection under Athenian law. What does this mean, except that even the most modest private suit may no longer be settled by your own courts but be adjudicated at Athens, before Athenian juries, amid such corruption and cupidity as I pray you are never compelled to endure.
“You of the nobility are estate holders and equestrians. When war resumes, and it will-in this our Athenian friend spoke truly-who will suffer most among your countrymen? Will it be the commons, who will find work with the fleet and discover their position enhanced by war, or yourselves, whose property, which lies outside these vaunted Long Walls, will be laid waste? Whose sons will die first, whose estates be reduced and devastated?”
My mates ran other jobs for Lysander. Pay for one that autumn was thirty drachmas, a month's wages for two nights' work, but it required a man acquainted with the roads inside Lacedaemon.
When Telamon informed his employer that his mate was an anepsios, educated at Sparta, I was sent for. Lysander had his headquarters then at an inn called the Cauldron, at Ptolis on the Mantinean frontier. We were ushered in after midnight when all other officers, and witnesses, had been dismissed.
Lysander claimed to remember me from the Upbringing, extremely unlikely as he was three age-classes ahead and in an elite training battalion. I remembered him, however. Of the four Firsts a youth could win in his commission year, in Wrestling, Chorus, Obedience, and Chastity, Lysander took three. His birth, however, was so mean, and he was seen so to curry favor with his betters, that such qualities failed to gain him the swift ascent they remarked. Peace further retarded his career. He was thirty-five or about; he should hold a lieutenant-colonelcy of infantry. Instead he was just a cavalry captain, the least prestigious element of Spartan arms. In fact nothing about him impressed me this night so much as his good looks, which were nearly as arresting as Alcibiades'. He was tall, with steel-colored eyes and hair falling to his shoulders. That this individual would one day preside over the dismemberment of the Athenian Empire and reign as a god over the entire Hellenic world seemed in this hour impossible of conception.
Lysander detailed the prospective errand. Telamon and I were to convey to Sparta a fledgling owl in a cage, a gift from himself to Cleobulus, chief of the war party. The real chore, however, was to deliver a dispatch, which for fear of discovery must be committed to memory and imparted to its addressee only. This was a plea to the Board of Magistrates to take seriously the intrigues of Alcibiades. The ephors must act, and act swiftly, for the measures set in motion by this solitary Athenian, Lysander professed, had placed the very survival of Sparta at hazard. When I balked at performing this, fearing it would work harm to my countrymen, Lysander laughed. “Remember, you can always tender this intelligence, and all else you see and hear at Lacedaemon, to your friend”-meaning Alcibiades-”for love or profit.” To this day I recall the text.
…our peril lies neither with the knight Nicias nor the so-called popular leaders of Athens-Hyperbolus, Androcles, and the demagogues-whose vision extends no further than pandering to the mob for next year's election, but with this glory-driven aristocrat who alone possesses both strategic vision and implacable will. He employs this Peace as if it were war, seeking to advance his personal renown through the surrogateship of other states, his object to cut off our nation from her Peloponnesian allies. We must counter these conspiracies before it is too late, my friend, nor scruple at means or measures.
Lysander knew Alcibiades. From summers in boyhood, when Alcibiades and his brothers visited their xenos, guest-friend, Endius at Sparta. As a youth Lysander, as I said, had been penniless; he had secured tuition to the Upbringing only as a mothax, a “stepbrother” or sponsoree, dues paid by Endius' father, named Alcibiades. You may reckon to what extent such subordination galled the youth's pride and fueled the acrimony he bore lifelong toward his rival.
I ran this job and others, courier chores mostly. At Sparta one indeed felt a sea change. The war party had seized ascendancy; the young men (and, more telling, the women) clamored for action that would restore Spartan pride. A battle was coming. You could smell it.
The army took the field twice that summer, both full call-ups under King Agis. When the second fizzled at the very gates of Argos, the Spartans turned upon their own king in fury at his fecklessness. Alcibiades leapt upon this. Rousing the allies, they took Orchomenos, securing the plain and passes north of Mantinea and cutting off Sparta from her allies beyond the gulf. Tegea and Orestheum now stood vulnerable as well. The fall of these was unthinkable to Spartan arms, as they opened the entire Eurotas valley. Yet still the ephors did not act. The knights and colonels thought their king a dunce or a coward, and no one trusted the freed helots who now constituted a significant portion of the army.
The cauldron bubbled just shy of the boil.
One night Telamon came with a job. We would run it on horseback with two Athenian shields, Rabbit and Chowder, so named for his incapacity to keep a meal down at sea. The task was to descend downvalley to Tegea, twelve miles; from there to escort in secret the commander of the Spartan regiment on-site, Anaxibius, to the fort at Tripolis, where he would receive orders from the home government. We must have him there at the second watch and back to Tegea by dawn.
Lysander did not inform us of this, but Alcibiades was at that hour at Tegea. He was there with his freed Messenians, addressing the Council.
We located the Spartan and got off. Before the party had ridden a mile, however, a runner from Lysander intercepted us. Plans had changed; we must divert to the shrine of Artemis on the Tegea-Pallantion road.
Our Spartan, Anaxibius, was a full colonel and in nowise averse to employing the ash of his staff upon the tardy or slow of wit.
Twice he cracked Chowder across the ribs, demanding to know who the hell had trained us and what kind of a cocked-up operation we were running.
We reached the sanctuary well into the second watch. Clearly our irascible charge would not be back by dawn. Nor, mounting the steps, could Lysander be discovered. “By the Twins!”-Anaxibius smote the stone with the butt of his staff such a blow as nearly ruptured the drums of our ears-”I'1I flay you all for this insolence
, and that bastard mothax in his turn.”
From behind a column emerged Lysander, alone save his squire, called Strawberry after a birthmark. He beseeched the colonel's pardon, who yet clutched his staff before him and continued to beat it upon the stone, taking in vain the names of abundant divinities. Lysander appealed to him to desist, as troops were encamped about and the racket might be taken as an alarm.
“Take your staff to me, sir, if you wish, but hear the message I am ordered to impart.”
Anaxibius at last lowered his lumber. In that instant Lysander snatched forth his own blade and, striking upon the colonel's undefended right, fetched him such a blow, backhand, as to cleave his neck to the bone and in fact nearly decapitate him. Anaxibius dropped like a sack from a wagon; fluid gushed as from an overturned pail. Our four gaped as Strawberry spun the fallen form facedown on the stone and, plunging again and again into its back the bared steel of a nine-foot spear, inflicted such wounds as could only be read as the blows of cowards and assassins.
Weapons filled my mates' hands; our squad had formed up, backs to each other, certain that our own murders were next, at the hands of other concealed confederates of Lysander. No sound came, however. No squads materialized from shadow. If indeed there was a camp about, no stir arose from it.
“What a waste.”
Lysander broke the silence, indicating the corpse of his countryman. He spat blood. He had bitten his lip through, accidentally, as one does frequently in such exigencies. “He was a good officer.”
“For whose murder we four will be accounted.” This from Telamon, indicating himself and our party.
“Not by name,” was our employer's cool rejoinder.
Lysander knelt, examining what had been a man and was now meat.
One came by degrees to grasp his perfidy's object. The colonel's assassination would be passed off as the work of agents of Athens.
We who had been dupes need neither be named nor apprehended; the act alone would suffice to ignite outrage at Sparta. The home government would shuck its sloth and rise, in time to snatch Tegea from the brink.
“Will you murder us now, Captain?” Telamon inquired.
Lysander rose, pressing at his cut lip. He had, by his demeanor, never entertained such a notion.
“Men as yourselves, who stand apart from the fealty of statehood, are invaluable to me.”
He nodded to his squire, who accorded us our pay.
“Then we will require more than this,” spoke Telamon.
Our patron laughed. “I'm flat.”
“We'll have the horses, then.”
Lysander approved this.
Rabbit had crossed to the portico; he motioned all clear. My own blood, which had run chill for all this interval, now refound its course and heat. “Who slaughters his own, Captain,” I heard my voice address the Spartan, “scorns God as well as man.”
Lysander's eyes met mine, as steel-black as I recalled. “Take your man's portion, Polemidas, and leave heaven to me.”
XI
MANTINEA
I would not have been at Mantinea save for my brother. He was at Orchomenos with Alcibiades and got a message to me.
The greatest battle in history is about to be fought. I shall try to hold it for you, if you hurry.
One must understand the topography of the Peloponnese to reckon the peril to the Spartan state had she failed to carry that day. From Mantinea the Argives and allies, had they been victorious, would have swept down the plain to Tegea, then south to Asea and Orestheum, from which the entire Eurotas valley lay open to the sword. Sparta's serfs would have risen, in numbers ten times their masters'. Slaughter by hoe and mattock would have confronted the lads and women of Sparta. Joined by whatever remained of the Corps of Peers, the defenders would have resisted to the last breath, perishing in a bloodbath unprecedented.
I arrived the morning of the battle, in the train with Telamon and our Messenians, so wretched with septic fever that I must be borne on a wagon with the infants, the pregnant camp wives, and the spare spears hafts.
I had never seen so many troops, and of such quality. Once as lads, Lion and I had larked after the runners in the torch race of the Panathenaea. From the statue of Love in the Academy where the competitors light their brands, we paced with them through the Sacred Gate, across the agora, past the Altar of the Twelve Gods, lapping the Acropolis to the Heracleum, every foot of which thronged with humanity. That was nothing beside Mantinea. The entire army of Argos stood to hand, led by their elite, the Thousand, along with the corps of Mantinea, regiment after regiment, the Cleonaeans and Orneaeans, the allies and hired troops of Arcadia, with a thousand heavy infantry of Athens, dispatched in “defensive posture,” so as not to poach upon the Peace. Further, it seemed, every jack of the Argolid who could hurl a dart or sling a stone had collected, making five and six light-armed for every heavy infantryman.
We crossed with our Messenians behind the marshaling troops.
I was sick and puking like a dog. I must arm, however, or never face my mates again. I was just commencing, abetted by Eunice, when Lion reined in above. He bore a courier's pennant and trailed a second mount, a mare which, he reported, had thrown her rider.
I must mount as a dispatch runner. Such office, at Alcibiades' orders, would not be left this day to pages but only officers.
Alcibiades was on-site not as a commander (he had failed of election this term to the Board of Generals at Athens), but only as an envoy. Such distinctions were academic, of course, as any post he held became the hub and marrow simply by his occupation of it.
Here was how the battle kicked off: There had been a false start three days prior, a full-dress advance aborted by Agis a stone's toss before contact. The Spartans had withdrawn south to Tegea. No one knew what they were up to. Attempting to flood the plain, the allies heard. The month was Boedromion; there wasn't a course strong as an old man's piss in either river. A day passed; then another. The allies took fright that Agis would pull something truly harebrained.
They came down off Mount Alesion, an impregnable position, into the throat of the plain, just north of the Pelagos wood. Word came that the Spartans were advancing from the south with every spit and jigger they could carry. That was when I arrived. The allies had formed up, two miles across, barring the plain.
Now a fresh rumor started: the Spartans had turned back. There would be no battle; our side would haul out too. The regiment above which my brother and I perched had marshaled beneath pear trees, the only crop left untorched by the Spartans because they were not ripe, and the troops from boredom had begun gnawing the stony culls. These made men crap like geese. By twos and threes troops fell from formation, ostensibly to heed nature's call but in truth to get a jump on packing for decampment.
Suddenly one saw dust.
Wisps ascended from the Pelagos wood a mile away. This appeared at first as the brush-burning in fall, when the olive grovers rake their piles beneath the canopy and light them off.
Now tendrils grew to vapors, and vapors to clouds. All stir ceased within our formation. The front of dust broadened; isolated risers conjoined. The tread of thirty thousand could not raise such a storm; the enemy must be twice that. Yet one saw neither a flash off a shield nor even a scout rider cantering in the fore. Just dust, ascending in thunderheads from the canopy of oak until the wood seemed to smoke from end to end.
Lion reined beside me; we must make to the commanders to receive orders. He began directing me to the swiftest track.
Suddenly, inexplicably, our troops began to advance.
You have witnessed such movements in hosts of men. Soldiers in massed formation often cannot hear even a legitimate signal, owing to various clamors of the field. The individual finds himself stepping off in response to the motion of others, knowing no more why he follows than a sheep or a goose. At any event the corps began to move. “Get to the fore.” My brother motioned me toward the plain. “Find out what the hell's going on!”
&n
bsp; I have said I am no equestrian. More, the mare was rank; as I sought to heel her through the milling troops she began to caper and buck. The formation was among orchards, as I said, with branches abounding to crack one's skull, not to say a forest of elevated spearpoints as my mount plunged past, while my knees and ankles clamped her in a death grip and both fists clawed into her mane. Beast and rider broke into the clear.
From Pelagos the first columns of the foe now emerged. We learned later that the Spartans had been startled nearly witless, issuing from the wood, by the sudden apparition of the allied army drawn up before them. Such was the brilliance of their discipline, however, and the order with which they deployed from column of march to line of battle, that it was we and not they who nearly buckled with terror.
I turned back to our side, the estate of Euctemon, whoever he was, who owned the land upon which the allied armies had marshaled. Here they came, left and right but no middle. Two corps advanced, with half a mile of daylight between. By the gods, what a mess!
Enemy regiments continued unpeeling from the wood. One discovered in aftermath the extent of the Spartan mobilization. So grave was the perceived threat engineered by Alcibiades that the foe had called up seven of eight age-classes, eight thousand Spartiates under both kings, Agis and Pleistoanax, with the full Corps of Knights and four of five ephors present as serving officers.
In addition they had activated the forces of the seventy Lacedaemonian towns, twenty thousand heavy infantry, constrained to “follow the Spartans whithersoever they shall lead,” with the whole army of Tegea defending native soil, the Arcadian allies of Heraea and Maenalia, plus the freed helots, the brasidioi, and the “new citizens,” the neodamodeis. With the Argives, Mantineans, and allies arrayed in opposition, this was the mightiest massing of Greek against Greek in history.
Now I saw Alcibiades. Even at a distance one knew him by the dash with which he rode. The allied center at last emerged, with him and other officers galloping to join the commanders in the fore.
Tides of War, a Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War Page 10