Tides of War, a Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War

by Steven Pressfield

  The full body of the foe had emerged from the wood, fifteen hundred yards off. On the flat between the armies one could see materializing, as preceding all battles, boys afoot and on ponies, and even girls come to lark and goggle. Some, caught up in the moment, would dash onto the field and lose their lives; others would prove heroes, recovering the fallen; while yet more would linger to loot the corpses of the slain. One heard the cries of dogs.

  The wild packs can smell a battle, and even tame hounds, whipped to a pitch by that keening heard only by their race, may be driven from the field by naught but their own extinction. I galloped toward the commanders. One could see them unnerved by the foe's impeccable advance. “Let it be now!” Alcibiades called above the approaching din. “Let it be now!”

  The foe's skirmishers led, an eighth mile off. Lion hauled in beside me. The first sling bullets started chewing divots at our feet; in moments stones began clattering like hail. I could not reach the commanders, scattering to their units. We must fight as cavalry now, my brother shouted. Here came our own darters and lancers, packs of them on the scamper, and to the rear the mass of the heavy infantry, Argives, Mantineans and Athenians, Orneaeans and Cleonaeans, and the mercenary Arcadians. The plain trembled beneath their tread. They had commenced the paean, the same Hymn to Castor their Doric kinsmen, the Spartans, would take up in moments.

  At the right of the field twined a dry course and the wreckage of a vineyard torched earlier by the foe. Over these razed walls advanced the Spartan Sciritae, eighty shields across and eight deep, whose place of honor is ever on the left. Adjacent pressed another sixteen hundred scarlet cloaks, the regiments who had fought in Thrace under Brasidas; they and the new citizens, two hundred shields more bearing the lambda of Lacedaemon.

  On their right came the Corps of Peers. There was no mistaking the precision of their order and the brilliance of their kit. Every other nation of Greece advances to battle beneath the trumpet; only Spartans employ the pipes. These now skirled that cadenced wail which is part music and part curdling of the blood. Agis the king marched at the center, flanked by the Three Hundred, the agema of Knights. The entire force, all seven regiments, strode in scarlet with their shields at march port and spears, unsheathed nine-footers, at the upright.

  Across the air came “Advance to Battle.” The beat picked up and the corps as one lifted its voice in the Hymn to Nike. The formation, shields straked solid, rolled out onto the flat of the plain.

  I clutched my mare's mane and kicked her like hell.

  On came the line of lambdas. The Mantineans who must clash with them had worked themselves into a state of frenzy. Fear drove them to shout and beat their shields; out front their officers sought in vain to check the discomposure. Four hundred yards now separated the armored infantry. The allied line kept edging right, as armies will, as each individual seeks the shelter of the shield of the man at his shoulder, so that our wing overlapped the Spartans by an eighth of a mile. An order pealed down their line; the pipers picked it up; the Sciritae went to echelon left, fanning to conform to the oncoming Mantineans. A gap opened between them and the adjacent companies. Something had got cockeyed.

  No reserves advanced to fill the break. The Sciritae commanders, perceiving their vulnerability, piped back to the right. Too late. A hundred yards remained. Spears lowered to the attack. With a cry the Mantineans closed ranks and fell upon the Spartan left.

  Of all moments of concentrated fury in this long and bitter war, few surpassed this, as the corps of Mantinea, fighting for home and country against that race which had lorded it over them for centuries, descended upon this blood foe, while the isolated left of Sciritae and brasidioi set shoulder by shoulder and dug in to endure the scrum of the othismos.

  My brother and I were on the extreme right, with the cavalry and the overlapped heavy infantry of Mantinea. The Spartan left had been cut off on both sides, to their right by the void between themselves and the Corps of Peers, to the left by the lapped wing of the Mantineans. Here is the posture a fighting force fears most-envelopment.

  Slingers and javelineers of both sides, who had been passed over by the heavy troops in the advance, now flooded into the gaps, assaulting each other and the compacted infantry. They were so close to the fight, the darters, that they flung their shafts over the shoulders of their comrades, into the faces of the foe, while across, the same dish was being served hot to them. Clouds of missiles arced and ascended, plunging and vanishing within battlements of dust. The Mantinean heavy infantry swept past Lion and me, as triremes on the sea in that maneuver called the “breakthrough,” shooting the Spartan line and doubling back to take it from flank and rear. The enemy wing, doubled upon itself, resisted with spectacular gallantry. But the mass of the Mantineans, ten thousand against fewer than five, drove them under. The foe bellied rearward. Fusillades rained upon their shivered ranks, while the heavy armor of Mantinea heaved and rammed, thirty and forty men deep. Such a cry of joy erupted as the Mantineans, so long overawed by these masters of the Peloponnese, forecast for an instant the overthrow of Sparta entire. It seemed in that moment as if nothing could stop it.

  The allies drove the Sciritae back across the dry course and into the trees, all the way to the Spartan camp where the older men and the baggage train awaited. They burned this and slaughtered all they could lay hands on.

  The warrior must resist now that dislocation which in the flush of apparent victory dissevers him from self-command. I found my brother and reined beside him. Our own archers were shooting at us and the other friendly cavalry, purely from elation and the prospect of such juicy targets. “We have to get over!” Lion shouted, meaning to the left of the field, where our Athenian troops and cavalry fought. We rallied what horsemen we could and set out.

  A rack of defiles impeded our passage; light troops ranged like locusts. The field stood choked with smoke and dust. Mounting a rise, we expected to see the central corps clashing. Instead the expanse sprawled vacant, populated only by scattered wounded of Mantinea and Argos. We peered right, seeking the Spartans in flight. There was nothing.

  We spun left. Already half a mile gone could be seen the rear ranks of the Corps of Peers, Agis, the Knights, and the seven regiments. They were driving the Argives as dogs drive sheep.

  What struck terror was the pitiless precision of the Spartan advance. Neither ravening nor keening as other armies in the rush of triumph, but in order, pressing steadily, relentlessly forward. As stalks of grain submit to the scythe, so did the allies fall before the Spartan advance. Their center was a half mile across, victorious along its entire length.

  I heard a cry at my shoulder. A rider crumpled and pitched.

  Sling bullets screamed past our ears. The foe's skirmishers, no longer in companies but a disordered host, rushed at us on the hinter ground. Our pack bolted; again my mount balked. Lion wheeled to my aid. We could see the mob of men and boys dashing upon us, while their bolts and missiles tore past with the sound of rending fabric.

  We got to a ditch, but mounting the far wall, my mare tumbled.

  I hit teeth-first with the beast spilling atop me. My brother had breasted the bank and spurred on. From the brink the foe poured stones and darts. To my astonishment the mare returned. She was a warhorse! I clawed onto her back, which was lacerated in more places than my own. But the sheer bank undid us. Three boys had got within the ditch; they were slingers and too close to fire; instead they rushed and backed, bawling profanities as they sought to hamstring the mare with their sickles and foul her legs with the straps of their slings. Rarely have I experienced such terror, looking into those urchin eyes mad for my blood. My brother thundered from nowhere to preserve me, he and our pack from the right of the field. The mare flew from the trench. “You're supposed to ride the horse, not the other way round!” Lion roared as we fled.

  The far left was where our countrymen were, and the cavalry with Alcibiades. We must reach them, if only to die at their side.

  But the gro
und as if sown with dragon's teeth birthed yet more skirmishers. We were sitting ducks, up high. Damn me if I ever climb on a horse again! Suddenly the main Spartan corps reversed and countermarched. One of those implausible moments of war now eventuated. The foe broke off pursuit of the Argives and Orneaeans and came about to assist its own routed countrymen of the left. This preserved us, the erstwhile horse of that quarter, from the slingers who ravened upon our track. Massed Spartan armor swept past, interdicting our pursuers. The Corps of Peers are of course all heavy infantry; on horseback we were out of their reach.

  Past they surged, close enough to read the details on their unit guidons and see the men's eyes within their sockets of bronze.

  On the left our Athenians had been routed too; the infantry had long fled, leaving the cavalry to range the overrun ground, defending the wounded as best they could. I saw Alcibiades' horse, dead in the dirt, and farther in a ditch his helmet.

  It struck with the clarity of revelation that our nation could not survive his loss. Perhaps this distress was fatigue-spawned. Surely my bowels and belly had been void for hours. Strength had fled both arms from grappling all day with this wild beast, upon whose back the pounding had sapped the last from my hams and knees.

  And yet, with that lucidity that comes at the end of one's strength, this fear for our commander seemed valid utterly.

  I must find him. Must preserve him. Up and down the courses I drove my rank mare, whose name I never learned and never care to, seeking Alcibiades.

  I could not find him. Only in camp, when descent of night had at last adjourned the struggle, did he emerge from the field, in infantryman's armor, which he had stripped apparently from a corpse midbattle and in which he had fought all day. He did not shed it now but ranged among the troops of Argos and the allies, the shield on his shoulder dark with blood and his eyes like snuffed tapers.

  In defeat one learns who are friends to him, and by whom he is accounted friend. Past midnight Alcibiades' attendant summoned my brother and me to his tent. Only those most intimate were included-his cousin Euryptolemus, Mantitheus, Antiochus the pilot, Diotimus, Adeimantus, Thrasybulus, and a dozen others.

  This was the singular honor of our lives, Lion's and mine, nor did either stand uncognizant of it.

  It was a most dolorous caucus. What wisdom could be culled from calamity was carved like a dry goose and shared out absent appetite.

  Defeat tolled the knell for our commander's alliance. Mantinea and Elis would be compelled again into the Spartan fold, as would Patrae, whose long walls would be torn down. Orchomenos could not be held; Epidauris and Sicyon would be squeezed tighter beneath the foe's screw. The Spartans would exile or execute the last democrats and take as hostages children of all suspect families.

  At Argos the democracy would fall; it would only be a matter of time before she, too, toppled into the Spartan bag.

  Alcibiades did not speak all evening, permitting Euryptolemus to articulate as his surrogate, as he often did, so in tune were the cousins with each other's cast of mind. Euro urged his kinsman to depart for Athens at dawn. Word of defeat would fly home; he must stand present to endure it with honor and to shore up those who had stood at his side.

  Alcibiades would not leave. He must remain to take up the dead.

  “The dam is down, cousin,” he accounted. “We will not hold the flood.”

  None slept that night. Retrieval parties formed up before dawn.

  Mules and asses, even cavalry mounts, had been rigged with the pole sleds called “baker's boards”; wagons of the commissariat had been recruited, augmented by sledges and litters; men carried cloaks and blankets upon which a body may be borne. The Spartans sent across their priests of Apollo to sanctify the field and formalize permission to us to take up our dead. They had already reclaimed their own.

  At first light the Hymn to Demeter and Kore was sung; the parties moved out by tribes. Alcibiades wore dust sandals and a white chiton without emblem of rank. He was grave but not downcast. He took up the dead in silence, working beside soldiers' squires and even slaves.

  Where the Tegeans and lesser Lacedaemonians had won their victory, the bodies of the allied slain had been stripped naked.

  Armor and weapons were plundered; the foe had looted even the shoes.

  Where the Corps of Peers had triumphed, however, no corpses had been violated. Each lay where he had fallen, intact of shield and armor. The Spartans had granted them honor to forbear this indignity. Many wept, my brother included, to behold such greatness of heart.

  Midday found Alcibiades stopping with the party in which my brother and I labored. “Is it true, Pommo, that you dashed about the field at battle's close, seeking to preserve me?” A number had told him as much; this seemed to delight him enormously. “I did not know you loved me so.”

  I advanced some jest that we of the infantry needed him; he knew how to pay. He did not laugh at this poor joke; rather glanced soberly, first to my brother, then me. “Of payment I know this, my friends-how to requite those whose hearts are true.”

  Earlier in the forenoon, Lion and I were told later, Alcibiades had chanced to be at the extreme right of the field, that quarter where we had been when the Mantineans routed the Spartan Sciritae. He was speaking with several Mantinean officers when a captain of Spartan cavalry rode up and reined in.

  It was Lysander. The rivals spoke at ease, strife forsworn beneath the truce. Lysander remarked the scale of the allied victory in this quarter. Had such prevailed across even another fifth of the field, the outcome had been catastrophe for Sparta.

  “You came this close, Alcibiades,” Lysander is said to have spoken.

  In response his adversary quoted the proverb “Close captures no crowns.”

  To which Lysander replied, “God grant that be your epitaph,” and, turning, spurred away.

  When the shadows began to lengthen, the Spartan Corps of Peers moved out for home. We could see them emerge round the shoulder of the wood and trek in column toward the Tegea Road.

  Agis strode at the fore, flanked by the Knights, with the seven regiments in order in the train. Lion pointed. There was Lysander; he had insinuated his cavalry into a role as royal guard. These trooped adjacent the fore polemarchs, the war leaders, and the pythioi, the priests of Apollo. The main body trailed, to the skirling of the pipes.

  They were eight thousand, all in scarlet, spears at the slope, with squires, one to a man, trooping at their shoulders, bearing their shields, slung and burnished to a mirror's sheen. Where we stood in the dust of the field, all squatted in shadow. The victors strode in sun.

  They were singing. A cadence chant, “Hemorrhoids, Hangnails, and Hell,” which to a beat bespeaks a profane disdain for death.

  Their spearpoints were sheathed, but their helmets, bossed, flashed like gold in the sun.

  A sound broke from Alcibiades. When I turned, his brow stood flushed; tears pooled in the well of his eyes. At first I apprehended this as grief, at the overthrow of all his enterprise. Examination, however, discovered this affect barren of regret. He was moved, as we all, by the splendor of the enemy's discipline and will.

  “Magnificent-looking bastards, aren't they?”

  XII

  A COMPANION OF THE FLEET

  Upon termination of this day's session with the assassin Polemides [my grandfather continued], as he and I took leave of one another, the man requested of me a service.

  His sea chest, he declared, lay now in storage at the officers' commissary at Munychia naval base, in care of the porter. Would I retrieve it for him? There were documents in it he wished to show me. More, he added, would I keep this chest after his execution?

  I urged the man not to get ahead of himself. Acquittal was possible, perhaps even probable, given Socrates' conviction and the powerful association in the public mind between the philosopher and Alcibiades. Alcibiades' repute stood now at its ebb; this did not augur inauspiciously for any in faction of opposition to him.

&nbs
p; “Yes, of course.” Polemides smiled. “I forgot.”

  Passing out of the prison, a violent thundershower detained me at the portal. As I waited on the storm's passage a boy approached, dashing from the victualer's shop across the way and, confirming my identity, bade me abide a few moments longer. An older man could be seen, a cripple, hobbling into the lane from the same shop.

  The fellow shambled across, presenting himself before me in the posture of a panhandler. I retreated, set to step into the downpour rather than endure the assault of this unkempt and aggressive mute. “You don't recognize me, do you, sir?”

  The man's voice struck me through.

  “It's Eumelus of Oa, Cap'n. 'Bruise.' From the old Europa.”

  “Bruise? By the Holy Twain, can it be you?”

  This man had served with me at Abydos and Bitch's Tomb under Alcibiades, twenty years into the war and eleven prior to this day. He had been a toxotes, a marine archer, and something of a personal batman to me. A game but inexpert boxer, hence his nickname, he possessed the courage of an eagle and harbored ambitions to rise in service. At Abydos he had borne me from Europa's quarterdeck when my leg had been sheared in the action.

  Bruise had remained in service to the bitter end: Aegospotami.

  He was captured by Lysander and sentenced to death but was reprieved to the slavers' block by the lie that his mother was Megarian and he thus not an Athenian citizen. “Soon as they burned me, I skipped. I was home in time to watch Lysander sail in and take our surrender.”

  He led me across to the victualry. The shop was his; the lad his grandson. Through his daughter-in-law, he testified, he had secured a contract under the Eleven Administrators; his mart provisioned the warders and inmates, since the refectory's shuttering in the latest crackdown. He, Bruise, had noted my passing in and out of the prison, but this day was the first, he said, that he had summoned the temerity to approach.