Inaction spawned discontent and discontent bred insurrection.
Men dozed brazenly on watch; they lounged about the barbers' tents and packed the closets of the whores' camp, presenting themselves in every quarter except the drill field. Discipline could not be enforced by the newly minted officers, who owed their very station to their men's contempt for them. Malingering grew epidemic. Soldiers went absent without leave and on return did not deign even to offer excuse. At night units no longer stuck together, but individuals scattered to their own, with no object nobler than hunting trouble. Theft grew rampant. Vigilantism rose in response. A man would open another's guts over a stolen shoe or jealousy of a woman or boy.
Where was Nicias, our commander? III in his tent, with nephritis. His sixty-second birthday had come and gone. The men laughed at him and the seers and soothsayers who winged about his tent like gulls above the refuse dump.
That current of enterprise which properly conducted by wise and effective officers produces a disciplined army now, turned from its proper course, flowed into more malignant channels.
Those who had bought themselves out of work turned this leisure to commerce, in women and contraband and even legitimate materiel. Who would stop them? They were businessmen and traders, who knew how to hold out a palm and how to grease one.
Good men, witnessing this corruption and observing their commanders impotent to impede it, lost all incentive to keep their own order. Soldiers' kits looked like trash. Hygiene went to hell.
There were more men down sick than at work on the wall. Even I succumbed to this swell of misfeasance. My protests had long since got me busted to private soldier. I took to hunting. I had dogs and beaters, a regular racket going. I fled camp ten days at a time and was never missed. Pandora's marines had scattered, some back to the ship, thinking sea duty easier than hod-humping, others ducking work in obscure wards of the camp. With Lion I vacated as well, to the Olympieum, adjacent Telamon's Arcadians.
One evening we took a ramble up the heights called Epipolae.
Lion brooded, seeking the deficiency that had turned the army so sour. Telamon was taking a piss and didn't even look up.
“No Alcibiades, no empire.”
Night fell; that fort called the Circle was lit up beneath cressets.
We walked, looking out over the city and harbor. “Nicias has had his career,” Telamon continued. “He's like an old plough horse who wishes only to get back to the barn.”
The mercenary gestured to the ant colony that sprawled beneath us, harbor to sea. “Look at this hell. Why would any man cross an ocean to besiege a nation no threat to his own? Fear won't make him, nor even greed. Only one force will call him. A dream!
That dream is gone. It defected with your friend Alcibiades.”
We were on the wrong side, Telamon declared. We were going to lose. Lion and I laughed. How could we lose? Syracuse is cut off.
The native cities flock to our side. No armies are coming to preserve the Syracusans, and they certainly can't save themselves.
Who will teach them?
“The Spartans,” testified Telamon, as if it were patent.
“Once Alcibiades dispatches them, schoolmasters to their fellow Dorians of Syracuse.”
XX
SCHOOLMASTERS OF WAR
Among the ways the Spartans differ from other peoples is this.
When an ally in distress applies to them for aid, they alone dispatch neither troops nor treasure but a solitary commander, a general. This officer alone, assuming charge of the beleaguered forces, is sufficient, they feel, to turn affairs about and produce victory.
This as the world knows is what happened at Syracuse. The general's name was Gylippus. I knew this man from my schooling at Sparta. A true story:
When he was a boy, Gylippus was an exceptionally fast runner.
At ten he won the boys' Hyacinthiad over the Long Course, a cross-country trial in excess of ten miles. The ordeal of the event is as follows: each entrant must fill his cheeks with water, preserving this unswallowed, then produce it entire at race's end into a receptacle, a bronze of Apollo Crabwise holding out his cupped hands. If you swallow, you're out. Almost all do. Sometimes one simply trips and gulps his cargo by reflex.
Gylippus had contrived a ruse. Beyond sight of the judges, he swallowed and raced all out. He had secreted a portion of water in a hollow stone about a mile from the finish. Beating the other boys to this, he was able to fill his mouth again and hold it to the pole.
In this way he won at ten and again at eleven. But one night, sleeping beside his elder brother Phoebidas, he boasted of his secret. Phoebidas determined to teach a lesson. At next year's race he dashed out to the stone and overturned it. When Gylippus reached the site, in the lead, he found no means of refilling his cheek-and the other boys were bearing down fast from behind.
Gylippus sprinted to the finish, first again. Now the judges commanded him to fill the god's hands, that is to spit, deliver his water. Gylippus obeyed. He had bitten his tongue through, filling his mouth with blood.
In his twenties Gylippus, serving as a brigade commander under Brasidas in Thrace, not only distinguished himself repeatedly for personal valor but achieved signal successes commanding inferior troops, helot conscripts without adequate armor and with minimal training. He seemed to possess an affinity for these roughshod rogues and a genius for whipping them into crack troops. This faculty held no small bearing, it is certain, upon his election by the ephors as commander for Syracuse.
This same Gylippus, now a polemarch, a war leader, of thirty-six years, holder of three prizes of valor including Mantinea, arrived in Sicily with only four ships, two secretaries, one junior lieutenant, and a handful of freed helots serving as marines.
Within twelve months he had overturned all. Commencing with the Syracusan Admiralty, which prior to his arrival had bedazzled with a peacock's array of robes of rank, he banned all colors but white and burned the offending rags in public, inaugurating the Festival of Naked Poseidon, Gymnopotideia in Doric. To roust his cohorts from the sack, he instituted a predawn sacrifice and required attendance by all commanders. Headgear at sea he prohibited, partly to efface all distinctions of vanity but primarily to make his men dark and vigorous from the sun.
The Little Harbor, whose shipyards had lain open to Athenian depredation, Gylippus fortified with seawalls and palisades.
Behind these he set his charges to work. Naval architects and shipwrights had heretofore been deemed artisans, among the meaner orders. Gylippus overturned this, granting to these trades brooches of honor and acclaiming them poleos soteres, Saviors of the City. Prior to his reformations, lads under eighteen might not inscribe their names upon the citizen rolls, while those past sixty, regardless of skill or vigor, suffered mandatory retirement.
Gylippus repealed these ordinances, attracting to his corps of shipbuilders the brightest youths as prentices and the most practiced elders as masters. By winter's end the navy of Syracuse possessed nearly as many warcraft as her besiegers, and her commanders had acquired such temerity as to challenge the invaders ship for ship at sea.
Gylippus likewise refashioned the army. He made trials to discover which men craved most neither riches nor power but honor. These he appointed captains. All who had secured their stations through wealth or influence must reapply, with no eye on them save Gylippus' and his new commanders'. The army itself he reorganized into companies mobilized not by tribe, but by precinct within the city. He set side by side those wards which bore a natural rivalry, offering prizes for competitions between them. In this way the battalion of the Geloan quarter roused itself to excellence against their adversaries of the Andethusia. Then he pitted these as allies against others. By such exercises each unit gained confidence in itself and the army as a whole developed faith in each division.
Discovering weapons and armor to be lacking, Gylippus ordered all who possessed shield and breastplate to present themselves in the central square. The
rich, showing off, produced armor gilded to its most dazzling. When these had been erected in prideful display, Gylippus set his own plain panoplia alongside. All excess was stripped and sold, proceeds applied to acquire arms for the commons.
To raise revenue, Gylippus employed the following stratagem.
Fearing that direct levy might turn the aristocratic element against him, he induced the Assembly instead to require each citizen to come forward on a specific day and render a public accounting of his wealth. Now each could behold with his own eyes the extent of treasure his fellows had hoarded. At once the privileged felt shame not to have contributed more, while the humble who had served with honor were esteemed as better men than the rich.
Contributions flooded in. The cavalry grew flush with mounts, while the vaults overflowed with treasure.
Exploiting the linguistic bonds of the Doric Spartans and Syracusans, Gylippus enlisted words, too, to the cause. Armored infantrymen he now called homoioi, Peers or Equals. Regiments were designated lochoi, divisions morai Among other Spartan usages he compelled each member of a military unit to discontinue the practice of dining at home or with friends and to take his meals in the common mess with his company. In this way unit esprit was fostered, and all felt themselves equal and united.
Gylippus outlawed drunkenness and declared it a whipping offense to neglect the marching condition of one's feet. He made it a crime for a man to have a potbelly or appear at large with stooped shoulders. He introduced anthems of ridicule, the same as at Sparta, and recruited the city's children to swarm upon any slovenly fellow, rebuking him in song. These and other reforms Gylippus instituted. But supreme among all stood his own presence, the fact that he had come in person to share his comrades' peril and to donate all to preserve their freedom.
One morning in late winter as Gylippus marshaled his battalions and we hastened to position to engage them, I noted Lion jotting notes. “Have you noticed,” he remarked, “with what discipline the Syracusans take their stations now that Gylippus has forged them in his image?”
I looked. Of the allies about us-Athenians, Argives, and Corcyreans-many knelt or squatted. Breastplates sprawled on the earth; shields canted, splayed flat or even perched upon by their owners. Squires served double- and triple-duty, their fellows hired out as laborers long since. Directly across, every Syracusan stood in full panoplia, shield against knee, squire at his left, taking the weight of helmet and cuirass in the Spartan manner.
They beat us that day. By late summer their counterwall had cut our wall off. With this all hope of investing Syracuse was lost. In a night attack Gylippus took Labdalum, that fort and storehouse atop Epipolae which held not only our siege gear but our paymaster's cash. He fortified Euryalus, the Heights' lone avenue of vulnerability, and continued his crosswall to fortify the elevation entire. Even at sea, where the skill of our mariners stood preeminent, Gylippus set his new navy on the offensive. The ingenuity of his commanders now served him. Recognizing that the fight would come not in the open sea, but in the confines of the Great Harbor, he had the prows and catheads of his triremes reinforced and built out triple-wide, to ram head-on instead of from the flank as the skilled Athenians preferred. We learned a new word from him, boukephalos, oxhead. With these brutes he pounded our lighter, hollow-rammed ships, chasing us back behind both breakwaters to the inner harbor. Now it was we who were sinking pilings for half-moons and manning the dredging barge to plant “hedgehogs” and “dolphins.”
By autumn's close Gylippus' dreadnoughts had sunk or disabled forty-three of our ships and his troops had driven us off Epipolae entire, save the Circle fort at Syce. His own fleet had suffered terribly, more than seventy vessels crippled or sunk, but these losses he made up swiftly, bringing in fresh timber through the Little Harbor and overland, protected now by the counterwall.
Gylippus was blockading us now, and his fist screwed the press tight. The Syracusans could afford to lose two men for every one of ours, two ships, two walls, and every day their position grew stronger as more Sicilian cities, smelling blood, defected from the invaders to their compatriots. Nicias ordered the upper walls abandoned. We lost lines of assault across city and harbor and, more telling, the baker's mill, which had supplied our bread.
Sutlers and camp followers, and many of our women, melted away.
We hunkered, hemmed like rats south of Feverside, the marsh at the gut of the harbor. And when in another night attack Gylippus' troops drove us from the Olympieum, he threatened this wretched toehold as well.
My old ship, the Pandora, had passed all summer fending the enemy off Plemmyrium, the foe's attacks so unremitting that the ship could not be dragged up and dried out. When at last she beached for refitting, I went aboard to visit an old snoozing spot, fore of the catheads. Setting my heel on the king-beam, the timber gave like a sponge.
Our ships were rotting.
The paymaster's reserve had run out; wages fell three months, then four in arrears. Foreign sailors began to desert, while the attendants and slaves who replaced them slid over the side at their first taste of the lash. Nicias' infirmity worsened. Morale was in the shithouse. Mercenary officers could no longer hold their men.
Telamon had lost a fifth, gone over to the foe.
At the start of the second winter came this letter from Simon.
He reports Lion's wife remarried, to a good man, a war cripple. Our cousin has encountered Eunice, harboring deep bitterness toward me, and my children, who are well.
… numerous reports of Gylippus and his mischief. Athens has only herself to blame. What did they expect Alcibiades to do, thank them for their death warrant?
We at home are in our friend's debt as well. In addition to sending Gylippus to you, he has convinced the Spartans to redouble their efforts against us. King Agis is before our walls with his whole army, and they are not going home. They have fortified Decelea, another stroke urged by Alcibiades. Twenty thousand slaves have hotfooted it there already. Three hundred go over every night, skilled craftsmen sorely missed. Wheat and barley no longer come in overland via Euboea. All must go by sea round Sounium. A loaf costs a morning's wages. As for me, the hocks hop has taken my last dandy's cloak. The Meleager has dropped me from the roll of Knights. Can't reprove them, as I no longer possess a horse. Ah, but fortune has smiled…
A second fleet outfits under the hero Demosthenes, embarking at once to your aid. Parting with my last duck to bribe the recruitment officer, I have been accepted in a cavalry unit without mounts. These we shall acquire in Sicily, or so our commanders assure us. Therefore brace up, cousins. I ride (or walk) to your rescue!
By the time this letter arrived, four months after its posting, the fleet under Demosthenes had reached Corcyra. Another ten days and the first corvettes appeared. Seven more and here came the armada-seventy-six vessels, ten thousand men, armor and money and supplies. Gylippus' defenders withdrew to Lardbottom and Pedagogue's Frock, their third and fourth counterwalls; their fleet fell back behind Ortygia to the Little Harbor.
The fortunes of war had reversed again. As these fresh ships of Athens streamed into the Great Harbor, brothers and mates swept toward one another with joy. Arriving marines leapt from the vessels' decks, embracing companions hip-deep in the sea. Others onshore stripped naked and swam to the ships, mounting the oar ports hand over hand. Lion and I found Simon, on the strand with his horseless cavalry, both of us weeping as we clasped him to our breasts.
How long it had been! Two bitter winters since the expedition sailed from home so full of hope, two summers of dilation and demoralization since its men had seen beloved friends and brothers, heard from their lips news of home, or pressed them in the flesh to their bosoms. Nor had these, our reinforcements, come an hour too soon.
Each man of the first expedition, soon as he had made certain of friends and kinsmen, must seek with his own eyes Demosthenes.
Our new co-commander came ashore on foot, mounting to the strand with his helmet under his arm and his
cloak trailing in the sea. Atop the palisades, the troops whooped themselves hoarse.
There he stands, brothers! His flesh is not sallow like Nicias' with illness and care, but sun-burnished with vigor and resolve. Nor does he make at once to erect an altar seeking counsel of the gods, but strides to assess the issue with his own eyes and reason.
Demosthenes, men! Now at last we have a winner, who triumphed in Aetolia and Acarnania and the Gulf, defeated and captured the Spartans at Sphacteria!
Demosthenes' first order was to get the men paid. He marched forty thousand past the tables in an afternoon, making good all arrears in newly minted owls and virgins. That night his speech was terser than a Spartan's.
“Men, I've looked this hellhole over and I don't like it one lousy bit. We came here to pound these bastards. It's time we started.”
This was acclaimed with a riot of spears hafts clashing upon shields; the army roared its resolution and approval.
Three nights later a force of five thousand retook the Olympieum. The succeeding dawn an assault by ten thousand cleared the Syracusans from the bay. The fleet recaptured the Rock and reblockaded the city; another night attack took back a mile of our old wall.
Casualties were massive. Four days' losses exceeded the total for the year, yet they must be borne so long as their produce was victory. Nor would Demosthenes permit momentum to flag. He harvested armor from the dead and wounded, converting auxiliary troops and even cooks to heavy infantry. My cousin's horse unit was among those reconfigured. Simon had never fought on foot in armor. It is not a skill one acquires in a night. Nor would he or his mates of the mounted troopers be granted the luxury of breaking-in on some soft or easy target.
The next assault must be against only one place, Epipolae. The Heights must be retaken; without them no assault on the city could prevail.
Tides of War, a Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War Page 18