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

by Steven Pressfield

  No emotion showed. Only his eyes altered during the sternest parts; they and the muscles beneath the jaw, which all soldiers have witnessed working involuntarily in a man under torture.

  “Are you tired, Pommo? Shall we take up later?”

  “No, let's finish it.”

  “I'm bored to tears,” Endius broke in.

  “Then go to bed.”

  “How many times must we hear this?”

  “Until I've heard it enough.”

  Alcibiades made me recount instances of individual sacrifice or intrepidity, not only of Athenians but of allies and even slaves. At each his secretaries noted name, patronymic, and home district; I was queried again and again to be certain.

  “Either stop pacing, Endius, or go to sleep!”

  Near dawn I finished. Alcibiades had not budged all night.

  “That's all of it,” I said, and rose.

  I walked out to the paddock alone. The estate was just coming awake. I watched the grooms advancing to their chores, the ring being sprinkled and raked, riding mounts taken out to their exercise. I could feel Alcibiades emerge behind me, in shadow, yet turned neither to speak nor acknowledge his presence.

  “I have never felt anyone,” he remarked, “hate me as you.”

  “Don't flatter yourself. Many hate you more.”

  He chuckled. “You came here to kill me. Why haven't you?”

  “I don't know. Failure of nerve possibly.”

  I turned back. I have never seen anything like the look that stood then upon his face.

  He appeared as a man utterly alone beneath heaven. One who may confide in no one, not even the gods, least of all the gods. His own death, one could see, accounted nothing to him. Rather he was held, like an agonist in a trial, by that perverse genius which licensed him to perceive with a clarity beyond all others of his generation the dictates of necessity and which granted him in the service of this gift the powers of passion and persuasion to articulate its imperatives. Yet his own countrymen would not heed him to their weal, but only his enemies, and they, the more advantage they derived, hated him the more.

  Every other captain of war held some rank or office, spoke or commanded in the name of some authority. Only Alcibiades stood alone, owning neither station nor commission nor even the garment on his back. Here he stood, stateless and accursed, outcast among his worst enemies, yet still he more than any, Spartan or Athenian, manipulated the course of the war by his will and enterprise alone.

  Later among the pavilions of the Persian, I found myself seized on occasion by an unnameable panic. This was the discovery of myself at too distant a remove from all I knew. How might my benefactor have deflated such distress? What frontier could be more remote than that upon which he already stood? What greater crimes might he commit? How much more alone could he get? And yet he burned. Not, as his enemies professed, for wealth or glory.

  Not even, I believe, for redemption. Rather he was locked in battle with fate or heaven, that ruinous genius which set at naught all his endeavors and brought to those to whom he wished only advantage destruction and evil.

  “Will you ever absolve me for preserving your life, Pommo?”

  My glance fell on the shoulder clasp which held his cloak. It was the wolfs tooth of Potidaea. I experienced that species of encounter called by the Spartans a “revenant,” when one feels that he relives an event, as it had happened before. “Why did you save me,” I heard my voice ask, “and not my brother?”

  “Your brother would not have come.”

  He uttered this absent malice, as an observation, plain and true.

  “And why bring me here?”

  “I needed one at my side who had passed through the same portal I had.”

  This was the phrase, precisely, which his apparition had spoken in my fever dream. Did I inform him? Why?

  “And what portal is that-to hell?”

  He did not answer. Rather, with an expression at once rueful and ironic, reached to the fang clasp and detached it. It read: “For Valor.” He pinned it to my cloak.

  “There is another reason I had you reprieved.”

  The sky had lightened beyond Mount Parnon. Toward this he turned. I waited.

  “When I am slain, I want it to be by one who truly hates me.”

  He turned back, meeting my glance with absolute directness.

  “Do you reckon how long we have been fighting this war, Pommo?

  We were children when it began. Babes of that day are grown men now.”

  He asked if I was sick of war.

  “With all my heart.”

  Across the fields one could see the helot groundsmen departing to work.

  “Lysander will summon you soon. What he instructs, you must perform.”

  “Why?”

  “For my sake.”

  I felt his hand upon my shoulder, sturdy as a friend's. “Don't condemn yourself so cruelly, Pommo. Sometimes it's harder to live than to die. Besides you had no choice. Heaven made you for this purpose, as me for mine.” He released my shoulder with a laugh.

  “Haven't you learned yet, my friend? We are in this, you and I, to the bitter end.”

  It was post noon of a brilliant day in the Spartan month of Karneius when Lysander sent for me. The city was decked for the Festival of Apollo; all training under arms had been suspended. I came to him beside the ball field they call the Islet. “You have served as a marine,” Lysander plunged in, skipping the small talk.

  “You will serve again.”

  “You mean not as assassin?”

  “Don't play at smart-mouth, you whore's son. The casting vote mine, you'd be rotting in the quarries still. And don't give yourself airs to think your friend has sprung you out of affection. He'll make a run for it soon. That's why you're here; he thinks you'll stand by him.”

  “Will I?”

  “You look upon heaven at my pleasure only, and take no breath unlicensed by me.”

  Lysander was not a physically powerful man. He stood only half a head taller than myself, possessed of shoulders of no greater breadth, yet I make no shame to say he scared me witless. ulf you're so certain he'll betray you,” I inquired, “why not kill him now?”

  “He's of use to me, as I him. For the present we are thick as brothers.”

  At his side Strawberry motioned; we were being observed.

  Lysander led off, beneath the acacias that front the Running

  Course and the little bronze of the god Laughter. We passed down the Amyclaian Way to the Ribbon, that straight track where the girls train, barefoot in their singlets. “Stop here.” Lysander indicated a site beneath thorn trees with grass for his horse to crop.

  “You must understand what will happen.

  “Sparta will ally herself with Persia. The price will be the Greek cities of Asia. We will sell them out to Darius in return for gold and a fleet to finish Athens. Alcibiades will produce this for us. No Spartan, myself and Endius included, could pull it off. That accomplished, Alcibiades will betray us. He must and will. He will move heaven and earth to get home and redeem himself in his countrymen's eyes.

  “Now the tricky part. Three forces will seek his destruction. His countrymen who hate him, his enemies in the Spartan camp, and whatever far-seeing Persians recognize the double cross he has in store for them.”

  Lysander turned toward me.

  “You will keep him alive, Polemidas,” he said, employing my Laconian name. “You and the marines I will hire and you will train.” “You mean until you yourself require his slaughter.”

  The Spartan drew up at this. It was clear that neither I nor my hollow righteousness arrested his interest. Yet the question itself bore consideration. For a moment his stony mien relented and, discovering in me not so much a fellow to whom he might confide as a proxy standing in for some wider constituency, met my eye an instant, with regret.

  “It will not be myself who requires our friend's extinction, Polemidas, but that solitary god to which he himself
proffers worship. “

  “And what god is that?”

  “Necessity.”

  XXVII

  ON THE QUAY AT SAMOS

  At this point in the recounting of Polemides' tale,

  [Grandfather interjected] a fortuitous turn transpired. My detectives, Myron and Lado, appeared at my study one evening, beside themselves.

  “Sir, we have found her! The woman!”

  What woman?

  “Eunice! The woman of your client, the assassin.”

  This was indeed news, as I had from Polemides believed her dead. She is here, Myron insisted, with her children, and has agreed-for a sum-to speak.

  An interview was arranged and conducted at my town house in the Piraeus. Little came of it, however, beyond the discovery, achieved serendipitously when she misspoke herself, that she, Eunice, was known to and known by that Colophon the son of Hestiodorus who had brought the charges of murder against Polemides. More, Eunice confirmed, she had herself witnessed the killing, which took place at a kapeleion, a rough tavern, at Samos during the twenty-third year of the war. Though I pressed vigorously, she would speak no more to either subject and in fact made off in such haste as not even to collect her fee. Nor had she, or an agent, returned to claim it.

  Of this I informed Polemides at our interview next day at the prison. He reacted without surprise to this report of the presence in Athens of the mother of his children. "Nothing about her surprises me.” Did he wish to see his son and daughter? Perhaps I could prevail upon Eunice, compensate her if necessary, to effect a reunion. The prisoner's response abashed me. "Did you actually see the children? Did she state categorically that she had them?” When I replied in the negative, he grunted and broke the matter off. The best I could deduce, more from the man's evasions than his attestations, was that boy and girl had last been in his custody, flown from their mother's. This had been within the year apparently, at Acharnae, on Polemides' family estate, Road's Turn.

  I pressed the query. If indeed I could locate the children, would their appearance be welcome?

  “Let them not see me in this place.”

  There was no window in the cell but an opening in the roof through which a rectangle of sunlight fell upon the northern wall.

  Polemides turned away to this spot, which he could reach shackled as he was, then faced back toward me. At once I recalled seeing him, years past. In much the same posture, with the identical expression, he had stood in armor in the bows of a longboat as its bumpers touched at Samos and he stepped off onto the dock, which that forenoon teemed with sailors and soldiers in the thousands, seething with anticipation. Three marines followed Polemides, one fore and two aft. Shielded by these advanced onto the quay Alcibiades. “You were his bodyguard, Polemides,” I remarked this unexpected recall. “I remember you. On the quay at Samos, the day he came back.” The prisoner did not react, held, I felt, by reflection upon his children, now nearly grown no doubt, and whatever disquietude preoccupied him on their account. I, however, struck by this recollected vision, felt myself piped back to that site and that forenoon.

  The fleet lay at Samos then. The war was in its twenty-first year.

  The time was seven, perhaps eight months, subsequent to the conversations in Sparta which our narrator had last recounted.

  Let me recite briefly events in the interval.

  Alcibiades, as our client related, had indeed sailed from Lacedaemon to Ionia, he and the Spartan Chalcideus, now fleet admiral of the Peloponnesian navy. This force was then a ragtag regatta of outdated triremes and penteconters contributed by Sparta's allies, primarily Corinth, Elis, and Zacynthus, with a few galleys built at Gythieum and Epidauris Limera and crewed by volunteers, mostly fishermen and draft evaders. There was not a Peer in the lot.

  Nonetheless within two months Alcibiades and Chalcideus brought into revolt against Athens not only Chios, with her squadrons of warships (who herself brought over Anaia, Lebedos, and Aerae), but Erythrae, Miletus, Lesbos, Teos, and Clazomenae as well as Ephesus, with her great harbor, later Lysander's bastion.

  By these coups Alcibiades had deprived Athens of a third of the tribute of her empire, critically needed in the wake of Syracuse.

  Worse, these strongholds, now in enemy hands, threatened the grain routes from the Pontus, without whose produce Athens could not survive.

  If these colors were not grim enough, reports now came that Alcibiades had made contact with the Persian governor Tissaphernes and brought him under his spell. Tissaphernes was satrap of Lydia and Caria under Darius the King. In addition to limitless treasure, he commanded the war fleet of Phoenicia, two hundred and thirty triremes (when Athens could man little above a hundred) crewed by Sidonians and Tyrians, the finest sailors of the East. Should Alcibiades incite his patron to bring these up on the Spartan side, the sequence of Athens' doom would be ordained.

  The lone report which stirred promise involved Alcibiades as well. This was the gossip that he had seduced and impregnated the lady Timaea, wife of the Spartan king, Agis. Nor did this gentlewoman, reports testified, exert care to conceal the affair.

  While in public she called the babe in her womb Leotychidas, in private she named him Alcibiades.

  She was out of her head in love with the man.

  Why did this inspirit us at home? Because it held out hope that Alcibiades could not keep from his old tricks and would fall inevitably by his own hand, beneath the rage of Agis and the party of hard-line Spartans.

  This of course is exactly what happened. Within five months he had added sentence of death, pronounced from Sparta, to that same distinction already worn of Athens.

  This time he fled to Persia, the court of Tissaphernes at Sardis, where he again reconstituted himself, no longer in the coarsecloth cloak of Lacedaemon but the purple robes of a dandy of the court.

  Tissaphernes had fallen so beneath his bewitchment, it was told, that he made Alcibiades his tutor in all things and even named his favorite paradise (as the Persians call their deer parks) in his honor, calling it Alkibideion.

  At home, Athens lay bankrupt and bereft. All of able body had been called up for the fleet. Only elders and ephebes remained to man the walls. That masculine eros which is the pith and marrow of a nation stood absent. The streets ached for it. The beds of wives lay barren of it.

  The polity possessed no champion. Its depleted soil produced only shoots of evil, stunted and malformed. Their posturings upon the political stage disclosed what hollow caricatures they were and made the people lament the more of their bereavement, shorn by plague and war of the bloom of two generations. Reared in such impoverishment, the young grew wild, absent respect for law or decency.

  Civility had fled. Age ducked its duties; youth dodged the draft.

  Of theater, the comic poets displayed the most vitality, and that only to excoriate those buffoons who dared set themselves up as statesmen. The few of quality who might have served well held back, abandoning the field to those whose greed for prominence was exceeded only by their want of scruple in its pursuit.

  Now the people remembered Alcibiades and longed for him.

  In memory they revisited the stages of the war, descrying in each his vision and vigor. As a youth none surpassed him in valor.

  Come to command, he had harried the foe as no other, compelling them to set their very survival upon one day's battle at Mantinea.

  His enterprise alone had called into being the greatest armada in history. Him in command, we would not have lost in Sicily. In command now, we wouldn't be losing in the East. Even the evils he had brought upon the state by his counsel to her foes were cited not as criminal or treasonous, but as evidence of his generalship and audacity, which capacities the city needed desperately and could discover nowhere. Further citation sprang from the roster of the fleet, whose most able commanders-Thrasybulus, Theramenes, Conon, and Thrasyllus-were either intimates of Alcibiades or officers he had sponsored from their debut. Impute what vice you may to his conduct or motive
, the demos declared, in statesman's terms he appeared a titan among midgets. In the barbershops and wrestling schools, the commons recalled that Alcibiades had not taken up with the enemy of his own. We ourselves had driven him to it! In our folly we had franchised the knaves and conspirators, jealous of Alcibiades' gifts, to deprive the state of the champion she needed most!

  My wife and I attended a comedy by Eupolis in which appeared a player garbed in extravagant style and meant to represent Alcibiades. The playwright had intended to hold this peacock up to ridicule; instead the audience erupted, chanting his name. On the street the actor was mobbed and borne home in triumph.

  On walls throughout the city appeared in scrawl, Anakaleson:

  “Bring him home.”

  It took another year, my grandson, but at last he was recalled, by the men of the Samos fleet, if not yet by the Assembly of Athens-promising Tissaphernes' gold and alliance with Persia.

  This was the moment I recollected to Polemides, when the longboat's bumpers touched the timbers of the quay at Samos and, compassed by twenty thousand sailors, soldiers, and marines of Athens, Alcibiades made his way to that elevated platform called the Load-out, where the teamsters back their wagons in to receive the sardiners' catch, and around which now congregated the throngs of the armored divisions and ships' companies, mounting every rooftop and pergola, even the masts of the ships, their spars and warpeaks, beneath the Hill of the Dolphins, to await with hope and trepidation what the repatriated renegade would say.

  XXVIII

  THE HILL OF THE DOLPHINS

  Twice he began and twice his voice miscarried, so overcome was he by the sight which now enlarged before him. When he failed a third time, a cry burst from those pressed in ranks to the immediate fore. “Again! Again!” men called, this summons reinforced at once by the thousands packing the bowl, the roar of men approving what they see. When the tumult had subsided, Alcibiades recommenced, so softly at first that the heralds, stationed at intervals to relay his words to those higher on the slope, must turn laterally and address their compatriots beside and even below.