“Yes, I would stand among them, and bring you with me, all.
Not in death or afterlife, but in the flesh and in triumph. You command me to look, Brick, to these about the fire. I am looking.
But I don't see chastened men, or meek. I see that valiant quick to which invincible battalions may be drawn; a corps of kinsmen who may say when death comes, as it must to all, that they have left no drop within the bowl. We clash tonight as brothers. What could be better? To gather on this site among brave and brilliant friends!
And who grander to stand among than these of yore? But one may not enter their company for the price of an iron spit. The toll is everlasting glory, won for that which one loves, at the risk of all he loves. I for one will pay that fare gladly. Let us dine with these, brothers, who brought fire to the East and claimed it for their own.”
Thrasybulus stood across, remarking the embers, which his mate and fellow commander had kindled to the blaze.
“You scare the breath out of me, Alcibiades.”
XXXI
THE INTREPIDITY OF THE GODS
I was in Athens [Grandfather now narrated] when Alcibiades took Chalcedon, Selymbria, and Byzantium, as he said he must and would.
The first he surrounded with a wall from sea to sea, and when the Persian Pharnabazus came against him with his troops and cavalry while simultaneously Hippocrates, the Spartan garrison commander, rushed upon him from the city, Alcibiades divided his forces and defeated them both, slaying Hippocrates. At Selymbria he had mounted the walls himself with an advance party, confederates within having colluded to betray the place, when, one among them failing of nerve, the others must give the signal prematurely. Alcibiades found himself cut off, supported by only a handful, with defenders swarming to overwhelm him. He had the trumpet sounded and, commanding silence, ordered the inhabitants to surrender their arms and receive clemency, this mandate issued with such authority as to make the foe believe that his army had already taken the city (which was nearly true, as his Thracians, massed in their thousands, clamored to sack the place entire), that the citizens consented to submit the state if he would only call off his dogs. And he kept his pledge, maltreating no one, only requiring that the city return to alliance with Athens and hold open the straits in her name.
He took Byzantium by the following stratagem. Having circumvallated the city and blockaded it also by sea, he made public that other urgent concerns must call him away and, embarking with a great show all beneath the city walls, he sailed and marched off, returning that night in darkness to overwhelm the slackened and unsuspecting guard.
He had now achieved all he had said he would, secured the Hellespont and beaten every force pitched against him. He had covered himself with such glory, as Thrasybulus had professed, that he may at last come home.
I was in Athens then, recovering from my wounds of Abydos.
Twice the sawbones carved timbers off my peg and each time suppuration assaulted the unexcised tissue. My wife nearly came undone with the fright of it. It was not so hard on me. I was a hero.
Those who had procured Alcibiades' banishment and those who had by their acquiescence abetted it now sought to ally themselves with me and every other officer associated with his triumphs and those he, Thrasybulus, and Theramenes continued to send home like so many bouquets. Soon they, the commanders, would come home too. Athens burned for them as a bride for her beloved.
Our client Polemides, it turned out, appeared briefly at Athens as well, which episode must be related, as its consequence affected if not the course of the war, then a direction she might have taken had events transpired otherwise.
Polemides resumed his tale on the twenty-eighth of Hecatombaion, Athena's Day, by coincidence the date his own son-named Nicolaus after his father-appeared at my door, beseeching me to take him with me to the prison. But this chronicle must hold a moment. Let us return to the Hellespont…and Polemides' narration: News of Endius' peace mission [Polemides resumed] had reached the straits two days before Alcibiades' ships returned from their detour to the tombs. Many celebrated, believing the war over.
I had tied the skin on pretty good myself, when a summons interrupted the spree. I was instructed, by Mantitheus in Alcibiades' name, to pack my kit, informing no one, and report to him at his command post, late, after the secretaries had departed.
I recall the night as well for another reason, an encounter with Damon, the young Cat's Eye. I must put a point here, that is, my own retirement from service to Alcibiades personally. I had begged off; I couldn't take the pimping. I now served the younger Pericles on the Calliope.
It was like this. Many competed to provide their commanders with feminine flesh. Certain officers had become professional procurers, importing from as far as Egypt. Any beauty stumbled on in the field would be tossed in a bag and presented at his superior's threshold. Sometimes our commander needed two or three a night, just to get to sleep. That was his business. But I could no longer station myself at his doorstep, fending spurned mistresses and aspiring suicides. He laughed when I proffered my resignation.
“I'm astonished you lasted so long, Pommo. You must love me more than I thought.”
This night, returning after the secretaries, I encountered the Gat's Eye, Damon. He had a girl with him, his fiancee, he said. He wished to show her off to Alcibiades. Would I let him in first? I glimpsed enough of the maid's face to see she was a beauty, though no comelier than any of scores who had worn a groove in the courtyard heretofore. Damon and the girl went in. I waited. My turn came.
The place was cleared out, not even junior officers or marines present.
“An embassy was dispatched to Endius this morning on the Paralus,” Alcibiades began, “to convey the generals' official response to the Spartan proposal of peace. You'll be unofficial.
From me only.”
I would carry no papers, Alcibiades informed me, register at no frontiers, and impart my intelligence to no one save Endius himself.
Interrogated upon my task, I may give any story so long as it was false. Alcibiades asked if I knew why he sent me and none other.
“Because Endius will believe you. You need do nothing, Pommo, only be yourself. A soldier on a soldier's errand.”
It came down to this: if Alcibiades could deliver Athens, could Endius deliver Sparta-to end the war and fight as allies in the conquest of Persia?
He laughed. “You don't even blink, Pommo!”
“I have known you a long time.”
“Good. Then listen closely. After Cyzicus, when we slew Mindarus, I had expected the Spartans to send Endius out in his place, or Lysander, who are far their ablest commanders. That they have made Endius peace envoy means his party has fallen.
Lysander will abandon him, if he hasn't already.
“You need waste no time convincing Endius of the wisdom of the course I propose; he has grasped it for years. His reaction, however, will still be suspicion. He will think I seek to command this coalition. Tell him I yield to him, or whomever he appoints in his stead, and if he laughs, which he will, and says he knows I scheme already to displace whatever luckless son of a whore sails across my bows, laugh back and tell him he's right. But that will be then, and such whore's son will have had time to prepare.
“Tell him the ephors have outsmarted themselves electing him as envoy; now I may not come home until I have swept my country's enemies from the sea. He will know this. The point is that then will be too late. If he can bring his country over, it must be soon, or the demos at Athens, inflamed by the victories I will bring them, will make such demands as Sparta may never accede to.
“If Endius asks you of Persia and her vulnerability, tell him what you have seen with your own eyes. No Persian fleet may stand up to Athens' navy, and no land force to Sparta's army. Darius ails.
Succession struggles will tear the empire apart.
“That being said, Endius will assume that simultaneous to this embassy to himself I also dispatch ambassadors to the co
urt of Persia reproposing alliance with them, as I know his countrymen have messengers on the track now to the Great King. Say only that I must play my hand as he his, but Necessity casts the final ballot; someone must trust someone sometime. God willing, it will be he and I.
“Find out what you can of the parties at Lacedaemon, but do not press him on this. He will know what can be done, nor do we need to. Inquire, however, of the feasibility of recruiting Lysander, or even Agis. I welcome either or both. Endius will realize of course that such an alliance between our cities will produce further war between us if it succeeds. Tell him I would rather fight that war then than this war now, which can only destroy us both and leave our mutual enemies triumphant by default.”
What if Endius required me to return with him to Lacedaemon to repeat this overture to others of his party?
“Do so. My needs are for the most and best intelligence you can acquire. No sight-seeing now. If you are spotted at either city, our foes will know you come from me and to whom I have sent you.
The audacity of the stroke gives it a chance. The faintest glimmer, premature, dooms it.”
He issued me money and passwords, assigning a ship to bear me as far as Paros, from which I must proceed on my own. I drew up upon departure. “Are you serious about this, Alcibiades? Or am I hanging my ass over for some ruse or gambit?”
As ever when he laughed, his face regained the flush of youth.
“When we return home, Pommo, which we shall in due course, Athens will hand herself to me on a plate. We will stand then upon the utmost promontory of peril, as expectations of such an order will be released as to make their disappointment a calamity surpassing even Syracuse. Do you know why I call the men and the fleet the Monster? Because they must be fed, tomorrow and the next day, and if they are not, they devour you and me and then themselves.”
He pronounced this lightly, as a gambler long since wagering home and treasure sets without qualm his own life upon the cast. I perceived then, and believe now, that his intrepidity was of an order not of men, but of gods.
“Defeating the enemy is child's play alongside feeding this monster, which itself is nothing alongside the demos of Athens, the Supreme Monster, particularly inflamed as she will be upon our return in glory. Do you understand, my friend? We must place before this monster an enterprise worthy of her appetite.”
He laughed, bright as a boy. “This is how destiny works. As this, tonight at the intersection of Necessity and free will.”
I heard a rustle from the chamber and, turning, glimpsed in shadow a female form advance and recede.
“Now go, old friend,
…nor let dawn o'ertake you, untossed upon the winding main.”
Passing that tavern calling itself Conger Eel, I descried young Damon, alone, drunk and getting drunker. I asked where his girl was.
“I am an imbecile,” he declared. “And merit an imbecile's desserts.”
XXXII
ON THE VIRTUE OF CRUELTY
That girl was Timandra, in whose garments Alcibiades' corpse was wrapped so few years later, in Phrygia, there being no other swathings with which to devise a shroud.
She was twenty-four, then on the straits. She entered his keep and no woman displaced her. She was what he needed; he knew it and she, at once. Those parasites who could not be chased even by armored marines, this slip of a lass scattered with but a glance.
Other than his wife while she lived, I never heard Alcibiades defend a woman save in jest or irony. Now his eyes darkened with such wrath at the least affront to this girl that captains of a thousand approached on tiptoe, lashes lowered as boys. She was like the dove of Trapezus, mated with an eagle, who became an eagle herself.
Much has been made of Alcibiades' lawlessness in his private life, by which his traducers meant that he would fuck an eel if it would hold still long enough. You have met Eunice, Jason. She is no eel, but he took her to his bed one night, or she went of her own, at Samos a year prior to Timandra's advent. This was her way of striking at me, when blows would not suffice, for lack of attendance upon her and her children, of which laxity I was surely culpable. I could not fault her, who was helpless as all women before the tempests of her heart, but must confront him who ought to know better, which prospect engendered no small apprehension, I confess, even in one as myself who, if possessed of no grander accomplishment, at least may say he feared no man face-to-face.
Not that I thought my commander would invoke authority against me, as he would never bend to such, but that upon the passion of the instant he might aim a blow. Such a prodigy was he as athlete and antagonist that I possessed, I felt, only a middling chance, myself armed and he empty-ended. Of course nothing of the sort fell out. Calling him to account, on a moment alone beside the hulk works, his response was of such grave rue that my anger failed at once, replaced, as you may believe or not, by sorrow on his account.
For his incapacity to govern his appetites was the single failing that made him feel mortal.
“She told me she was no longer your woman, that you had cast her into the street. Her pretext for entry to me was want of money.” He met my eye. “I knew it was a fraud and went ahead anyway, such a dog am I.” Then, dropping his hands: “Here, flatten me where we stand, Pommo, and I'll make no matter of it.”
What was I supposed to do, strike our fleet commander, there beside the strip yards?
“You don't even remember her name, do you?”
“My dear, I don't remember any of their names.”
Two evenings later I was training on the seawall when Mantitheus passed in a racing eight, working with ephebes fresh from home. “Got a clean set of spruces?” he called across, meaning the forest-green dress cloak of the fleet marine force. “The pleasure of our company has been requested. And bring your gentleman's manners!”
This was how my second wife was introduced to me, or me to her to put it exactly. She was the daughter of our Samian host of that evening, by name Aurore, whom I loved at once and with all my heart, though her time as my bride was barely a year before heaven took her, such has been my fortune. I never learned what Alcibiades told her father of me, or how it was communicated.
But upon the instant of this gentleman's welcoming Mantitheus and myself at his threshold, it was as if I were a prince anointed.
This was how Alcibiades made up his transgression, do you see?
It was the malformation of his destiny, and our own, that he must make up so many.
Timandra could not change him, but she took him in hand. They did not share the same room on the straits; she would not abide it, absent marriage, nor would she consent to such union, though he appealed for it strenuously. He must come to her bed and return to his own, unless she permitted. Nor did she install her lodgings adjacent his, to spy on him, but in the opposite wing, and as offices as well as quarters. She had means of her own which she managed, but her primary vocation upon entering his domain was to facilitate his practice, not of affairs of war, which were and must be his, but of matters of his well-being and efficient functioning.
Once, ambassadors of the Persians, Mithridates and Arnapes, called upon Alcibiades at his villa on Dog's Head Point and, being welcomed by Timandra in flawless Aramaic, took her for either the general's interpreter or his lover and brushed past her, seeking his offices. She had the marines jerk them up at swordpoint, and when the envoys expressed outrage and demanded her credentials, she told them:
“Gentlemen, it has been my observation among those whom men call great, that these may be addressed in only two ways-either to serve or to contest. In neither of these estates may the great man discover one to whom he may in safety unburden his heart. This is the service I afford our commander, and you, who have had abundant acquaintance of the great, may judge its worth.” She smiled. “Yet I have acted in overhaste to detain you thereby by force. Consider yourselves free, gentlemen, to pass as you wish.”
The envoys tendered that obeisance the Persians call ayana, pr
oper to a prince or minister. “Summon us when you wish, lady, but please accept, until we find more material means of expressing it, our regrets at this infraction.”
From girlhood this Timandra had been pursued by suitors, offering, through her mother the courtesan Phrasicleia, worlds and universes to possess her, much as men had courted Alcibiades in his youth. Perhaps this was a bond between them, an understanding. One would say, observing them in public, that they conducted themselves as chastely as brother and sister; yet it was clear that each was passionately devoted to the other.
Timandra domesticated Alcibiades, if such a word may be applied, and lent order to the often chaotic practice of his genius, managed as it was entirely in his head. But the sword of her advent had an under-edge, which was that the apparition of this female, wielding such influence at the epicenter of a coalition of war, contributed to an atmosphere about Alcibiades that smacked of royalty. What was she anyway? A queen? An imperial gatekeeper?
Yet it must be said that someone had to shield him from the siege of distraction which drew him apart from the business of the fleet. For Thrasybulus and Theramenes, though of equal rank, never experienced such inundation of celebrity. They may walk abroad unmolested by the throngs of petitioners, supplicants, and rank-fuckers whose importunities tormented their counterpart without cease.
But to return to my embassy to Endius. It took a month to reach Athens by the required route; by then the Spartan mission was gone, repudiated by Cleonymus and the demagogues. I set off at once to overhaul them, but they had crossed the Isthmus; I must enter the Peloponnese on my own, at last catching up at the border fort of Karyai.
Endius listened gravely to my recitation of Alcibiades' message, rejoining nothing. Next dawn Forehand appeared, bearing a message for Alcibiades in Endius' hand, whose dispatch, the squire stated in distress, was an act of either extraordinary devotion or plain recklessness. Fearing for his master should the letter be intercepted, Forehand refused to depart. I broke the seal. I myself destroyed the letter, committing its contents to memory, to shield this Peer of Lacedaemon whom I had always respected but for whom, till that day, I had felt scant affection.
Tides of War, a Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War Page 30