Endius to Alcibiades, greetings.
I dispatch these contents, my friend, knowing that their discovery may purchase my death. You are right; I may not contest the wisdom of the course you propose. I cannot help however. Not that our party has been overthrown; its agenda holds sway. But I myself have been displaced. Lysander now dominates. I can no longer control him.
Hear what I tell you. Lysander has made himself mentor to young Agesilaus, King Agis' brother, who will himself be king.
Through the youngster he has made Agis his patron, who hates you and you know why. Agis will welcome your head or your liver, but no other part.
Lysander intrigues tirelessly for appointment as fleet admiral.
He believes he can handle the Persian, unlike our other navarchs who could neither dissimulate their contempt for the barbarian nor their despising of themselves for groveling for his gold.
You know this yourself of Lysander's character. To him a lie and the truth are one; he employs which will effect his ends.
Justice in his view is a topic of the salon, personal pride a luxury the warrior may not afford. He despises as fools those of our country who will not bend the knee to the Persian, as he himself has before Agis and others, each prostration advancing himself and his influence. Lysander is by no means evil but by all means effective. He sees human nature for what it is, unlike yourself, who cannot resist sounding it for that which it may become. For what you must brave in him, you may reprove only yourself, as he has studied in your academy and disremembered nothing. All Spartan commanders are as children beside him, as they understand the fight and nothing more. Lysander understands the rest. He grasps the workings of the Athenian democracy, specifically the fickleness of the demos. He believes you capable of vanquishing all, save your own countrymen. They will destroy you, he contends, as every other of excellence before you. In other words, he does not fear you. He wants a fight. He believes he can win.
Lysander possesses all your virtues of war and diplomacy and one other. He is cruel. He will order assassination, torture, and murder wholesale, which are but tools to him, as perjury, bribery, subornation. He will not scruple to apply terror even to his own allies. Like Polycrates the tyrant, he believes his friends will be more grateful when he gives back what he has taken than if he had never taken it at all. Victory is his solitary standard.
Lastly, he believes he knows you. He understands your character. He has studied you, all the time you were in our country, knowing one day he would face you. Do not expect a fair fight. He will demur and dilate, absent all pride as a warrior, then appear from nowhere and overwhelm you.
It will come as cold comfort but I believe the course you outline, of Greek alliance against Persia, is one Lysander himself would champion were it politic at the moment.
I offer this page from his brief: do not undervalue cruelty or the employment of main force. Your style is to eschew coercion, which to you demeans coercer and coerced and backfires in the long run. But, my friend, everything backfires in the long run.
Be of stringent care. You may have met your match in this fellow.
The war for the Hellespont continued; Alcibiades' victories mounted. Lysander failed, for that year and the next, to achieve his posting as fleet admiral.
As for myself, I served at sea with the younger Pericles and in shore units, primarily under Thrasybulus. I paid court, by post and in person when action bore me south to Samos, to my heart's joy, Aurore. With time, acquaintance deepened as well with her father and brothers, for whom I came to feel such fondness and regard as I had known before only with Lion and my own father.
I returned to Alcibiades' squadrons in time for the capitulation of Byzantium. This was the sternest fighting of the Hellespontine War, against frontline Spartan troops, Peers and perioikoi of Selassia and Pellana, reinforced by Arcadian mercenaries and Boeotian heavy infantry of the Cadmus regiment, the same who had hurled us back on Epipolae. At one point a thousand Thracian cavalry under Bisanthes made a rush upon the Spartans, whose numbers had been cut to below four hundred, fighting before the walls all night. The Spartans carved them up, horse and all.
When at last the enemy gave way, overwhelmed by our numbers and the desertion of their Byzantine allies, it took all of Alcibiades' force, in person and shield in hand, to hold the Thracian princes from butchering them to the last man. He had to order our troops to drive the Spartans into the sea, as if to drown them, before the blood-mad tribesmen, who fear water more than you or I fear hell, would give back.
Our ships may not be beached that night, but ride to anchor, bearing the enemy dead and wounded. I assisted a physician of the foe, whom my tongue in error addressed as “Simon” more than once.
The strait lay choked in the morning, with smoking timbers and bodies drifting in the eddies where the outbound current abuts the in. Alcibiades ordered the channel swept and bonfires lighted on both shores, Byzantium on the European, Chalcedon the Asian.
Athens held them both now and with them the Hellespont.
At last Alcibiades commanded the Aegean.
At last he may go home.
Book VII
FEEDING THE MONSTER
XXXIII
THE BLESSINGS OF PEACE
I must insert this chapter on my own, my grandson, as it bears powerfully upon our client's fate, though he himself elected not to confide these matters as part of his history, deeming them too personal. They concern the Samian maiden Aurore daughter of Telecles, a privileged introduction to whom, you recall, was Alcibiades' way of requiting to our client his own indiscretion with Eunice.
Polemides took the girl to wife.
This was close after Byzantium, in the flush of victory, and before Alcibiades' return to Athens. As with the bride of his youth, Phoebe, Polemides passed over this matter with reticence. That which I gleaned came from the testimony of others and, largely, correspondence discovered thereafter in Polemides' chest.
Here, a formal decree from the archon's office at Athens, granting Athenian citizenship to the bride Aurore (as all Samians were accorded, several years later, for their steadfast service to our cause). Another parcel, from his great-aunt Daphne at Athens, contained apparently a golden hair clip, once Polemides' mother's, as a wedding gift for his bride.
In this letter to his aunt Polemides recounts incidents of the wedding, describing with pride his new father- and brothers-in-law, both officers of the fleet, with whom already he feels a bond as friends as well as kinsmen.
…lastly, my dear, I wish you could have seen her who has, heaven alone knows why, consented to be my wife. A match for me twice over in intellect, possessed of a beauty both chaste and passionate, and of such strength of character as to make my own pride as a warrior seem like a boy's idle conceit. I experience in her presence such hopes as I have not permitted my heart to entertain since the passing of my own Phoebe, that is, the wish for children, life at home, a family. I thought I would never feel these again; to you only, and her, may I own such a confidence. To bring innocents into a world as this seemed not only irresponsible but wicked. Yet with but a glance at this dear girl's face, before I had heard her voice or spoken to her a word, such despair as I have borne so long fell away as if it had never existed. Hope is indeed eternal, as the poets say.
From station with the fleet, to his bride at Samos:
…before you, it seemed the next milestone I would cross would be my own death, which I anticipated at any moment, marveling that it had not found me sooner. All I thought and did arose from this resolution, simply to be a good soldier till the end. I was an old man, dead already. Now with the miracle of your apparition, I am young again. Even my crimes are washed clean. I am reborn in your love and the simple prospect of a life with you, apart from war.
Aurore becomes pregnant. This from her to him with the fleet: It's a good thing you can't see me, my love. I'm porky as a piglet.
Haven't seen my toes in a month. I waddle about, clutching at walls to
keep from toppling. Father has moved my bed downstairs, fearing my clumsiness. I gobble desserts and double portions. What fun! All about wish to be pregnant too, even the little girls, with pillows on their bellies. The whole farm has caught the contagion. My joy-our joy-has spilled over onto them..
Another from the young bride:
… where are you, my love? It tortures me, not to know where your ship sails, though, if I knew, my torment would be equally excruciating. You must preserve yourself! Be a coward. If they make you fight, run away! I know you won't, but I wish it. Please be careful. Don't volunteer for anything!
From the same letter:
…you must now remark your life as mine, for if you fall, I perish with you.
And this:
Grant women rule and this war would end tomorrow. Madness!
Why, when all good things flow from peace, must men seek war?
Again from her:
…life seemed so complicated to me. I felt like a beast who rushes this way and that within its cage, yet discovers only more bars and walls. At once with you, my love, all is simple. Just to live, and love, and be loved by you! Who needs heaven, when we have such joy now?
Polemides responds:
It daunts me, my love, that I must now prove worthy of you. How shall I ever?
He takes steps to dissever himself from Eunice. He signs over half his pay to her and her children, makes application for citizenship for her and them, citing his years of service and the hardships Eunice and the children have borne at his side. He arranges transport for them to Athens and applies to his uncles and elder kinsmen to look to their care until his return.
This from his bride:
…I have learned from my father and brothers that a man's conduct at war may not be accounted by the measures of peace, certainly not one as yourself whose youth and manhood have been spent in service far from home and constant peril of his life. That existence which you have made before we met is yours; I may not judge it. I wish only that I might help, if that were possible without causing by our happiness unhappiness in those we wish to aid. Know that those children of the woman Eunice, yours or not, will receive support from our resources, my own and ours, yours and mine, and my father's.
Polemides dreams of reestablishing his father's farm, Road's Turn, at Acharnae, and settling there with his bride and child.
Peace, or victory which will drive the Spartans from Attica, is everything to him now. He writes his aunt, seeking to bring her, too, back to the land, and to those crofters who served during his father's term. He even prices seed and orders, at a bargain, an iron ploughs hare from a merchantman's inventory at Methymna. He ships this implement aboard the freighter Eudia, whose passage homeward is escorted by the fleet of Alcibiades, with Polemides again aboard the flagship Antiope, as her supreme commander returns to Athens in glory.
XXXIV
STRATEGOS AUTOKRATOR
Alcibiades had wished to return at break of winter, but elections at Athens were delayed; he must abide abroad, raiding the Spartan shipyards at Gytheium and killing time at other such offices. At last reports came. They could not have been better.
Alcibiades had been elected again to the Board of Generals; as was Thrasybulus, who had brought him home from Persia; Adeimantus, his mate and fellow exile; and Aristocrates, who had championed his recall before the Assembly. The other generals were either neutrals or men of independent virtue. Cleophon, leader of the radical democrats and Alcibiades' most bitter foe, had been supplanted, replaced by Archedemus, a thug but an amenable one, and a solicitor of Critias, Socrates' close friend.
Thrasyllus was at Athens already with the main of the fleet, whose crews would back their commander in anything. Yet still Alcibiades, whose sentence of death had not yet been rescinded, harbored apprehensions of the people's disposition. It was his cousin Euryptolemus' device, communicated by post from Athens, that the warships' arrival, only a flag squadron of twenty, be preceded by grain galleys (twenty-seven waited at Samos then, with another fourteen due out of the Pontus) and that these be known vessels of prominent houses, particularly those who had suffered most from Spartan depredations, and laden for the city, to recall to her that bounty set at her table by the son she had scorned.
This was only good manners, Euro's letter noted, as one would be rude to appear for a feast empty-handed.
So the galleys went ahead. These made port at Piraeus two days prior to the squadron, accompanied by a fast courier with instructions to return, reporting the vessels' reception. But the arrival of the merchantmen precipitated such elation in the port, with the news that Alcibiades' ships followed, that the people would not let the cutter reembark until a proper reception may be mustered to accompany her. Meanwhile the squadron, advancing unapprised of what awaited, began to fear. Beating round Cape Sounium into a fierce westerly, the lead vessels, descrying a score of triremes bearing down out of the sun so that their ensigns could not be made out, the younger Pericles, officer of the van, had brought the formation to line abreast to defend itself when it was realized that the advancing vessels bore not hazard but welcome, garlanded, and laden with parties of kinsmen and notables.
Still Alcibiades feared treachery. Beneath his cloak he wore not the light ceremonial cuirass, but a bronze breastplate of battle.
Directions were rehearsed to the marine party to remain about him at alert. The ships, which had been advancing in two columns, deployed to singles approaching the harbor entrance at Eetoniea.
Antiope layoff, seventh in column, that she may put about at once in the event of duplicity. We could see the ramparts now.
Reflections flared, as from spearpoints and armor of massed infantry. The flagship bore sidescreens “at the step,” primed for deployment. But as the vessels drew abreast of the bastion, the men could see the flares were not of missiles or armor, but of ladies' vanities and children's sundazzlers. Clouds of wreaths descended. Youths launched candies upon the breeze, suspended from the spruce spinners that old men whittle wharfside, which can soar for miles on the updrafts. These now came winging overhead, clattering against the hull and splashing amid the oar sweep.
Small craft swarmed, hailing the heroes. It seemed the entire city had taken holiday. The ships came parallel to the Choma now, where the trierarchs of the fleet for Syracuse had assembled so gravely before the apostoleis to receive the blessing and the Council's order to launch. Such a mob now swarmed upon the mole as to hide it entire. Atalanta advanced to our starboard, obscuring the vantage. Amid the throng, glimpsed through the rigging of our squadronmate's stern, ascended the figure of Euryptolemus, bald dome reflecting. With one hand this noble embraced himself, as if to fix his self-command; the other, with exuberant welcome, waved his straw sun hat.
“Can that be you, cousin?” Alcibiades spoke in a whisper, and, bending toward the apparition, permitted his arm to respond.
Ahead rose the pediment of the Bendidium and, beneath, the raked beaching ground of Thracian Artemis. Kratiste and Alcippe already executed reversions in place, for the bumpers to capture their sterns. Garlanded ephebes manned the shoring blocks awaiting Antiope. A pinging metallic clatter began to assault the deck. The people were throwing money. Boys swarmed over the gunwales and scrapped with their mates for the showering coins.
Where the Northern Wall abuts the Carriage Road, that dolorous highway I had trekked alone years past, returning from Potidaea; there where the hovels of the damned had sprawled during the Plague; now this gauntlet of horror had metamorphosed into a boulevard of joy. Cavalry mounts awaited the commanders.
Their hooves trod a carpet of lavender. Though the other generals rode in prominence, the mob paid no heed but rounded only to behold Alcibiades. Fathers pointed him out to sons, and women, elder dames as well as maidens, clutched at their bosoms and swooned.
He was borne to the pnyx, where the hillsides overflowed with celebrants, roosting even in trees, like birds. There had been a ceremony on the way before the Eleusinium.
Here at the hour of Alcibiades' banishment, the King Archon had mounted before the multitude to ordain the striking of the expelled's name from the katalogos of citizens and a stele of infamy erected, that the people never forget his perfidy and treason. Now advanced a new basileus, trembling, to present to this same man the reconstituted title to his holdings, within the city and his horse property at Erchiae, which had been confiscated at the time of his exile, and a suit of armor, the belated award of his prize of valor for Cyzicus. The stele had been broken apart, the archon pronounced, and cast into the sea.
Throughout these rites Alcibiades had maintained a bearing so stern and remote as to evoke in the people a species of dread. For the man before whom they now danced in supplication was no longer that princeling discharged so stonily beneath their whim but a war-scored commander at the head of such a fleet and army as at a word may seize the state and make dice of them all. The congregation searched the thunderheads of his brow, as children caught at mischief sound their headmaster as he grasps the rod.
And when he suffered the multitude's recantations with impatience and even disdain, handing off to aides the various encomia and bills of praise without even a glance, the crowd rustled in deepening trepidation.
In the square before the Amazoneum the triumphal wagons caught up with the procession, bearing the ensigns and warpeaks of the enemy, their rams, and the shields and armor of her generals.
Tides of War, a Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War Page 31