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

by Steven Pressfield

  Any other, scanning this hyperborean stadium, must query that fate which had driven him, after twenty-six years of war, to these barrens at this remove from civilization's quick. Yet for him such notion was so alien as to be unthinkable. That site on which he stood was ever, and must be ever, the hub and axis of the universe.

  “One has no need of Athens. I will draw her best to me, one man at a time, as I have drawn you. Look there to the camp. I already claim the ablest marine cadre in the world, the boldest cavalry commanders, the most skilled shipwrights. Money will buy sailors.

  Seuthes' timber will build ships.”

  Yes, if you can control him.

  “Seuthes is keen, Pommo, but he is a savage in awe of me. Where I have moved throughout the war, the nexus of enterprise has followed. Now it will follow me to Thrace; I will compel it. Seuthes cannot summon it on his own and he knows it. For the time being this affords me influence. The army may be his, but mark to whom it turns for command.”

  He indicated the awakening camp.

  “Alcibiades!”

  “Commander!”

  Captains hailed him; mounted officers spurred his way; others advanced at the double to receive his orders.

  “We will take the straits,” Alcibiades continued, meaning the Propontis at Byzantium, which conquest he had already accomplished with a tenth these numbers. “But we will not cut off Athens' grain or exact concessions, rather continue to supply her at our whim.”

  He would do it, I could see, and I must with him. But who will hold these savages, who worship the wind and come and go as ungovernably? “Even yourself, Alcibiades, are not so vain as to imagine they will stick for you.”

  He regarded me wryly. “I'm disappointed in you, old friend. Can you be as blind as these Thracians to what stares you, and them, in the face?”

  And what would that be?

  “Their own greatness.”

  He meant he would lift them to it. “They will not stay for my destiny, Pommo, but their own. For their nation poises like an eagle at the brink of the sky, lacking only the daring to launch and ascend. I will give them that. And when they have seized it, by all the gods, the feats they will perform will transfigure the world.”

  You have heard the stories, Jason, which say he had gone mad, or native. He danced all night, men claimed, to cymbal and timbrel.

  Liquor taken neat had stolen his wits. I myself saw his horse tethered in an alder copse alongside Alexandra's. It was fact that Seuthes grew distant, then hostile. Athens wooed the prince shamelessly, granting citizenship to his sons and dispatching to his court poets, musicians, even hairdressers. Toward the end, reports claimed, such irregularities infiltrated Alcibiades' speech as “the alchemy of acclaim” and “the plain of intercession,” the latter constituting, he averred, that field upon which gods and mortals mingle and convene. He warranted to rule by

  “commanding the mythos” and designated his philosophy “the politics of arete.”

  He began to refer to himself in the third person, they said, and invoke his own spirit as if it were a god. Sorcerers and warlocks sat to each hand. He declared it achievable to stop the sun. His flesh he mutilated, some recited, scorning the stuff as but a mantle to transcend or discard. I witnessed him sacrifice all night, more than once, to Hecate and Necessity. They say Timandra was his mentor in such deviation, a succubus herself and no woman but hellspawn.

  In thrall to her, men alleged, he debarred all from his society to dream and convoked wizards to divine these phantoms' import.

  He claimed once that he could fly, and had soared to Phthia on wings of quicksilver, conferring there with Nestor and Achilles.

  In spring he sent me to Macedonia to procure masts and ships' timbers. There chance set in my path Berenice, Lion's camp woman, by heaven's grace in sheltered circumstance, wife of a teamster. She had endured unimaginable sufferings since Syracuse, yet through all had preserved her lover's historia. This she restored to me, with the chest, the same which holds it now, carved by her new husband. I liked the fellow. He was an unplaned plank, much as his predecessor. He had come from work “down south,” trucking goods in secret out of Attica. Athens' own generals were caching their movables, he reported, so certain were they of the ruin to come.

  I was still there, at Pella in Macedonia, when report came of the final calamity at Aegospotami. In the days before the battle, after Lysander had taken Lampsacus and drawn up his two hundred and ten battleships across the strait from Conon's hundred and eighty, he came down from his castle, did Alcibiades, to the strand where his countrymen's fleet lay. He was garbed in fox skins, they said, hair unbound and falling to midback. Forty horsemen of the Odrysians provided his lifeguard, accoutered more savagely than he. He would bring fifty thousand horse and foot, he pledged, and strike Lysander by land, if Athens' generals would ferry him.

  Lampsacus he would recapture for them, entreating nothing. But they drove him off.

  “You command here no longer, Alcibiades.” This was the speech of the general Philocles, that villain whose concept of the warrior's code included putting forward the motion, carried so infamously by the Assembly at Athens, to strike off the hand of every enemy sailor taken captive.

  Thus was Alcibiades, for the third and final time, banished from the society of his countrymen. Sixteen months later, as that party which bore his murder trekked in his trace upon this selfsame sand, Endius with sorrow remarked that derangement which was at once Alcibiades' curse and genius, and to which, unforswearing, he held true all his life.

  “Nations are too puny for him. His self-conception supersedes statehood, and they are dwarves in his eyes who will not step in his train off the precipice of the world. He is correct of course; that is why he must be made away with.

  For his vision is the future, which the present uncompelled may not now, or ever, abide.”

  XLIX

  AEGOSPOTAMI

  The evolution of our tale [Polemides continued] now mandates address of that defeat which broke our nation. It would make a better story to appoint it a mighty conflagration, with tides of battle alternating between throw and overthrow and the issue in doubt to the ultimate hour. As you know, it had been lost years before.

  Give Lysander credit. This victory, devoid of honor, was yet informed by masterful cunning and forbearance, evincing such discipline and self-restraint, and such shrewd assessment of his enemy's weaknesses, as to render the event itself anticlimax.

  Lysander waited; the fruit fell. None may take this from him, that he gained for his country and her allies that triumph which no other had proved capable of securing over thrice nine years of war.

  I remained in Thrace through much of the winter preceding the battle. We heard of Lysander's agents overthrowing Miletus, putting all democrats to the sword. He took Iasus in Caria, an Athenian ally, executing all the males of military age, selling the women and children into slavery, and razing the city.

  During that final winter Alcibiades suffered a serious fall from a horse. For months he could not walk; to rise from his chair left him white with pain. Savage peoples possess no patience for incapacity.

  Medocus took his army and decamped; Seuthes followed. The prince, who should have hated Alcibiades for his offense with Alexandra, proved his most steadfast upholder. He had him borne by litter to Pactye, sent him a falconer, beasts for sacrifice, and his own doctor. He gave him five towns for his meat, wine, and necessities. When asked what he lacked for sustenance of his spirit, Alcibiades requested three regiments, which he put under Mantitheus, the younger Druses, and Canocles. These he trained as a type of mobile elite unknown heretofore, who could both row and fight as heavy infantry, each packing his own kit and armor, independent of squires or commissariat. When Medocus made sport of these as inconsequential numerically, Alcibiades declared he could triple their ranks in a month and not put out a penny. He simply outfitted them in colors of war and marched them through the Iron Mountains. So many were the youths drawn by the
splendor of this outfit that he raised ten thousand and must turn away ten more.

  At last in the spring his back was better. He could ride. The Thracian clans gather at the rising of Arcturus, and at this festival Alcibiades competed in the horse trials and took the crown, aged forty-six. I believe this put him back in fettle. Lysander had captured Lampsacus, so close across the strait you could see it on a haze less day. Now to the foreshore beneath Alcibiades' stronghold, summoned by what perverse destiny, came Athens' final fleet, commanded by Conon, Adeimantus, Menander, Philocles, Tydeus, and Cephisodotus.

  Polemides' report of this action was necessarily abridged, forasmuch as he himself had been absent, dispatched to Macedonia for ships' timbers, and because he addressed one, myself, already amply acquainted with the consequence. For your sake, my grandson, let me “take up the line” then and flesh out that which our client had passed over in his account addressed to me.

  Aegospotami lies dead across the Hellespont from Lampsacus.

  It is not a harbor, barely an anchorage. There are two small hamlets, no market. Wind is out of the northeast, steady and strong; a rip current runs adjacent the strand, making it difficult to launch and more so to beach, as the vessels of course must put in stern-first.

  The beach itself exceeds ten furlongs, abundant extent for the ships and camp for thirty thousand men. These, however, must hike four or five miles to Sestos to secure their dinner. There is good water at Aegospotami except at tide when the creeks run salt; one must track inland a quarter mile to fresh. It seemed folly to encamp on this inhospitable spit, with the allied city of Sestos so near. Yet to withdraw to that site, as many urged, including Alcibiades, would be to concede Lampsacus to the enemy, and this the generals dared not, recollecting the fate of their predecessors after Arginousai. The commanders burned to draw Lysander to battle. Whatever Aegospotami's liabilities, at least it sat square across from the foe. Lysander could not slip away; sooner or later he must come out and tangle.

  Here, from the Council inquest in the aftermath, this affidavit of my old mate Bruise, who served aboard Hippolyta upon that strand:

  “He come down from his castle. We all turned out, crowding about him. It was Alcibiades, all right, but gotten up like a savage.

  You know, sirs, how he took on the colors of them he slept with.

  The generals wouldn't let him address the troops, but every word he spoke spread like fire through the camp. He didn't say nothing that the men hadn't heard over and over: that this patch was a death trap, put back to Sestos. You're vulnerable, he said, scattering across miles to get your grub. What if Lysander puts the rush on? But we couldn't vacate, or Lysander'd scoot. What would come next, but the Salaminia putting in from Athens, calling the generals home to be tried for dereliction? We all knew how that would end.

  “Alcibiades brought food, but the generals wouldn't let the men take it. He'd provide a market, he swore, or even get us fed, free, off the country. He had his Thracians, he said, ten thousand, trained for foot, horse, and sail. Seuthes was coming, and Medocus too.

  Another fifty thousand. He would hand these over to Athenian command, taking no share for himself.

  “If they wouldn't take his troops, then give him one ship. He'd serve under any commander they named. But they couldn't do that neither. To give him a nibble was to hand over the whole cheese.

  Beat Lysander and all glory goes to him; lose and the shit rains down on us. How could the generals say aye to that? They'd be executed the second they set foot in Attica.

  “He proposed service not as a ship's captain, but a common marine. They drove him out of the camp. He was too big, see? He made 'em all dwarves beside him. And they was right. In the commanders' eyes he was Athens' worst enemy; they feared him more than Lysander.”

  For four dawns Lysander drew his force up in midstrait in battle order. For four days the fleet of Athens set up opposite. Each noon Lysander pulled back to Lampsacus; each noon the Athenians withdrew to Aegospotami. Each day our men must disperse for their meal, while Lysander's, with a city at their back, had theirs to hand beside their ships. The fifth noon Lysander ran the same drill: draw up, draw back. Athens' fleet followed suit. But this day, when our sailors scattered to fetch their dinner…

  “They came down on us stripped and at the triple-two hundred and ten men-of-war, forty-two thousand men. I don't have to tell you what chance we had. There's only one way to board a trireme-by companies, in order. But how do you do that with crews flushed over four miles of shell and pebble? Hippolyta got off with one bank manned. On our flanks Pandia and Relentless didn't muster even that. No one even tried to bring the ship to bear. We just ran for it. They holed us fore and aft.

  Whoever was in the water was dead. The rest the Spartans took apart on the strand.

  “Lysander had drilled them for it; they knew the ground and cut off both creeks and every out-track. Their ships got iron into ours and towed 'em off. Lysander was smart; no heavy infantry to bog down in the sand, just peltasts and javelineers. And they didn't come charging wildly, but formed up in companies, quartering the field like hounds. You looked back and saw scarlet everywhere.

  “He collected twenty thousand, did Lysander. Sold the islanders and slaves, hanging on to only Athenian citizens.”

  These were carried in captivity to Lampsacus, drawn up before a tribunal, and executed as oppressors of Greece. By the time of the Council inquest, the galleys had begun arriving at the Piraeus, bearing the cargo of this slaughter. Lysander restored to Athens the corpses of her sons, that none may impute impiety to him, but more so to break the city's heart. For though she no longer possessed a fleet or sufficient manpower to fit one, yet many had vowed to resist to the end, with bricks and stones if necessary, atop the Acropolis, precipitating themselves sooner than submit to the foe.

  Lysander transhipped the bodies naked, shorn of all identifying articles and garments. This was to compel the officers to layout the dead in mass, as a necropolis, that the people, to identify sons and husbands, must tread among lanes and boulevards of the fallen, peering into each face, seeking their own. By this ordeal Lysander sought to appall them with the issue of defiance and render their hearts vitiated of the will to resist.

  His corps now comprised the whole of Greece, backed by Cyrus' limitless gold. Agis' army besieged the city; Lysander's fleet blockaded her by sea.

  On the sixteenth of Munychion, the same date upon which Athens and her allies had at Salamis preserved Greece from the tyranny of Persia, Lysander's armada entered the Piraeus unopposed. That party headed by Theramenes turned over the city.

  Two battalions of Theban heavy infantry seized the Areopagus and shuttered all government vocations. A Corinthian regiment grounded arms in the agora; divisions of Elis, Olynthus, Potidaea, and Sicyon broke down the gates and began demolishing the fortifications of the Piraeus, while others of Oeniadae, Mytilene, Chios, and the empire, now liberated, commenced to the music of flute girls the dismantling of the Long Walls. Two brigades of Spartan and Peloponnesian marines, including brasidioi and the freed helots, the neodamodeis, under Pantocles, took possession of the Acropolis. They sacrificed to Athena Nike and made their camp upon the stones between the Erechtheum and the Parthenon.

  The last division, composed of Lacedaemonian marines and mercenaries of Macedonia, Aetolia, and Arcadia, took possession of the Round Chamber and the Assembly site on the Hill of the Pnyx.

  Among these was Polemides, clad in scarlet.

  L

  UPON ROAD'S TURN

  My aunt [Polemides resumed], despite her loathing of my conduct and myself, did not debar me from hoisting her belongings onto a carter's flat and herself upon the teamster's seat. She moved to Acharnae with me, to take up residence at Road's Turn. In the city tyranny reigned. The Thirty, as they were called, backed by a Spartan garrison, consolidated their power through the courts and by acts of terror. I sought repeatedly to evacuate my brother's former wife and children; but Theonoe was a to
wn woman and would not come. For two months my aunt and I provided each other's sole company; I at work on the land, she cooking, washing, mending, and in all ways commanding the household, servantless, as she had her husband's, staffed by scores.

  The lawlessness in the city at last convinced my sister-in-law to vacate; she came to us on the first of Hecatombaion, Lion's birthday, with her daughter, my niece, and the lass's two babes (her young husband missing with the fleet). Her son, my nephew, had fled to exile; he was nineteen and a partisan, vowing never to reconcile to his nation's vanquishers. Theonoe brought with her a boy, nine, and a girl, seven, issue of her second marriage to a mate of the merchant fleet, lost in another nameless action. Eunice I had tracked to a tenement at Acte. She would not let our children near me, fearing my influence upon the boy.

  In town the democracy had been abolished, the citizenry disfranchised and disarmed. A new constitution was being drafted, or so the Thirty assured the people. Months passed and no article appeared. Instead there were lists. Your name appeared on one and you were seen no more.

  What had been the popularly elected executive, the Board of Ten Generals, no longer existed. The Areopagus may not convene.

  Exiles were brought home, meaning those banished heretofore as enemies of the democracy. These were now either recruited to the Thirty or engaged as their agents. The courts were shuttered for civil litigation, which matter was perceived as forwarding the cause of the commons; when they opened again, it was as engines of persecution. As under all tyrannies prosecutorial legitimacy was extended to the preemptive. A man may be executed not alone for acts committed but for those he might commit. Nor were such arraignments confined to political targets. The Thirty went after anyone with money. The toll was fifteen hundred and counting.

  Those democrats who ducked the executioner were packed off to Lysander's service, the front lines.