Tides of War (38 page)

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.

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.

“I am not…” Alcibiades began, and, when his voice once more faltered, the heralds picked up that portion and relayed it as is.

“I am not…”

“…not the man I was…”

“…not the man I was…”

“…moments ago, mounting this platform.”

Again the heralds flung the phrase up the amphitheater. At last Alcibiades found his voice and, gesturing his seconds to mount farther, resumed.

“I had meant to cast myself in the role of savior. To present myself before you as one who brings with him, for your deliverance, alliance with that nation whose treasure and naval might will bring the victory which, unaided, you have thus far been unable to achieve. I had planned to address you as a commander and to wring from you a pledge of fidelity for the effort we must now make. But the sight of you…” Again his voice failed. “…the sight of you, my countrymen, breaks my heart. I am struck through with shame. It is not you who must pledge, but I. Not you who must serve, but I. That Athens which exiled me…”