Tides of War (40 page)

There was a seawall shielding the planters’ estates, and from atop
this the defenders unleashed a fire of ungodly concentration as the ships drove onto the muck flat beneath. The foe hurled stones and javelins and the wicked double-edged darts the Boeotians call “nut-cutters” and the Spartans “hatpins.” I felt two rake the backs of my thighs and was seized with fury, diced by these utensils. A fist hauled me to my feet. “What are you doing—rat-holing?”

It was Alcibiades.

He rushed forward onto the prow, flanked by the others of our party, Timarchus, Macon, and Xenocles, whose office it was with me to protect him. Marines in armor rode both catheads and the wales at the cutwater, even the rams themselves. The trumpet blared “Back water!”; oarsmen set into the straps of their footboards and heaved forward on the beat. Marines were pouring over the prow and both gunwales. Alcibiades had sprung to the strand, shouting for grapnels.

The Lacedaemonians were above us, supported by the Persian Pharnabazus’ infantry and mobs of Magnesian mercenaries, whom one recognizes by their beards, jet as ink, which they wear parted and netted. Furious fire poured from the foe. We wore only felt caps; you had to, or you couldn’t pick out the flung ash as it shrieked toward your man, to deflect it. The Athenians foundered, fighting uphill in the sand. Now the Spartans made their rush. The lines crashed along the length of the strand. I heard Macon at my shoulder screaming profanity. Where was Alcibiades?

He had burst through on his own. We could see him, churning upslope into the no-man’s-land between the Spartan rush and their beached ships. One cannot know the meaning of rage until he has served to protect such a man from his own fire for victory. Alcibiades wore no helmet and bore only his shield and a marine ax. He reached the first ship and sank a grapnel. Two of the foe fought to rip it free; he stove in the first’s skull with his shield, hamstrung the second with his ax. He hammered the iron into the timbers of the enemy prow. We of the lifeguard must now emulate him. There is a terrible skill to defending the flung javelin, particularly when one must set his own flesh as shield before another. I have never cursed any as our commander; I spit at him and slung stones; so did the others. He never saw a thing.

Three and a half years later, before Byzantium, I attended a nightlong
drinking bout. Someone had put the query “How does one lead free men?” “By being better than they,” Alcibiades responded at once.

The symposiasts laughed at this, even Thrasybulus and Theramenes, our generals.

“By being better,” Alcibiades continued, “and thus commanding their emulation.” He was drunk, but on him it accounted nothing, save to liberate those holdings nearest to his heart. “When I was not yet twenty, I served in the infantry. Among my mates was Socrates the son of Sophroniscus. In a fight the enemy had routed us and were swarming upon our position. I was terrified and loading up to flee. Yet when I beheld him, my friend with gray in his beard, plant his feet on the earth and seat his shoulder within the great bowl of his shield, a species of
eros,
life-will, arose within me like a tide. I discovered myself compelled, absent all prudence, to stand beside him.

“A commander’s role is to model
arete,
excellence, before his men. One need not thrash them to greatness; only hold it out before them. They will be compelled by their own nature to emulate it.”

Along the length of the strand Athenians bore cable and iron upon the foe. Alcibiades dragged the first ship off, and another and another. Mindarus’ troops held as only the Spartan-commanded can, in the face of Athenian reinforcements under Theramenes and more, including cavalry, driven on by Thrasybulus, the Brick. Alcibiades fell three times, seeking the Spartan commander. At last Mindarus’ own wounds took him down. When the enemy broke and fled, Alcibiades ravened upon their backs and every other followed, and when he dropped they dashed to his side and lifted him, in terror that some fatal dart had found their champion. But it was exhaustion only. And I, too, who had so few seasons past pledged to bear hell’s bane to this man, could no longer recall his crimes, even my own brother’s murder. All were eclipsed in that flame which he bore for our country and by which he conducted her to triumph.

I cite a moment from the sea fight earlier that day, not to panegyrize him, for all testimony is superfluous in that cause, but as exemplar of this beast, this form of courage he evinced which one glimpses in a lifetime as frequently as a griffin or a centaur.

The sea trap had been sprung: Alcibiades’ forty triremes emerging
as he had planned out of the squall line had lured the enemy’s sixty to pursue, thinking ours the whole of the Athenian force. These crews of Athens, the Samos fleet, were so good that when they fled, or even pretended, they maintained such order that the helmsmen must cry across to row more sloppily and make better feint of terror. Antiochus was Alcibiades’ helmsman. At his signal the lines came-about employing the Samian
anastrophe,
or “countermarch,” where the ships do not put about simultaneously, making rearmost foremost, but wheel in sequence of line-ahead, as chariots round the turning post. Alcibiades ordered this, the more demanding maneuver, to unnerve the enemy, to let him know he had been suckered and must pay.

Now Thrasybulus’ triples fell on the Spartans from astern. From concealment behind the promontory they emerged in four columns of twelve, pulling, as the chanty goes, with every shaft including the skipper’s wooden dick. They cut Mindarus off from the harbor. From the shoulder of the squall Theramenes’ thirty-six materialized, blocking all flight to the north. Alcibiades was shouting for Mindarus’ ensign and vowing a talent to the lookout who found it for him.

The Spartans fled for the shore two thousand yards distant. Alcibiades’ division pursued from the flank, picking a line to overhaul the foremost vessel. This was a squadron commander’s and she, sighting
Antiope
’s admiral’s ensign, made to make it a fight. At two hundred yards the foe wheeled to port, executed a cutback around two of her own ships whose oars had fouled, and came back at us. Antiochus slipped her rush, passing with such swiftness across her bows that her helm, hard over seeking to strike, put her onto her sisters, each furiously backing water to clear. Antiochus holed two almost at leisure, but striking the third amidships as she fled,
Antiope
’s ram became embedded; the momentum of the fleeing craft levered us against her flank-to-flank, snapping oars like kindling. As the ships crunched together, Spartan marines let fly with everything they had. Our men plunged for cover as the fusillade swept
Antiope
’s deck. I heard a bellow of rage and glanced up. Alone and exposed stood Alcibiades amid the storm of steel, scouring the sea for his rival in flight. “Mindarus!” he cried. “Mindarus!”

There is a causeway on the Macestos plain, just a farm dike, to which the Spartans had fled from the rout on the strand. There in the dusk their infantry were making a stand of spectacular stubbornness,
supported by Pharnabazus’ satrapal guard, which had dashed up from Dascylium. The clash funneled to a neck a wagon-width wide, while round this the fight slogged on in the muck, flax fields which the foe had flooded to impede the Athenian advance. Horses of both sides sank to their barrels; cavalrymen slugged it out atop mounts dying and already dead, which beasts remained upright, marooned in the mire.

Alcibiades galloped upon this impasse, fresh from the shore. Ahead squatted the bottleneck. Three squadrons of our cavalry and above a thousand infantry hung up where levees conjoined. A furlong ahead could be seen enemy horse advancing, with clouds of light troops and militia, farmers wielding pitchforks and muckrakes, driven by their masters’ whips. If we couldn’t break through we’d be overrun. You could get round by dikes east and west but there was no time, and if even a dozen of the foe beat the party to a juncture, there would be no breaking through.

Alcibiades rode a mare named Mustard, which had been Agasicles’, Thrasybulus’ adjutant, who had been slain by the ships. A horse, uncoerced by its rider, knows how to make its way through mire. Alcibiades slung the beast’s bridle and, taking about forty cavalry and two hundred infantry, set off through the slough. Mustard cut a thousand yards off the go-round, mounting muck-slathered up a dikeway in the foe’s rear. From there Alcibiades led the assault on the Spartan infantry, slaying their commander, Amompharetus the son of Polydamos, a knight and victor at Nemea. If you go even now to the Eurysacium at Athens you will see, on the left as you enter, a matchless bronze of a warhorse, no taller than a man’s hand, with this dedication:

That afternoon Mindarus was slain, the Spartans’ peerless general. Of the foe’s total ninety ships, fifty-eight were sunk and twenty-nine captured. His brigades of Lacedaemon and the Peloponnese were routed on the plain of the Macestos by Thrasybulus and Alcibiades, along with the mercenaries and Persian cavalry supporting them. Next night found Alcibiades master of Cyzicus, calling in the carters to load up contributions in cash, and within twenty days before Perinthus and Selymbria as well, raising more money, and fortifying Chrysopolis to bind the straits
and exact a tenth from all passing, to fund the fleet. This dispatch, intercepted, from the remnant Spartans to their home:

I need not recite for you, Jason, the litany of Alcibiades’ victories. You were there. You won your prize of valor at Abydos and earned it too. Did you know I forwarded the text of your commendation? That was one of my duties in those days. I see you flush; I’ll embarrass you no further, though I recall the citation, word for word.

To the young soldiers and sailors of the fleet, they for whom these victories under Thrasybulus and Alcibiades were all they had known, such bounty seemed no more than the merited produce of their preeminence, their birthright as Athenians. But for those of our generation, who had cut our teeth on plague and calamity, the experience of such ascendancy, each conquest succeeding so swiftly upon its predecessor, arose as if within a dream. No
pharmakon
like victory, the proverb says. And though we who bore the scars of Syracuse could not bring ourselves to trust them at first, when the wins kept coming, Bitch’s Tomb, Abydos, Methymna, Fool’s Cap Bay, Clazomenae, the Hollows, Chios, and Nine-Mile Cove, then second Chios and Erythrae, both on the same day, at last we, too, began to believe, as the youths from the start, that this run was neither fluke nor fortune but that at last conjoined upon one field Athens possessed such ships, crews, and commanders as to render her, barring the sons of Earth themselves ascending from Tartarus, invincible.

History was being made. A blind man could see it. Honoring Lion’s wish of the quarries, I set about enlarging his chronicle, or at least preserving within my sea chest such documents as I imagined one day in retirement editing and publishing in my brother’s name. I went so far as to record notes and even sketch terrain. Only later did I grasp that a recounting of actions or tactics was not what interested me, or anyone.

What held us all was not what our commander did, but how he did it. It was clear that he manipulated some force to which others commanded no access. Though he possessed on occasion superiority of might, he never needed it to best the foe. He was always clement to the vanquished, nor was it in him to pursue vengeance against those who
had worked him harm. He acted thus, not out of sentiment or altruism, but because he reckoned such actions ignoble and inelegant. Here, a communication to Tissaphernes, whom he called friend despite the notorious arrest at Sardis and after the Persian had bid ten thousand darics for his head.

From the succeeding paragraph:

Alcibiades was an abominable speller. When he worked late, he got worse and would shake awake anyone to hand. “Brick, sit up. How do you spell
epiteichismos
?” His bane was inversion of letters; his secretaries teased that he even wrote with a lisp. Thus many half-composed missives found their way to trash and from there to my chest.

In this note, addressed to his great enemy Anytus at Athens, but intended for circulation among the political clubs beneath his sway, Alcibiades seeks to allay the fears of those who had brought the indictments which led to his exile—fears, that is, that he, returning at the head of an all-conquering fleet, would exact vengeance upon them.