Tides of War (45 page)
Authors: Steven Pressfield
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.
FEEDING THE MONSTER
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 ploughshare 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.
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.
