Tides of War (67 page)

NIKE
    Goddess of victory.

OBOL
    One-sixth of a drachma, a “spit.”

OIKOS
    A household.

OLIGOI
    Aristocrats, “the few.”

OPSON
    A “relish” at dinner; that which one dipped his bread into.

OTHISMOS
    In ancient warfare, the scrum or shoving match that occurred when two close-ranked formations clashed.

PAEAN
    Hymn sung by Dorian infantry—Spartan, Syracusan, Argive, but not Athenian (who were Ionian)—as they marched into battle.

PALAMEDES
    Greek warrior of Trojan War, accused unjustly by Odysseus; emblematic of the man wrongfully charged.

PANATHENAEA
    The great festival at Athens in honor of Athena.

PANOPLIA
    Full armor for a heavy infantryman: helmet, breastplate, shield, greaves (shin guards). You had to be fairly well off to afford a
panoplia
.

PARAKATABOLE
    Fee deposited at Athens in arbitration of inheritance cases, equal to one-tenth the value of the disputed property.

PEER
    A full citizen of Sparta.

PELOPONNESE
    The mainland of southern Greece, literally “isle of Pelops,” an ancient hero.

PERICLES
    Athenian statesman and general of the mid-fifth century, “the Olympian” presided over the Golden Age of Athenian democracy, empire, and artistic achievement. Kinsman and guardian of Alcibiades.

PERIOIKOI
    The “neighbors” or “dwellers-around” of the allied towns outlying Sparta. Autonomous but of noncitizen status and required to follow the Spartans “whithersoever they should lead.”

PHARMAKON
    Painkiller, pl.
pharmaka
.

PHARNABAZUS
    Persian satrap or governor of Phrygia and the Hellespont. Capital at Dascylium.

PHOINIKIS
    The scarlet cloak of Lacedaemon.

PHRATRIAI
    Brotherhoods of kinsmen at Athens.

PHTHIA
    Achilles’ home region in Thessaly.

PILOS
    A cap of felt, often worn as padding beneath the bronze helmet.

PNYX
    A hill southwest of the Acropolis on which the Athenian Assembly met, in the open air, to conduct its deliberations.

POLEMARCH
    “War leader.”

POLIS
    City-state; pl.
poleis
.

PORNE
    Whore; pl.
pornai
.

PROSTATES
    Bow officer of a trireme; “he who stands forward.”

PRYTANEIS
    The fifty “presidents” at Athens who represented their tribe in the Council of five hundred. Each group served for a tenth of the year, a prytany, as the executive committee of the Council and Assembly.

PSEUDOS
    A lie.

PYTHIOI
    Spartan priests of Apollo; warriors themselves, who also performed the priestly offices of battle.

ROUND CHAMBER
    The
Tholos,
where the executive committee of the Council, the
prytaneis,
met at Athens.

SAMOS
    Island of the Aegean and staunch ally of Athens; her overseas naval bastion throughout the war in the East.

SCIRITAE
    Spartan rangers of the district of Sciritis.

SICELS
    Non-Greek inhabitants of Sicily.

SKYTALAI
    Message sticks. As a means of encrypting dispatches, the Spartans issued a dowel-like
skytale
of a specific circumference to their commanders sent abroad, maintaining a duplicate at Sparta. To send a message a strip of leather was wound obliquely about the home stick; the message was written on it, then unwound and dispatched, decipherable only when wound again about an identical-size
skytale
.

SOLON
    Athenian sage and statesman of the sixth century; he wrote the laws that laid the groundwork for the democracy.

SPARTIATAI
    Spartans of the officer class, Peers or Equals; anglicized as “Spartiates.”

STADION RACE
    A straightaway dash covering one
stade,
about two hundred yards.

STRATEGOS
    An Athenian general or war commander; or one of the Board of Ten Generals elected yearly, roughly the executive branch of the democracy.

SYKOPHANTAI
    Informers and extortionists who preyed upon the litigants in Athenian law courts.

TALENT
    A weight of silver worth roughly 6,000 drachmas. It took about a talent a month to keep a warship in action.

TARTARUS
    A sunless abyss below Hades, where Zeus imprisoned the Titans. An anvil, dropped from Olympus, would fall nine days before reaching Earth—and another nine days, beneath the earth, till it reached Tartarus.

TAXIARCH
    Each of the ten tribes at Athens was required to supply an infantry regiment, a
taxis
, to the state. Its commander was a
taxiarchos
.

TECHNITAI
    Craftsmen.

TEMENOS
    Sacred precinct surrounding a temple or sanctuary.

TETRAS
    A group of four.

THALAMITAI
    Trireme oarsmen of the lowest row; holdsmen.

THEMISTOCLES
    Athenian statesman and general, victor over Persia in the sea battle of Salamis, 480
B.C.
Fortified Piraeus, initiated construction of the Long Walls, set Athens on the course of sea power and empire.

THERMOPYLAE
    Pass in central Greece at which three hundred Spartans and their allies held off for six days the advance of the Persian myriads under King Xerxes, 480
B.C.

THE Thirty
    Puppet government at Athens following surrender to Sparta in 404
B.C.
, headed by Critias. Known for its tyrannical acts of repression.

THRANITAI
    Trireme oarsmen of the topmost bank, who rowed through an outrigger.

THRASYTES
    Boldness.

TISSAPHERNES
    Persian satrap of Lydia and Caria. His capital was at Sardis.

TOXOTES
    A marine archer; pl.
toxotai
.

TRIERARCH
    A trireme captain. Wealthy Athenians were conscripted to command, and bear the financial burden for, a warship for a term of one year. This could prove a white elephant, as anyone who has owned a seagoing vessel can testify.

TRIERARCHY
    At Athens the civic obligation to serve as a
trierarch
.

TRIERES
    A trireme; pl.
triereis
.

TRIREME
    The primary ship of war, propelled by three banks of oars, crew of about two hundred.

“TWO-AND-ONE”
    On a trireme, resting one bank of oarsmen while the other two row.

XENOS
    Stranger; also “guest-friend,” a privileged bond between families of different states.

XIPHOS
    The short Spartan-style sword.

XYELE
    A sicklelike weapon carried by Spartan youths.

ZYGITAI
    Trireme oarsmen of the middle row, between the
thalamitai
and
thranitai
.

Any work set in the era of the Peloponnesian War begins and ends with Thucydides. Not to mention Plato, Xenophon, Plutarch, Aristophanes, Diodorus, Andocides, Antiphon, Lysias, Aelian, and Cornelius Nepos. A pretty stellar lineup to say thanks to.

Of modern scholarship I must single out the works of Irving Barkan, Jacob Burckhardt, Walter Ellis, Steven Forde’s
The Ambition to Rule,
Peter Green for
Armada from Athens,
Donald Kagan, D.M. MacDowell, J.H. Morrison and J.F. Coates for
The Athenian Trireme,
Barry Strauss, and Jean Hatzfeld for
Alcibiade,
with special thanks to Dr. Christine Henspetter for translating the latter for me (longhand no less) from the French.

Among friends and colleagues, Dr. Ralph Gallucci and Dr. Walter Ellis have applied a most excellent chisel and mawl to the manuscript. Thanks, above and beyond the call of duty, to Dr. Ippokratis Kantzios, who has been my indispensable counsel from the first and also a great and true friend. And to the Baronessa C. S. von Snow, my companion and cartographer to antique lands.

My profound gratitude to my editors at Doubleday and Bantam, Nita Taublib, Kate Burke Miciak, and Shawn Coyne, and especially Shawn, who did what old-time editors used to do in plunging in, shirtsleeves up, to whip what was a sprawling monster of a manuscript into what we both hope is a work suitable for literary consumption.

Finally
Tides of War
is fiction, not history. I have taken liberties with events and chronology and interpreted historical characters, hopefully in a higher cause. For the book’s faults and shortcomings the responsibility is entirely mine.

For their generous permission to use translated material: Rex Warner and Penguin Classics for Alcibiades’ speech from Thucydides’
History of the Peloponnesian War
. Attribution also to Rex Warner and Penguin Classics for the Spartan dispatch from Xenophon’s
A History of My Time
. And to the memory of John Dryden for Critias’ verses quoted by Plutarch in
Lives of the Noble Greeks
(Alcibiades). All other quoted lines are either fictional or made over by the author.

Go to the next page to read an excerpt from

The Profession

1

A BROTHER

MY MOST ANCIENT MEMORY
is of a battlefield. I don’t know where. Asia maybe. North Africa. A plain between the hills and the sea.

The hour was dusk; the fight, which had gone on all day, was over. I was alive. I was looking for my brother. Already I knew he was dead. If he were among the living, he would have found me. I would not have had to look for him.

Across the field, which stretched for thousands of yards in every direction, you could see the elevations of ground where clashes had concentrated. Men stood and lay upon these. The dying and the dead sprawled across the lower ground, the depressions and the sunken traces. Carrion birds were coming down with the night—crows and ravens from the hills, gulls from the sea.

I found my brother’s body, broken beneath the wheels of a battle wagon. Three stone columns stood above it on an eminence—a shrine or gate of some kind. The vehicle’s frame had been hacked through by axes and beaten apart by the blows of clubs; the traces were still on fire. All that remained aboveground of my brother was his left arm and hand, which still clutched the battle-axe by which I
recognized him. Two village women approached, seeking plunder. “Touch this man,” I told them, “and I will cut your hearts out.”

I stripped my cloak and wrapped my brother’s body in it. The dames helped me settle him in the earth. As I scraped black dirt over my brother’s bones, the eldest caught my arm. “Pray first,” she said.

We did. I stood at the foot of my brother’s open grave. I don’t know what I expected to feel: grief maybe, despair. Instead what ascended from that aperture to hell were such waves of love as I have never known in this life or any other. Do not tell me death is real. It is not. I have sustained my heart for ages with the love my brother passed on to me, dead as he was.

While I prayed, a commander passed on horseback. “Soldier,” he asked, “whom do you bury?” I told him. He reined in, he and his lieutenants, and bared his head. Who was he? Did I know him? When the last spadeful of earth had been mounded atop my brother’s grave, the general’s eyes met mine. He said nothing, yet I knew he had felt what I had, and it had moved him.

I am a warrior. What I narrate in these pages is between me and other warriors. I will say things that only they will credit and only they understand.

A warrior, once he reckons his calling and endures its initiation, seeks three things.