Tides of War (7 page)

Alcibiades, laughing, declared himself indeed indispensable. “Were not Themistocles, Miltiades, Pericles indispensable? The state would lie in ruins without them. And let us not forget Solon, who gave us those laws in whose defense our friend stands with such steadfastness. Do not misunderstand me. I seek not to overturn law, but to adhere to it. To declare men ‘equal’ would be absurd if it were not evil. In truth that argument which seeks to calumniate one man as ‘above the law’ is false on its face, for that man, if he be Themistocles or Cimon, conforms by his actions to a higher law, whose name is Necessity. To impede in the name of ‘equality’ the indispensable man is the folly of one ignorant of the workings of this god, who antedates Zeus and Cronos and Earth herself and stands everlastingly as their, and our, lawgiver and progenitor.”

More laughter and rapping of wine bowls. Socrates was about to respond when a commotion interrupted from without. An overturned brazier had set the adjoining shelter alight; now all poured forth to assist in its extinguishment. The salon broke up. I found myself beside Alcibiades. He motioned to his groom to fetch horses. “Come, Pommo, I’ll escort you back to your camp.”

I secured the password of the changing watch and we set out into the cold. “Well,” Alcibiades inquired when we had cleared the first line of pickets, “what did you think of him, our Professor Baldpate?”

I replied that I could not quite make the man out. Sophists, I knew,
grew rich from their fees. Yet Socrates, garbed as he was in homespun, appeared more like…

“A beggar?” Alcibiades laughed. “That is because he scorns to profit from that which he pursues out of love. He would pay if he could; he considers himself not a teacher but a student. And I will tell you something else. My crown of valor…did you notice this night that I never set it, as one decorated ought, upon my head? This is because the prize rightly belongs to him, to our own coarsecloth master of discourse.”

Alcibiades related that at the height of the battle for which he had been honored he had fallen, wounded and cut off, assailed on all sides by the enemy. “Socrates alone came to my defense, dashing from safety to shelter me beneath his shield, until our comrades could rally and return with reinforcements. I argued vehemently that the prize belonged to him, but he convinced the generals to award it to me, no doubt seeking to school my heart to aspire to forms of glory nobler than those of politics.”

We traversed the remainder of the crossing in silence. Beyond the battlements of the besieged city one discerned cookfire smoke.

“Do you mark that smell, Pommo?”

It was horseflesh.

“They’re cooking their cavalry,” Alcibiades observed. “By spring they will be done for, and they know it.”

At the foresters’ camp Alcibiades made a show of his arrival, without words putting it clear to all that I stood in his esteem, and any who crossed me must deal with him. Sure enough, within ten days my commander received orders rotating him back to Athens, his replacement an officer with instructions to leave me free to run my platoon as I wished.

I dismounted now and handed the reins back up to my friend. “What will you do with the rest of your evening?” he inquired.

I would write a letter to my sister. “And you? Will you return to continue your discussions of philosophy?”

He laughed. “What else?”

I watched him depart, trailing the companion horse. His track in the snow bore him back, however, not along the picket line toward Aspasia Three, but in ascent upon the slope called Asclepium to that cabin of spruce wherein awaited the lady Cleonice, she of the violet eyes.

Thus
[Grandfather resumed]
concluded my initial interview with the assassin Polemides. I left him and made haste to Socrates. It occurred to me crossing the Iron Court, which conjoined the wings of the prison, that mention of this evening thirty years past might summon a smile from our friend. In addition I was curious. Did Socrates recollect the young soldier called Pommo? I decided against this, however, not wishing to further burden one with so much already upon his mind. Also I imagined the crush of friends and followers would prevent me from securing a moment apart with our master.

When I arrived at his cell, however, I discovered him alone. The mode of his execution had been established that day by the Eleven Administrators of Justice: he must take hemlock. Though this method mercifully spared the flesh from mutilation, its pronouncement this day, bringing home as it did the imminence of our master’s end, had cast his friends into such a state that Socrates had been constrained to banish them, only to secure an interval of peace. Of this the warder informed me on my approach. I anticipated a similar dismissal and was relieved to see Socrates rising, motioning me warmly within. “So, Jason, are you coming from your other client?”

He knew all about Polemides. Indeed he recalled the youth, he confirmed, not alone from that evening of the siege but from subsequent service with the infantry, and by report from Alcibiades’ days of triumph in the East, in which Polemides had served as captain of marines. Our master remarked upon the conjunction of these two defendants, the philosopher sentenced for schooling Alcibiades and the assassin awaiting trial for slaying him. “It would seem that a jury possessed of consistency must, having convicted the one, acquit the other. This bodes well,” he observed, “for your client Polemides.”

At that time Socrates’ summers had passed seventy, yet he appeared save his beard gone white and the noble amplitude of his girth much as Polemides described during the siege of Potidaea. His limbs stood hale and sturdy, his
carriage vigorous and purposeful; it required scant imagination to picture the veteran snatching up shield and armor to advance once again into the fray.

Not surprisingly the philosopher evinced curiosity about his fellow inmate and even advanced counsel upon how best to defend him. “It is too late to file a countersuit, a
paragraphe,
declaring his indictment unlawful, which of course it is. Perhaps a
dike pseudomartyriou,
a suit for false witness, which may be invoked up to the moment of the jury’s vote.” He laughed. “You see, my own ordeal has rendered me something of a jailhouse lawyer.”

We discussed the Amnesty, in place since the restoration of the democracy, which exempted all citizens from prosecution for crimes committed theretofore. “Polemides’ enemies have gotten around this cleverly, Socrates, by charging him with ‘wrongdoing.’ That rakes a lot of mud, and, as he admits, there is more than enough with which to tar him.” I narrated an abridged version of Polemides’ story, what he had told me thus far.

“I knew several of his family,” Socrates remarked when this chronicle concluded. “His father, Nicolaus, was a man of exceptional integrity, who perished in attendance upon the stricken during the Plague. And I enjoyed a cordial if chaste acquaintance with his great-aunt Daphne, who effectively ran the Board of Naval Governors through her second and third husbands. She was the first of the aristocratic dames, in her widowhood, to conduct her affairs entirely on her own, with no male as
kyrios
or guardian, and not even a servant about the house.”

Our master expressed concern for Polemides’ comfort. “The heat is stifling on that side of the court, I hear. Please, Jason, take him this fruit, and that wine; I may imbibe no more, as they say it spoils the savor of hemlock.”

When the others returned with the evening, some measure of amusement was wrung from the coincident confinement of the murderer and the philosopher. Crito, Socrates’ wealthiest and most devoted follower, spoke. In the days prior to our master’s trial, he had hired detectives and set about acquiring intelligence of the philosopher’s accusers, seeking to bring to light their private crimes and thus discredit them and their indictments. It occurred to me now that I might do the same for Polemides.

I had then in my employ a married couple of middle years, Myron and Lado. They were incorrigible snoops, both, who delighted in nothing more than digging up dirt on the high and mighty. I decided to set these bloodhounds to work. What had become of Polemides’ family? What motivated his
accusers? Had someone put them up to this, and if so, who? What covert agenda did they seek to promote?

Meanwhile, my grandson, I sense your assimilation of this tale wanting. You need more background. Polemides and I were contemporaries; he knew as he spoke that I understood the times and required no exposition as to their feel and flavor. You of a later generation, however, may benefit by a brief historical digression.

In the years before the War, that period of my own and our narrator’s boyhood, Athens stood not in the state of faded glory within which she currently resides. Her best days were not behind her, but present, to hand, dazzling and incandescent. Her navy had routed the Empire of Asia and driven the Persian from the sea. Tribute flowed to her from two hundred states. She was a conqueror, an empire, the cultural and commercial capital of the world.

The Spartan War lay years in the future, yet already Pericles’ vision had inspired him to prepare for it. He fortified the harbors at Munychia and Zea, reinforced the Long Walls along their entire length, and built the Southern Wall, the “Third Leg,” that, should the Northern or Phalerian Wall fall, the city would remain impregnable.

You, my grandson, who have known these adamant marvels or their restored rendition all your life, take their existence for granted. But at that time they were a feat of engineering such as no city of Greece had ever dreamt, let alone dared. To extend the city’s battlements, four and a half miles on one side, nearly the same on the other, yoking the upper city to the harbors at Piraeus, bounding these as well on all sides save the sea, thus turning Athens into an island of invincible fortification…this was considered folly by most and madness by many.

My own father and the main of the equestrian class had stood in violent opposition to this enterprise, opposing first Themistocles, then Pericles implementing the former’s policy. They discerned clearly, the landholders of Attica, that the Olympian, as Pericles was called, intended when war came to leave defenseless before the invader, and in fact abandon, our estates, farms, and vineyards, including this one above whose fields you and I now sit. Pericles’ strategy would be to withdraw the citizenry behind the Long Walls, permitting the foe to ravage our farmsteads at will. Let them deplete their warrior spirit in the slave’s tasks of chopping vines and torching garners. When they got bored enough, they would go home. Meanwhile Athens, which controlled the
sea and could procure its needs from the states of its empire, would peer down contemptuously upon the invader, secure behind her impregnable battlements.

All revolved about the navy.

The great houses of Athens, the nobles of the Cecropidae, Alcmaeonidae, and Peisistratidae, the Lycomidae, Eumolpidae, and Philaidae, all prided themselves as knights and hoplites. Their ancestors and they themselves had defended the nation as cavalrymen or gentleman warriors of the armored infantry. Now Athens had devolved into a nation of oar pullers. The fleet employed and emboldened the commons, and the commons packed the Assembly. They hated it, the aristocracy, but were powerless to resist the tide of change. Besides, the navy was making them rich. Reforms initiated by Pericles and others established pay for public service, appointing officials by lot rather than ballot, thus stacking the magistracies and the courts with
hoi polloi,
the many. To those of the “Party of the Good and True” who expressed revulsion at the spectacle of our city’s champions slouching down harbor lanes bearing their oars and cushions, Pericles responded that it was not his policies that had made Athens a naval power and an empire. History had done it. It was our fleet, manned by our citizen crews, which had defeated Xerxes at Salamis; our fleet which had chased the Persian from the seas; our fleet which had restored freedom to the islands and the Greek cities of Asia. And our fleet that was hauling in, and enriching us all with, the wealth of the world.