Tides of War (8 page)

The construction of the Long Walls was no gauntlet flung into the teeth of history, Pericles argued, but recognition plain and simple of the reality of the time. We would never beat the Spartans on land. Their army was invincible and always would be. Athens’ destiny lay at sea, as Apollo himself had decreed, declaring,

and as Themistocles and Aristides had proved at Salamis, and Cimon and all our conquering generals in the succeeding generation, including Pericles himself, had confirmed again and again.

Others inveighed against this policy of “walls and ships,” declaring that imperial expansionism would inflame, and had inflamed, mistrust of us among the Spartans. Leave them in peace and they will leave us. But push them into a corner, show up their pride by our ever-enlarging power, and they will be compelled to respond in kind.

This was true and Pericles never refuted it. Yet such was the brass, the crust, the arrogance of those years that Athens’ citizenry disdained accommodation of other states as her tradesmen and even her whores scorned to vacate for their betters the public way. Why should they? They who had defeated the mightiest army and navy on earth, who had made the Aegean their millpond, by what dereliction should they leave their city vulnerable for fear of offending Spartan delicacy? Does not the husbandman secure his garden with a palisade of stone? Do not the Spartans themselves ring their camps with pickets and sentries at arms? Let them live with the navy and the Long Walls. And if they could not, then let come what may.

And come, war did. I served the first seasons as a sail lieutenant but was reassigned with the second winter to the northern siege, the same described by our client, of Potidaea. The hardship, if anything, was greater than he told. Plague had begun; fully a fourth of the infantry were carried off. We bore their ashes home in clay pots beneath the benches of our oarsmen and nested their shields and armor beneath weather-cover on our decks.

With the third spring Potidaea fell. The wider war was now two years old. Clearly it would not soon end. The Greek states had been split between Athens and Sparta, each compelled to side with one or the other.

Corcyra with her fleet had entered the lists, allied with Athens. Argos held aloof. Save Plataea, Acarnania, Thessaly, and Messenian Naupactus, every state of the mainland stood with Sparta—Corinth with her wealth and navy; Sicyon and the cities of the Argolid; Elis and Mantinea, the great democracies of the Peloponnese; north of the Isthmus, Ambracia, Leucas, Anactoria; Megara, Thebes, and all Boeotia with her mighty armies; and Phocis and Locris with their matchless horse.

The islands of the Aegean and all Ionia stood within Athens’ hegemony; our warships still ruled the sea. But revolts flared in Thrace and Chalcidice, vital to Athens for her timber, copper, and cattle, and the indispensable Hellespont, the city’s lifeline for barley and wheat.

Attica had become a Spartan playground. The foe rolled across the frontier at Eleusis, laying the Thriasian plain waste for the second time, then doubled Mount Aegaleus to scorch again the districts of Acharnae, Cephisia, Leuconoe, and Colonus. Spartan troops devastated the Paralian district as far as Laurium, ravaging first the side that looks toward the Peloponnese, then that facing Euboea and Andros. From atop their Long Walls the citizens of Athens peered toward the shoulders of Mounts Parnes and Brilessus, beyond which rose the smoke of our last estates succumbing to the torch. At the city’s threshold the invaders broke apart the shops and tenements of the suburbs, tearing up even the paving stones of the Academy.
Polemides served under Phormio in the Corinthian Gulf, first at Naupactus, then in Amphilochian Argos. In Aetolia he suffered among other wounds one of the skull, which rendered him sightless for an interval and required confinement at home for most of a year. This my bloodhounds reported, produce of their scourings. No member of Polemides’ family could be located. His brother Lion’s two daughters, now grown, had married and vanished into the sequestration of their husbands’ households. Polemides had a son and daughter of his own, though my ferrets could discover no more than their names. These were the issue of an apparent second marriage, to one Eunice of Samothrace; though no registration of this union could be found.

Polemides had been married once, for certain, during the interval of his recuperation after Aetolia, to the daughter of a colleague of his father’s. The bride was named Phoebe, “Bright.” As many in that reign of war, Polemides married young, just twenty-two. The maiden was fifteen.

When I attempted during our next visitation to query him on this subject, he demurred, politely but with emphasis. I respected this and forswore further interrogation. My importunity had, however, recalled to our client’s mind the matriarch of his clan who had arranged this union, for whom the prisoner clearly felt profound affection and to whose memory his thoughts now returned. He recalled an interview in her apartments upon his return after these campaigns. “How odd,” he remarked. “I have not thought of that day in twenty years. Yet much of its content may have bearing upon our tale, and at this very juncture.” I held my tongue; after several moments Polemides began:

I didn’t get back to Athens for two and a half years after Potidaea, serving in one campaign and another. You know how it was. The wound that packed me home didn’t even come in action; I plunged from a scaffold and split my skull. I was blind with it for a while. My
dear comrades in hospital rifled every item of kit I owned except three silver tetradrachms I kept up my ass; they’d have got shield and breastplate too if I didn’t pillow my head on one with an elbow crooked round the other. The letters to my sister Meri that one crony wrote for me never made it back to Athens, so that when I tramped down the gangplank at Munychia, there was no one to greet me, and I couldn’t even pluck a spit to hire a jitney up to town. I hiked alone, humping arms and armor, while the flaming poker inside my skull threatened at every step to drop me faint.

The Plague had begun. I could not believe the alteration it had wrought. The Circuit Road, whose breadth at my departure twenty-six months earlier had yawned so amply that young bloods used to race horses on it at midnight, now stood narrowed to a wagon-width, shoulders solid with stalls and shanties butted flush to the Long Walls, the hovels of refugees driven in from the country. In town, alleys teemed with the dispossessed. Civility had fled. Even the sight of one as myself, a young soldier suffering, elicited neither a kind word nor a hand to help one up a curb. Upon familiar lanes one glimpsed only strangers, thumbing their few damp obols, borne not in purses, but, like bumpkins, in their cheeks.

In town again I rested a day, doted upon by my sweet sister. Meri had saved stone cherries for me, the year’s last, against this homecoming her heart feared might never come. Her love was like sunshine to me; I wished to bask all day. For Meri’s part, merely to look upon her brother was not enough. She must touch my face and hair and sit pressed to my side for hours. “I must be sure it’s really you.”

She and our father insisted that I visit, as soon as strength permitted, our aunt Daphne, in whose care I had passed my early years and who languished now alone and embattled, in her sixty-second winter. Meri sent a boy ahead and at the third noon I went over.

Daphne was really our great-aunt. She had been a celebrated beauty in her day. As a maiden she had led the basket girls of the Greater Panathenaea and borne to the Serpent of the Acropolis the sacred bowl of milk. Now five decades on, she yet set at the city’s service all she possessed. Uncoerced she had let her lower floors to a family of the countryside. These had in turn opened their doors to others in straits and these likewise, so that the court when I entered shocked me with the
mob of its tenants and the state of disrepair their privation had produced. Upstairs, however, my aunt’s sphere remained unaltered, including my own boy’s room exactly as I had left it. The old dame’s looks survived as well, and bidding me sit in that chamber which had been her fourth husband’s drawing room and now doubled as cupboard and kitchen, she yet projected the self-assurance of one to whom attention has been paid and who commands it still.

Had I seen the shanties in the streets? “By the gods, were I a man, Polemides, the Lacedaemonians would rue their insolence!”

My aunt always addressed me by my full name and always with the same tenor of disapproval. “What kind of a name is that to give an infant? ‘Child of War’ indeed! What in heaven’s name was your father thinking, and his wife to accede to such whim?”

She decried as always the untimely passing of my mother. “Your father would not remarry, yet he was overwhelmed by the three of you young ones and the care of the farm. That is why he sent you abroad for your schooling. That and the fear that I might pamper you soft.”

She took my callused fists in hers. “As a babe you had hands plump as a goose’s breast and soft sweet curls like Ganymede. Now look at you.”

She insisted on preparing my lunch. I fetched bowls from the high shelves and charcoal from the shuttle. I could feel her eyes upon me, missing nothing.

“You have suffered a skull fracture.”

“It’s nothing.”

“By the Holy Twain! Do you think I have learned nothing all these years?”

She had sounded each campaign I had served in, upbraiding me now for volunteering when I might have taken ship home a year and even eighteen months earlier. She knew the names of each of my commanders and had interrogated all, if not in person, then their lieutenants, and if not these, their mothers and sisters.

“What derangement possesses you, Polemides, to step forth undrafted
before the line? You have not been stoned!” She meant conscripted, summoned from the
katalogos
to assemble for induction before the tribal stone. “Do you volunteer just to break your sister’s heart and mine?”

She spoke of Meri, whose betrothed, a lieutenant of marines, had lost his life at Methymna. My sister remained a virgin, seventeen now, with only the slenderest dowry, thanks to our straitened case. How many other maidens languished thus, all young men called to war?

My aunt did not wish me to shun hazard, she insisted, only to serve with prudence and forethought. “The aim of your education at Sparta was to inculcate virtue and self-command, not to train you for the warrior’s trade. You are a gentleman! By the gods, do you feel no call to the land?”

I squirmed.

“Your brother displays even less attendance than yourself. And your cousins care only for actors, horses, and their own good looks. Who will preserve us, Polemides? Who will keep the land?”

“It’s all moot, isn’t it, Aunt? With Spartan companies roasting stew over the sticks of our beds and benches.”

“Don’t dish that cheek to me, boy. I’ll still put you over my knee and fan your biscuits!”

She made a prayer and set the pot upon the coals.

I had two cousins, Daphne’s grandsons, Simon and Aristeus, who had grown up on horseback; they had distinguished themselves with the cavalry and acquired, my aunt now informed me, a certain dubious celebrity. Did I know that they had taken to carousing about town with that pack of dissolutes and dandies that make up to the coxcomb Alcibiades? “I have seen it with my own eyes,” my aunt declared. “Your cousins dine with playwrights and whores.”

“The best playwrights, I’m sure.”

“Yes. And the most accomplished whores.”

She had observed this mob herself one dawn, she reported, as she stood opposite the Palladium in procession for the City Dionysia, awaiting the trumpet. “Here they came in a pack, self-crowned and gamboling like satyrs, inebriated from some all-night debauch. And there my Simon and Aristeus! Do you know the baker’s emporium on the corner by the General’s Bench? When the postulants emerged with the holy offering, these sots waylaid it for their dinner! Yes, and caroled for us of
the procession as well. All of them, your cousins included, disporting themselves in ribald mockery of heaven!”

My aunt reprehended the profligacy of that whole crowd, but before all its champion, Alcibiades. He had brought home from the north, she narrated, his bastards by that alien tart Cleonice—two boys—and set the lot up in apartments of the same quarter as his own, upon a lane down which his legitimate daughters by his wife Hipparete must pass each day on their nurse’s walk. “What shall these maidens say when they reach the age of reason? ‘There go our daddy’s by-blows, aren’t they handsome?’ ”

I made some remark that sought to make light of it.

“Is there nothing you and your generation cannot find to mock?”

My aunt regarded me with resignation and rue.

“Perhaps your father named you more aptly than I gave him credit for. Tell the truth: you enjoy war. They are congenial to you, the stink of the cookfire and the tramp of comrades at your side. Your grandfather was like that. I admire it on you; it is manly. But war is a young man’s sport. And none, not even you, may maintain that state forever.”