About the Book

ONE MAN. TWO ARMIES. THE FATE OF THE ANCIENT WORLD IN THE BALANCE.

His name was Alcibiades. Kinsman of Pericles, protégé of Socrates, immortalized by Plutarch, Plato and Thucydides, he was an audacious soldier and charismatic leader without equal. And he would come to dominate the Peloponnesian War, the devastating twenty-seven-year conflict between Athens and Sparta that brought Greece to its knees at the end of the fifth century BC.

Undefeated on the battlefield, Alcibiades’ popularity – and his political aspirations – fed the resentment of his rivals in Athens who secured his death warrant on a trumped-up charge of treason. Escaping to Sparta, he proved intrumental in guiding its legendary army from one military triumph to the next. Ultimately though, it waas Athens that would claim his fiercest loyalty, their destinies inextricably interwined.

In an epic story filled with triumph and tragedy and ringing to the sound of battle, the acclaimed author of GATES OF FIRE once more breathes brilliant life into the bones of ancient history to paint a dazzling portrait of a remarkable man whose fortunes mirrored the ebb and flow of the tides of war…

Contents

Cover

About the Book

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

Maps

Historical Note

The Fifth Century BC

Book One: Against Polemides

Chapter One: My Grandfather Jason

Chapter Two: Murder in Melissa

Chapter Three: In Polemides’ Cell

Chapter Four: Ordeal and Commission

Chapter Five: The Indispensable Man

Book Two: The Long Walls

Chapter Six: A Young Man’s Sport

Chapter Seven: A Significant Silence

Chapter Eight: Prognosis Death

Chapter Nine: A Calling Acquired

Book Three: The First Modern War

Chapter Ten: The Joys of Soldiering

Chapter Eleven: Mantinea

Chapter Twelve: A Companion of the Fleet

Chapter Thirteen: Three Times the Victor’s Name

Chapter Fourteen: A Prospectus of Conquest

Chapter Fifteen: A Lecture from Nicias

Chapter Sixteen: A Soldier’s Dream

Chapter Seventeen: A Document of the Admiralty

Book Four: Sicily

Chapter Eighteen: A Dislocation of Recall

Chapter Nineteen: A Chronicler of Strife

Chapter Twenty: School Masters of War

Chapter Twenty-One: Disaster on Epipolae

Chapter Twenty-Two: The Averted Face of Heaven

Chapter Twenty-Three: Upon The Wall of Ships

Chapter Twenty-Four: The Issue of Defeat

Book Five: Alcibiades in Sparta

Chapter Twenty-Five: The Soldier in Winter

Chapter Twenty-Six: Among the Sons of Leonidas

Chapter Twenty-Seven: On the Quay at Samos

Chapter Twenty-Eight: The Hill of the Dolphins

Book Six: Victory at Sea

Chapter Twenty-Nine: The Intersection of Necessity and Free Will

Chapter Thirty: Beside the Tomb of Achilles

Chapter Thirty-One: The Intrepidity of the Gods

Chapter Thirty-Two: On the Virtue of Cruelty

Book Seven: Feeding the Monster

Chapter Thirty-Three: The Blessings of Peace

Chapter Thirty-Four: Strategos Autokrator

Chapter Thirty-Five: Beyond the Reach of Envy

Chapter Thirty-Six: A Disrefracting Glass

Chapter Thirty-Seven: A Hunt on Parnes

Book Eight: Thrice Nine Years

Chapter Thirty-Eight: The Gravity of Gold

Chapter Thirty-Nine: Bawlers and Crawlers

Chapter Forty: The Red Rag of Sparta

Chapter Forty-One: Fire From the Sea

Chapter Forty-Two: The Chore of Pillage

Book Nine: Tides of War

Chapter Forty-Three: Between the Earth and the Sea

Chapter Forty-Four: A Witness to Murder

Chapter Forty-Five: An Advocate at the Gate

Chapter Forty-Six: A Cross the Iron Court

Chapter Forty-Seven: The Tale to its End

Chapter Forty-Eight: Thraceward

Chapter Forty-Nine: Aegospotami

Chapter Fifty: Upon Road’s Turn

Chapter Fifty-One: A Death on Deer Mountain

Chapter Fifty-Two: A Magistracy of Mercy

Chapter Fifty-Three: The Holm Oak’s Bloom

A Note on Spelling

Glossary

Acknowledgements

With Gratitude

About the Author

Copyright

FOR CHRISTY

HISTORICAL NOTE

By their epochal victories over the Persians in 490 and 480/479 BC, Sparta and Athens established themselves as the pre-eminent powers in Greece and the Aegean – Sparta on land, Athens at sea.

For half a century the states maintained a tenuous equilibrium. At Athens these years inaugurated the Golden Age of Periclean democracy. The Parthenon was constructed, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides commenced performance; Socrates began to teach.

By 431, however, Athens’ power had become too great for the free states of Greece to endure. War came – that struggle called by Thucydides ‘the greatest in history’, which lasted, as the oracle had foretold, thrice nine years and ended with the capitulation of Athens in 404.

One man set his stamp upon this conflict, for good or ill, beyond all others. This was Alcibiades of Athens.

Kinsman of Pericles, intimate of Socrates, he was, the ancient sources attest, the most handsome and brilliant man of his era, as well as the most lawless. As a general he was never beaten.

THE FIFTH CENTURY BC

… the worst enemies of Athens are not those who, like you, have only harmed her in war, but those who have forced her friends to turn against her. The Athens I love is not the one which is wronging me now, but that one in which I used to have secure enjoyment of my rights as a citizen. That country that I am attacking does not seem to be mine any longer; it is rather that I am trying to recover a country that has ceased to be mine. And the man who really loves his country is not the one who refuses to attack it when he has been unjustly driven from it, but the man whose desire for it is so strong that he will shrink from nothing in his efforts to get back there again.

Alcibiades addressing the Spartan Assembly, in Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War

She [Athens] loves, and hates, and longs to have him back …

Aristophanes, on Alcibiades, in The Frogs

BOOK ONE

AGAINST POLEMIDES

ONE

MY GRANDFATHER JASON

MY GRANDFATHER, JASON the son of Alexicles of the district of Alopece, died just before sunset on the fourteenth day of Boedromion, one year past, two months prior to his ninety-second birthday. He was the last of that informal but fiercely devoted circle of comrades and friends who attended the philosopher Socrates.

The span of my grandfather’s years ran from the imperial days of Pericles, the construction of the Parthenon and Erechtheum, through the Great Plague, the rise and fall of Alcibiades, and the full tenure of that calamitous twenty-seven-year conflagration called in our city the Spartan War and known throughout greater Greece, as recorded by the historian Thucydides, as the Peloponnesian War.

As a young man my grandfather served as a sail lieutenant at Sybota, Potidaea, and Scione and later in the East as a trierarch and squadron commander at the battles of Bitch’s Tomb, Abydos (for which he was awarded the prize of valour and incidentally lost an eye and the use of his right leg), and the Arginousai Islands. As a private citizen he spoke out in the Assembly, alone save Euryptolemus and Axiochus, against the mob in defence of the Ten Generals. In his years he buried two wives and eleven children. He served his city from her peak of pre-eminence, mistress of two hundred tributary states, to the hour of her vanquishment at the hands of her most inclement foes. In short he was a man who not only witnessed but participated in most of the significant events of the modern era and who knew personally many of its principal actors.

In the waning seasons of my grandfather’s life, when his vigour began to fail and he could move about only with the aid of a companion’s arm, I took to visiting him daily. There appears ever one among a family, the physicians testify, whose disposition invites and upon whom falls the duty to succour its elderly and infirm members.

To me this was never a chore. Not only did I hold my grandfather in the loftiest esteem, but I delighted in his society with an intensity that frequently bordered upon the ecstatic. I could listen to him talk for hours and, I fear, tired him more severely than charity served with my enquiries and importunities.

To me he was like one of our hardy Attic vines, assaulted season after season by the invader’s torch and axe, blistered by summer sun, frost-jacketed in winter, yet unkillable, ever-enduring, drawing strength from deep within the earth to yield up despite all privations or perhaps because of them the sweetest and most mellifluent of wines. I felt keenly that with his passing an era would close, not only of Athens’ greatness but of a calibre of man with whom we contemporary specimens stood no longer familiar, nor to whose standard of virtue we could hope to attain.

The loss to typhus of my own dear son, aged two and a half, earlier in that season, had altered every aspect of my being. Nowhere could I discover consolation save in the company of my grandfather. That fragile purchase we mortals hold upon existence, the fleeting nature of our hours beneath the sun, stood vividly upon my heart; only with him could I find footing upon some stony but stabler soil.

My regimen upon those mornings was to rise before dawn and, summoning my dog Sentinel (or, more accurately, responding to his summons), ride down to the port along the Carriage Road, returning through the foothills to our family’s mains at Holm Oak Hill. The early hours were a balm to me. From the high road one could see the naval crews already at drill in the harbour. We passed other gentlemen upon the track to their estates, saluted athletes training along the roads, and greeted the young cavalrymen at their exercises in the hills. Upon completion of the morning’s business of the farm, I stabled my mount and proceeded on foot, alone save Sentinel, up the sere olive-dotted slope to my grandfather’s cottage.

I brought him his lunch. We would talk in the shade of the overlook porch, or sometimes simply sit, side by side, with Sentinel reclining on the cool stones between us, saying nothing.

‘Memory is a queer goddess, whose gifts metamorphose with the passage of the years,’ my grandfather observed upon one such afternoon. ‘One cannot call to mind that which occurred an hour past, yet summon events seventy years gone, as if they were unfolding here and now.’

I interrogated him, often ruthlessly I fear, upon these distant holdings of his heart. Perhaps for his part he welcomed the eager ear of youth, for once launched upon a tale he would pursue its passage, like the tireless campaigner he was, in detail to its close. In his day the scribe’s art had not yet triumphed; the faculty of memory stood unatrophied. Men could recite extended passages from the Iliad and Odyssey, quote stanzas of a hundred hymns, and relate passage and verse of the tragedy attended days previous.

More vivid still stood my grandfather’s recollection of men. He remembered not alone friends and heroes but slaves and horses and dogs, even trees and vines which had graven impress upon his heart. He could summon the memory of some antique sweetheart, seventy-five years gone, and resurrect her mirage in colours so immediate that one seemed to behold her before him, yet youthful and lovely, in the flesh.

I enquired of my grandfather once, whom of all the men he had known he adjudged most exceptional.

‘Noblest,’ he replied without hesitation, ‘Socrates. Boldest and most brilliant, Alcibiades. Bravest, Thrasybulus, the Brick. Wickedest, Anytus.’

Impulse prompted a corollary query. ‘Was there one whom memory has driven deepest? One to whom you find your thoughts returning?’

At this my grandfather drew up. How odd that I should ask, he replied, for yes, there was one man who had, for cause to which he could not give name, been of late much upon his mind. This individual, my grandfather declared, stood not among the ranks of the celebrated or the renowned; he was neither admiral nor archon, nor would his name be found memorialized among the archives, save as a dark and self-condemned footnote.

‘Of all I knew, this man could not but be called the most haunted. He was an aristocrat of the district of Acharnae. I helped to defend him once, on trial for his life.’

I was intrigued at once and pressed my grandfather to elaborate. He smiled, declaring that to launch upon this enterprise might take many hours, for the events of the man’s tale transpired over decades and covered on land and sea most of the known world. Such prospect, far from daunting me, made me the more eager to hear. Please, I entreated; the day is well spent, but let us at least make a beginning.

‘You’re a greedy whelp, aren’t you?’

‘To hear you speak, Grandfather, the greediest.’

He smiled. Let us start, then, and see where the tale takes us.

‘In those days,’ my grandfather began, ‘that class of professional rhetorician and specialist in affairs of the courts had not yet arisen. On trial a man spoke in his own defence. If he wished, however, he might appoint an associate – a father or uncle, perhaps a friend or gentleman of influence – to assist in preparing his case.

‘By letter from prison this man solicited me. This was odd, as I shared no personal acquaintance with the fellow. He and I had served simultaneously in several theatres of war and had held positions of responsibility in conjunction with the younger Pericles, son of the great Pericles and Aspasia, whom both of us were privileged to call friend; this, however, was far from uncommon in those days and could in nowise be construed as constituting a bond. Further this individual was, to say the least, notorious. Though an officer of acknowledged valour and long and distinguished service to the state, he had entered Athens at her hour of capitulation not only beneath the banner of the Spartan foe but clad in her mantle of scarlet. I believed, and told him so, that one guilty of such infamy must suffer the supreme penalty, nor could I contribute in any way to such a criminal’s exoneration.

‘The man persisted none the less. I visited him in his cell and listened to his story. Though at that time Socrates himself had been convicted and sentenced to death, and in fact resided awaiting execution within the walls of the same prison, and to his aid I must before all attend, not to mention the affairs of my own family, I agreed to assist the man in the preparation of his defence. I did so not because I believed he could be acquitted or deserved to be (he himself readily ratified his own inculpation), but because I felt the publication of his history must be accomplished, if only before a jury, to hold the mirror up to the democracy which, by its conviction of the noblest citizen it had ever produced, my master Socrates, had evinced such wickedness as to crown and consummate its own self-immolation.’

My grandfather held silent for long moments. One could see his eye turn inward and his heart summon the memory of this individual and the tone and tenor of that time.

‘What was the man’s name, Grandfather?’

‘Polemides the son of Nicolaus.’

I recalled the name vaguely but could not place it in quarter or context.

‘He was the man,’ my grandfather prompted, ‘who assassinated Alcibiades.’

TWO

MURDER IN MELISSA

THE ASSASSINATION PARTY [My Grandfather continued] was led by two nobles of Persia acting under orders of the Great King’s governor of Phrygia. They proceeded by ship from Abydos on the Hellespont to the stronghold in Thrace to which Alcibiades had repaired in his final exile, whence, discovering their prey absconded, the party pursued him back across the straits to Asia. The Persians were accompanied by three Peers of Sparta whose chief, Endius, had been Alcibiades’ guest-friend and intimate since boyhood. These had been appointed by the home government, not to participate in the murder, but to serve as witnesses, to confirm with their own eyes the extinction of this man, the last left alive whom they still feared. Such was Alcibiades’ renown for escape and resurrection that many believed he could cheat even that final magistrate, Death.

A professional assassin, Telamon of Arcadia, accompanied the party, along with some half-dozen henchmen of his selection, to plan and execute the action. His confederate was the Athenian Polemides.

Polemides had been a friend of Alcibiades. He had served as captain of marines throughout Alcibiades’ spectacular sequence of victories in the Hellespontine War, had acted as his bodyguard when the conqueror returned in glory to Athens, and had stood upon his right hand when Alcibiades restored the procession by land in celebration of the Eleusinian Mysteries. I recall vividly his appearance, at Samos, upon Alcibiades’ recall from exile to the fleet. The moment was incendiary, with twenty thousand sailors, marines, and heavy infantry, distraught for their own fate and the survival of their country, enveloping the mole they called Little Choma as the longboat touched and Polemides stepped off, shielding his charge from the mob which seemed as ripe to stone as salute him. I studied Alcibiades’ expression; nothing could have been clearer than that he trusted the man at his shoulder absolutely with his life.

It was this Polemides’ duty now, some seven years subsequent, to draw the victim out and with his cohort, the assassin Telamon, perform the slaughter. For this his fee was a talent of silver from the treasury of Persia.

Of all this the man informed me, concealing nothing, within the first minutes of our initial interview. He did so, he stated, to ensure that I – whose family shared bonds of marriage with the Alcmaeonids, Alcibiades’ family on his mother’s side, and myself through my devotion to Socrates, whose link to Alcibiades was well known – would know the worst at once and could pull out, if I wished.

The actual indictment against the man made no citation of Alcibiades.

Polemides was charged in the death of a boatswain of the fleet named Philemon, who had been murdered some few years prior in a brothel brawl at Samos. A second impeachment was preferred against him, that of treason. It was under this rubric, clearly, that the jurors would read that more consequential slaying. Such obliquity was not uncommon in those days; yet its indirection was compounded by the specific statute under which his accusers had brought him to trial.

Polemides had been arraigned neither under a writ of eisangelia, the standard indictment for treason, nor a dike phonou, a straight charge of murder, both of which would have permitted him to elect voluntary exile, sparing his life. Rather he had been denounced (by a pair of known rogues, brothers and stooges of acknowledged foes of the democracy) under an endeixis kakourgias, a far more general category of ‘wrongdoing’. This struck one at first as preposterous, the issue of prosecutors ignorant of the law. Further reflection, however, revealed its cunning. Under this category of indictment, the accused might not only be imprisoned before and throughout trial, without option of voluntary exile, but denied bail as well. The death penalty still obtained, and the trial would take place, not before the Council or Areopagus, but a common people’s court, where such terms as ‘traitor’ and ‘friend of Sparta’ could be counted upon to inflame the jurors’ ire. Clearly Polemides’ accusers wanted him dead, by the right hand or the left. As far as one could predict, they would get their wish. For all those who hated Alcibiades and blamed him for the fall of our nation, yet many still loved him. These would raise no remonstrance to the execution of the man who had betrayed and slain their champion. Still, Polemides observed, his accusers were, he was certain, of the opposite party – those who had conspired with their country’s enemies, seeking to purchase their own preservation at the price of their nation’s ruin.

As to the man Polemides himself, his appearance was both striking and singular, dark-eyed, of slightly less than average height, extremely thick-muscled, and, though well past forty years, as lean through the middle as a schoolboy. His beard was the colour of iron, and his skin despite imprisonment retained the dark copper of one who has spent much of his life at sea. Scars of fire, spear, and sword crisscrossed the flesh of his arms, legs, and back. Upon his brow, though bleached by exposure to the elements, stood vivid the koppa slave brand of the Syracusans, token of that captivity endured by survivors of the Sicilian calamity and emblematic of unspeakable suffering.

Did I abhor him? I was prepared to. Yet in the flesh his clarity of thought and expression, his candour and utter want of self-exoneration, disarmed my prejudice. His crimes notwithstanding, the man appeared to my imagination much as might have Odysseus, stepping forth from the songs of Homer. Nor did he comport himself in the brutish or insolent manner of the soldier for hire; on the contrary his demeanour and self-presentation were those of a gentleman. What wine he had, he proffered at once and insisted upon vacating for his guest the solitary stool his cell possessed, pillowing it for my comfort with the fleece he used to bundle the chamber’s single bare pallet.

Throughout that initial interview he performed as we spoke various calisthenics intended to maintain fitness despite confinement. He could place his heel upon the wall above his head and, standing flat on the other sole, set his forehead with ease upon his elevated shin. Once when I brought him some eggs, he placed one within the cage of his fist and, extending his arm, challenged me either to prise his fingers apart or crush the egg. I tried, employing all my strength, and failed, as he grinned at me mischievously the while.

I never felt afraid with the man or of him. In fact as the days progressed I came to embrace a profound sympathy for the fellow, despite his numerous criminal deeds and lack of repentance therefor. His name, Polemides, as you know, means ‘child of war’. But he was not a child of just any war, rather one unprecedented in scale and duration and distinguished beyond all previous conflicts by its debasement of that code of honour, justice, and voluntary restraint by whose tenets all prior strife among Hellenes had been conducted. It was indeed this war, the first modern war, which forged our narrator’s destiny and directed it to its end. He began as a soldier and ended as an assassin. How was I any different? Who may disaffirm that I or any other did not enact in the shadows of our private hearts, by commission or omission, that same dark history played out in daylight by our countryman Polemides?

He was, like me, a product of our time. As, to the harbour, high road and low follow their several courses along the shore, so his path had paralleled my own and that of the main of our contemporaries, only passing through different country.

THREE

IN POLEMIDES’ CELL

YOU ASK, JASON [The Prisoner Polemides Spoke], which aspect is most distasteful of the assassin’s art. Knowing you as the paragon of probity you are, you no doubt anticipate some response involving bloodguilt or ritual pollution, perhaps some physical difficulty of the kill. It is neither. The hardest part is bringing back the head.

You have to, to get paid.

Telamon of Arcadia, my mentor in the profession of murder, taught me to pack it in olive oil and bring it home in a jar. In the early days of the war such proof was not required. A ring might do, or an amulet, or so my tutor apprised me later, as at that time I had not yet commenced employment in the ‘silent art’, but served as a common soldier like everyone else. The assassin’s requirements grew sterner as the war dragged on. Those victims who got the chance invariably pleaded, some quite eloquently, for their lives. For my part I considered it dishonourable, not to say bad business, to yield to such blandishments. I honoured my commitments.

I see you smile, Jason. You must remember I was not always a villain. My family counted among its ancestors the hero Philaeus, Ajax’s son, forebear of Miltiades and Cimon, he to whom the rights of the city were granted with his brother Eurysaces, from whom Alcibiades claimed descent. My father was a Knight of Meleager and bred racehorses, a number of exceptional lineage, including the mare Briareia, who was the pole horse on Alcibiades’ team when it won the crown at Olympia, the year of his magnificent triple, when Euripides himself sang the victory ode. We were good people. People of quality.

That said, I make no pretence to innocence of Alcibiades’ assassination or any other charge. But these scoundrels aren’t after me for that, are they? They’re still too happy to see him dead. Men hate nothing worse than that mirror held before them whose reflection displays their own failure to prove worthy of themselves. This likewise is your master’s crime, Socrates the philosopher. He will suck hemlock for it. My own transgressions, I fear, remain unsullied by such aspirations to honour.

This murder charge, I say, the one of that luckless fellow Philemon … of this I’m innocent. It was an accident! Ask anyone who saw it.

But listen to me beg for my life! I sound like every other lying swine in here. [Laughs.] If I had gold in the yard, I’d dig it up. Yes, and have your way with my wife and daughters as well! [Laughs again.]

But hear me, Jason. I appreciate your coming. I am aware of the demands upon you from other quarters and grateful for your time. I know you despise, if not me, then my transgressions. As for my chances of acquittal, the betting man will long since have purchased the shovel to dig my grave. Yet remain, I beseech you. Track with me the course of this man I am said to have slain and our intertwined fates – yours, mine, and our nation’s.

If I am guilty, Athens is too. What did I perform, save what she desired? As the city loved him, so did I. As she hated him, I did too. Let us tell that story, of the spell he cast over our state and how that bewitchment led us to ruin, all in the same basket. As I plead for my life like the dog I am, perhaps we may dig up some gold in the yard, the treasure of insight and illumination. What do you say, Jason? Will you assist me? Will you help a villain explore the provenance of his villainy?

FOUR

ORDEAL AND COMMISSION

WHEN I WAS ten, my father sent me for my schooling to Sparta. This was far from unheard-of in the decades before the war, when fellow feeling still prevailed between the two great states by whose allied exertions Greece had been preserved from the Persian yoke. Periodic clashes and conflicts notwithstanding, the dominant disposition towards Sparta among the Athenian gentry was respect. Many of the older landed families, not alone of our city but of Greece entire, shared bonds of guest-friendship with clans at Sparta; such gentlefolk often felt keener kinship for their kind across borders than for the commons of their own states, whose increasing stridency and self-assertion threatened not only to overturn the old courtly ways but to coarsen and corrupt the rising generation of youth. What more satisfactory inoculation for these striplings, their fathers reasoned, than a turn or two in the Spartan agoge, the Upbringing, where a lad learned the old-fashioned virtues of silence, continence, and obedience?

Among my father’s forebears were the Athenian heroes Miltiades and Cimon, the latter esteemed by the Spartans little less than their own kings, which affection Cimon returned in abundance, naming his eldest son Lacedaemonius, who himself trained at Sparta, though only to age sixteen. Through such ties and by his own exertions my father succeeded in enrolling his first-born among that handful of foreigners permitted to ‘stand, steal, and starve’ beside their Lacedaemonian counterparts. Some twenty or thirty of us anepsioi, ‘cousins’, trekked in each year from all Greece, taking our places among the seven hundred homegrowns. Alcibiades himself, though he did not train at Lacedaemon, was xenos, guest-friend, of the Spartan knight Endius (who would stand present in Asia to oversee his friend’s assassination). Endius’s father was named Alcibiades, a Lacedaemonian name which alternated in both families. My own father’s name, Nicolaus, is Laconian, as was mine at birth, Polemidas, but whose pronunciation and spelling I Atticized upon enlistment.

I was nineteen when war began, at Sparta, one season short of that commencement called O and C, Ordeal and Commission, the accession granted to non-Lacedaemonians, equivalent to initiation into the Corps of Peers for citizens, the Spartiatai, and their ‘stepbrother’ comrades, the mothakes.

Few believed then that the war would last more than a season. True, Athenian troops were in action, besieging Potidaea, but this was strictly an internal affair between Athens and one of her subject states, however vocally the latter might squeal, and did not violate the Peace. It was not Sparta’s ox being gored. The Spartan army, egged on by her allies, had indeed invaded Attica in retaliation, yet so lightly was this regarded that I without demurral participated in the make-up of the two line divisions, to be reinforced by twenty thousand heavy infantry of Sparta’s Peloponnesian allies, which comprised the invasion brigades. All the foreign boys helped too. We thought nothing of it. The army would march in, raise hell, and march out, to be succeeded by some form of negotiated settlement by autumn or winter. The idea that we lads in schooling might be sent home was never even broached.

It was on the eve of the Gymnopaedia, the Festival of the Naked Boys, that I learned my father’s estate had been burned. I had been elected an eirenos, a youth-captain, and this night took charge for the first time of my own platoon of boys. We were at choral practice, just setting up, when one of the lads, a particularly bright youth named Philoteles, advanced in the scrupulous manner prescribed by the laws, eyes down, hands beneath his cloak, and sought permission to address me. His father, Cleander, was with the army in Attica and had sent a message home. He knew our farm. We had welcomed him as a guest more than once.

‘Please convey to Polemidas my extreme regret,’ Cleander’s letter stated, employing my Laconian name. ‘I exerted all influence I possessed to prevent this action, but the district had been selected by Archidamus, prompted by the omens. One farm could not be spared when all others were torched.’

I applied at once for an interview with my commander Phoebidas, the brother of Gylippus, whose leadership in Sicily, scores of thousands of deaths later, was to prove of such calamitous effect against our forces. Should I return or complete my passage to initiation? Phoebidas was a gentleman of virtue, a throwback to a nobler age. After much deliberation, including taking of the dream omens at Oeum, it was decided that duty to the gods of hearth and fatherland superseded all conflicting obligations. I must go home.

I trekked to Acharnae, a hundred and forty miles in four days, without even a dog to accompany my steps, oblivious of the sequence of sorrows of which this blow was the precursor. I expected to find vines and groves blackened by fire, walls toppled, crops laid waste. This, as you know, Jason, is no calamity. The grapes and olives spring back, and nothing can kill the land.

I arrived at my father’s farm, Road’s Turn, during the hours of darkness. It looked bad, but nothing could prepare me for the devastation which greeted my eyes at daybreak. Archidamus’s men had not simply scorched vineyard and grove but sheared the living plants to the nub. They had poured lime into the open stumps and spread this brew across every square yard of field. The house was ashes, and the cottages and barns. All stock had been slaughtered. They had even killed the cats.

What kind of war was this? What manner of king was Archidamus to countenance such depredation? I was enraged; more so my younger brother Demades, whom we called Little Lion, when at last I located him in the city. Eluding our father by whose command he was to maintain his study of music and mathematics, he had enlisted in the regiment of Aegeis, outside our tribe and under false papers. My two younger uncles and all six cousins had joined their companies. I signed as well.

The war had begun. In the far north the Potidaeans, emboldened by the vigorousness of the Spartan incursion into Attica, had enlarged their revolt from our empire. A hundred ships and ninety-five hundred Athenian and Macedonian troops held them besieged. Alcibiades, the most illustrious youth of our generation, had mustered already. Too impatient to wait for his twentieth birthday and the cavalry trials, he had shipped as a common infantryman with the Second Eurysaces, that company which his guardian, Pericles, had claimed as his first command. When weather and the close of sailing season threatened to strand the last of our unembarked Acharnian companies, we were piggybacked onto the penteconters of this unit. We sailed on the eighth of Pyanopsion, Theseus day, into a howling northerly.

Of the hundreds of passages I have endured in subsequent seasons, this was the worst. No mast was even stepped; sail was broken out only as weather-cover, pitifully inadequate, against the seas which pounded over the bows daylong onto the exposed backs and shoulders of us, serving as oarsmen as well as infantry, bereft of refuge in the undecked galleys. It took eighteen days to get to Torone, whereupon our Acharnian companies and those of Scambonidae were conjoined under the Athenian general Paches and, reinforced by two troops of Macedonian cavalry, sent back the way we had come, by sea, with orders to capture and occupy the Perrhaebian fortresses at Colydon and Madrete.

These sites were unknown to me, as was the region entire; I felt as one washed up at the extremities of earth. Surely such weather could prevail only at the verges of Tartarus. We made south, twenty-two ships – among whose companies now stood my brother, ‘making the skip’ from his original regiment – packed with puking neophytes greener even than ourselves, while enemy cavalry tracked the flotilla’s progress from shore, barring all attempts at landing. Alcibiades was aboard our ship, the Hygeia. He had made a nasty name for himself by assigning his turn at oars to his attendant (when none other younger than twenty-five even dreamt of such extravagance) while he himself monitored the convoy’s passage more like a fleet commander than an untried shield-humper like the rest. About his shoulders he wore a black woollen cloak with the design of an eagle in silver, of such superb workmanship that its worth could be no less than a year’s pay for a colonel. Every item of his kit was the finest, and his looks … well, you know these as well as I. One was torn between jealousy, for all knew well of his wealth and lovers, and awe, that any of flesh could be so spectacularly gifted by heaven. For three days the squadron alternately ran before, then beat into, a gale which the locals described as ‘moderate’ but which to me was indistinguishable from the hoarblast of hell. At last at the third sunset a storm of murderous ferocity struck. Paches’ flagship signalled all vessels to make for shore, enemy be damned.

Do you know that headland, Jason, called the Blacksmith’s Bellows? Its sound once heard may never be forgotten. The swifter vessels fetched the lee; those lumbering pots, as our own, were driven in and nearly dashed. The sole landing site was a splinter of gravel, walled on three sides by two-hundred-foot cliffs, and defended across its solitary channel of ingress by stone promontories exploding with white water and booming beneath the thunder of storm-pounded surf. Only after a struggle titanic in its exertions and sustained throughout the terrifying descent of darkness did our severed remnant, six ships, succeed in beaching upon that site called the Boilers, a strand so slender that the vessels’ prows (beaching stern-first being out of the question in such a tempest) were staring straight into the face of rock. Waves taller than a man crashed about their stern-posts, seeking to suck them back into the sea. To augment the hospitality of the place, the foe had got above us, at the summit of a precipice too sheer to scale, and begun raining boulders and initiating rockslides. Two of six ships were holed at once, nor could the youths of our force be induced to respond to orders to preserve the others, but crouched in clefts at the base of the fall, drenched and dread-stricken.

Command had broken down. Paches and the Athenian officers had been swept beyond the headland; it took an eternity to determine the ranking senior of our shredded squadron, a captain of Macedonian infantry it turned out, and he, overcome by the extremity, had retreated to a cave at the cliff base, from whose shelter he could not be drawn.

Upon the strand boulders plummeted like hail. With each ship holed, our extinction became more certain; the enemy would simply close from above and take us down with stone and shaft. Beside Hygeia, a horse transport had broached to. A number of the beasts thrashed in the surf, drowning; two who had made land had been struck by rockfalls and back-broken; their cries unstrung the rookie troops further. The vessel herself pitched among the breakers, secured only by bow and stern lines, each manned by twenty lads, frantic themselves and buffeted chest-deep in the maelstrom. Alcibiades and his cousin Euryptolemus had hurled themselves into this rescue. I found my brother Lion; we joined too. After monumental exertions the transport was at last beached. Without a word Alcibiades had become our commander. He strode off, seeking a senior officer to report to, ordering the rest of us to follow as soon as the horses had been secured ashore.

The gale continued to scour the landing beach. Boulders plummeted from above; concussions of thunder never ceased. My brother and I had just reached the brow of the strand, seeking the command post; we could see Alcibiades ahead, addressing the Macedonian captain. Suddenly this officer struck him with his staff. We dashed forward. Even amid the cacophony of storm and surf, the content of the confrontation was clear: Alcibiades demanding orders, the captain incapable of giving them. He wheeled upon the youth, twenty years his junior, whose family and reputation he knew, as we all. ‘Your kinsman Pericles is not here, young man, nor may you presume to dictate in his name!’

‘I speak in my own and that of these who will perish, absent your deliverance,’ Alcibiades rejoined. His gesture took in ships, gale, and the rain of rubble which continued to pelt from the enemy above. ‘Take action, sir, or by Heracles I will!’

Only two fifties remained unholed. Alcibiades struck for them. The captain was shouting, commanding him to stay put and threatening hell if he disobeyed. The youth bawled no defiance, simply strode on; and we, my brother and two score others, followed in his train as if drawn by fetters of adamant. At breakers’ brink he issued orders. No-one could hear a word. Yet we seized oars and launched into the teeth, ten at each bank, without even stepping the steering oars, so worthless were they in that sea. How the ships got off without loss of life I cannot say. What preserved the party, beyond heaven’s clemency, can only have been the beaminess of the craft and the quantity of seas shipped as unintended ballast. Of four pulls at oars, only one found purchase. Gale-driven chop hammered the hull like a siege engine, while swells twice the vessels’ length made them race like runaways. Plummeting into a trough, the bows nosed under, sending seas cascading into the bilges; ascending from a crest, the gale struck upon the exposed keel, elevating the vessels vertical as vine stakes. At oars we were literally standing on the thwarts of our comrades aft.

Somehow the two fifties managed to pull a half mile to sea. The lads communicated like dogs, by cries rendered mute in the blast; yet one understood the object: to make the first northward landing, scale the face, and get behind the foe.

Now Alcibiades rowed, with such a will as to impel all to emulation; his orders, shouted man-to-man down the banks, were to run into shore any way possible, taking no care for the vessels but only to land ourselves. The crest that bore us in unspooled with such velocity as to fling all bodily from their benches. We plunged over the gunwales. I was knocked senseless by the fall, coming to myself among breakers, shield filling with the weight of the seas, which hauled me under with a violence unimaginable. My forearm, seated through the sleeve to the elbow, bound me as a shackle; only the rivets’ failure, wrenched from their sockets by the press of turbulence, loosed me to breach the surface. A boy drowned before my eyes, dragged under in the same way. On the strand our remnant collected, shattered with exhaustion and bereft, all, of shields and weapons. Both boats were splinters. Lads shook as if palsied, blue to the bone.

One turned to Alcibiades. Drenched and weaponless as he was, and quaking as convulsively as we others, yet he revelled in this. No other phrase may describe it. To the lads unnerved by the ships’ loss he responded that had the vessels not sunk of their own, he would have ordered them holed and scuttled. ‘Banish all thought of retreat, brothers. No avenue remains but to advance, and no alternative save victory or death.’ He ordered count, and when three were discovered missing, drowned, he commanded our remainder to give meaning to their sacrifice. What we lacked accounted nothing beside the audacity of our stroke. ‘Want of weapons is no liability in this dark. Our sudden apparition in the enemy’s rear will be weapon enough. The foe will flee from the shock of our assault alone.’

Alcibiades drove us up the face. He was a horseman and knew in this wet that the enemy, being cavalry, would seek before all to get his mounts under cover. We were not lost, he repeated, however black the tempest, but must only follow the brink, employing heaven’s bolts as our beacon, till we discovered such a site. Of course he was right. A crag appeared. There they were. We fell upon the enemy’s grooms with stones and clubs and the shivered shafts of our oars. In moments our commander had us mounted and pounding along the precipice in dark as total as the tomb. At the crest the main of the foe fled, as Alcibiades had predicted. We chased a dozen into the fells, myself desperate to strip the shield from one. For the Spartan-trained, death was preferable to return from action, even victorious, empty-handed.

Here the first man fell beneath my blow. A plunge among rocks; I heard his skull crack on the stone in the dark. My brother dragged me off him, seeking to strip breastplate as well as shield. I was mad with the joy of my own survival and felt myself invincible, as so many young soldiers who in such states commit acts of barbarity. Lion hauled me back to the precipice. Our party had collected, masters of the site. We had won! Below, our troops cheered their deliverance. The face of the cliff had been roped, I saw; several from the strand had mounted and now stood before us. I recognized the Macedonian captain. He was berating Alcibiades, vehemently and with malice.

He declared the youth reckless and insubordinate, a disgrace to his country and the order of the Alliance. Three are dead by his defiance, two ships lost for his usurpation of command! Where are your shields and weapons? Do you know the penalty for their deficit? The captain’s eyes blazed. He would see Alcibiades hauled up on charges of mutiny, if not treason, and by Zeus dance upon his grave!

Three Macedonian warrant officers, the captain’s compatriots, reinforced him at arms. Alcibiades’ expression never altered, awaiting only the harangue’s termination.

‘One must not make such a speech,’ he declared, ‘with one’s back to the precipice.’

I will resist overdramatizing the moment, but report only that the three henchmen, considering their position, seized their commander and executed his precipitation.

The rest of us, who had just experienced for the first time in our young lives such a baptism of terror – and over such a sustained interval as we had never imagined – now discovered ourselves confronted with an even more extreme exigency. What would become of us? Surely those below must report Alcibiades’ action. We were accessories. Would we not be tried as murderers? Would our names be blackened, our families shamed and dishonoured? Would we be returned to Athens in chains to await execution?

At once Alcibiades stepped to the three Macedonians, setting a hand on their shoulders to assure them he harboured no malign intent. Might they inform him, he enquired, of the name and clan of their fallen captain?

‘You will prepare the following despatch,’ Alcibiades commanded. He proceeded to dictate the text of a commendation for valour. Each act of heroism which he had himself performed, he now credited to the captain. He recited this officer’s valour in the face of overwhelming peril; how he had, disregarding his own safety, put out into the storm, scaled the sheer face of stone to envelop and rout the enemy, preserving by his actions the ships and men of his company below. At the summit of triumph, as his sword slew the foe’s commander, cruel fortune overhauled him. He fell. ‘The fame of this action,’ Alcibiades concluded, ‘shall endure, imperishable.’

This despatch would be sent, Alcibiades declared further, to the captain’s father and presented personally by himself to Paches and the generals of Macedonia upon our squadron’s return. He turned then to us youths, including Lion and myself, looking on.

‘Which of you, brothers, will set his hand beneath mine on this citation?’

Need I recount, none failed to assent.

As to our unofficial company of infantry, it succeeded, reunited with the brigade under Paches, in its mission over a month and more of fighting, during which Alcibiades at nineteen, though by no means officially in command, was in fact deferred to by all superiors and permitted such latitude of action and initiative as to render him effectively its captain. When this unit at last reached Potidaea, our original destination, and joined the line troops engaged in the siege, it was disbanded as nonchalantly as it had been formed, and Alcibiades, undecorated but unindicted, was repatriated to his regiment.

It was my brother’s observation regarding this incident that, though he, and I as well, served in subsequent seasons beside a number of the young men present at the precipice in that hour and had ample opportunity of converse, formal and informal, on this or any subject, never did one offer mention of this instance or confirm by word or allusion the actuality of its occurrence.

FIVE

THE INDISPENSABLE MAN

AT THE SIEGE of Potidaea two young men established themselves as indispensable: Alcibiades and my brother. By his bearing both in action and in counsel it had become patent that the former was

pre-eminent of hero’s fire,

without rival among the host.

Within all the corps he was acknowledged the most brilliant and audacious, possessed of the most abundant genius of war. At Athens his fields of enterprise had been limited by youth to sport and seduction. Campaign overturned this, granting him a sphere commensurate to his gifts. Overnight he came into his own. It was deemed by no few that he, though not yet twenty, could have been elevated to supreme command and not only prosecuted the siege with greater vigour and sagacity but brought it to a successful conclusion with far less loss of life.

As to my brother, he had made his name among the hard heads and raw knots of the corps. Experience teaches that however numerous the brigade or army, the work of war is performed by small units, and each must possess to be effective one man like Lion who is unacquainted with fear, who arises cheerful each morning despite all hardship, ready to shoulder another’s load with a laugh and turn his hand to all tasks, however mean or humble. A unit lacking a man like Lion will never endure, while one with such a mate may be beaten but never broken.

Our father’s letters caught up to us at Potidaea. We were summoned, Lion and I, to the tent of Paches’ adjutant, a captain of Aexone whose name I cannot recall. The officer read aloud two pleas of our father, confirming my brother’s age at sixteen years three months and pleading for his immediate discharge, with a pledge to pay all fines and fees of transport. ‘What have you to say, young man?’ our captain demanded.