Steven Pressfield: Tides of War, a Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War

“Who is it?” he shouted.

He was blind. The flames had taken half his face. I called my name. He could not hear. I cried louder, at his ear. I was riven with such distress as words may never compass. Behind, the Thracians put up a clamor ungodly, claiming their prize. The cottage continued collapsing by sections. Again I shouted into his ear.

This time he heard. His fist held me like a griffin's claw. “Who else?”

I told him Endius and the Persians.

A terrible groan escaped his breast. It was as if this was what he had expected and, expectation fulfilled, he recognized his fate. His grip clenched me fast.

“The woman…she must not be left undefended in this country.”

I swore I would protect her.

His great shield, the same he had borne down thrice nine years since our first blooding beneath those cliffs called the Boilers, rested yet across his chest and shoulders. I had set it thus to cover his nakedness. He shifted now, straining against its weight. With what strength remained he declined the bronze, exposing the flesh of his neck and throat.

“Now, my friend,” he said. “Take what you came for.”

Polemides here elevated his glance and met my eyes. For a moment I thought he could not continue, nor was I at all certain I wished him to.

Lysander had said of Alcibiades that in the end Necessity would bring him low. Perhaps she did, but it was my hand which drove the fatal blade. Nor did I slay a general or statesman, as history will memorialize him, but a man, hated by many and loved by more, myself not last among them. Set aside his feats and felonies. In this I honor him: that he drove the vessel of his soul to where sea and sky conjoin and contended there, without fear, as few before, save perhaps only your master, his first instructor.

Who will sail so far again?

And I, who took upon himself such freight of self-condemnation for my acts of the Plague and after, discovered myself experiencing on Deer Mountain, to my wonder, no such grief or remorse. I did not act so much as enact. Do you reckon the distinction, my friend? I was Alcibiades' own arm, as I had been since that night of our youth upon the storm-bound strand, striking that blow which he himself called down. Who is guilty? I and he, and Athens and all Greece, who have fashioned our ruin with our own hands.

Polemides finished. It was enough. No more need be narrated.

Later, within his sea chest, I discovered this correspondence in Alcibiades' hand. It bore no salutation and was salted with misspellings, indicative of a preliminary draft-to whom one may only guess. By its date, the tenth of Hecatombaion, it may be the last he ever wrote.

…my end, though it come at the hands of strangers, will have been purposed and paid for by my own countrymen. I am to them that which they esteem most and may endure least: their own likeness writ large. My virtues-ambition, audacity, emulation of heaven rather than prostration before it-are but their own, amplified.

My vices are theirs as well. Those qualities which my constitution lacks-modesty, patience, self-effacement-they too despise, but whereas my nature has preserved me unfettered by these, theirs has not. They both fear and worship that brilliance to which my example summons them, but which they possess insufficient spirit to embrace. Athens, confronted by the fact of my existence, owns only these options: to emulate or eliminate. When I am gone, she will cry for me. But I will never come again. I am her last.

She will produce no more as myself, however many hoist the jack and ensign.

I passed Socrates' final day [Grandfather continued] in his cell with the others. I was exhausted and dozed. I had this dream: Weary and wishing to attend our master with the clearheadedness he deserved, I hunted through the prison for a recess in which to catch a catnap. My search delivered me to the carpenter's loft. There, horizontal, spread the tympanon on which Polemides would this day meet his end. “Go ahead, sir.” The carpenter motioned me in. “Take a snooze.” I lay down and fell at once into a blissful slumber. I awoke with a start, however, to discover officers binding me to the instrument. My wrists and ankles were fettered beneath the cramp irons; the chain strangled me about the throat. “You've got the wrong man!” I shouted. But my cry was throttled by the iron. “I'm the wrong man! You've got the wrong man!”

I snapped-to to discover myself in Socrates' cell. I had cried out and disquieted him. He had taken the hemlock already, I was informed, and, awaiting its effect, had settled to rest upon his pallet, compassed by those who loved him, his face shrouded beneath a cloth. I begged the company's pardon. It was clear that agitation was the last thing our master needed. In distress I excused myself and hastened from the cell.

It was late in the day. As I emerged at the head of the Iron Court, I glimpsed a woman and a boy vacating toward the vestibule.

Eunice. This was odd, as Polemides had thus far refused to see her.

Had something happened?

At once the lad reappeared. Polemides' son Nicolaus. He had not been departing, only assisting his mother upon her way. He strode straight up to me and took my hand, narrating his gratitude for my exertions on his father's behalf. A sea change had overtaken the youth. Though lank and cranelike as ever, he had acceded to manhood. He greeted me equal-to-equal, so much so that I found myself abashed and, seeking to allay what I imagined to be his distress, addressed him to this effect: that though his mother had been the engine of this grief, he must recall that her object was his own preservation, that is, to keep him from harm, running off to war.

The boy regarded me queerly. “That is not how the land lies at all, sir. Has my father not told you?”

His mother, the lad insisted, had not engineered anything. She was no instigator of this prosecution but its pawn. That perjurer Colophon who had brought suit against my father, the youth said, acted as stooge for those who had hired him, Polemides, during the reign of the Thirty, to assassinate Alcibiades.

“These villains, learning of my father's return to the city, feared exposure for their crimes. They have put the squeeze on my mother, reckoning her vulnerable as a noncitizen, and compelled her to provide particulars of that accidental homicide in Samos, years past, by which the rogues have secured my father's sentence of death.”

Polemides had delivered his confession, the lad informed me, in return for a warranty of citizenship for Eunice and the children, made to him in secret by his prosecutors, who apparently possessed the sway to pull it off. He had been loath to reveal this to me lest I, in outrage at the cost to himself, seek to expose it.

There is a bench beside the steps which lead from the Iron Court. Weariness now overcame me. I must sit. The lad took the place at my side. Darkness fell. Brands were lit and set within their hangers.

I came to myself after some while, roused by a commotion across the cloister. The keeper stood in heated skirmish with Socrates' dear friend, Simmias of Thebes, who had this moment been summoned apparently from the cell. Had the master expired?

I crossed at once with the boy. The porter now joined this affray, whose core of contention was, to my puzzlement, horses. “You may have hired them, sir,” porter and keeper protested to Simmias,

“but it's our necks if they're found out.”

Simmias tugged me aside in consternation. “By the gods, I have cocked up, Jason.”

Some days earlier, he explained, confident of securing Socrates' assent to a design of escape, Simmias had engaged several gentlemen of dubious reputation to hire mounts and purchase the silence of guards and informers. This course he had set in motion, Simmias accounted, before Socrates had with such finality repudiated it. “Can you credit it, Jason? With all else the scheme has slipped my mind entirely!”