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

How lead free men? Only by this means: the summoning of each to his nobility.

When I was a boy, my tutor took me down to Piraeus to watch the racing shells sculling from Acte to the Silent Harbor.

My child's eye imagined that one creature drove each boat, a single splendid beast with multiple pairs of arms. But when the shells pulled in, I saw that men propelled them. Will you believe me, friends, when I say that I broke from my pedagogue to touch them with my hand, to see they were real? How could six, I begged to know, row as one? “Look there, little cousin, and see a hundred seventy-four do the same.”

A trireme on the wing: by the gods, here is a sight of splendor!

Nobler still a line at the advance and noblest of all, that symphony, a fleet. And you, my friends, of all who ever sailed or ever will, you are the finest. When sorrowful age has wrung us in its grip, what shall remain? Fathers and mothers, wives, lovers, even our own children, all will fall away, I believe, leaving only these, our comrades with whom we have made trial of death. They are enough, my friends. They are that which few ever feel or know.

You do not need me, brothers. No force on earth can stand up to you. May the gods bear you from victory to victory. The last sight I behold as hell hauls me down shall be your faces. Thank you for honoring me with your comradeship. And now good-bye, my friends. Fare you well.

I studied the mercenary Telamon as he finished his feed. Though calculation put his years well past fifty, his aspect was so lean and weatherworn as to tell thirty-five or even fewer. I wished earnestly to interrogate him, of Polemides' final seasons and his own.

One look told he would endure nothing of the sort. I inquired only where he was bound. To the harbor, he replied, to ship out on campaign.

I had a pair of boots in the barn and a woolen mantle far superior to that threadbare article he wore. He would take neither.

He rose, shouldering his kit.

Upon the bench he set a coin.

I protested that he offended the farm's hospitality.

He smiled. “It's from Pommo, Cap'n. He thought you might find the piece of interest.”

I picked it up. It was a gold daric of Phrygia, a month's pay for an infantryman. The reverse bore a trireme and a winged Victory; the obverse Athena Triumphant framed by an owl and olive branch.

The coin was called an “alcibiadic,” Telamon reported. It was a favored piece, good across all Asia.

The lane passing out from the farm bisects the central compound. The hands' kitchen and service stalls mark the west, as you know, adjacent several cottages and a transients' barracks.

Equipment sheds stand across, with that steading upslope we call the Crease, and the stock pens beyond. As the mercenary trekked down toward the gate, a huddle of gawkers tracked him with their gaze, arrested by his appearance and his kit. This following was comprised not alone of lads but of maids and even husbandmen and dames breaking off at their labors. As he approached the gate, two boys dashed ahead, that he not be put to trouble by the latch, and would have trailed him a distance down the lane, or to the sea itself, had not their fathers hailed them back.

I, too, was held by this apparition, unable to turn apart until he had vanished along the avenue of holm oak, whose blossom yields that scarlet dye which ever colors the soldier's cloak of war.