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

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 Phormia 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.”