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

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.”

She made the offering and served my plate.

“We must find you a bride.”

I laughed.

“You'll catch something from those whores.” At last her handsome face lit with a smile. I clasped her to me, this noble dame who had ever been my benefactor and champion. When my embrace at last released her, I beheld on her face no longer mirth but sorrow.

“What shall become of us, Pommo?”

This cry wrenched from her, heartsore, with my name unwontedly colloquialized.

“What has become of our family? What will become of you?”

My aunt began to weep.

“This war will be the end of all that was fair and gentle.”

Then turning as if in conformity to some impulse of heaven, she seized both my hands in hers and pressed them with a vigor remarkable in one so frail.

“You must survive it, my boy. Swear to me by Demeter and Kore.

One among us must endure!”

From the street could be heard the rude cry of some ruffian, no longer that of one passing through as a drayman or teamster, but one who dwelt here, below, and called this once-noble lane his own.

“Pledge this, my child. Give me your oath!”

I swore it, the way you do to a dotty old lady, never thinking of this promise more.

It was this lady Daphne [Grandfather resumed his narration] who arranged the marriage of her great-nephew Polemides to the maiden Phoebe.

You may find it queer, my grandson, when I relate that our client, throughout all recounting of the events of his life, not once made mention of his bride by name. In fact, save a solitary confession toward the terminus of his tale, he cited her existence only thrice, and that indirectly. Did this indicate a want of affection? On the contrary, I find this omission extremely significant, indicative in fact of precisely the opposite. Let me explain.

In those days, more so even than today, a man made reference to his spouse rarely. The greatest glory of a woman was modesty and reserve; the less said of her, for good or ill, the better. A wife's place was within chambers, her role the rearing of children and the management of the household.

A boy raised in that period, particularly one as Polemides, schooled beneath the stern aegis of the Lacedaemonians, was taught primarily to endure. The virtues were those of men; beauty, men's beauty. Remark the sculpture of that era. Only in recent seasons has the female form-and that only of goddesses-come to rival the male in currency of bronze and stone. A youth of that era was schooled to idealize the form of other men, not in a manner prurient or lascivious, but as a model of emulation. To behold in marble the peerless physiques of Achilles and Leonidas, to admire like perfection in one's comrades or elders, fired the youth to forge his own flesh in the image of that ideal, to embody inwardly the virtues such perfection of externals implied.

The spell cast over his contemporaries by Alcibiades derived in no small part, in my opinion, from this impetus. His beauty was remarked, for those of noble mind, as an intimation of some loftier perfection inhering within. Why else would the gods have made him look like that? Another of our master's disciples was the poet Aristocles, called Plato. His Theory of Forms arises from that selfsame interpretation. As the material manifestation of an individual horse embodies the particular and the transitory, Plato suggested, so must there exist within some higher realm the ideal form of Horse, universal and immutable, of which all corporeal horses "partake” or “participate in.” To this way of perceiving, a man of Alcibiades' spectacular beauty appeared little shy of the divine, his perfection in flesh approaching that ideal existent only upon loftier planes. This is why men followed him, I believe, and found it so reflexive to do so.