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

“Upon this simple seaman's cart we bore our friend's corpse home. We were twenty, in a body, as we felt we must be in fear of the mob. None molested our way, however; their lust for blood had been sated. Pericles' son Xanthippus was the bravest. Only fourteen, he strode before the party erect and dry-eyed. He dressed his father's corpse, in apprehension yet that the Eleven may order it expelled from Attica, and that night sheared his mother's hair and bound her in the cowl of mourning. The order had already been served, confiscating Pericles' property. Do you remember?

We gathered to take into our own homes whomever and whatever we could. Yet what fell out was this: within two days the people had come to themselves and discovered their derangement.

Collective contrition seized the city, as men discerned the outrage they had wrought and lamented bitterly their own passion and overhaste.

“Now Chione refused to confine herself to the women's quarters.

'Let them stop me,' she declared. Draped in mourning, she strode abroad, veilless, with her shorn locks, in reproach to all and every.

To those few who summoned courage to approach she addressed not a word, day upon day, but only displayed her cropped hair.

“Do you understand, Jason? She was a philosopher. Untutored, her valiant heart grasped the requirement of the hour and endowed her with the intrepidity to act. Neither Brasidas nor Leonidas, not Achilles himself, ever evinced greater fortitude or more selfless love for hearth and country. How then may I, friends, who call love of wisdom my calling, how may I permit myself an action unworthy of it or of her? I may step off the precipice, so to say, as in silence the younger Pericles, her husband, did. And you, friends, may walk abroad with shorn heads, as his wife.”

I finished.

Polemides said nothing for long moments, absorbed in meditations of his own.

“Thank you,” he spoke at last.

He smiled then and, producing a document from his chest, passed it to me.

“What is it?”

“Take a look.”

I glanced at its prologue. It was my defense of the younger Pericles, the very address I had, in Socrates' redaction, just recounted.

“Where did you get this?”

“From Alcibiades, in Thrace. He admired it greatly, as do I. It was not the only copy among that army.”

Again my throat thickened, recalling those loved ones, Polemides' as well as my own, of whom we could claim naught but memory. The night was well advanced; the porter's steps could be heard below retiring to his cubby. It would require a racket now to accomplish my release. Let it go, I thought. My wife will not fret, but think me overnighting with one of our company. I turned to my companion, who, alert as well to my predicament, regarded me with amusement.

“Now you must keep your bargain, Pommo, to conclude your tale aloud. Or are you too wearied to see it through?”

An odd expression animated him.

“Why do you smile like that?” I asked.

“You've never addressed me as 'Pommo.'''

“Haven't I?”

Indeed it would be his pleasure to finish, he said. He confessed he had feared that I myself had lost interest, absent the need to prepare for trial. “Let us bring the ship to port, then, shall we, and secure her safely, if the gods will.”

I was with the Spartan colonel Philoteles at Teas

[Polemides resumed] when reports came from Athens of the execution of Pericles and the generals. The Spartans could not believe it. First Alcibiades deposed, now their best men put to death. Had Athens gone mad? There was a ditty then.

Two-eyed the Owl-men

Once polled sound as brass.

Now they ballot with one eye,

The one in their ass.

Heaven had severed Athens from her senses for the excesses of her empire. Such was the Deity's requital, the street-corner prophets proclaimed, for the hubris of imperial pride.

Spartan morale soared. Desertions from Athens redoubled. I passed along Lysander's quays that autumn; one saw the same faces as at Samos, so many were the oarsmen, islanders, who had come over. Even the ships were the same. Cormorant, Lysias' squadron leader, was now Orthia. Vigilant and Sea Swallow, captured at Arginousai from the Cat's Eyes, were Polias and Andreia. Already in the taverns one heard shorttimers' jabber; sailors and marines spooked of some fluke demise before war's end and discharge.

Athens had cobbled together her final fleet. Every jack who could piss standing up had been conscripted, even the Knights.

The generals were so shaky they didn't even plunder. One defeat would finish them, while the Spartans, floated by Persian gold, could absorb loss after loss, simply making each good and continuing to fight.

I had put back to Ephesus after Samos. Where else could I go, with homicide appended to treason on my proscript? Not that anyone noticed amid the flocks of deserters, turncoats, and renegades lining up at the recruiting desks beneath the red rag. I refound Telamon. A new generation of officers had come out from Sparta, many mates of my youth. They had won their colonelcies or come East to try.

Philoteles, under whom I now took service, was the lad of my agoge platoon, twenty-six years past, who had with such empathy informed me of the burning of my father's farm. Now a division commander, he vowed to make good that long-ago injustice.

“When we take Athens I'll set the title in your fist, Pommo, and see him racked who dares cry foul.”

Here is how I became an assassin. We were training marines, Telamon and I, trying to stay out of trouble. Lysander, who had been recalled to Sparta on expiry of his commission as navarch, was back. The ephors had appointed him vice-admiral under Aracus, since no Spartan may hold supreme command twice.

Lysander was chief, however, in all but name. Not hintermost among his directives was the elimination of political resistance within the cities. The Spartans are past masters at this, having acquired the practice from the subjugation of their own helots.

Now Lysander recruited these themselves, the neodamodeis, the freed Spartan serfs, to carry out his campaign of terror.

These helots make able troops in units under Spartan officers.

On their own, however, they are notorious. Atrocities began coming to light. Philoteles approached Telamon and others, myself among them, who could be entrusted to act with restraint.

We were called “summoners.” It worked like this. We were issued warrants, called “writs of remission.” The names upon these were of officials and magistrates, naval and army officers, any who had held positions of responsibility under Athenian rule and whose sympathies might lie opposed to “freedom.” In Spartan eyes these were traitors, plain and simple. The bills were death warrants. Arrest was followed by execution, at once and on the spot.

We endeavored to be clement. A man was granted time to shrive himself or scribble his testament. If he'd fled to the interior and we'd had to chase him, we brought him back. The flesh was spared, as much as possible, and bodies released for burial to kin.

There was a science to it, this state-sanctioned homicide. It was best to take a man in the street or the marketplace, where dignity enjoined him from putting up a fuss. A good arrest was civilized.

No weapons were drawn or even exposed. The man himself, recognizing his position, sought decorum. The bravest summoned quips. One could not but admire them.

You ask, how did one feel about this? Was he shamed, schooled in the honorable profession of arms, to discover himself a butcher?

Telamon for his part lost not a wink and scorned all who did. To him this work, though distasteful, was as legitimate an aspect of the warrior's trade as siege operations or the erection of ramparts.