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

In town the democracy had been abolished, the citizenry disfranchised and disarmed. A new constitution was being drafted, or so the Thirty assured the people. Months passed and no article appeared. Instead there were lists. Your name appeared on one and you were seen no more.

What had been the popularly elected executive, the Board of Ten Generals, no longer existed. The Areopagus may not convene.

Exiles were brought home, meaning those banished heretofore as enemies of the democracy. These were now either recruited to the Thirty or engaged as their agents. The courts were shuttered for civil litigation, which matter was perceived as forwarding the cause of the commons; when they opened again, it was as engines of persecution. As under all tyrannies prosecutorial legitimacy was extended to the preemptive. A man may be executed not alone for acts committed but for those he might commit. Nor were such arraignments confined to political targets. The Thirty went after anyone with money. The toll was fifteen hundred and counting.

Those democrats who ducked the executioner were packed off to Lysander's service, the front lines.

Telamon rode out to Road's Turn one day, bearing wine and parched barley, most welcome. I asked him what he would do, now the war was over. He laughed.

War is never over.

He had come to recruit me. To no specific employer; just back on the tramp. Surely I reckoned that my tenure on the land bore an expiry. Sooner or later, if only from her own want of allies, Sparta must lift her heel from Athens' throat. The democracy would revive. Such swallows as myself who had roosted under the conqueror's eave would find themselves back out in the storm. We would either be butchered in the street by our neighbors or called to execution by due process. My luck consisted in this, Telamon observed, that my kin were women and children. Its revenge sated upon me, the demos would leave these innocents alone.

I regarded my mentor as he put his case. How youthful he looked! He had not aged a month, it seemed, down twenty-seven years of war. “Give us the secret of your immortality!”

He would lecture me, I knew, on vices. Three he abhorred-fear, hope, and love of country. He abominated only one beyond these: contemplation of past or future. These were offenses against nature, Telamon maintained, as they bound one to aspiration, to a result whose issue was adjudicated by forces, above the earth and beneath, which mortals may neither alter nor apprehend.

Alcibiades was guilty of these, my mate observed, and of another violation of heaven's law.

Alcibiades perceived war as a means. In truth it was an end.

Where our commander claimed to honor only Necessity, Telamon served a divinity more primordial.

“Her name is Eris. Strife. All things are brought forth through Strife, my friend, even ourselves torn from our mothers' wombs.

Look there to those hawks on the hunt; they serve her, as even these weeds at our feet, whose roots duel beneath the earth for each square fist of dirt.

“Strife is life's oldest and most holy fundament. You tease me, my friend, that I have not aged. If this be true, it arises of obedience to her, this dame at once ancient as earth and youthful as the morrow's dawn.”

I smiled. “Do you know how many times I have heard this sermon?”

“Yet still you do not learn.”

War waged for advantage yields only ruin. Yet one may not disown war, which abides as constant as the seasons and eternal as the tides.

“What world is it you seek, Pommo, that is 'better' than this? Do you imagine like Alcibiades that you, or Athens, may elevate yourselves or anyone to some loftier sphere? This world is the only one that exists. Learn its laws and obey them. This is true philosophy.”

Perhaps to him. Yet I was not ready to don the perennial soldier's kit and enlist, beyond hope, in Strife's battalions. I stayed.

How my aunt despised me! We worked the lambing together, barefoot in aprons. “Don't credit yourself with preserving us. We would all be here just the same, absent your intercession.”

“Thank you, dear.”

At table she had assumed the patriarchy, abdicated by myself, and employed this pulpit to decant at full strength for the innocents' edification love of freedom and enmity of tyranny. I knew how desperate her patriot's heart had grown when one day from her harangue arose the name Alcibiades. “By the Holy Twain, none remains but he, possessed of the bowels to resuscitate the state.”

In the country markets one overheard kindred sentiments.

Gravers inquired of merchants from the city, did Alcibiades yet live? Had we driven him, by our repudiation, apart from Athens' cause forever?

To me this was madness. He had gone over to the Persian now.

God knows what robes he swathed himself in and what fictions he wove to preserve his hide. Let Athens, like her waste and weary lands, set her own store to order. Let it rest! Let him!

I trekked in to the port one day with my nephew and a vintner of the overhill farm. Cresting the track at Butadae, one could see the city walls, untouched and imposing as ever. Then you made the turn above the Academy, where the Carriage Road and the Northern Wall conjoined.

There was nothing left of it.

The quarter west of Melite had been leveled to the distance of a furlong. We passed Maroneia, the played-out silver mines, where these bricks and stones had been dumped. The rubble covered acres, deep enough to bury a fleet, which in the truest sense it had.

When we passed the Legs themselves, the walls that had linked city to port, you could see from one side to the other, so utterly had the fortifications been obliterated. Far gone as I thought I was, this sight chilled my heart. My companion, the vintner, wept.

My aunt Daphne died on the twenty-third of Boedromion, final day of the Mysteries.

My son had come out, as on several prior occasions, run off from Eunice. I must restore him to her, but let him stay for now. He seconded me at the old dame's obsequies. We sang the Hymn for the Fallen, the first time in our family for a woman. She had earned it.

Some days later a party of deputies from the city appeared at Road's Turn. I was coming in from the fields and saw them before they saw me. Should I run? What good would it do? They took me into town to an abandoned private home two blocks off the Sacred Way. Windows had been bricked, all furnishings removed. Where the hearth had stood, the stone squatted dark with blood.

I was led into a back room. There were other men, armed, and a plank desk, behind which sat two, unknown to me, but by whose demeanor I recognized as agents of the Thirty.

“Your name has come up on a list,” the taller asserted.

“Which list?”

He shrugged.

The shorter passed two documents across, inquiring which I wished him to sign. The first was my death certificate, the second a warrant of Athenian citizenship for my son and daughter.

“We have a job we want you to do.”

Before any spoke, I knew what it was.

“I call him friend,” I declared, “and the last hope of our country.”

A sound came from the side door; I rounded toward it. Telamon filled the frame to the lintel, in his kit of war. I turned back to the agents.

“That is why,” the taller spoke, “you must kill him.”

Alcibiades had fled Thrace by sea to Phocaea, heading east into the Empire. That country is vast but roads are few; it is no chore to track a man once on his trail. From Smyrna one makes Sardis in two days; three more carry him to the Lydian city of Cydrara and another to Colossae and Anaua in Phrygia.

Roadhouses, called “ordinaries,” terminate each trek. Every fifth day is an inn, where it is the custom of the country to layover two nights to rest one's stock. Other troopers gave report of him. He traveled with his mistress Timandra and a party of Mysian mercenaries, fewer than five, serving as bodyguards.