Nicholas Nicastro - The Isle of Stone

The Peloponnesian War was the war to end all wars in antiquity: a conflict of unprecedented scope, length, and destructiveness, after which nothing was the same. Fought over a period of twenty-seven years, it pitted Athens and her sometimes-reluctant imperial subjects against a league of Peloponnesian states led by Sparta. This novel dramatizes one of the war’s key campaigns-the entrapment and siege of hitherto undefeated Spartan soldiers on a narrow island in the west of Greece. The incident turned out to be a high point of the struggle for the Athenians, who still lost the war.

Readers unfamiliar with this subject may be confused by the varying ways the ancients referred to the Spartans and their allies (“Lacedaemonians,” “Laconians,” “Peloponnesians,” “Spartiates,” “Equals,” et al). By way of clarification, “Lacedaemon” and “Laconia” are alternative names for the fertile valley region in the southern Peloponnese that encompassed the city of Sparta. Although all Lacedaemonians were Peloponnesians, the region of the Peloponnese included a number of other important city-states that were part of the Spartan bloc. Describing a force as “Peloponnesian” therefore emphasizes a preponderance of Spartan allies within (though at least some Spartans were usually part of such armies or fleets).

The term “Spartiate” is a more restrictive one than “Lacedaemonian.” It refers to those adult males in the Spartan population who attained the status of full citizenship by completing the requisite course of education (the agoge or “Rearing”), being elected to a communal mess, and attaining the age of thirty. The number of full-blown Spartiates amounted to only a small minority in the city population and the army. This shortage of elite manpower obligated the state to accept into service noncitizen Lacedaemonians, including resident aliens called perioikoi (“circum-habitants,” here designated as “Nigh-Dwellers”), ex-citizens stripped of their citizenship for conduct or financial reasons, and, in extreme circumstances, state slaves (“helots”) who served in exchange for their freedom. Spartiates referred to one another as homoioi, which I follow certain authorities in translating as “Equals.” Those who had graduated from the agoge, but were not yet thirty years old, belonged in an informal age-class called the hebontes (rendered here simply as “under-thirties”).

The precise organization of the Spartan army has long been a subject of debate, including as it did a number of subdivisions that are unclear in nature and changed with time. For my purposes here I have remained agnostic on these questions. Since the names of the subdivisions are numerous and unfamiliar, I have opted to translate them into rough modern equivalents (e.g., “platoon” for the Spartan enomotia of thirty-six men, “battalion” for the lochos of one thousand, etc.). Similarly, the names of age-groups in the Rearing, which would have sounded archaic even to classical Greeks, have been changed here to the closest equivalents in American idiom: West Point class monikers (“Firsties,” “Cows,” etc.). My apologies to the purists.

A mixture of ancient and modern units of measure is used in the text. For the sake of convenience, modern units are used when they were more or less similar to their ancient counterparts (e.g., feet, hours, months). Verisimilitude has been served by including a number of antique units that are common in the relevant historical sources. Most prominent here is the “stade,” a Greek unit of distance approximately equivalent to six hundred modern feet (and from which the word “stadium” is derived).

The common monetary unit is the Athenian “drachma,” which is equivalent in value to six “obols.” The superordinate units are the “mina,” worth one hundred drachmas, and the “talent,” equaling six thousand drachmas. We know that a decent house in a suburb of Athens in the late fifth century BC would set the buyer back five hundred to one thousand drachmas (or five to ten minas); a gallon of olive oil, more than three drachmas; a good pair of shoes, about ten drachmas; a healthy adult slave, three hundred to five hundred. Still, for various reasons, expressing the value of a drachma in today’s currency is not as straightforward as finding modern equivalents for, say, distance. According to an oft-cited rule of thumb, the wage for the average laborer in classical Athens was one or two drachmas a day. A talent, therefore, works out to the equivalent of almost twenty years of work, or in modern terms something like a million dollars.

As for the calendar, the reader will notice there are no absolute dates given for the events depicted here. This is due to the simple fact that no universal system existed until recent times (and arguably, does not exist even today, given that the Chinese, Muslim, and Jewish calendars are still in use). Instead, years were designated either by counting the years since some important event, or on the basis of who held important magistracies at that time (in Athens, years were named for the so-called “eponymous” archons). For instance, the historian Thucydides dates the beginning of the Peloponnesian War to “the forty-eighth year of the priestess-ship of Chrysis at Argos, during the ephorate of Aenesias at Sparta and in the last month but two of the archonship of Pythodorus at Athens…” (2.2.1). This works out to the early summer of 431 BC by modern reckoning. The focal events of this book are the Great Earthquake in Laconia in 464 BC, and the battle at Pylos and subsequent siege of the island of Sphacteria, which took place over a seventy-two day period in the mid to late summer of 425 BC.

Finally, to help the reader navigate a plethora of similar-sounding Greek names, an index of characters is included at the back of the book.

In the early morning of her wedding day, Damatria went out to the privy hole behind her father’s house. She had just cut her hair in short, boyish style, in preparation for the traditional first-night visit from her betrothed. Squatting, she imagined the smell of Molobrus as he pressed down on her, reeking of the barracks, of swine blood and vinegar from the mess table. He would fumble down there, and she would need to guide him in the process of her deflowerment. How ignorant of women were the brave lads, who lived their youths naked on Taygetus but trembled, lost as lambs, in the foothills of the Mount of Venus! What responsibilities womanhood entailed, ruling these men of Sparta.

She was struck at once by a certain unsteadiness. After bracing herself against the ground, she realized it was the earth itself that was moving, not she. It was just a mild dislocation at first, as if she was perched on the wrist of a giant who was repeatedly clenching his fist. Then came a sick-making pulsation, wave upon wave, as if the earth became liquid. This went on for a few uncommonly vivid minutes, consuming her attention, until the waves ceased and she rose uncertainly to her feet, arms outstretched, as if expecting to plunge into the betrayed solidity below.

Her father’s house lay at the outskirts of the village of Mesoa. Where the structure had stood, there was now a cloud of plaster dust over a neat pile of debris. No houses stood intact anywhere she could see, though there were a number of other figures who were, like herself, standing unscathed. She met the gaze of the wife and mother who lived in the house next door; mute as a post, she was holding the handle of a broken water jug, her eyes reflecting a faint bemusement with the reordered landscape. The woman seemed not to register the interleaved walls of the house before her, where minutes before her infant had delighted in lifting his tiny head. Damatria looked to the skyline of Taygetus over the valley, ordinarily so comforting in its familiarity. This time, in a way she could not describe, even the mountain seemed changed.