they haunted my nightmares.
Termites and carpenter ants, hornets and wasps, locusts, mites, aphids and grain beetles, moths, chiggers, weevils and blowflies; the corers and borers, burrowers and devourers. God alone may testify to the creatures which infest the innards of the farmer's livestock; canker and cutworms, leeches and tapeworms; into how many bungholes must one plunge to the elbow? The earth itself may not be relied upon, but each morn another retaining wall has toppled, another runoff ditch caved in. Every task costs money on the land, and the landsman never has money. The farmer's cash is sweat, the only commodity he possesses in unlimited bulk. Rain is the farmer's nemesis, too much or too little, and sun and wind and fire and time. Hired hands put out work only on payday, and if you're mad enough to invest in a slave or two, you import only their troubles. Calf-deep in sheep shit, my brother and I exchange this wordless query: how in hell's name did the old man do it? How could one man alone wring profit from this dirt when the team of us, yoked, is vanquished utterly? The farmer is ancient at forty. He endures season to season through the offices of one ally only: his dog.
Tireless, ever faithful, the landsman's Number One (all secondaries comprising a useless pack of curs) bounds to his heel at cock's crow and toils there daylong, unshirking, ever cheerful, craving no wages save the sound of his master's voice and a quick pat and ruffle at labor's end. Lord of all beasts, night sentry, bulwark of the line, the farm could not survive without him.
The land of course is bliss for a child, for whom each chore is a lark and every creature a playmate. A woman, too, comes into her own on a farm. Eunice reveled in it. Lion's Theonoe was a city dame; the country bored her. But her children throve, inflicting on my dame that ache only a childless woman knows. I must take Eunice to wife soon if I meant to remain; she would not stand the tramp more.
That fall a message came from Euryptolemus. There would be a fleet to invade Sicily; Alcibiades would hold command. I could name my appointment, as could my brother. The mustering bonus would be three months' pay, with officers' double wages for the duration.
Eunice would not remain in the room when Lion and I debated this.
Not long thereafter, Alcibiades appeared before our clan to make a presentation. He rode out to Weather Hill at Acharnae, my grandfather's ancient tile-roofed farmhouse. Above thirty of our kinsmen assembled-old wealth primarily, but with a salting of the younger bloods as well. Alcibiades addressed the gathering after dinner. He wanted money for the fleet. Not an assessment of the eisphora, the war tax, for which all citizens had been levied hitherto, but additional capital ventured uncompelled. Specifically he sought private sponsors, individuals to endow warships in their own names or as syndicates. He desired them to build these vessels from the keel up, bear all costs of commission and shakedown, then donate the completed craft to the fleet, with funding for a year for officers and crew. This was for Sicily, for the great invasion.
One must here note a distinguishing characteristic of Alcibiades' political style. This was his temerity to advance a cause, absent all office. Though he had been four times elected to the Board of Generals, the prestige he brought this night was neither backed by state authority nor issued in an official capacity. He came before us entirely on his own.
As to this Sicilian enterprise: it chanced, as you know, that Athens at that time had a treaty of mutual defense with the city of Egesta; representatives of this state had recently appealed to the Assembly, seeking assistance in a dispute with their neighbors, the Selinuntines, who, aided now by the might of Syracuse, held them besieged. Alcibiades and others who favored war had seized upon this pretext; in no time the measure was ratified by the people.
Funds were appropriated for an expedition; three generals, Alcibiades, Nicias, and Lamachus, appointed. Opponents, however, including Nicias himself, intrigued successfully to cap expenditures, hoping to sap the venture before it began. Alcibiades took his case to the people, meaning those with money, the great families and the private political associations. By the evening he appeared before our family, he had made presentations to at least three score such gatherings and had four more scheduled for the next four nights. In all Alcibiades put his pitch, it was estimated, to over two hundred clans and brotherhoods; it took the better part of fall and winter. Men joked of these nocturnal canvassings that at least they kept him out of the whorehouses.
This was serious business, however, and Alcibiades approached it in deadly earnest. Prior to his evening with the men of our family, he had taken the time to seek out each in private, on the land or in town, wherever he could catch the man at ease and speak with him informally and apart. This was to soften him up. Further each potential benefactor had received at his home a prospectus, and Alcibiades brought more, updated, which he distributed upon the actual evening. Worthy of note was that to two of my uncles, whose resources were too slender to foot such a monumental contribution, were proffered not brochures of the fleet, but more modest briefs soliciting donations to the cavalry. I recall my grandfather's astonishment, not to say indignation, that Alcibiades had acquired such intelligence of our family's most privileged holdings. What must he know of the city's loftier eupatridai, the true old-money rich?
The evening broke frosty and clear. Braziers had been set up on my grandfather's south terrace, which had for the occasion been cloistered on three sides by woolen blinds, open on the fourth toward Decelea. Alcibiades arrived early, accompanied by his comrades Menestheus and Pythiades, with the naval architect Aristophon to answer technical questions. It was lost on no one that both Alcibiades' colleagues were recipients of fleet prizes of valor, Menestheus as a ship's master at Mytilene, Pythiades as a squadron commander at Cos, and that the pair were men of mature years and oligarchic inclination, recruited no doubt to offset their principal's youth and notoriety as a champion of the commons.
The meal and hymn concluded, and all dining vessels cleared, Alcibiades saluted his hosts and thanked them for their attendance and hospitality.
“Let us plunge right in and, as the Spartans, keep it short and sweet. Though, as you gentlemen know, I have been elected to the Board of Generals and share command of the expeditionary fleet, I come before this college tonight in no capacity other than private citizen. I address you, friends, in my own name only. One may reprove this, calling it prideful or presumptuous. This is what our enemies the Spartans would say, who act, when they do, alone by procedure and through channels. This is why our polity is superior to theirs and why they never have, and never shall, excel us. For our way provides that any citizen may place an issue before any other or aggregation of others, seeking by reason and persuasion to build a constituency for his cause. This is democracy in its best sense. Not the grandstanding of the demagogue to the mob, but the cool and measured appeal to the judicious and the prudent, in the interest of all.
“I am aware, gentlemen, that a number of you are skeptical of my motives and hold me personally in less than high regard. Permit me to address this at once and, I hope, persuade you that those qualities of my person which may cause you distress will prove in the present circumstance not liabilities but assets to our cause as individuals and to our city as a whole.
“Some of you disapprove my ambition, of which I make no secret. It smacks of outrage; you fear its consequence. Others have been scandalized by instances of my personal deportment. If I may say, I've been scandalized myself! This is no more than youth, gentlemen, and excess of spirit. When one purchases a colt he wishes to race, he looks not for docility, but fire. He seeks a horse that will run. Let his trainers school the beast. This is what I ask of you gentlemen tonight. Take me in hand. Harness my rashness to your temperance. This balance is how great teams are made and mighty races won.
“Sicily is a mighty race. Her lands are vast, richer than all the Peloponnese and in arable acreage greater than Greece entire.
Barley grows in Sicily, and wheat and rye and oats. Olives thrive, and fruit of all kinds. Sicily has water and timber and horses; who holds her has no need of Black Sea grain. And Sicily possesses mineral wealth, gold and silver, iron and copper and tin. Her cities, fifty in number, are the equal of Greek poleis in resource and treasure.
“More tempting, Sicily squats on the threshold of Italy. I need not detail the wealth of that unexploited land. I see none disputes this, gentlemen. Good. Yet your unspoken question stands clear: what's in it for me?
“All of you have sons, some with sons of their own. Each heir dilutes your patrimony, as holdings must be divided. What may we leave our successors? Where will they find their portion? You, my friends, are of the fifty- measure and equestrian classes; you are estate holders and knights. Let me put a question to you. Which is easier: to build up a landholding from dirt and stone, or to conquer one whole and entire, a founded property already in possession of cleared and planted fields, with water and fences and pasture land and even crofters who know and work the land? When we take Sicily, to whose sons will the choicest of these prizes go? Whom but those who have
