One evening we took a ramble up the heights called Epipolae.
Lion brooded, seeking the deficiency that had turned the army so sour. Telamon was taking a piss and didn't even look up.
“No Alcibiades, no empire.”
Night fell; that fort called the Circle was lit up beneath cressets.
We walked, looking out over the city and harbor. “Nicias has had his career,” Telamon continued. “He's like an old plough horse who wishes only to get back to the barn.”
The mercenary gestured to the ant colony that sprawled beneath us, harbor to sea. “Look at this hell. Why would any man cross an ocean to besiege a nation no threat to his own? Fear won't make him, nor even greed. Only one force will call him. A dream!
That dream is gone. It defected with your friend Alcibiades.”
We were on the wrong side, Telamon declared. We were going to lose. Lion and I laughed. How could we lose? Syracuse is cut off.
The native cities flock to our side. No armies are coming to preserve the Syracusans, and they certainly can't save themselves.
Who will teach them?
“The Spartans,” testified Telamon, as if it were patent.
“Once Alcibiades dispatches them, schoolmasters to their fellow Dorians of Syracuse.”
XX
Among the ways the Spartans differ from other peoples is this.
When an ally in distress applies to them for aid, they alone dispatch neither troops nor treasure but a solitary commander, a general. This officer alone, assuming charge of the beleaguered forces, is sufficient, they feel, to turn affairs about and produce victory.
This as the world knows is what happened at Syracuse. The general's name was Gylippus. I knew this man from my schooling at Sparta. A true story:
When he was a boy, Gylippus was an exceptionally fast runner.
At ten he won the boys' Hyacinthiad over the Long Course, a cross-country trial in excess of ten miles. The ordeal of the event is as follows: each entrant must fill his cheeks with water, preserving this unswallowed, then produce it entire at race's end into a receptacle, a bronze of Apollo Crabwise holding out his cupped hands. If you swallow, you're out. Almost all do. Sometimes one simply trips and gulps his cargo by reflex.
Gylippus had contrived a ruse. Beyond sight of the judges, he swallowed and raced all out. He had secreted a portion of water in a hollow stone about a mile from the finish. Beating the other boys to this, he was able to fill his mouth again and hold it to the pole.
In this way he won at ten and again at eleven. But one night, sleeping beside his elder brother Phoebidas, he boasted of his secret. Phoebidas determined to teach a lesson. At next year's race he dashed out to the stone and overturned it. When Gylippus reached the site, in the lead, he found no means of refilling his cheek-and the other boys were bearing down fast from behind.
Gylippus sprinted to the finish, first again. Now the judges commanded him to fill the god's hands, that is to spit, deliver his water. Gylippus obeyed. He had bitten his tongue through, filling his mouth with blood.
In his twenties Gylippus, serving as a brigade commander under Brasidas in Thrace, not only distinguished himself repeatedly for personal valor but achieved signal successes commanding inferior troops, helot conscripts without adequate armor and with minimal training. He seemed to possess an affinity for these roughshod rogues and a genius for whipping them into crack troops. This faculty held no small bearing, it is certain, upon his election by the ephors as commander for Syracuse.
This same Gylippus, now a polemarch, a war leader, of thirty-six years, holder of three prizes of valor including Mantinea, arrived in Sicily with only four ships, two secretaries, one junior lieutenant, and a handful of freed helots serving as marines.
Within twelve months he had overturned all. Commencing with the Syracusan Admiralty, which prior to his arrival had bedazzled with a peacock's array of robes of rank, he banned all colors but white and burned the offending rags in public, inaugurating the Festival of Naked Poseidon, Gymnopotideia in Doric. To roust his cohorts from the sack, he instituted a predawn sacrifice and required attendance by all commanders. Headgear at sea he prohibited, partly to efface all distinctions of vanity but primarily to make his men dark and vigorous from the sun.
The Little Harbor, whose shipyards had lain open to Athenian depredation, Gylippus fortified with seawalls and palisades.
Behind these he set his charges to work. Naval architects and shipwrights had heretofore been deemed artisans, among the meaner orders. Gylippus overturned this, granting to these trades brooches of honor and acclaiming them poleos soteres, Saviors of the City. Prior to his reformations, lads under eighteen might not inscribe their names upon the citizen rolls, while those past sixty, regardless of skill or vigor, suffered mandatory retirement.
Gylippus repealed these ordinances, attracting to his corps of shipbuilders the brightest youths as prentices and the most practiced elders as masters. By winter's end the navy of Syracuse possessed nearly as many warcraft as her besiegers, and her commanders had acquired such temerity as to challenge the invaders ship for ship at sea.
Gylippus likewise refashioned the army. He made trials to discover which men craved most neither riches nor power but honor. These he appointed captains. All who had secured their stations through wealth or influence must reapply, with no eye on them save Gylippus' and his new commanders'. The army itself he reorganized into companies mobilized not by tribe, but by precinct within the city. He set side by side those wards which bore a natural rivalry, offering prizes for competitions between them. In this way the battalion of the Geloan quarter roused itself to excellence against their adversaries of the Andethusia. Then he pitted these as allies against others. By such exercises each unit gained confidence in itself and the army as a whole developed faith in each division.
Discovering weapons and armor to be lacking, Gylippus ordered all who possessed shield and breastplate to present themselves in the central square. The rich, showing off, produced armor gilded to its most dazzling. When these had been erected in prideful display, Gylippus set his own plain panoplia alongside. All excess was stripped and sold, proceeds applied to acquire arms for the commons.
To raise revenue, Gylippus employed the following stratagem.
Fearing that direct levy might turn the aristocratic element against him, he induced the Assembly instead to require each citizen to come forward on a specific day and render a public accounting of his wealth. Now each could behold with his own eyes the extent of treasure his fellows had hoarded. At once the privileged felt shame not to have contributed more, while the humble who had served with honor were esteemed as better men than the rich.
Contributions flooded in. The cavalry grew flush with mounts, while the vaults overflowed with treasure.
Exploiting the linguistic bonds of the Doric Spartans and Syracusans, Gylippus enlisted words, too, to the cause. Armored infantrymen he now called homoioi, Peers or Equals. Regiments were designated lochoi, divisions morai Among other Spartan usages he compelled each member of a military unit to discontinue the practice of dining at home or with friends and to take his meals in the common mess with his company. In this way unit esprit was fostered, and all felt themselves equal and united.
Gylippus outlawed drunkenness and declared it a whipping offense to neglect the marching condition of one's feet. He made it a crime for a man to have a potbelly or appear at large with stooped shoulders. He introduced anthems of ridicule, the same as at Sparta, and recruited the city's children to swarm upon any slovenly fellow, rebuking him in song. These and other reforms Gylippus instituted. But supreme among all stood his own presence, the fact that he had come in person to share his comrades' peril and to donate all to preserve their freedom.
