They may abide even the despoliation of their city and the slaughter of their sons. But they will never forgive us for our shame. ”
You are a gentleman, Jason, but you are also a warrior. And you call yourself a philosopher. I believe you are. Do you know why I sought you out to aid me in my defense? Not because I believed you could help. None can; my grave is dug. Rather I imposed on you out of self-interest. I wanted to meet you. I have admired you since Potidaea. Will it surprise you to learn that I have followed your career, as much as one may at the remove at which I found myself from the city of my birth? I know of the death, or murder, of your two dear sons at the hands of the Thirty. I know the ruin brought upon the family of your second wife. I am aware of the peril in which you placed yourself and your kin, defending the younger Pericles before the Assembly; I have read your speech and admire it greatly. To own to honor lifelong is no mean feat.
Yet I flatter myself that I share with a man such as yourself, if not qualities of honor, then of perception. Here is my crime, and to account it I haul all Greece into the dock beside me: to save my skin I abandoned my fellows, both on the field and within my heart. But let us plumb this unbosoming. I abandoned not only my brothers but myself. To save myself, I abandoned myself.
All vice springs from the flesh; your master Socrates teaches as much, does he not? As Agathon sets in the speech of Palamedes before Troy, himself on trial for his life:
… to the extent to which a man unites his self-conception to his flesh, to that measure will he be a villain. To the extent he unites it with his soul, he will be divine.
But who among us has done that? Your master indeed. Men hate him for this, because to acknowledge his nobility is to concede their own baseness, and this they can never do. They hate him as fire hates water, as evil hates good.
We who have abandoned our countrymen and our own nobler natures, we whom long and brutal war has compelled to such abjuration, is there one, other than ourselves, who may be called our object? One whom we have individually and collectively abandoned?
Who else but Alcibiades? Not once but three times did Athens spurn him, when he knelt before her proffering all he owned. And what made Athens hate him more? Just this: that he repudiated her abandonment. Compelled by his own proud nature, in which he confuted himself and his native land, Alcibiades demonstrated this truth of the soul: that which we cast out returns to revenge itself.
How apt that Athens reviles these twain as few others: the most measured of men, your master, and the most reckless, his friend.
And they hate both for the same reason. Because each-one bearing the lamp of wisdom, the other the brand of glory-illumined that glass in whose reflection his countrymen may see their own self-forsaken souls.
But I have strayed afield. Let us return to the Great Harbor, to defeat and its issue…
With Chowder's death and Splinter's, Pandora had lost all her original marines except myself and Lion. Of our fourteen after Iapygia had fallen to wounds Meton called Armbreaker, Teres called Skull, Adrastus called Towhead, Colophon Redbeard, and Memnonides; to disease Hagnon called the Small, Stratus, Maron, and Diagoras; deserted Theodectes and Milon the pentathlete. If the measure of an officer be the number of his command he restores to home alive, this roster speaks with its own eloquence. I may say in defense only this: none did better. Of sixty thousand free citizens, subject-state volunteers, and conscripts inclusive of both fleets, fewer than a thousand made it home, and these on their own and only after appalling trials.
The fault I own as mine, for my men. The tuition in obedience I had received as a boy, reinforced by the code acquired in the mercenary service, was too severe, too Spartan if you will, to be imposed upon Athenians, particularly the unpropertied roughnecks who constituted the bulk of the latter-day fleet marine force. Courage and initiative they owned in abundance.
They were born to debate and disputation, abashed by no authority established over them, brash and spirited and untamable as cats. Invincible when events ran their way, they could not summon the self-command to rally when the sky began to rain shit, nor was I, or Lion, capable of inspiriting it in them. They personified that type of warrior who beneath a commander of vision and audacity may roll resistlessly from success to success.
Compelled, however, to endure adversity over a sustained interval-not alone defeat but simply delay and inaction-the restless enterprise that made them great would turn upon itself and, like a caged rat, commence to gnaw its vitals. From Lion's observations:
A soldier must not own too much of imagination. In victory it overheats his ambition; in defeat it inflames his fears. A brave man possessed of imagination will not be brave long.
The soldiers and sailors of Athens had won so often that they did not know how to lose. Overthrow unmanned them, as a sudden blow will a boxer who has seldom been hit. I never saw men lose weapons and armor as these. Restless, easily bored, our citizen campaigners possessed not the patience of the warrior and did not care to acquire it. The virtue of obedience, in Sparta so highly prized as to be worshiped as a god, was to Athenians the same as want of vision or deficiency of daring. In victory they disdained their officers; in defeat they mutinied openly. One could not pound it into their skulls that obedience and command are reverse and obverse. Those generals of quality who by luck arose to command held up to their men the very virtues-forbearance, steadfastness, endurance-which to these youths were worthless as piss and imposed punishments which could not be enforced in a democratic camp. The best one may say to honor these dead is that they perished when the fight might yet bear the name of honor.
Two nights after the defeat in the Great Harbor, the army packed up and pulled out, all forty thousand who could trek, seeking any part of the island where survival could be fought for.
The sick and wounded would be left to die.
My cousin would not desert them. I confronted him as the army massed to move out. The night was pitch, yet one could see the shades of the maimed and mutilated, hobbling and even crawling to the formation of their fellows, pleading to be taken with them.
Please, one without legs would implore, I can be drawn! Pull me like a sack! Men would promise gold when they got home, all their fathers owned. Others appealed in the name of the gods or of filial piety, of boyhood bonds, oaths sworn, trials endured in common.
The order came to move out. The sick pressed their treasure upon the able-bear me only a mile, friend! — while the well forced all they had into the fists of the disowned. Here, mate, buy your life if you can. The distress of those pleading for deliverance was exceeded only by the agony of their comrades, possessed of no option but to deny them. I begged Simon to depart with us. What good could he accomplish, holding here to die? The failing ringed him about, imploring him to heed. Go-and take me with you!
Others importuned Lion and Telamon, who, with kind hearts steeled, sought to deflect them. Suddenly a youth lurched from the press. This was the petty officer of the Pandora called Rosy Cheeks, who had taken a spike through the foot. He clutched at my cloak.
“Friend, I can hobble. I beg you, lend me your arm!” In two years of campaign I had not yielded to terror or rage. Now my belly failed. I flung the beggar off me, cursing him and all the sick. Why don't you croak, the mob of you, and get it over with! I pleaded with Simon not to cast his life away on these who were already dead. He responded by requiring my blessing. I called him a fool who deserved to die. He struck me in the face. “Give me your blessing.”
“Take it to hell.”
My brother caught me from behind. We embraced our cousin, weeping.
“See my boy gets his schooling and my lass her dowry.” Simon pressed into my palm his rings and an ivory charm he had won for a solo at the Apaturia. “For Road's Turn,” he said, meaning Acharnae, his tomb.
The track beyond the palisade ran across the marsh held by the enemy throughout the sea fight. It had been vacated. The men took cheer and accelerated the pace. “He's afraid of us,” someone proposed, meaning Gylippus. The Syracusans were behind their city walls, celebrating. You could hear their cymbals and drums.
We were missing a hell of a party.
We must link with the Sicels inland, then drive to Catana, twenty miles north. The way round, for we dared not skirt Epipolae, climbed stony slopes from the harbor. The army was to advance in a hollow square with the noncombatants in the center, but great flocks of camp wives pressed out, seeking their men.
Lion's Berenice and her sister Herse trekked beside us; it went with excruciating slowness. The formation extended on both sides of the road; every time it came to a wall the mob bunched to a standstill.
Near dawn enemy scouts overhauled us. We could hear them, horseback, calling to each other in the fog. By
