cracked, apprehending this.
“Lastly, my friends, remember that you are Athenians and Argives and Ionians, the sons of heroes and heroes yourselves. You have won great glory in this war and, fortune willing, will claim more. Remember your fathers and the trials they have undergone with courage. Hold fast, brothers. With heaven's aid and our own exertions, we will endure to see again our homes and families whom we love.”
Orders came to light a multitude of fires. The army stoked them and packed out. By dawn the column had reached the Helorine Road, right back where we started. We would flee south this time, pick a river, and track it inland, to scribe the circle and try for Catana again.
All day long and all the next the Syracusan cavalry made rushes on the column. We had no horses or archers; we could do nothing but endure. The enemy attacked in squadrons of fifty and a hundred; we would form up at the double, so spent we could barely move, while the foe loosed volleys upon us. At first our youngest made rushes upon them, slashing at the horses' legs or seeking to drive their bellies through with the nine-footer. But a man on foot is an easy target. Two or three horsemen would converge; if our man fell the foe's cavalry trampled him or slung point-blank to open his guts. Others of ours must dash to the rescue. With each rush by the enemy, another two or three fell. A broken arm, gashed thigh, a concussion. Men must bear others.
The strong carried the weak, and when they failed, others carried them. An officer recruited the asses of the train for makeshift cavalry. But these were too spent and terror-stricken to be managed. We passed one mule, gutted; our men crazed with thirst licked its blood.
The column was in open country now, without shelter from the sun. One's skin ceased to sweat, only burned. Among soldiers on the march is this term, “sun stupid.” The column labored in fever, a procession of the doomed. The senses spawned mirages. A man would cry aloud the names of his children; his comrades, too abashed to call him to it, trudged on in mortification. At last one, unable to endure longer, would bark at the first to shut up, and he, roused as from a dream, would not even know he had cried aloud.
One tried to start a song, something crude to cheer the march. It failed before the second verse. Thirst hammered the column. One gnawed twigs and set pebbles beneath the tongue. “Here they come!” Another attack, another siege of terror leaving one yet more exhausted and in the aftermath, another three wounded, another three who must be borne.
Now one longed no more for Alcibiades for his leadership. Now one hated him for his absence. It was he who had sent this scourge upon us, out of his own pride and from the foe's embrace; he who, set upon that balance point between his country and himself, chose his own survival and directed hell on us, his brothers. God preserve me, a man cried to heaven, to see him paid out! Let me live, if only long enough to deal him death.
Two days later, mad with thirst, the column reached the Assinarus. We were at the rear and heard the story later.
The enemy had not dammed this river. Instead he was drawn up on the far side, two thousand across and ten deep, with five thousand cavalry on the flanks, funneling our column as it approached toward the massed armor and missile troops of their comrades. The Syracusan archers and slingers had been drawn up in the fore, on the opposite bank, less than a hundred feet away.
They began firing while our troops were still two hundred feet from the river. Nicias and the commanders sought to hold our men back. But the soldiers stampeded into the river, even as the enemy poured volley after volley upon them. Men were shot through and dying, yet still battling one another for drink. Thousands fell in the water; thousands more, fleeing, were run down or rounded up for slaves. Behind us, Demosthenes' division had been overrun by fifty thousand, the columns we had spotted from the summit of Gylippus' wall. Our force was tatters. Forty thousand had set out; under six remained.
Nicias surrendered next morning. Two nights later we were in the quarries.
Here is how they branded us. They had chutes, four of them, like a farmer's for sheep. We were driven forward in lines. At the end was a stanchion. This captured your skull. At my station the man with the brand was instructing a prentice. “Not like an ox, boy!
This is man skin, not cowhide. Kiss the flesh…just a sweetheart's kiss, like that!”
I remember rising to my feet, seeking a reflecting surface to behold my new slave self who bore the kappa brand. This was not necessary. One glance at your mates told all.
In the quarries men clung to the frailest vessels of hope. Many reasoned that because the Syracusans had not put us to death, they must eventually make us work or sell us. Others held out the hope of ransom. Lion made it his task to dash such expectations, the harboring of which, he felt, served only to demoralize us further.
We must make up our minds to die like men. Those we had abandoned at the Great Harbor, he recalled to us, had already done so.
There were sixty-eight hundred in the quarries, all Athenians, Argives, and free allies. Fifteen thousand had been killed on the roads; perhaps five thousand had been rounded up by private soldiers and hidden from their officers for slaves. Of the remaining thirteen thousand-mercenaries, mechanics, camp followers-great numbers had been slaughtered; the rest had been sold.
The quarries were limestone defined by that cleft-the infamous spelaion, the cavern-which split the cliffside; the rest exposed, varying in depth from thirty feet to above a hundred. The site was immediately outside the city, abutting the sector of Temenites. Our captors let us down by ladders, then pulled the ladders up. When a man died he may not be buried, but the corpses collected in piles, emitting an unendurable stench. Those summoned by their captors for punishment, or fun, would be hauled out feet-first, elbows pressed tight for protection to their skulls, which banged into the stone at each heave on the tackle.
Rations were a pint of grain a day, uncooked slop, and a half-pint of water, both lowered in vats contrived to be too cumbersome for a man or even two to receive without spilling, and roped down at sites of such precipitousness as to make those who received them risk their necks from a fall. Our captors routinely urinated in our water; we plucked turds from our dinner every day.
The warders called us “ponies,” for the horse brand on our brows. Their officers took a census the first day by unit; we must count out eight times each day subsequent. All must be on our feet before dawn and not sit till dark. A man caught would be stoned or roped topside for a “pony ride.” Those who returned alive from these sessions did not remain so for long.
The Syracusans moved to crush our spirits by eliminating officers. Those whose identities they had obtained were hoisted to the pit rim, there to endure within earshot of their men below sieges of barbarity as long as two and three days. Beneath this torture, the names of other officers were extracted and these hauled up to undergo like atrocities. The dead were pitched back over the brink. Any who attempted to honor them by burial were shot down or stoned. This ordeal continued until no commander above the rank of subaltern remained.
This was not the finish, however. By some misintelligence, or inspired by malice alone, our captors pronounced their conviction that three officers remained yet unsurrendered. The foe commanded that this trio be produced. It went without saying that, absent immediate compliance, the enemy would commence butchering at random.
At once three stepped forward. These were Pythodorus the son of Lycophron of Anaphlystus, Nicagoras the son of Mnesicles of Pallene, and Philon the son of Philoxenos of Oa. Their monument, the Three Officers, stands at Athens now, on the slope opposite the Eleusinium. As the Syracusans bound and hauled these up feet-first, none of whom had held rank beyond squad commander, our men unprompted commenced the Hymn to Victory.
Goddess, born of bitter labor,
Joy-bringer, Truth-revealer,
Long-sought Nike, our voices
We lift in song to thee.
Sternest of immortals,
Yet clement to the brave,
For him who endures
Thou effaceth all evil.
So fierce was the emotion produced by these stanzas that it seemed to fill the great bowl like a liquid, echoing stone-amplified about the quarry face.
Thunderer's fickle daughter,
Enter we thy precincts of agon.
To thee, Brightling, or to Death
