That afternoon Mindarus was slain, the Spartans' peerless general. Of the foe's total ninety ships, fifty-eight were sunk and twenty-nine captured. His brigades of Lacedaemon and the Peloponnese were routed on the plain of the Macestos by Thrasybulus and Alcibiades, along with the mercenaries and Persian cavalry supporting them. Next night found Alcibiades master of Cyzicus, calling in the carters to load up contributions in cash, and within twenty days before Perinthus and Selymbria as well, raising more money, and fortifying Chrysopolis to bind the straits and exact a tenth from all passing, to fund the fleet. This dispatch, intercepted, from the remnant Spartans to their home: Ships sunk, Mindarus slain, men starving. We know not what to do.
I need not recite for you, Jason, the litany of Alcibiades' victories.
You were there. You won your prize of valor at Abydos and earned it too. Did you know I forwarded the text of your commendation?
That was one of my duties in those days. I see you flush; I'll embarrass you no further, though I recall the citation, word for word.
To the young soldiers and sailors of the fleet, they for whom these victories under Thrasybulus and Alcibiades were all they had known, such bounty seemed no more than the merited produce of their preeminence, their birthright as Athenians. But for those of our generation, who had cut our teeth on plague and calamity, the experience of such ascendancy, each conquest succeeding so swiftly upon its predecessor, arose as if within a dream. No pharmakon like victory, the proverb says. And though we who bore the scars of Syracuse could not bring ourselves to trust them at first, when the wins kept coming, Bitch's Tomb, Abydos, Methymna, Fool's Cap Bay, Clazomenae, the Hollows, Chios, and Nine-Mile Cove, then second Chios and Erythrae, both on the same day, at last we, too, began to believe, as the youths from the start, that this run was neither fluke nor fortune but that at last conjoined upon one field Athens possessed such ships, crews, and commanders as to render her, barring the sons of Earth themselves ascending from Tartarus, invincible.
History was being made. A blind man could see it. Honoring Lion's wish of the quarries, I set about enlarging his chronicle, or at least preserving within my sea chest such documents as I imagined one day in retirement editing and publishing in my brother's name.
I went so far as to record notes and even sketch terrain. Only later did I grasp that a recounting of actions or tactics was not what interested me, or anyone.
What held us all was not what our commander did, but how he did it. It was clear that he manipulated some force to which others commanded no access. Though he possessed on occasion superiority of might, he never needed it to best the foe. He was always clement to the vanquished, nor was it in him to pursue vengeance against those who had worked him harm. He acted thus, not out of sentiment or altruism, but because he reckoned such actions ignoble and inelegant. Here, a communication to Tissaphernes, whom he called friend despite the notorious arrest at Sardis and after the Persian had bid ten thousand darics for his head.. it is not possession of force which produces victory, but its apparition. A commander of ability manipulates not armies but perceptions.
From the succeeding paragraph:
… the function of disciplined movement in battle is to produce in the mind of the friend the conviction that he cannot lose and the mind of the foe that he cannot win. Order is indispensable for these considerations beyond all others.
Alcibiades was an abominable speller. When he worked late, he got worse and would shake awake anyone to hand. “Brick, sit up.
How do you spell epiteichismos?” His bane was inversion of letters; his secretaries teased that he even wrote with a lisp. Thus many half-composed missives found their way to trash and from there to my chest.
In this note, addressed to his great enemy Anytus at Athens, but intended for circulation among the political clubs beneath his sway, Alcibiades seeks to allay the fears of those who had brought the indictments which led to his exile-fears, that is, that he, returning at the head of an all-conquering fleet, would exact vengeance upon them.
…my enemies accuse me of seeking to impose my will upon events, either for glory or fortune or, those who admit me a patriot, for the weal of my country.
This is erroneous. I do not believe in personal will, and haven't since I was a boy. What I have tried to do is to follow the dictates of Necessity. This is the solitary god I revere and in my opinion the only god that exists. Man's predicament is that he dwells at the intersection of Necessity and free will. What distinguishes statesmen, as Themistocles and Pericles, is their gift to perceive Necessity's dictates in advance of others-as Themistocles saw that Athens must become a sea power and Pericles that naval supremacy prefigures empire. That course of individual or nation aligned with Necessity must prove irresistible. The trick is that each moment contains three or four necessities. Necessity moreover is like a board game. As one option closes, a new necessity obtains. What has disfigured my career is that I have perceived Necessity but been unable to persuade my countrymen to act upon its dictates. My hope with you now, sir, is that we may act as mature men of politics..
From Thrasybulus to his fellow general Theramenes, the latter impatient at his star's overshadowing beside the sun of Alcibiades..I have found it of great utility to regard him less as a man and more a force of nature. My concern alone is for Athens. I brought him back from exile, and stuck my neck on the block thereby, the way one confronting an insuperable enemy at sea calls down a great storm, or facing the foe on land enlists a mighty earthquake.
From the same letter:
…remember, my friend, that Alcibiades himself does not comprehend his gift and is ruled by it as much as ruling. His immodesty, however galling you may find it, is to him objectivity.
He is superior. Why conceal it? To a mind such as his this course would be hypocrisy, and he is nothing if not the most frank of men.
Another:
… though his enemies style him a great double-crosser, in fact he is incapable of duplicity, and of all he has ever done, he has warned foe and friend long in advance.
The men loved Thrasybulus and feared and respected Theramenes, but Alcibiades they clasped to their hearts with a fierce solicitousness, as a magical child. Had he eaten? Had he slept? Fifty times a day sailors and marines approached me to inquire of their general's well-being, as if he were a sorcerer's lamp whose flame they feared would by heaven's jealousy be snuffed.
The security party's charge now turned upon its head, shielding our commander no longer from harm but the excessive affection of his own men and the relentless importunities of those trucklers and petition-pleaders who dogged his circuit day and night.
Then there were the women. They descended in clouds, not alone hetairai, courtesans, and pornai, common whores, but free women, maids and widows, sisters presented by their own brothers. More than once I must chase a lad pimping his mother.
The dame's response? “How 'bout you, then, mate?” Buck lieutenants screwed themselves witless, just on their commander's castoffs.
As for Alcibiades himself, the allure of the debauch had abated.
He didn't need fornication; he had victory. He had changed. A becoming modesty settled about his shoulders like the plain marine's cloak he wore, albeit clasped at the throat with a brooch of gold. He had become a new Alcibiades and he liked it. I never saw a man so revel in the triumphs of his comrades, absent envy, even and especially those who might be called his rivals, Thrasybulus and Theramenes. When a villa was vacated for him on Pennon Point at Sestos, he declined, not wishing to displace its occupants, and continued to bunk in the tent beside his ship, refusing even a floor till the carpenters framed it on their own while he was absent with the fleet. He became if not cheap, then frugal. Every spit went for the men, and every moment.
Correspondence. He posted a hundred letters a day. Entire watches were consumed with this, amid rotating shifts of secretaries, often through night and morn and into the next night.
This was the grind of coalition-building, the day-by-day extension of influence and persuasion. “How can you stand this?” I asked him once. “Stand what?” he replied. He loved it. To him these letters were not chores but men; it was a symphony to him and at last he held the conductor's stand.
There were other missives, the main in truth, whose lines he dictated late or scrawled in his own hand. These were the widow letters, the commendations of the maimed and fallen-ten, twenty, thirty a day. He directed these personally to the recipient himself if he were still alive, but often, as well, he had the rolls dispatched to father or mother or wife without the honored man's knowledge.
