women. He recognizes the genius of it and recognizes that Alcibiades knew before and knows now that he would recognize it. He wants this genius, does Seuthes, and knows he's got a mentor now if he'll make him his friend, to counsel and instruct him in the acquisition of it. The kid embraces Alcibiades. Ten thousand tribesmen whoop.
Our party goes limp with relief.
And he did come with his horses, Prince Seuthes. Not five hundred but two thousand, when the fleet and army took Chalcedon and Byzantium, bottled up the straits, and drove the Spartans to their blackest ebb of the war. But I have gotten ahead of myself and overshot a tale, and a turning point, which must be recounted.
Passing down the straits, a month after the great victory at Cyzicus, the flag party was met by a dispatch cutter from Samos.
The night was moonlit and she signaled by flare; the vessels have to in midchannel. The state galley Paralus, the cutter reported, had this day arrived from Athens with news that a Spartan legation had approached the Assembly, seeking peace. A great cheer erupted from the men, clamoring to learn the terms proposed, which were an armistice in place, each side to withdraw from the other's territories, repatriating all prisoners. Another cheer, and a cry from the crews that they would soon go home.
“The Spartans are at Athens now?” Alcibiades called across to the cutter.
“Aye, sir.”
“Who leads the embassy?”
“Endius, sir.”
Fresh cheers arose.
“The Lacedaemonians have singled you out for honor, Alcibiades. Why else send Endius, your friend?” This from Antiochus, Alcibiades' helmsman and among the exiles who had shared his seasons at Sparta. “It shows they see you, even technically an exile, as foremost among the Athenians.”
Thrasybulus' Endeavor had come up to leeward and now hove-to within earshot. Her steersman called across. Did this indeed mean we could go home? Alcibiades made no answer, only held motionless in the moonshadow of the sternpeak.
“Here is no offer of peace,” he spoke soberly to the officers on the quarterdeck and the stern oarsmen close beneath at their benches, “but a ploy to sever you and me from the people of Athens and ruin us all.” He turned to his quartermaster: “Make signal to all, continue to Samos, and to Thrasybulus, follow us alone.” Then to Antiochus at the helm: “Take us in now, there, to Achilleum.” ~
XXX
The plain of the Scamander sprawls as sere and wind-scored today as it did seven hundred years past, when Troy fell beneath Achilles' spear. On the strand where Homer's Achaeans beached their undecked fifties, Athenians and Samians now made shore in their bronze-rammed two-hundreds. That stream of “whirling Xanthos” still flows, where Achilles in his valor drove the Trojans to flight. Our parties had overnighted on the site a dozen times, transiting in and out of the Hellespont, but never till this eve had our commander directed us inland to the mounds.
There are eighteen in all, seven great ones for the nations of the Achaeans, Mycenaeans, Thessalians, Argives, Lacedaemonians, Arcadians, and Phocians and eleven lesser for the individual heroes, and the final pair, conjoined, Patrocles and Achilles.
It is chill this night. The wind bends the sickle grass on the tombs' untended slopes; sheep have carved stairsteps in the faces.
We purchase a goat of some boys, inquire which mound is Achilles'. They stare. “Who?”
Upon this plain, Alcibiades has observed, men of the West carried war to men of the East and drove them under.
Our commander dreams of accomplishing it again.
Ally with Sparta and turn on Persia.
“As long as I have been with the fleet,” he states now, as he has heretofore, “we have believed we must bring Persia to our side in order to defeat the Spartans. We must ask: is this a phantom? I believe it is. Persia will never align herself with Athens; our ambitions at sea conflict with hers; she can never let us win this war. And though we thrash her satraps' armies up and down the coast, the wealth of the Eastern empire replenishes all. Persian gold makes her Spartan allies unkillable; we destroy one fleet, they build another. We cannot patrol every cove of Asia and Europe.”
Thrasybulus protests, sick of war and eager to accept this offer of armistice. “The enemy honors you, Alcibiades. All it takes is you to clasp his hand and peace is ours.”
“My friend, the Spartans' intent is not to honor me, but by this wile to make our countrymen fear my ambition. They slant their favor toward me to inflame Athens' fears that I, returning with the victories this fleet has won, will set myself up as tyrant. If they win-that is, incite the demos to displace me-that is Sparta's victory. This is her design, not peace.”
We must have more victories, he declared. “More, and more after that, until our forces possess the Aegean absolutely, the straits and every city on them, with the grain routes clamped tight in our grip. Till then we cannot go home.”
It took scant imagination for those about the fire to conjure the bastions of Selymbria, Byzantium, and Chalcedon, each formidable as Syracuse, and the trials we must endure to take them.
Thrasybulus slung his lees into the embers. “You mean you can't go home, Alcibiades. I can.” He rose, unsteady on his shoring timbers.
“Sit down, Brick.”
“I will not. Nor take your orders.” He was drunk, but plain-spoken and fit to have his say. “You may not go home, my friend, till you garb yourself in such a mantle of glory that none dare fart within a furlong. But I can go. We all can, who are sick of this war and want no more of it.”
“None may go. You least of all, Brick.”
The men looked on, torn between their commanders. Alcibiades saw it.
“Friends, if your eyes cannot perceive Necessity's dictates, I beg you to trust mine. Have I led you anywhere but to victory? The Spartans dangle peace before your noses and you snap at it like winter faxes. Peace to them means respite to rebuild for war. And us? Since when do we, or any victor, quit the field owning less than at contest's commencement, when that and more stand plump for the taking? Look around you, friends. The gods have led us to this plain, where Greek vanquished Trojan, to direct us to their will and our destiny. Will we die in our beds, praising peace, that phantom with which our enemies swindled us, who could not defeat us in fair fight upon the sea? I despise peace if it means failing our destiny, and I call upon the blood of these heroes to witness.”
He stood, addressing Thrasybulus. “You accuse me, my friend, of hunting glory at the price of devotion to our nation. But no such contradiction obtains. Athens' destiny is glory. She was born to it, as we her sons. Do not devalue yourselves, brothers, accounting our worth as meaner than these heroes' whose shades eavesdrop upon us now. They were men like us, no more. We have won victories equal to and greater than theirs, and will win more.”
“Those you call us to emulate, Alcibiades,” the younger Pericles spoke, “are dead.”
“Never!”
“Sir, we encamp beside their tombs.”
“They can never die! They are more alive than we, not in occupation of fields of Elysia, where Homer tells us not pain nor grief may follow, but here, this night and every, within ourselves. We cannot draw a breath absent their exemption, or close our eyes save to see their heritance before us. They constitute our being, more than bone or blood, and make us who we are.
“Yes, I would stand among them, and bring you with me, all.
Not in death or afterlife, but in the flesh and in triumph. You command me to look, Brick, to these about the fire. I am looking.
