Spartans, taken by surprise, had attacked them by ones and twos, by tens and twenties. The only way to beat a phalanx in the open field was with another phalanx. With most of their full citizens, their hoplites, not close enough to their home polis, the Spartans didn’t, couldn’t, assemble one. And they paid. Oh, how they paid.
Through the roar of the flames, an officer shouted, “We take back no prisoners. None, do you hear me? Nothing to slow us down on the march back to the fleet. If you want these Spartan women to bear half-Athenian children, do it here, do it now!”
The other hoplite said, “A woman like that, you drag her into the dirt, she’s liable to try and stab you while you’re on top.”
“I’m too old to find rape much of a sport,” Sokrates replied.
An officer called, “Come on, lend a hand on the ropes, you two! We’ve got to pull down this barracks hall before we set it afire!”
Sokrates and the other Athenian set down their shields and spears and went to haul on the ropes. The Athenians had guards standing close by, so Sokrates didn’t worry about losing his weapons. He pulled with all his might. The corner post crashed down. Half the barracks collapsed. The Athenians cheered. A man with a torch held it to a beam till the flames took hold. When they did, another cheer rose to the heavens with the smoke.
Wearily, Sokrates strode back to pick up his equipment. A little Spartan boy-he couldn’t have been more than ten-darted in like a fox to try to grab the shield and spear first. The boy had just bent to snatch them up when a peltast’s javelin caught him in the small of the back. He shrieked and fell, writhing in torment. Laughing, the peltast pulled out the throwing spear. “He’ll take a while to die,” he said.
“That is an evil end,” Sokrates said. “Let there be as much pain as war must have, but only so much.” He knelt, drew his sword, and cut the boy’s throat. The end came soon after that.
An old woman-older than Sokrates, too old for any of the Athenians to bother-said, “Thank you for the mercy to my grandson.”
Her Doric drawl and some missing front teeth made her hard to understand, but the Athenian managed. “I did not do it for him,” he replied. “I did it for myself, for the sake of what I thought to be right.”
Her scrawny shoulders went up and down in a shrug. “You did it. That is what matters. He has peace now.” After a moment, she added, “You know I would kill you if I could?”
He dipped his head. “Oh, yes. So the old women of Athens say of the Spartans who despoiled them of a loved one. The symmetry does not surprise me.”
“Symmetry. Gylippos is dead, and you speak of symmetry.” She spat at his feet. “That for your symmetry.” She turned her back and walked away. Sokrates found no answer for her.
Even before the sun rose red and bloody over the smoke-filled valley of the Eurotas, Alkibiades booted the Athenian trumpeters out of sleep. “Get up, you wide-arsed catamites,” he called genially. “Blare the men awake. We don’t want to overstay our welcome in beautiful, charming Sparta, now do we?”
Hoplites groaned as they staggered to their feet. Spatters of fighting had gone on all through the night. If the army lingered, the fighting today wouldn’t be spatters. It would be a storm, a flood, a sea. And so, Alkibiades thought, we don’t linger.
Some of the men grumbled. “We haven’t done enough here. Too many buildings still standing,” was what Alkibiades heard most often.
He said, “The lion yawned. We reached into his mouth and gave his tongue a good yank. Do you want to hang on to it till he bites down?”
A lot of them did. They’d lost farmhouses. They’d seen olive groves that had stood for centuries hacked down and burned. They hungered for as much revenge as they could take. But they obeyed him. They followed him. He’d led them here. Without him, they never would have come. When he told them it was time to go, they were willing to believe him.
They didn’t have much to eat-bread they’d brought, bread and porridge they’d stolen, whatever sheep and pigs they’d killed. That alone would have kept them from staying very long. They didn’t worry about such things. Alkibiades had to.
Away they marched, back down the trail of destruction they’d left on the way to Sparta, back up toward the pass through the Taygetos Mountains. Even if nobody had pointed the way, the Spartans would have had no trouble pursuing. That didn’t matter. The Spartans could chase as hard as they pleased, but they wouldn’t catch up.
As he had on the way to Sparta, Nikias rode beside Alkibiades on the way back to the ships. He reminded Alkibiades of a man who’d spent too much time talking with Sokrates (though he hadn’t really spent any), or of one who’d been stunned by taking hold of an electric ray. “Son of Kleinias, I never thought any man could do what you have done,” he said in amazement. “Never.”
“A man who believes he will fail is surely right,” Alkibiades replied. “A man who believes he can do great things may yet fail, but if he succeeds… Ah, if he succeeds! He who does not dare does not win. Say what you will of me, but I dare.”
Nikias stared, shook his head-a gesture of bewilderment, not disagreement-and guided his horse off to one side. Alkibiades threw back his head and laughed. Nikias flinched as if a javelin had hissed past his head.
Halfway up the eastern slope of the mountains, where the woods came down close to the track on either side, a knot of Spartans and perioikoi, some armored, some in their shirts, made a stand. “They want to stall us, keep us here till pursuit can reach us,” Alkibiades called. “Thermopylai was a long time ago, though. And holding the pass didn’t work for these fellows then, either.”
He flung his hoplites at the enemy, keeping them busy. The peltasts, meanwhile, slipped among the trees till they came out on the track behind the embattled Spartans. After that, it wasn’t a fight anymore. It was a slaughter.
“They were brave,” Nikias said, looking at the huddled corpses, at the torn cloaks dyed red so they would not show blood.
“They were stupid,” Alkibiades said. “They couldn’t stop us. Since they couldn’t, what was the point of trying?” Nikias opened his mouth once or twice. Now he looked like nothing so much as a tunny freshly pulled from the sea. Dismissing him from his mind, Alkibiades urged his horse forward with pressure from his knees against its barrel and a flick of the reins. He raised his voice to a shout once more: “Come on, men! Almost halfway back to the ships!”
At the height of the pass through the mountains, he looked west toward the bay where the Athenian fleet waited. He couldn’t see the ships, of course, not from about a hundred stadia away, but he looked anyhow. If anything had gone wrong with them, he would end up looking just as stupid as those Spartans who’d tried to slow down the Athenian phalanx.
He lost a few men on the journey down to the seashore. One or two had their hearts give out, and fell over dead. Others, unable to bear the pace, fell out by the side of the road to rest. “We wait for nobody,” Alkibiades said, over and over. “Waiting for anyone endangers everyone.” Maybe some soldiers didn’t believe him. Maybe they were too exhausted to care. They would later, but that would be too late.
Where was Sokrates? Alkibiades peered anxiously at the marching Athenians. The dear old boy could have been father to most of the hoplites in the force. Had he been able to stand the pace? All at once, Alkibiades burst out laughing once more. There he was, not only keeping up but volubly arguing with the younger soldier to his right. Say what you would about his ideas-and Alkibiades, despite listening to him for years, still wasn’t sure about those-but the man himself was solid.
As the Athenians descended the western slopes of the Taygetos Mountains, they pointed, calling, “ Thalatta! Thalatta! ”-The sea! The sea! — and, “ Nees! Nees! ”-The ships! The ships! Sure enough, the transports and the triremes protecting them still waited there. Alkibiades allowed himself the luxury of a sigh of relief.
Then sand flew up under his horse’s hooves. He’d reached the beach from which he and the Athenians had set out early the morning before. “We did our part,” he called to the waiting sailors. “How was it here?”
“The Spartans’ triremes stuck their noses in to see what we had,” a man answered. “When they saw, they turned around and skedaddled.”
“Did they?” Alkibiades had hoped they would. The sailor dipped his head. Alkibiades said, “Well, best one, now we shall do the same.”
“And then what?” the fellow asked.
“And then what?” Alkibiades echoed. “Why, then we head back to our polis, and we find out just who ‘the
