their crimson lambdas showing clear and dark against the flashing bronze. The Spartan troops watching from the heights of Sphacteria turned away in disgust.
At first Demosthenes could not help but share the elation of his men. But his downcast turn of mind soon asserted itself, and he found himself reflecting on the comparative childishness of the Athenians, celebrating the end of what was just an indecisive skirmish. The Lacedaemonians, in contrast, had the same expressions on their faces when they rowed away as when they had rowed in to attack. They never showed outward triumph or disappointment on the battlefield-victories, for them, were to be expected, and their reverses only transient conditions. They were never in a rush to redeem their setbacks, and the only ardor they ever showed lay in their conspicuous acts of piety.
When the next day dawned as calm as the last, the bulk of the Peloponnesian fleet came across the bay again. With typical persistence, they attacked in exactly the same way, with the ships coming in in virtually the same order. Demosthenes had seen this bloody-mindedness before, this conviction that their cause would prevail not through pretty tactics or innovation, but by virtue of the fact that they were Spartans. But Demosthenes soon understood the method behind their approach: with the Athenian blocking triremes burned to the waterline, his men had to defend a wider front. From the land side, a corps of Lacedaemonian slingers had been hastily organized. Their skills were so primitive, however, that they could hit nothing except from very close in, well in range of his archers.
The impasse resumed, the waves of attackers ebbing and flowing, until Athenian sweat salted the water of the bay and the Peloponnesian rowers grew ragged in their strokes. The sun climbed and loomed pitiless over them all, blazing with such intensity that its mere reflection in sand and water blinded the helmeted men. Despite the vain cleverness of their commander, Athenians were beginning to fall under the blades of the enemy hoplites. Into Demosthenes’ throat crept the same sense of futility that he felt in Aetolia-the suspicion of being overmatched, of holding back a crimson torrent with clenched fingers, of his arrogance to believe that mere strategy could stop men as determined as the Lacedaemonians. Though not a single Spartan had yet set foot on dry sand, he began to feel as good as defeated. The conviction settled like a boulder on his chest until he heard someone calling to him from far away.
The voices were those of his lookouts on the hill. His head pounding with heat and consternation, he watched with incredulity as his men leapt and pointed out to sea, to the southwest. In the noise of the fight he could not hear their voices; he began to suspect what they might be saying, and with that suspicion felt the boulder lift.
The Athenian fleet sailed into the bay like a squadron on review, in single file, through the narrow gap between the island and Little Sphacteria. Their attention having been focused on the main channels, the Peloponnesians seemed caught off guard by the maneuver. The Athenians had more than twenty ships in the bay before the enemy sallied out with fifteen. The fleets made for each other, rams gleaming in the sun, as the Athenians deftly arranged themselves in line abreast and the Peloponnesians dissolved into an ungainly mass.
The result was never in doubt. Attacking in synchrony, the Athenians rammed or sheared the oars off each enemy vessel in turn. The hindmost Peloponnesian ships didn’t wait to be taken, but broke for shore. Some of these were rammed amidships as they turned, and the rest pursued into shallow water as the enemy hoplites waded as far as they dared to support them. Demosthenes scaled Koryphasion to watch the aftermath: half a dozen half-sunk Peloponnesian vessels, their crews scattered around them like chaff, were pulled in opposite directions by the Lacedaemonian hoplites and Athenian sailors.
The battle around the stockade ground to a halt as both sides became spectators. Demosthenes’ men cheered as the rest of the Athenian fleet, twenty-five hulls strong, struck from the west and drove away the Peloponnesian vessels guarding the north channel. With that, the Lacedaemonians broke off their attack. Two more enemy ships were run down from behind as they tried to escape; the land forces withdrew in good order, enduring as they went the taunts of the Messenians atop the barricade.
Old Eurymedon came down the gangway with a frown on his face. Fixing his one good eye on Demosthenes, he disgorged a spitting torrent of curses before he was in earshot, and didn’t finish until the other was standing right in front of him.
“You will explain, Demosthenes, your defiance of our agreement!” Eurymedon snarled, looking as if he would hit the other with his staff.
“What explanation is necessary for men to make, when they mean only to defend themselves in a hostile place?”
“You insult all of us with your damnable arrogance! Why are you here at all, in this miserable trap, that you must force the entire fleet to come to your rescue?”
“Forgive my arrogance,” Demosthenes replied in measured tones, “but it seems that it is the Lacedaemonians who are trapped now.”
He was suddenly able to move again, as if blood had at last forced its way into the strangled vessels in his legs. Gifted now with a sudden fluidity, he wanted to dance the praises of Nike who had cured him. But no one danced before Eurymedon.
Across the strait, hundreds of Lacedaemonians stood on the high ground of Sphacteria. All around the island, meanwhile, the Athenian ships swarmed, driving every Peloponnesian vessel away from its shores. The enemy force that had landed there to help contain the Athenians instead found itself cut off.
Eurymedon stood with his mouth open, as if the implications of hundreds of marooned Spartiates took that long to sink into his mind. After some time, he spoke again.
“If this is what you had in mind… it is not worth risking the fall of Corcyra.” And then, turning to the captain of his flagship, he issued the command Demosthenes longed to hear: “Organize a blockade of the island. Let no one get off or come to the Lacedaemonians’ aid.”
III
The Theory of Joy
1.
Twenty-eight years earlier, Stone, Frog, Redhead, and Cricket left the herd of young boys to enter the most junior of the single age-classes-a pack made up solely of youths who had started their education in the same year. Antalcidas had already learned much in the half decade since leaving home. Along with Tyrtaeus, he knew great swaths of Homer, and most of the basic marching songs such as “Castor’s Air.” He had his letters, and soon would be literate enough to decipher the simple battlefield dispatches that constituted the only proper reading of the Spartan male. And though he had not yet practiced marching in formation, he already knew the steps of the Pyrrhic dance, which included most of the dodging, thrusting, and turning movements he would need in battle.
Survival out of doors, in all seasons, became second nature to him. He was proud of the engrained dirt on his knees and elbows, and the calluses that clad his feet. After his boyhood tunic was taken away, replaced only by a single cloak issued to him each year, he grew to despise the wearing of any clothes. Noble Thibron looked with approval on anyone who went around in defiant nakedness, standing up straight in front of the girls as they whispered and pointed in the streets. To Antalcidas they would exclaim, “There goes the boy who throws stones!” and laugh in mockery until, despite himself, he blushed in his hurt. Caring what females thought was one weakness he had not yet conquered.
To be sure, in their time the girls had also come in for derision. With their homebound diets, most of them had grown taller and stronger than the boys, and liked to show off the strength of their legs by gathering their tunics in bustles above their waists. Yet in their pride they would reveal exactly what they lacked. Antalcidas was much amused one day when, on the banks of the Eurotas, he spied three girls trying to piss standing up. They made such a mess of it, wetting themselves more than the ground, that he and his packmates fell out of the weeds laughing at them.
With the passage of years the attitudes of the adults hardened toward the boys. Every grown male in Laconia
