Tides of War Read Free Page A

despise, if not me, then my transgressions. As for my chances of acquittal, the betting man will long since have purchased the shovel to dig my grave. Yet remain, I beseech you. Track with me the course of this man I am said to have slain and our intertwined fates—yours, mine, and our nation’s.
    If I am guilty, Athens is too. What did I perform, save what she desired? As the city loved him, so did I. As she hated him, I did too. Let us tell that story, of the spell he cast over our state and how that bewitchment led us to ruin, all in the same basket. As I plead for my life like the dog I am, perhaps we may dig up some gold in the yard, the treasure of insight and illumination. What do you say, Jason? Will you assist me? Will you help a villain explore the provenance of his villainy?

IV
                           ORDEAL AND COMMISSION
    When I was ten, my father sent me for my schooling to Sparta. This was far from unheard-of in the decades before the war, when fellow feeling still prevailed between the two great states by whose allied exertions Greece had been preserved from the Persian yoke. Periodic clashes and conflicts notwithstanding, the dominant disposition toward Sparta among the Athenian gentry was respect. Many of the older landed families, not alone of our city but of Greece entire, shared bonds of guest-friendship with clans at Sparta; such gentlefolk often felt keener kinship for their kind across borders than for the commons of their own states, whose increasing stridency and self-assertion threatened not only to overturn the old courtly ways but to coarsen and corrupt the rising generation of youth. What more satisfactory inoculation for these striplings, their fathers reasoned, than a turn or two in the Spartan
agoge,
the Upbringing, where a lad learned the old-fashioned virtues of silence, continence, and obedience?
    Among my father’s forebears were the Athenian heroes Miltiades and Cimon, the latter esteemed by the Spartans little less than their own kings, which affection Cimon returned in abundance, naming his eldest son Lacedaemonius, who himself trained at Sparta, though only to age sixteen. Through such ties and by his own exertions my father succeeded in enrolling his firstborn among that handful of foreigners permitted to “stand, steal, and starve” beside their Lacedaemonian counterparts. Some twenty or thirty of us
anepsioi
, “cousins,” trekked in each year from all Greece, taking our places among the seven hundred homegrowns. Alcibiades himself, though he did not train at Lacedaemon, was
xenos,
guest-friend, of the Spartan knight Endius (who would stand present in Asia to oversee his friend’s assassination). Endius’ father was named Alcibiades, a Lacedaemonian name which alternatedin both families. My own father’s name, Nicolaus, is Laconian, as was mine at birth, Polemidas, but whose pronunciation and spelling I Atticized upon enlistment.
    I was nineteen when war began, at Sparta, one season shy of that commencement called O and C, Ordeal and Commission, the accession granted to non-Lacedaemonians, equivalent to initiation into the Corps of Peers for citizens, the Spartiatai, and their “stepbrother” comrades, the
mothakes
.
    Few believed then that the war would last more than a season. True, Athenian troops were in action, besieging Potidaea, but this was strictly an internal affair between Athens and one of her subject states, however vocally the latter might squeal, and did not violate the Peace. It was not Sparta’s ox being gored. The Spartan army, egged on by her allies, had indeed invaded Attica in retaliation, yet so lightly was this regarded that I without demurral participated in the pack-out of the two line divisions, to be reinforced by twenty thousand heavy infantry of Sparta’s Peloponnesian allies, which comprised the invasion brigades. All the foreign boys helped too. We thought nothing of it. The army would march in, raise hell,