Virtues of War Read Free

the south grows to manhood in a
polis
, a city-state with a marketplace, an assembly, and walls of stone to keep out the foe. He is a good talker but a poor fighter. The plainsman of Scythia lives on horseback, trailing his stock and the seasonal grass. He is savage but not strong.
    Ah, but the hill clansman. Tough as dirt, mean as a snake, here is a man whose belly you can split with a pike of iron and he’ll still crawl back to carve out your heart and eat it raw before your face. The mountain man is proud; he will rend your liver over a trifle. Yet he knows how to obey. His father has schooled him by the oxhide of his belt.
    Here is the stock of which great soldiers are made. My father understood this. Once in the high country when I offered a smart remark of some clay-eating creaseman, Philip snatched me short. “My son has fallen under the spell of Homer’s Achilles,” he remarked to Parmenio and Telamon at his side (both of whom served my father before they served me). “He cites his descent from the hero—by his mother’s blood, not mine—and dreams of assembling his own corps of Myrmidons, the invincible ‘ant men’ who followed ‘the best of the Achaeans’ to Troy.” Philip laughed and swatted me gaily across the thigh. “Who do you imagine Achilles’ men were, my son, except raw bastards like these? Clansmen from the hinter creases of Thessaly, rude and unlettered, soaked in spirits, and hard as a centaur’s hoof.”
    Men are hard in my country, and women harder. My father understood this too. He paid court to these lasses of the uplands, or, more accurately, to their fathers, whose friendship and fealty he secured by all means. Thirty-nine marriages he made, seven official, by my mother’s count; the tally of his brats may only be guessed at. There is an old jest of my army’s loyalty: Of course they will not desert me; they are all my half brothers.
    When I was twelve, my dear mate Hephaestion and I accompanied a recruiting party under my father to a crease called Triessa in the highlands above Hyperasopian Mara. Horses may not be ridden into such rugged country; their legs will break. One must use mules. My father had invited the clans from a number of contending runs. They all showed up, all drunk. Philip was born to rule such men. He boasted that he could “outdrink, outfight, and outfuck” the lot, and he could. The clansmen loved him. It was just after dark; a pig-riding contest was in progress. A sow the size of a small pony had broken loose; men and boys, mud-slathered, attempted to bring her down. Hephaestion and I looked on from the ring of the stone corral as one rogue with great mustaches flung himself upon the beast’s neck. His mates began daring him to mount the sow and have intercourse with her. My father seconded this with exuberance, himself shit-faced and waist-deep in the slough. Cataracts of hilarity descended as the mustached fellow wrestled the sow in the slop. When the act had been accomplished, the luckless beast was butchered. The banquet of its flesh went on all night.
    As we rode home next day, I asked my father how he could countenance such brutishness in men he would soon lead into battle. “War,” he replied, “is a brutish business.”
    This response struck me as outrageous. “I would sooner have the sow,” I declared, “than the man.”
    Philip laughed. “You will not win battles, my son, leading an army of sows.”
    It was my father’s genius to forge these carlish highlanders into a disciplined modern army. He perceived the utility of recruiting such clansmen, who had been enslaved for centuries by their own vices and vendettas, to a new conception of soldiering, in which station and birth counted for nothing, but where a man might make his career on guts alone, and within whose order the very qualities that had held the hillman in chains—his own