Athenian Steel (Book I of the The Hellennium) (13 page)

END OF PART I

Metageitnion in the archonship of Stratokles
(August 425 BCE)

That the weather held for the voyage around
the Peloponnese and home was doubly fortunate, for every shore
passed by the fleet of beaked triremes and round-hulled cargo ships
was a hostile one.  It thus could not even put to anchor at
night to let soldiers and sailors sleep on a beach or in a friendly
port, of which there were none.  The fleet could only sail on
beneath the quiet stars, which was for the best, perhaps, since
half of the men aboard had spent a season trapped at Pylos and were
scarcely eager to delay their homecoming by even a day.

A swift, unladen ship carried word of their
victory ahead, and so a massive crowd was on hand at Pireaus, the
port of Athens, in time for their arrival.  Priests shouted
prayers of thanksgiving and poured libations on the shore, while
great masses of men stood in clusters to greet victorious sons and
brothers and nephews leaping from the freshly beached prows.
 Even some citizen women came, under the watchful eyes of
their lords, to seedy Piraeus, so auspicious was the occasion and
so battered were the ancient social codes of Athens by years of
siege and plague.

Demosthenes had no wife, no brother, no
mother awaiting him.  Plague had spared only his father
Alkisthenes, and the old man's health was too fragile to permit him
the quarter-day's journey from the country estate where he passed
his days, now that the Lakedaemonians weren’t slashing and burning
it.  Thus, while men around him were embraced by weeping kin,
Demosthenes was sought out instead by a parade of city officials
and various others who hoped he would remember their names when the
time came to support their pet projects—a new garden or cult statue
for their 
deme
, a wider market road, or whatnot.
 He gave these sycophants short shrift, taking the slightest
excuse to ignore them.  Boys ran up in search of nothing more
than to have their fathers' swords, one day to be theirs, touched
by the hand of a hero.  Those requests Demosthenes granted
gladly, silly as they were.  Still others wanted a lock of his
sandy hair, but that request he smilingly refused, if only because
he would otherwise return home with none left.

Not all could share in the joy.
 Eighteen Athenians had fallen on Sphakteria, and their loved
ones, not yet informed, would find themselves cast into grief this
day.  Still others present in the crowd would already know
they had lost brothers or sons in the first Spartan assault on
Pylos earlier in the summer.  Shortly after landing,
Demosthenes spied the white-bearded father of one such casualty, a
tribemate of his, and pushed through the crowd to kneel and kiss
the hem of the old man's flowing 
himation
 and
deliver a promise to bring his son's arms and pay personally to his
home.  Tears welling in his bright eyes, the old man pulled
Demosthenes to his feet for an embrace.

At the top of the beach waited another old
man: the statesman and general Nikias, with his lined face, square
jaw, and gray hair which he kept trimmed back to a near-stubble.
 His unclouded eyes were fierce, and his limbs had more life
in them than most men half his years.  Nikias, more than
anyone apart from the Spartans, was responsible for the hardship of
Pylos.  A word of support from him in the Assembly could have
ended all debate and dispatched the needed reinforcements months
ago, but instead it had taken a long and bitter siege and the
posturing of a demagogue—Kleon, who at the moment was consorting
with those same sycophants Demosthenes had shunned—to deliver final
victory.

But now was not the time to bear grudges.
 Nikias embraced Demosthenes warmly, showing none of the
bitterness which he must surely have felt on seeing a venture he
had so strenuously opposed end in a victory that was likely to
change the course of the war.

“You’ll not lose out for a generalship this
year,” Nikias told him, and  Demosthenes accepted the somewhat
backhanded compliment graciously.

Nikias had no compliment, not even a smile,
for Kleon, even though decorum dictated he congratulate the man.
 The ruddy-faced demagogue grinned broadly anyway, as he had
throughout the proceedings, shaking every hand and missing no
opportunity to remind all comers of the prisoners he had brought
back from Pylos in a glorious over-fulfillment of his already
ambitious promise to the Assembly of swift victory.  More than
once, he lifted his hand palm up with fingers curled, as if to
demonstrate how the fates of those prisoners rested in his own
meaty grasp.

There at the top of the beach, in the
presence of most of the Board of Ten, the eponymous archon, who
this year was a man named Stratokles, crowned the two triumphant
commanders with laurel wreaths, then led them up onto the dusty
harbor road where waited two quadrigas bedecked with garlands and
pulled by four white horses each.  Demosthenes boarded his
chariot behind its driver, accepting his effusive welcome and
looked back in the direction of the beach, where his trusted men
and Kleon's were unloading the spoils and hauling in the empty
triremes for drying and maintenance.  He had asked Thalassia
to follow him some fifty paces behind and she was heeding the
request, it seemed, for at about that distance Demosthenes picked
her out amidst the thronging crowd of returnees and celebrants.
 Plying the human sea with ease, she reached the roadside just
as the two chariot drivers began whipping their teams forward, and
the quadrigas' great wheels, which had flowering vines woven into
their spokes, began to turn.  She would have to walk alongside
the procession, of course, for as far as anyone else in Athens
knew, she was but a slave.

At a snail's pace, the procession made its
way to Athens between the Long Walls that connected the city to its
port.  The walls were three times the height of a man and
lined with evenly spaced bastions within easy bowshot of one
another.  By ensuring her access to the sea, the Long Walls
had saved Athens from ruin in each of the past seven summers of
Spartan siege—a ruinous tradition cut short this year by the
successful attack on Pylos.  So long as the walls ensured that
Athens touched her beloved sea, the city could not fall.

The crowd, traveling on foot and horse and
two-wheeled donkey cart to the accompaniment of pipers and drummers
and hymn-singers, clogged the wide, arrow-straight port-road for as
far behind as Demosthenes could see.  Near the center of that
seething human mass marched the reason that many of today's
spectators had made the trek to Piraeus: the prisoners.  The
Spartans walked in a formation eight abreast with each rank yoked
by neck and arms to a ship's mast laid across their collective
shoulders.  Clamped on their ankles and hobbling them were
irons which had been forged by and for their own freed Helot slaves
in Pylos.  A constant barrage of stones, mud, rancid
vegetables, and anything disposable which came to men's hands
assaulted the vanquished Spartiates from all sides, but the
prisoners walked on as if the assortment of missiles were no more
than a fine, misting rain.  Now and then a prisoner would be
struck hard in the head or face, but the rigid timbers borne by
seven of his comrades ensured that he kept moving, and so the
Lakedaemonians' formation remained intact, and with it what
remained of their pride.

Whilst engaging in idle chatter with the
cluster of hangers-on near his chariot, Demosthenes cast frequent
looks back at the prisoners.  He understood the rage of the
garbage-throwers, certainly, for here before them marched some of
the very men responsible for their hot summers of misery, the years
of plague and corpse-carts and daily mass pyres when all the folk
of Attica had holed up in the teeming city while outside its
inviolable walls, their farms were razed and livestock slaughtered
by this enemy, perhaps by these very men.

As righteous and justified as the crowd's
anger was, disapproval of its behavior nagged at Demosthenes.
 The articles of their surrender had included a pledge against
mistreatment.  Vegetables could scarcely harm them, but still.
It was like watching a man mistreat a dog, he realized, for that's
what these Spartiates were: dogs harshly trained from birth to obey
the needlessly complex chain of command bequeathed them by the
founder, Lykurgos.  Even before their capture, these Spartans
had worn every day of their lives an even heavier yoke than the
timbers under which they now marched, for what greater curse could
one endure than to be a professional soldier, slave to the whims of
kings and elders, and never just a free man and master of one's
destiny?

He pitied them, and both pity and duty urged
action upon him, but was it worthwhile?  Could he hope to win
a generalship in the coming winter if the citizens present
remembered him as the one who had sought to deny them what little
revenge it was in their power to take?  Would anyone vote for
Demosthenes, the Spoiler of Fun?

Some distance to his right, borne by his own
chariot, Kleon held aloft as trophies the plumed helm of Epitadas
and a punctured, lambda-blazoned hoplon as he addressed the crowd
constantly with words Demosthenes was glad he could not make
out.

A realization spurred him to act: to think
only of 
elections
 was to think like Kleon.

Demosthenes stepped down from the
slow-moving quadriga, turning the head of the startled charioteer,
and wove a path through onlookers who cheered the act they did not
yet understand.  He marched through the crowd to a
thick-bearded citizen sitting astride a serviceable brown mare, the
reins of which were held by a slave on foot.  Demosthenes
offered the citizen a silver obol for use of his horse for the
remainder of the procession, but the citizen refused payment and
surrendered it for free—even if he made a point of mentioning his
name, Kallias, three times.

Mounting, Demosthenes rode against the
languid current to rejoin the procession some distance back, where,
coming up alongside the prisoners, he inserted himself between
their third and fourth ranks and wheeled the horse forward.
 The Spartans' matted long hair was abuzz with insects and
their already soiled chitons stained with marks from the same
flying debris that now pelted Demosthenes.  As they were
forced to part to accommodate the horse, the prisoners gazed up at
their mounted vanquisher with bitterness in their dark eyes.
 No doubt they anticipated some new humiliation.

From their laughter, the people of Athens
expected the same, but slowly they came to realize their error.
 The hail of mud and overripe fruit grew gradually thinner,
the cheers and jeers died down, and a silent confusion settled over
the crowd which Demosthenes did nothing to allay.

Soon he was not the only Athenian in the
rank of prisoners.  At least eight men who were loyal to him
joined in, even daring to go on foot among a humiliated enemy which
gave no indication that it appreciated the gesture.  Before
long, none other than Nikias had fallen back on his white stallion
to ride among the prisoners.  With him came two more generals
of the Board of Ten, the old man's political allies.  Those
additions served no practical purpose, for the air was by now free
of missiles; but here was an opportunity for Nikias and his faction
to show the sovereign 
demos
 which of the two
returning 'Heroes of Pylos' had their endorsement.  Perhaps
Nikias sensed that if and when Demosthenes rejoined the Board of
Ten, he might not be warlike Kleon's man after all, but a potential
ally of theirs in pursuit of an honorable peace.

The first glimpse of Athens on the ride up
the Long Walls was, as ever, her soaring acropolis.  Topping
it, with its pediment gleaming burgundy and gold beneath the
noonday sun, was the mighty temple to the Virgin Athena which
Perikles had built.  Demosthenes locked eyes on it and, as was
the habit he shared with thousands of his countrymen, thanked that
goddess aloud for having seen him safely home.  The procession
ended on the gentle slope of the Pnyx, the ancient hillside theater
which was the seat of Athens' Assembly, and there the crowd swelled
with those who, for any number of reasons, had not made the trek to
Piraeus and back but had waited in the city instead.  After
the Spartans in their yokes were led away, it was time for speeches
to be given in the shadow of the towering acropolis.  Nikias,
being the senior 
strategos
, and this being an occasion
of military significance, was invited first to mount the slab of
white stone called the speaker's step.  The old man spoke for
a full ten minutes without ever mentioning the names Kleon or
Demosthenes, and when at last he did speak them, the former seemed
to stick in his throat.

Even as Demosthenes gave the senior general
the courtesy of his attention, he worked his way to the eastern
fringes of crowd, the direction in which lay dense pine groves
sacred to the nymphs.  The nymphs' wood, he hoped, might offer
sanctuary to a man wishing to escape unwelcome obligations.
 He was no bad citizen, of course, and would scarcely dream of
shirking his duty to vote in an Assembly (not least because of the
fine levied on those caught) but this was no Assembly.  This
gathering was more an excuse for making speeches to bend the will
of the 
demos
 one way or the other.

By the time the applause went up for Nikias,
at least half of it forced, Demosthenes stood by the tree line
where only a few pairs of eyes were positioned to observe his
departure.  He flashed the owners of those eyes a smile and a
silencing gesture, and the young men smiled their agreement in
return, gratified to be made co-conspirators by one of the day's
heroes.  When he was safely out of sight, Demosthenes spun on
his heel in the grove's floor of dry needles and began walking a
line for his home in the 
deme
 of Tyrmeidai.
 Behind him, Kleon's voice boomed over the hillside, which
meant that in an hour or so, when the demagogue finally finished,
the crowd would expect a speech from Demosthenes.  It would be
disappointed.