My expression answered for me.
He glared at me with contempt. What are they to you, moron? Your city was sacked, they say.
You hate the Argives and think these sons of Herakles – he indicated the drilling Peers, spitting the final phrase with sarcastic loathing – are their enemies. Wake up! What do you think they would have done had they sacked your city? The same and worse! As they did to my country, to Messenia and to me. Look at my face. Look at your own. You've fled slavery only to become lower than a slave yourself.
Dekton was the first person I had ever met, man or boy, who had absolutely no fear of the gods.
He didn't hate them as some do, or mock their antics as I had heard the impious freethinkers did in Athens and Corinth. Dekton didn't grant their existence at all. There were no gods, it was as simple as that. This struck me with a kind of awe. I kept watch, waiting for him to be felled by some hideous blow of heaven.
Now, on the road home from Antirhion, Dekton (I should say Rooster) continued the harangue I had heard from him so many times before. That the Spartans had gulled me like they gull everyone; that they exploit their chattel by permitting them the crumbs off their table, elevating one slave a fraction above another and turning each individual's miserable hunger for station into the invisible bonds which held them in chains and in thrall.
If you hate your masters so much, I asked him, why were you hopping like a flea during the battle, so frantic to get into the fight yourself?
Another factor, I knew, added to Rooster's frustration. He had just got his barnfriend (as the helot boys called their illicit wenches) pregnant. Soon he would be a father. How could he flee then?
He would not abandon a child, nor could he make his getaway lugging a girl and a babe.
He stomped along, cursing one of the other herd boys who had let two goats stray, chasing the urchin back after these stragglers behind the herd. Look at me, he growled as he fell again into step beside me. I can run as fast as any of these Spartan dick-strokers. I'm fourteen but I'll fight any twenty-year-old man-to-man and bring him down. Yet here I trudge, in this fool's nightshirt, holding the leash on a goat.
He vowed he would steal a xyele and cut a Spartan's throat one day.
I told him he must not speak like this in my hearing.
What'll you do? Report me?
I wouldn't and he knew it.
But by the gods, I swore to him, raise your hand once against them, any one of them, and I'll kill you.
Rooster laughed. Pluck a sharp stick from the roadside and drive it into your sockets, my friend.
It couldn't make you any blinder than you are already.
The army reached the frontier at Oion at nightfall of the second day, and Sparta herself twelve hours later. Runners had preceded the troops; the city had known for two days the identities of the wounded and the slain. Funeral games stood already in preparation; they would be celebrated within the fortnight.
That evening and the following day were consumed in decamping the battle train: cleaning and refitting weapons and armor, reshafting spears which had been shivered in combat and rewrighting the oaken hubs of the hoplon shields, disassembling and storing the riggings of the waggons, tending to the pack and draught animals, making sure each beast was properly watered and groomed and dispersed with their helot teamsters to their various kleroi, the farmsteads they worked. That second night, the Peers of the train at last returned to their messes.
This was customarily a solemn evening, in the aftermath of a battle, when fallen comrades were memorialized, acts of valor recognized and dishonorable conduct censured, when errors were reviewed and turned to instruction and the grave capital of battle stored up against future need.
The messes of the Peers are customarily havens of respite and confidentiality, sanctuaries within which all converse is privileged and private. Here after the long day friends may let down their hair among friends, speak as gentlemen the truths of their hearts and even, though never to excess, embrace the mellowing comfort of a bowl or two of wine. This night, however, was not one for ease or conviviality. The souls of the twenty-eight perished hung heavily over the city.
The secret shame of the warrior, the knowledge within his own heart that he could have done better, done more, done it more swiftly or with less self-preserving hesitation; this censure, always most pitiless when directed against oneself, gnawed unspoken and unrelieved at the men's guts. No decoration or prize of valor, not victory itself, could quell it entire.
Well, Polynikes called the youth Alexandras forward and addressed him sternly, how did you like it?
He meant war.
To be there, to see it raw and entire.
The evening stood now well advanced. The hour of the epaikla had expired, that second course of the meal at which game meat and wheaten bread may be contributed, and now the sixteen Peers of the Deukalion mess settled, hunger satisfied, upon their hardwood couches. Now the lads who stood-to the mess for their instruction might be summoned and roasted upon the griddle.
Alexandras was made to stand forth before his elders at the position of boy's attention, hands tucked from sight beneath the folds of his cloak, eyes glued to the floor as not yet worthy of rising to meet a Peer's full in the face.
How did you enjoy the battle? Polynikes queried.
It made me sick, Alexandras replied.
Under the interrogation the boy confessed that he had been unable to sleep since, neither aboard ship nor on the march home. If he closed his eyes even for a moment, he declared, he saw again with undiminished horror the scenes of slaughter, particularly the death spasm of his friend Meriones. His compassion, he acknowledged, was elicited as much by those casualties of the enemy as for the fallen heroes of his own city. Pressed hard upon this point, the boy declared the slaughter of war barbarous and unholy.
Barbarous and unholy, is it? responded Polynikes, darkening with anger.
The Peers in their messes are encouraged, when they deem it useful for the instruction of youth, to single out one lad, or even another Peer, and abuse him verbally in the most stem and pitiless fashion. This is called arosis, harrowing. Its purpose, much like the physical beatings, is to inure the senses to insult, to harden the will against responding with rage and fear, the twin unmanning evils of which that state called katalepsis, possession, is comprised. The prized response, the one the Peers look for, is humor. Deflect defamation with a joke, the coarser the better. Laugh in its face. A mind which can maintain its lightness will not come undone in war.
But Alexandras possessed no gift for the wisecrack. It wasn't in him. All he could do was answer in his clear pure voice with the most excruciating candor. I watched him from my service station at the left of the mess entrance, beneath the carven plaque- Exo tes thyras ouden, Out this door nothing-meaning no word spoken within these precincts may be repeated elsewhere.
It was a form of high courage which Alexandras displayed, to stand up to the Peers' hammering without a joke or a lie. At any time during a harrowing, the object boy may signal and call a stop.
This is his right under the laws of Lykurgus. Pride, however, prevented Alexandras from exercising this option, and everyone knew it.
You wanted to see war, Polynikes began. What did you imagine it would be?
Alexandras was required to answer in the Spartan style, at once, with extreme brevity.
Your eyes were horror-stricken, your heart aggrieved at the sight of the manslaughter. Answer this: