What did you think a spear was for?
A shield?
A xiphos sword?
Questions of this kind would be put to the boy not in a harsh or abusive tone, which would have been easier to bear, but coldly, rationally, demanding a concisely expressed reasoned response.
Alexandras was made to describe the wounds an eight-footer could produce and the types of deaths that would ensue. Should an overhand thrust be aimed at the throat or the chest? If the tendon of a foeman's calf be severed, should you pause-to finish him off or press forward with the advance? If you plunge a spear into the groin above a man's testicles, should it be pulled straight out or ripped upward, blade vertical, to eviscerate the man's bowels? Alexandras' face flushed, his voice quaked and broke. Would you like to stop, boy? Is this instruction too much for you?
Answer concisely:
Can you envision a world without war?
Can you imagine clemency from an enemy?
Describe the condition of Lakedaemon without her army, without her warriors, to defend her.
Which is better, victory or defeat?
To rule or be ruled?
To make a widow of the enemy's wife or to have one's own wife widowed?
What is the supreme virtue of a man? Why? Whom of all in the city do you admire most? Why?
Define the word mercy. Define compassion. Are these the virtues of war or of peace? Of men or of women? Are they virtues at all?
Of the Peers who harrowed Alexandras this evening, Polynikes did not on the surface seem the most relentless or display the harshest severity. He did not lead the arosis, nor was his interrogation overtly cruel or malicious. He just wouldn't let it stop. In the tone of the other men's voices, no matter how ruthlessly they grilled Alexandros, resided at bottom the unspoken fundament of inclusion. Alexandros was of their blood, he was one of them; everything they did tonight and every other night was not to break his spirit or crush him like a slave, but to make him stronger, to temper his will and render him more worthy of being called warrior, as they were, of taking his place as a Spartiate and a Peer.
Polynikes' harrowing was different. There was something personal about it. He hated the boy, though it was impossible to guess why. What made it even more painful, to watch as it must have been to endure, was Polynikes' supreme physical beauty. In every aspect of his person, face as well as physique, the Knight was formed as flawlessly as a god. Naked in the Gymnasion, even alongside scores of youths and warriors blessed in comeliness and elevated by their training to the peak of condition, Polynikes stood out, without equal, surpassing all others in symmetry of form and faultlessness of physical structure. Clothed in white robes for the Assembly, he shone like Adonis. And armed for war, with the bronze of his shield burnished, his scarlet cloak across his shoulders and the horsehair-crested helmet of a Knight pushed back upon his brow, he shone forth, peerless as Achilles. To watch Polynikes train on the Big Ring, in preparation for the Games at Olympia or Delphi or Nemea, to behold him in the pastel light of day's end when he and the other sprinters had finished their distance work and now, under the eyes of their trainers, donned their racing armor for the final dressed sprints, even the most hardened Peers, training in the boxing oval or the wrestling pits, would pull up from their regimens and watch.
Four runners regularly trained with Polynikes: two brothers, Malineus and Gorgone, both victors at Nemea in the diaulos sprint; Doreion the Knight, who could outrun a racehorse over sixty meters; and Telamonias the boxer and enomotarch of the Wild Olive regiment.
The five would take their marks and a trainer would clap the start. For thirty meters, sometimes as long as fifty, the elite field remained a pack of straining bronze and flesh, laboring beneath the weight of their harness, and for a span of heartbeats the watching Peers would think, maybe this once, maybe this singular time, one will best him. Then from the fore, as the runners' accelerating power began to break the bonds of their burdens, Polynikes' churning shield would emerge, twenty pounds of oak and bronze sustained upon the pumping flesh and sinew of his left forearm; you saw his helmet flash; his polished greaves extended next, flying like the winged sandals of Hermes himself, and then, with a force and power so magnificent they stopped the heart, Polynikes would catapult out of the pack, blazing with such impossible swiftness that he seemed to be naked, even winged, and not belabored by the poundage upon his arm and across his back.
Around the turning pole he flew. Daylight burst between him and his pursuers. He vaulted forward to the finish, four hundred meters total, no longer in his mind competing with these lesser fellows, these pedestrian mortals, any one of whom in another city would have been the object of adoration, mobbed by throngs of admirers, but who here, against this invincible runner, were doomed to eat dust and like it. This was Polynikes, No one could touch him. He possessed in every pore those blessings of feature and physique which the gods allow to combine in a single mortal only once in a generation.
Alexandros was beautiful too. Even with the broken nose Polynikes had gifted him with, his physical perfection approached that of the peerless runner. Perhaps this, in some way, lay at the root of the hatred the man felt for the boy. That he, Alexandros, whose joy lay in the chorus and not on the athletic field, was unworthy of this gift of beauty; that it, in him, failed to reflect the manly virtue, the andreia, which it in Polynikes so infallibly proclaimed.
My own suspicion was that the runner's animus was inflamed further by the favor Alexandros had found in Dienekes' eyes. For of all the men in the city with whom Polynikes competed in virtue and excellence, he resented most my master. Not so much for the honors Dienekes had been granted by his peers in battle, for Polynikes, like my master, had been awarded the prize of valor twice, and he was ten or twelve years younger.
It was something else, some less obvious aspect of character which Dienekes possessed and which the city honored him by recognizing, instinctively, without prompting or ceremony.
Polynikes saw it in the way the young boys and girls joked with Dienekes when he passed their sphairopaedia, the ball-playing fields, during the noonday break. He caught it in the tilt of a smile from a matron and her maids at the springs or an old woman passing in the square. Even the helots granted my master a fondness and respect that were withheld from Polynikes, for all the heaps of honors that were his in other quarters. It galled him. Mystified him. He, Polynikes, had even produced two sons, while Dienekes' issue were all female, four daughters who, unless Arete could produce a son, would extinguish his line altogether, while Polynikes' strapping swift lads would one day be warriors and men. That Dienekes wore the respect of the city so lightly and with such self-effacing wit was even more bitter to Polynikes.
For the runner saw in Dienekes neither beauty of form nor fleetness of foot. Instead he perceived a quality of mind, a power of self-possession, which he himself, for all the gifts the gods had lavished upon him, could not call his own. Polynikes' courage was that of a lion or an eagle, something in the blood and the marrow, which summoned itself out of its own preeminence, without thought, and gloried in its instinctual supremacy.
Dienekes' courage was different. His was the virtue of a man, a fallible mortal, who brought valor forth out of the understanding of his heart, by the force of some inner integrity which was unknown to Polynikes. Was this why he hated Alexandros? Was it why he had splintered the boy's nose that evening of the eight-nighter? Polynikes sought to break more than the youth's face now. Here in the mess he wanted to crack him, to see him come apart.
You look unhappy, pais. As if the prospect of battle held for you no promise of joy.
Polynikes ordered Alexandras to recite the pleasures of war, to which the boy responded by rote, citing the satisfactions of shared hardship, of triumph over adversity, of camaraderie and Philadelphia, love of one's comrades-in-arms.