… the broken ground east of the city had been, before we arrived, a pleasant suburb of temples and promenades. There was a boys' school, residential blocks, a ball field. Now it's all rubble. Every house, wall, and road has been demolished. The stones are now part of the wall. All trees have been felled for timber for forms, inclines, and stockades; not a blade of grass remains for miles. The only edifice spared is a mill for the bakers' ovens. The army and its followers are a hundred thousand. The tent city is big as Syracuse; it has not lanes but boulevards. Latrines are numbered; otherwise one loses his way taking a crap.
Across the plain, piles of stone are set along the line where the wall will advance. Before these are spiked ditches, with palisades atop. At night the two and a half miles from harbor to sea are lit solid with bonfires and torches. It is spectacular. This of course does not account the fleet, at anchor in the harbor or visible running drills at sea. It is literally one city besieging another.
Lion and I trekked down to visit Telamon, whose Arcadians were stationed at the southern end of the wall, a pretty park area called the Olympieum. The mercenary commended his comrade's literary undertakings but with a wry amusement that exasperated the aspiring historian. Lion wanted Telamon's views. Our mentor regarded him as if he had gone balmy.
Lion offered pay. This turned the trick. The topic was heroism.
Was the valor of men in mass as worthy of note as that of the solitary champion?
“We have a proverb in my country,” Telamon declared: Heroism makes good song but poor soup.
This means steer wide of champions. Passion is their coin. Lion has chosen his hero well in Alcibiades, for this creature breathes passion and arouses it. He will end badly.”
Lion pressed our mate to elaborate.
“In Arcadia we build no cities; this is how we like it. The city is the spawning ground of passion and the hero. Who is more consummately a man of the city than Alcibiades?”
“Are you saying, Telamon, that heroism has no place for you, a professional soldier?”
“Heroes are recognized by their tombs.”
At this I protested. Telamon himself was a hero!
“You confound prudence with valor, Pommo. If I fight up front, it's because I find it safer. And if I fight to win, well… the dead line up before no paymaster.”
Telamon had said all he wished; he stood to depart. Lion pressed. “What about pay, my friend? Surely you feel passion for this.”
“I use money but never permit money to use me. To serve for pay sets one at a remove from the object of his or his commander's desire. This is money's proper use; it renders service in its name a virtue. Love of country or glory, on the other hand, unites one to the object of his desire. This makes it a vice. The patriot and the fool serve without pay.”
“The patriot because he loves his country,” proposed Lion.
“Because he loves himself. For what is a man's country but the multiplied reflection of himself, and what is this but vanity? Again your choice of champion is surpassing, my friend, for who of all men loves himself more than Alcibiades? And who more personifies love of country?”
“And is love of country a vice?”
“Less a vice than a folly. But then all love is folly, if by love one means that which one clasps to his heart, rendering no distinction between it and himself.”
“Then Alcibiades by your measure is a slave to Athens?”
“None surpasses him in abjection.”
“Even as he works with might and main against her?”
“Same coin, obverse side.”
“Then we ourselves,” Lion suggested, indicating the soldiers and marines attending within the tent, “are fools and slaves?” “You serve that which you value.”
“And what do you serve, Telamon? Other than money.”
Indignation informed Lion's tone. He was offended. Telamon smiled.
“I serve the gods,” he declared.
“Wail…”
“The gods, I said. Them I serve.”
And he exited.
Construction continued on the wall. The expedition had ceased to be war, if it ever had been. It had become public works. There was a defect to this. Men ceasing to act as warriors cease to be warriors.
By midsummer it began to show. Soldiers now paid others to stand their watches and bought their way out of labor on the wall.
They hired Sicels, the non-Greek natives, or employed camp followers, setting themselves at idleness. Even sailors began enlisting surrogates. When their officers sought to check this, the men voted them out and replaced them with commanders who knew, like the kit of the marble fox, from which tit flowed milk and which water.
Inaction spawned discontent and discontent bred insurrection.
Men dozed brazenly on watch; they lounged about the barbers' tents and packed the closets of the whores' camp, presenting themselves in every quarter except the drill field. Discipline could not be enforced by the newly minted officers, who owed their very station to their men's contempt for them. Malingering grew epidemic. Soldiers went absent without leave and on return did not deign even to offer excuse. At night units no longer stuck together, but individuals scattered to their own, with no object nobler than hunting trouble. Theft grew rampant. Vigilantism rose in response. A man would open another's guts over a stolen shoe or jealousy of a woman or boy.
Where was Nicias, our commander? III in his tent, with nephritis. His sixty-second birthday had come and gone. The men laughed at him and the seers and soothsayers who winged about his tent like gulls above the refuse dump.
That current of enterprise which properly conducted by wise and effective officers produces a disciplined army now, turned from its proper course, flowed into more malignant channels.
Those who had bought themselves out of work turned this leisure to commerce, in women and contraband and even legitimate materiel. Who would stop them? They were businessmen and traders, who knew how to hold out a palm and how to grease one.
Good men, witnessing this corruption and observing their commanders impotent to impede it, lost all incentive to keep their own order. Soldiers' kits looked like trash. Hygiene went to hell.
There were more men down sick than at work on the wall. Even I succumbed to this swell of misfeasance. My protests had long since got me busted to private soldier. I took to hunting. I had dogs and beaters, a regular racket going. I fled camp ten days at a time and was never missed. Pandora's marines had scattered, some back to the ship, thinking sea duty easier than hod-humping, others ducking work in obscure wards of the camp. With Lion I vacated as well, to the Olympieum, adjacent Telamon's Arcadians.
One evening we took a ramble up the heights called Epipolae.
Lion brooded, seeking the deficiency that had turned the army so sour. Telamon was taking a piss and didn't even look up.
“No Alcibiades, no empire.”
Night fell; that fort called the Circle was lit up beneath cressets.
We walked, looking out over the city and harbor. “Nicias has had his career,” Telamon continued. “He's like an old plough horse who wishes only to get back to the barn.”
The mercenary gestured to the ant colony that sprawled beneath us, harbor to sea. “Look at this hell. Why would any man cross an ocean to besiege a nation no threat to his own? Fear won't make him, nor even greed. Only one force will call him. A dream!
That dream is gone. It defected with your friend Alcibiades.”
We were on the wrong side, Telamon declared. We were going to lose. Lion and I laughed. How could we lose? Syracuse is cut off.
The native cities flock to our side. No armies are coming to preserve the Syracusans, and they certainly can't save themselves.
Who will teach them?
“The Spartans,” testified Telamon, as if it were patent.
“Once Alcibiades dispatches them, schoolmasters to their fellow Dorians of Syracuse.”