Alcibiades galloped upon this impasse, fresh from the shore.
Ahead squatted the bottleneck. Three squadrons of our cavalry and above a thousand infantry hung up where levees conjoined. A furlong ahead could be seen enemy horse advancing, with clouds of light troops and militia, farmers wielding pitchforks and muckrakes, driven by their masters' whips. If we couldn't break through we'd be overrun. You could get round by dikes east and west but there was no time, and if even a dozen of the foe beat the party to a juncture, there would be no breaking through.
Alcibiades rode a mare named Mustard, which had been Agasicles', Thrasybulus' adjutant, who had been slain by the ships.
A horse, uncoerced by its rider, knows how to make its way through mire. Alcibiades slung the beast's bridle and, taking about forty cavalry and two hundred infantry, set off through the slough.
Mustard cut a thousand yards off the go-round, mounting muck-slathered up a dikeway in the foe's rear. From there Alcibiades led the assault on the Spartan infantry, slaying their commander, Amompharetus the son of Polydamos, a knight and victor at Nemea. If you go even now to the Eurysacium at Athens you will see, on the left as you enter, a matchless bronze of a warhorse, no taller than a man's hand, with this dedication:
I led, Victory followed.
That afternoon Mindarus was slain, the Spartans' peerless general. Of the foe's total ninety ships, fifty-eight were sunk and twenty-nine captured. His brigades of Lacedaemon and the Peloponnese were routed on the plain of the Macestos by Thrasybulus and Alcibiades, along with the mercenaries and Persian cavalry supporting them. Next night found Alcibiades master of Cyzicus, calling in the carters to load up contributions in cash, and within twenty days before Perinthus and Selymbria as well, raising more money, and fortifying Chrysopolis to bind the straits and exact a tenth from all passing, to fund the fleet. This dispatch, intercepted, from the remnant Spartans to their home: Ships sunk, Mindarus slain, men starving. We know not what to do.
I need not recite for you, Jason, the litany of Alcibiades' victories.
You were there. You won your prize of valor at Abydos and earned it too. Did you know I forwarded the text of your commendation?
That was one of my duties in those days. I see you flush; I'll embarrass you no further, though I recall the citation, word for word.
To the young soldiers and sailors of the fleet, they for whom these victories under Thrasybulus and Alcibiades were all they had known, such bounty seemed no more than the merited produce of their preeminence, their birthright as Athenians. But for those of our generation, who had cut our teeth on plague and calamity, the experience of such ascendancy, each conquest succeeding so swiftly upon its predecessor, arose as if within a dream. No pharmakon like victory, the proverb says. And though we who bore the scars of Syracuse could not bring ourselves to trust them at first, when the wins kept coming, Bitch's Tomb, Abydos, Methymna, Fool's Cap Bay, Clazomenae, the Hollows, Chios, and Nine-Mile Cove, then second Chios and Erythrae, both on the same day, at last we, too, began to believe, as the youths from the start, that this run was neither fluke nor fortune but that at last conjoined upon one field Athens possessed such ships, crews, and commanders as to render her, barring the sons of Earth themselves ascending from Tartarus, invincible.
History was being made. A blind man could see it. Honoring Lion's wish of the quarries, I set about enlarging his chronicle, or at least preserving within my sea chest such documents as I imagined one day in retirement editing and publishing in my brother's name.
I went so far as to record notes and even sketch terrain. Only later did I grasp that a recounting of actions or tactics was not what interested me, or anyone.
What held us all was not what our commander did, but how he did it. It was clear that he manipulated some force to which others commanded no access. Though he possessed on occasion superiority of might, he never needed it to best the foe. He was always clement to the vanquished, nor was it in him to pursue vengeance against those who had worked him harm. He acted thus, not out of sentiment or altruism, but because he reckoned such actions ignoble and inelegant. Here, a communication to Tissaphernes, whom he called friend despite the notorious arrest at Sardis and after the Persian had bid ten thousand darics for his head.. it is not possession of force which produces victory, but its apparition. A commander of ability manipulates not armies but perceptions.
From the succeeding paragraph:
… the function of disciplined movement in battle is to produce in the mind of the friend the conviction that he cannot lose and the mind of the foe that he cannot win. Order is indispensable for these considerations beyond all others.
Alcibiades was an abominable speller. When he worked late, he got worse and would shake awake anyone to hand. “Brick, sit up.
How do you spell epiteichismos?” His bane was inversion of letters; his secretaries teased that he even wrote with a lisp. Thus many half-composed missives found their way to trash and from there to my chest.
In this note, addressed to his great enemy Anytus at Athens, but intended for circulation among the political clubs beneath his sway, Alcibiades seeks to allay the fears of those who had brought the indictments which led to his exile-fears, that is, that he, returning at the head of an all-conquering fleet, would exact vengeance upon them.
…my enemies accuse me of seeking to impose my will upon events, either for glory or fortune or, those who admit me a patriot, for the weal of my country.
This is erroneous. I do not believe in personal will, and haven't since I was a boy. What I have tried to do is to follow the dictates of Necessity. This is the solitary god I revere and in my opinion the only god that exists. Man's predicament is that he dwells at the intersection of Necessity and free will. What distinguishes statesmen, as Themistocles and Pericles, is their gift to perceive Necessity's dictates in advance of others-as Themistocles saw that Athens must become a sea power and Pericles that naval supremacy prefigures empire. That course of individual or nation aligned with Necessity must prove irresistible. The trick is that each moment contains three or four necessities. Necessity moreover is like a board game. As one option closes, a new necessity obtains. What has disfigured my career is that I have perceived Necessity but been unable to persuade my countrymen to act upon its dictates. My hope with you now, sir, is that we may act as mature men of politics..
From Thrasybulus to his fellow general Theramenes, the latter impatient at his star's overshadowing beside the sun of Alcibiades..I have found it of great utility to regard him less as a man and more a force of nature. My concern alone is for Athens. I brought him back from exile, and stuck my neck on the block thereby, the way one confronting an insuperable enemy at sea calls down a great storm, or facing the foe on land enlists a mighty earthquake.
From the same letter:
…remember, my friend, that Alcibiades himself does not comprehend his gift and is ruled by it as much as ruling. His immodesty, however galling you may find it, is to him objectivity.
He is superior. Why conceal it? To a mind such as his this course would be hypocrisy, and he is nothing if not the most frank of men.
Another:
… though his enemies style him a great double-crosser, in fact he is incapable of duplicity, and of all he has ever done, he has warned foe and friend long in advance.
The men loved Thrasybulus and feared and respected Theramenes, but Alcibiades they clasped to their hearts with a fierce solicitousness, as a magical child. Had he eaten? Had he slept? Fifty times a day sailors and marines approached me to inquire of their general's well-being, as if he were a sorcerer's lamp whose flame they feared would by heaven's jealousy be snuffed.