Through the youngster he has made Agis his patron, who hates you and you know why. Agis will welcome your head or your liver, but no other part.
Lysander intrigues tirelessly for appointment as fleet admiral.
He believes he can handle the Persian, unlike our other navarchs who could neither dissimulate their contempt for the barbarian nor their despising of themselves for groveling for his gold.
You know this yourself of Lysander's character. To him a lie and the truth are one; he employs which will effect his ends.
Justice in his view is a topic of the salon, personal pride a luxury the warrior may not afford. He despises as fools those of our country who will not bend the knee to the Persian, as he himself has before Agis and others, each prostration advancing himself and his influence. Lysander is by no means evil but by all means effective. He sees human nature for what it is, unlike yourself, who cannot resist sounding it for that which it may become. For what you must brave in him, you may reprove only yourself, as he has studied in your academy and disremembered nothing. All Spartan commanders are as children beside him, as they understand the fight and nothing more. Lysander understands the rest. He grasps the workings of the Athenian democracy, specifically the fickleness of the demos. He believes you capable of vanquishing all, save your own countrymen. They will destroy you, he contends, as every other of excellence before you. In other words, he does not fear you. He wants a fight. He believes he can win.
Lysander possesses all your virtues of war and diplomacy and one other. He is cruel. He will order assassination, torture, and murder wholesale, which are but tools to him, as perjury, bribery, subornation. He will not scruple to apply terror even to his own allies. Like Polycrates the tyrant, he believes his friends will be more grateful when he gives back what he has taken than if he had never taken it at all. Victory is his solitary standard.
Lastly, he believes he knows you. He understands your character. He has studied you, all the time you were in our country, knowing one day he would face you. Do not expect a fair fight. He will demur and dilate, absent all pride as a warrior, then appear from nowhere and overwhelm you.
It will come as cold comfort but I believe the course you outline, of Greek alliance against Persia, is one Lysander himself would champion were it politic at the moment.
I offer this page from his brief: do not undervalue cruelty or the employment of main force. Your style is to eschew coercion, which to you demeans coercer and coerced and backfires in the long run. But, my friend, everything backfires in the long run.
Be of stringent care. You may have met your match in this fellow.
The war for the Hellespont continued; Alcibiades' victories mounted. Lysander failed, for that year and the next, to achieve his posting as fleet admiral.
As for myself, I served at sea with the younger Pericles and in shore units, primarily under Thrasybulus. I paid court, by post and in person when action bore me south to Samos, to my heart's joy, Aurore. With time, acquaintance deepened as well with her father and brothers, for whom I came to feel such fondness and regard as I had known before only with Lion and my own father.
I returned to Alcibiades' squadrons in time for the capitulation of Byzantium. This was the sternest fighting of the Hellespontine War, against frontline Spartan troops, Peers and perioikoi of Selassia and Pellana, reinforced by Arcadian mercenaries and Boeotian heavy infantry of the Cadmus regiment, the same who had hurled us back on Epipolae. At one point a thousand Thracian cavalry under Bisanthes made a rush upon the Spartans, whose numbers had been cut to below four hundred, fighting before the walls all night. The Spartans carved them up, horse and all.
When at last the enemy gave way, overwhelmed by our numbers and the desertion of their Byzantine allies, it took all of Alcibiades' force, in person and shield in hand, to hold the Thracian princes from butchering them to the last man. He had to order our troops to drive the Spartans into the sea, as if to drown them, before the blood-mad tribesmen, who fear water more than you or I fear hell, would give back.
Our ships may not be beached that night, but ride to anchor, bearing the enemy dead and wounded. I assisted a physician of the foe, whom my tongue in error addressed as “Simon” more than once.
The strait lay choked in the morning, with smoking timbers and bodies drifting in the eddies where the outbound current abuts the in. Alcibiades ordered the channel swept and bonfires lighted on both shores, Byzantium on the European, Chalcedon the Asian.
Athens held them both now and with them the Hellespont.
At last Alcibiades commanded the Aegean.
At last he may go home.
Book VII
XXXIII
I must insert this chapter on my own, my grandson, as it bears powerfully upon our client's fate, though he himself elected not to confide these matters as part of his history, deeming them too personal. They concern the Samian maiden Aurore daughter of Telecles, a privileged introduction to whom, you recall, was Alcibiades' way of requiting to our client his own indiscretion with Eunice.
Polemides took the girl to wife.
This was close after Byzantium, in the flush of victory, and before Alcibiades' return to Athens. As with the bride of his youth, Phoebe, Polemides passed over this matter with reticence. That which I gleaned came from the testimony of others and, largely, correspondence discovered thereafter in Polemides' chest.
Here, a formal decree from the archon's office at Athens, granting Athenian citizenship to the bride Aurore (as all Samians were accorded, several years later, for their steadfast service to our cause). Another parcel, from his great-aunt Daphne at Athens, contained apparently a golden hair clip, once Polemides' mother's, as a wedding gift for his bride.
In this letter to his aunt Polemides recounts incidents of the wedding, describing with pride his new father- and brothers-in-law, both officers of the fleet, with whom already he feels a bond as friends as well as kinsmen.
…lastly, my dear, I wish you could have seen her who has, heaven alone knows why, consented to be my wife. A match for me twice over in intellect, possessed of a beauty both chaste and passionate, and of such strength of character as to make my own pride as a warrior seem like a boy's idle conceit. I experience in her presence such hopes as I have not permitted my heart to entertain since the passing of my own Phoebe, that is, the wish for children, life at home, a family. I thought I would never feel these again; to you only, and her, may I own such a confidence. To bring innocents into a world as this seemed not only irresponsible but wicked. Yet with but a glance at this dear girl's face, before I had heard her voice or spoken to her a word, such despair as I have borne so long fell away as if it had never existed. Hope is indeed eternal, as the poets say.
From station with the fleet, to his bride at Samos:
…before you, it seemed the next milestone I would cross would be my own death, which I anticipated at any moment, marveling that it had not found me sooner. All I thought and did arose from this resolution, simply to be a good soldier till the end. I was an old man, dead already. Now with the miracle of your apparition, I am young again. Even my crimes are washed clean. I am reborn in your love and the simple prospect of a life with you, apart from war.
Aurore becomes pregnant. This from her to him with the fleet: It's a good thing you can't see me, my love. I'm porky as a piglet.
Haven't seen my toes in a month. I waddle about, clutching at walls to keep from toppling. Father has moved my bed downstairs, fearing my clumsiness. I gobble desserts and double portions. What fun! All about wish to be pregnant too, even the little girls, with pillows on their bellies. The whole farm has caught the contagion. My joy-our joy-has spilled over onto them..