“He proposed service not as a ship's captain, but a common marine. They drove him out of the camp. He was too big, see? He made 'em all dwarves beside him. And they was right. In the commanders' eyes he was Athens' worst enemy; they feared him more than Lysander.”
For four dawns Lysander drew his force up in midstrait in battle order. For four days the fleet of Athens set up opposite. Each noon Lysander pulled back to Lampsacus; each noon the Athenians withdrew to Aegospotami. Each day our men must disperse for their meal, while Lysander's, with a city at their back, had theirs to hand beside their ships. The fifth noon Lysander ran the same drilclass="underline" draw up, draw back. Athens' fleet followed suit. But this day, when our sailors scattered to fetch their dinner…
“They came down on us stripped and at the triple-two hundred and ten men-of-war, forty-two thousand men. I don't have to tell you what chance we had. There's only one way to board a trireme-by companies, in order. But how do you do that with crews flushed over four miles of shell and pebble? Hippolyta got off with one bank manned. On our flanks Pandia and Relentless didn't muster even that. No one even tried to bring the ship to bear. We just ran for it. They holed us fore and aft.
Whoever was in the water was dead. The rest the Spartans took apart on the strand.
“Lysander had drilled them for it; they knew the ground and cut off both creeks and every out-track. Their ships got iron into ours and towed 'em off. Lysander was smart; no heavy infantry to bog down in the sand, just peltasts and javelineers. And they didn't come charging wildly, but formed up in companies, quartering the field like hounds. You looked back and saw scarlet everywhere.
“He collected twenty thousand, did Lysander. Sold the islanders and slaves, hanging on to only Athenian citizens.”
These were carried in captivity to Lampsacus, drawn up before a tribunal, and executed as oppressors of Greece. By the time of the Council inquest, the galleys had begun arriving at the Piraeus, bearing the cargo of this slaughter. Lysander restored to Athens the corpses of her sons, that none may impute impiety to him, but more so to break the city's heart. For though she no longer possessed a fleet or sufficient manpower to fit one, yet many had vowed to resist to the end, with bricks and stones if necessary, atop the Acropolis, precipitating themselves sooner than submit to the foe.
Lysander transhipped the bodies naked, shorn of all identifying articles and garments. This was to compel the officers to layout the dead in mass, as a necropolis, that the people, to identify sons and husbands, must tread among lanes and boulevards of the fallen, peering into each face, seeking their own. By this ordeal Lysander sought to appall them with the issue of defiance and render their hearts vitiated of the will to resist.
His corps now comprised the whole of Greece, backed by Cyrus' limitless gold. Agis' army besieged the city; Lysander's fleet blockaded her by sea.
On the sixteenth of Munychion, the same date upon which Athens and her allies had at Salamis preserved Greece from the tyranny of Persia, Lysander's armada entered the Piraeus unopposed. That party headed by Theramenes turned over the city.
Two battalions of Theban heavy infantry seized the Areopagus and shuttered all government vocations. A Corinthian regiment grounded arms in the agora; divisions of Elis, Olynthus, Potidaea, and Sicyon broke down the gates and began demolishing the fortifications of the Piraeus, while others of Oeniadae, Mytilene, Chios, and the empire, now liberated, commenced to the music of flute girls the dismantling of the Long Walls. Two brigades of Spartan and Peloponnesian marines, including brasidioi and the freed helots, the neodamodeis, under Pantocles, took possession of the Acropolis. They sacrificed to Athena Nike and made their camp upon the stones between the Erechtheum and the Parthenon.
The last division, composed of Lacedaemonian marines and mercenaries of Macedonia, Aetolia, and Arcadia, took possession of the Round Chamber and the Assembly site on the Hill of the Pnyx.
Among these was Polemides, clad in scarlet.
L
My aunt [Polemides resumed], despite her loathing of my conduct and myself, did not debar me from hoisting her belongings onto a carter's flat and herself upon the teamster's seat. She moved to Acharnae with me, to take up residence at Road's Turn. In the city tyranny reigned. The Thirty, as they were called, backed by a Spartan garrison, consolidated their power through the courts and by acts of terror. I sought repeatedly to evacuate my brother's former wife and children; but Theonoe was a town woman and would not come. For two months my aunt and I provided each other's sole company; I at work on the land, she cooking, washing, mending, and in all ways commanding the household, servantless, as she had her husband's, staffed by scores.
The lawlessness in the city at last convinced my sister-in-law to vacate; she came to us on the first of Hecatombaion, Lion's birthday, with her daughter, my niece, and the lass's two babes (her young husband missing with the fleet). Her son, my nephew, had fled to exile; he was nineteen and a partisan, vowing never to reconcile to his nation's vanquishers. Theonoe brought with her a boy, nine, and a girl, seven, issue of her second marriage to a mate of the merchant fleet, lost in another nameless action. Eunice I had tracked to a tenement at Acte. She would not let our children near me, fearing my influence upon the boy.
In town the democracy had been abolished, the citizenry disfranchised and disarmed. A new constitution was being drafted, or so the Thirty assured the people. Months passed and no article appeared. Instead there were lists. Your name appeared on one and you were seen no more.
What had been the popularly elected executive, the Board of Ten Generals, no longer existed. The Areopagus may not convene.
Exiles were brought home, meaning those banished heretofore as enemies of the democracy. These were now either recruited to the Thirty or engaged as their agents. The courts were shuttered for civil litigation, which matter was perceived as forwarding the cause of the commons; when they opened again, it was as engines of persecution. As under all tyrannies prosecutorial legitimacy was extended to the preemptive. A man may be executed not alone for acts committed but for those he might commit. Nor were such arraignments confined to political targets. The Thirty went after anyone with money. The toll was fifteen hundred and counting.
Those democrats who ducked the executioner were packed off to Lysander's service, the front lines.
Telamon rode out to Road's Turn one day, bearing wine and parched barley, most welcome. I asked him what he would do, now the war was over. He laughed.
War is never over.
He had come to recruit me. To no specific employer; just back on the tramp. Surely I reckoned that my tenure on the land bore an expiry. Sooner or later, if only from her own want of allies, Sparta must lift her heel from Athens' throat. The democracy would revive. Such swallows as myself who had roosted under the conqueror's eave would find themselves back out in the storm. We would either be butchered in the street by our neighbors or called to execution by due process. My luck consisted in this, Telamon observed, that my kin were women and children. Its revenge sated upon me, the demos would leave these innocents alone.
I regarded my mentor as he put his case. How youthful he looked! He had not aged a month, it seemed, down twenty-seven years of war. “Give us the secret of your immortality!”
He would lecture me, I knew, on vices. Three he abhorred-fear, hope, and love of country. He abominated only one beyond these: contemplation of past or future. These were offenses against nature, Telamon maintained, as they bound one to aspiration, to a result whose issue was adjudicated by forces, above the earth and beneath, which mortals may neither alter nor apprehend.