Nikias started. Alkibiades almost laughed out loud. Didn’t expect that, did you, you omen-mongering fool?
Aloud, he continued, “If we triumph here in Sicily under my command, will that not prove I have done no wrong in the eyes of heaven? If we triumph-as triumph we can, as triumph we shall — then I shall return to Athens with you, and let these stupid charges against me be forgotten forevermore. But if we fail here…If we fail here, I swear to you I shall not leave Sicily alive, but will be the offering to repay the gods for whatever sins they reckon me to have committed. That is my offer, to you and to the gods. Time will show what they say of it. But what say you, men of Athens? What say you, people of Athens?”
He waited for the decision of the Assembly he’d convened. He didn’t have to wait long. Cries of, “Yes!” rang out, and, “We accept!” and, “Alkibiades!” A few men tossed their heads and yelled things like, “No!” and, “Let the decision of the Assembly in Athens stand!” But they were only a few, overwhelmed and outshouted by Alkibiades’ backers.
Turning to Herakleides and Nikias, Alkibiades bowed once more. They’d thought they would be able to address the Athenian soldiers and sailors after he finished. But the decision was already made. Herakleides looked stunned, Nikias dyspeptic.
With another bow, Alkibiades said to Herakleides, “You will take my answer and the true choice of the people of Athens back to the polis?”
The other man needed two or three tries before he managed to stammer out, “Y-Yes.”
“Good.” Alkibiades smiled. “Tell the polis also, I hope to be back there myself before too long.”
Sokrates settled his helmet on his head. The bronze and the glued-in padded lining would, with luck, keep some Syracusan from smashing in his skull. The walls of Syracuse loomed ahead. The Athenians were building their own wall around the city, to cut it off from the countryside and starve it into submission. Now the Syracusans had started a counterwall, thrust out from the fortifications of the polis. If it blocked the one the Athenians were building, Syracuse might stand. If the hoplites Alkibiades led could stop that counterwall…A man didn’t need to be a general to see what would happen then.
Sweat streamed down Sokrates’ face. Summer in Sicily was hotter than it ever got back home in Attica. He had a skin full of watered wine, and squirted some into his mouth. Swallowing felt good. A little of the wine splashed his face. That felt good, too.
“Pheu!” said another hoplite close by. “Only thing left of me’ll be my shadow by the time we’re done here.”
Sokrates smiled. “I like that.” He tilted back his helmet so he could drag a hairy forearm across his sweaty forehead, then let the helm fall down into place again. He tapped the nodding crimson-dyed horsehair plume with a forefinger. “This makes me seem fiercer than I am. But since all hoplites wear crested helms, and all therefore seem fiercer than they are, is it not true that the intended effect of the crest is wasted?”
Laughing, the other hoplite said, “You come up with some of the strangest things, Sokrates, Furies take me if you don’t.”
“How can the search for truth be strange?” Sokrates asked. “Do you say the truth is somehow alien to mankind, and that he has no knowledge of it from birth?”
Instead of answering, the other Athenian pointed to one of the rough little forts in which the Syracusans working on their counterwall sheltered. “Look! They’re coming out.” So they were, laborers in short chitons or loincloths, with armored hoplites to protect them while they piled stone on stone. “Doesn’t look like they’ve got very many guards out today, does it?”
“Certainly not,” Sokrates answered. “The next question to be asked is, why have they sent forth so few?”
Horns blared in the Athenian camp. “I don’t think our captain cares why,” the other hoplite said, pulling down his helmet so the cheekpieces and nasal protected his face. “Whatever the reason is, he’s going to make them sorry for being so stupid.”
“But do you not agree that why is always the most important question?” Sokrates asked. Instead of answering, the other hoplite turned to take his place in line. The horns cried out again. Sokrates picked up his shield and his spear and also joined the building phalanx. In the face of battle, all questions had to wait. Sometimes the fighting answered them without words.
The Athenian captain pointed toward the Syracusans a couple of stadia away. “They’ve goofed, boys. Let’s make ’em pay. We’ll beat their hoplites, run their workers off or else kill ’em, and we’ll tear down some of that wall they’re trying to build. We can do it. It’ll be easy. Give the war cry good and loud so they know we’re coming. That’ll scare the shit out of ’em, just like on the comic stage.”
“How about the comic stage?” the hoplite next to Sokrates asked. “You were up there, in Aristophanes’ Clouds.”
“I wasn’t there in person, though the mask the actor wore looked so much like me, I stood up in the audience to show the resemblance,” Sokrates answered. “And it’s the Syracusans we want to do the shitting, not ourselves.”
“Forward!” the captain shouted, and pointed at the Syracusans with his spear.
Sokrates shouted, “Eleleu! Eleleu!” with the rest of the Athenians as they advanced on their foes. It wasn’t a wild charge at top speed. A phalanx, even a small one like this, would fall to pieces and lose much of its force in such a charge. What made the formation strong was each soldier protecting his neighbor’s right as well as his own left with his shield, and two or three serried ranks of spearheads projecting out beyond the front line of hoplites. No soldiers in the world could match Hellenic hoplites. The Great Kings of Persia knew as much, and hired Hellenes by the thousands as mercenaries.
The Athenians might have made short work of Persians or other barbarians. The Syracusans, though, were just as much Hellenes as they were. Though outnumbered, the soldiers guarding the men building the counterwall shouted back and forth in their drawling Doric dialect and then also formed a phalanx-only four or five rows deep, for they were short of men-and hurried to block the Athenians’ descent on the laborers. They too cried, “Eleleu!”
As a man will do on the battlefield, Sokrates tried to spot the soldier he would likely have to fight. He knew that was a foolish exercise. He marched in the third row of the Athenians, and the enemy he picked might go down or shift position before they met. But, with the universal human longing to find patterns whether they really existed or not, he did it anyway.
“Eleleu! Elel-” Crash! Both sides’ war cries were lost in what sounded like a disaster in a madman’s smithy as the two front lines collided. Spearpoints clattered off bronze corselets and bronze-faced shields. Those shields smacked together, men from each side trying to force their foes to danger. Some spearpoints struck flesh instead of bronze. Shrieks and curses rang through the metallic clangor.
Where the man on whom Sokrates had fixed went, he never knew. He thrust underhanded at another Syracusan, a young fellow with reddish streaks in his black beard. The spearpoint bit into the enemy’s thigh, below the bronze-studded leather strips he wore over his kilt and above the top of his greave. Blood spurted, red as the feathers of a spotted woodpecker’s crest. The Syracusan’s mouth opened enormously wide in a great wail of anguish. He toppled, doing his best to pull his shield over himself so he wouldn’t be trampled.
Relying on weight of numbers, the Athenians bulled their way forward, forcing their foes to give ground and spearing them down one after another. Most of the laborers the Syracusans had protected ran back toward the fort from which they’d come. Some, though, hovered on the outskirts of the battle and flung stones at the Athenians. One banged off Sokrates’ shield.