Review
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“Pressfield’s battlefield scenes rank with the most
convincing ever written.”—USA Today
“Pressfield serves up not just hair-raising battle scenes . . .
but many moments of valor and cowardice, lust and bawdy humor. .
. . Even more impressively, he delivers a nuanced portrait of
ancient athens.”—Esquire
“Unabashedly brilliant, epic, intelligent, and moving.”—Kirkus
Reviews
“Pressfield’s attention to historic detail is exquisite. . . .
This novel will remain with the reader long after the final
chapter is finished.”—Library Journal
“Astounding, historically accurate tale . . . Pressfield is a
master storyteller, especially adept in his graphic and embracing
descriptions of the land and naval battles, political intrigues
and colorful personalities, which come together in an intense and
credible portrait of war-torn Greece.”—Publishers Weekly
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From the Inside Flap
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Brilliant at war, a master of politics, and a charismatic
lover, Alcibiades was Athens' favorite son and the city's
greatest general.
A prodigal follower of Socrates, he embodied both the best and
the worst of the Golden Age of Greece. A commander on both land
and sea, he led his armies to victory after victory.
But like the heroes in a great Greek tragedy, he was a victim of
his own pride, arrogance, excess, and ambition. Accused of crimes
against the state, he was banished from his beloved Athens, only
to take up arms in the service of his former enemies.
For nearly three decades, Greece burned with war and Alcibiades
helped bring victories to both sides -- and ended up trusted by
neither.
Narrated from death row by Alcibiades' bodyguard and assassin, a
man whose own love and loathing for his former commander mirrors
the mixed emotions felt by all Athens, Tides of War tells an epic
saga of an extraordinary century, a war that changed history, and
a complex leader who seduced a nation.
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About the Author
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Steven Pressfield is author of the international bestseller
Gates of Fire, an epic novel of the battle of Thermopylae, and
The Legend of Bagger Vance. He lives in Los Angeles.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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I
My Grandher Jason
My grandher, Jason the son of Alexicles of the district of
Alopece, died just before sunset on the fourteenth day of
Boedromion, one year past, two months prior to his ninety-second
birthday. He was the last of that informal but fiercely devoted
circle of comrades and friends who attended the philosopher
Socrates.
The span of my grandher’s years ran from the imperial days of
Pericles, the construction of the Parthenon and Erechtheum,
through the Great Plague, the rise and fall of Alcibiades, and
the full tenure of that calamitous twenty-seven-year
conration called in our city the Spartan War and known
throughout greater Greece, as recorded by the historian
Thucydides, as the Peloponnesian War.
As a young man my grandher served as a sail lieutenant at
Sybota, Potidaea, and Scione and later in the East as a trierarch
and squadron commander at the battles of Bitch’s Tomb, Abydos
(for which he was awarded the prize of valor and incidentally
lost an eye and the use of his right leg), and the Arginousai
Islands. As a private citizen he spoke out in the Assembly, alone
save Euryptolemus and Axiochus, against the mob in defense of the
Ten Generals. In his years he buried two wives and eleven
children. He served his city from her peak of preeminence,
mistress of two hundred tributary states, to the hour of her
vanquishment at the hands of her most inclement foes. In short he
was a man who not only witnessed but participated in most of the
significant events of the modern era and who knew personally many
of its principal actors.
In the waning seasons of my grandher’s life, when his vigor
began to fail and he could move about only with the aid of a
companion’s arm, I took to visiting him daily. There appears ever
one among a family, the physicians testify, whose disposition
invites and upon whom falls the duty to succor its elderly and
infirm members.
To me this was never a chore. Not only did I hold my grandher
in the loftiest esteem, but I delighted in his society with an
intensity that frequently bordered upon the ecstatic. I could
listen to him talk for hours and, I fear, tired him more severely
than charity served with my inquiries and importunities.
To me he was like one of our hardy Attic vines, assaulted season
after season by the invader’s torch and ax, blistered by summer
sun, frost-jacketed in winter, yet unkillable, ever-enduring,
drawing strength from deep within the earth to yield up despite
all privations or perhaps because of them the sweetest and most
mellifluent of wines. I felt keenly that with his passing an era
would close, not alone of Athens’ greatness but of a caliber of
man with whom we contemporary specimens stood no longer familiar,
nor to whose standard of virtue we could hope to obtain.
The loss to typhus of my own dear son, aged two and a half,
earlier in that season, had altered every aspect of my being.
Nowhere could I discover consolation save in the company of my
grandher. That fragile purchase we mortals hold upon
existence, the fleeting nature of our hours beneath the sun,
stood vividly upon my heart; only with him could I find footing
upon some stony but stabler soil.
My regimen upon those mornings was to rise before dawn and,
summoning my dog Sentinel (or, more accurately, responding to his
summons), ride down to the port along the Carriage Road,
returning through the foothills to our family’s mains at Holm Oak
Hill. The early hours were a balm to me. From the high road one
could see the naval crews already at drill in the harbor. We
passed other gentlemen upon the track to their estates, saluted
athletes training along the roads, and greeted the young
cavalrymen at their exercises in the hills. Upon completion of
the morning’s business of the farm, I stabled my and
proceeded on foot, alone save Sentinel, up the sere olive-dotted
slope to my grandher’s cottage.
I brought him his lunch. We would talk in the shade of the
overlook porch, or sometimes simply sit, side by side, with
Sentinel reclining on the cool stones between us, saying nothing.
“Memory is a queer goddess, whose gifts metamorphose with the
passage of the years,” my grandher observed upon one such
afternoon. “One cannot call to mind that which occurred an hour
past, yet summon events seventy years gone, as if they were
unfolding here and now.”
I interrogated him, often ruthlessly I fear, upon these distant
holdings of his heart. Perhaps for his part he welcomed the eager
ear of youth, for once launched upon a tale he would pursue its
passage, like the tireless campaigner he was, in detail to its
close. In his day the scribe’s art had not yet triumphed; the
faculty of memory stood unatrophied. Men could recite extended
passages from the Iliad and Odyssey, quote stanzas of a hundred
hymns, and relate passage and verse of the tragedy attended days
previous.
More vivid still stood my grandher’s recollection of men. He
remembered not alone friends and heroes but slaves and horses and
dogs, even trees and vines which had graven impress upon his
heart. He could summon the memory of some antique sweetheart,
seventy-five years gone, and resurrect her mirage in colors so
immediate that one seemed to behold her before him, yet youthful
and lovely, in the .
I inquired of my grandher once, whom of all the men he had
known he adjudged most exceptional.
“Noblest,” he replied without hesitation, “Socrates. Boldest and
most brilliant, Alcibiades. Bravest, Thrasybulus, the Brick.
Wickedest, Anytus.”
Impulse prompted a corollary query. “Was there one whom memory
has driven deepest? One to whom you find your thoughts
returning?”
At this my grandher drew up. How odd that I should ask, he
replied, for yes, there was one man who had, for cause to which
he could not give name, been of late much upon his mind. This
individual, my grandher declared, stood not among the ranks of
the celebrated or the renowned; he was neither admiral nor
archon, nor would his name be found memorialized among the
archives, save as a dark and self-condemned footnote.
“Of all I knew, this man could not but be called the most
haunted. He was an aristocrat of the district of Acharnae. I
helped to defend him once, on trial for his life.”
I was intrigued at once and pressed my grandher to elaborate.
He smiled, declaring that to launch upon this enterprise may take
many hours, for the events of the man’s tale transpired over
decades and covered on land and sea most of the known world. Such
prospect, far from daunting me, made me the more eager to hear.
Please, I entreated; the day is well spent, but let us at least
make a beginning.
“You’re a greedy whelp, aren’t you?”
“To hear you speak, Grandher, the greediest.”
He smiled. Let us start, then, and see where the tale takes us.
“In those days,” my grandher began, “that class of
professional rhetorician and spet in affairs of the courts
had not yet arisen. On trial a man spoke in his own defense. If
he wished, however, he might appoint an associate — a her or
uncle, perhaps a friend or gentleman of influence — to assist in
preparing his case.
“By letter from prison this man solicited me. This was odd, as I
shared no personal acquaintance with the fellow. He and I had
served simultaneously in several theaters of war and had held
positions of responsibility in conjunction with the younger
Pericles, son of the great Pericles and Aspasia, whom both of us
were privileged to call friend; this, however, was far from
uncommon in those days and could in nowise be construed as
constituting a bond. Further this individual was, to say the
least, notorious. Though an officer of acknowledged valor and
long and distinguished service to the state, he had entered
Athens at her hour of capitulation not only beneath the banner of
the Spartan foe but clad in her mantle of let. I believed,
and told him so, that one guilty of such infamy must suffer the
supreme penalty, nor could I contribute in any way to such a
criminal’s exoneration.
“The man persisted nonetheless. I visited him in his cell and
listened to his story. Though at that time Socrates himself had
been convicted and sentenced to death, and in fact resided
awaiting execution within the walls of the same prison, and to
his aid I must before all attend, not to mention the affairs of
my own family, I agreed to assist the man in the preparation of
his defense. I did so not because I believed he could be
acquitted or deserved to be (he himself readily ratified his own
inculpation), but because I felt the publication of his history
must be accomplished, if only before a jury, to hold the mirror
up to the democracy which, by its conviction of the noblest
citizen it had ever produced, my master Socrates, had evinced
such wickedness as to crown and consummate its own
self-immolation.”
My grandher held silent for long moments. One could see his
eye turn inward and his heart summon the memory of this
individual and the tone and tenor of that time.
“What was the man’s name, Grandher?”
“Polemides the son of Nicolaus.”
I recalled the name vaguely but could not place it in quarter or
context.
“He was the man,” my grandher prompted, “who assassinated
Alcibiades.”
II
Murder in Melissa
The assassination party [my grandher continued] was led by two
nobles of Persia acting under orders of the Great King’s governor
of Phrygia. They proceeded by ship from Abydos on the Hellespont
to the stronghold in Thrace to which Alcibiades had repaired in
his final exile, whence, discovering their prey absconded, the
party pursued him back across the straits to Asia. The Persians
were accompanied by three Peers of Sparta whose chief, Endius,
had been Alcibiades’ guest-friend and since boyhood.
These had been appointed by the home government, not to
participate in the murder, but to serve as witnesses, to confirm
with their own eyes the extinction of this man, the last left
alive whom they still feared. Such was Alcibiades’ renown for
escape and resurrection that many believed he could cheat even
that final magistrate, Death.
A professional assassin, Telamon of Arcadia, accompanied the
party, along with some half dozen henchmen of his selection, to
plan and execute the action. His confederate was the Athenian
Polemides.
Polemides had been a friend of Alcibiades. He had served as
captain of marines throughout Alcibiades’ spectacular sequence of
victories in the Hellespontine War, had acted as his bodyguard
when the conqueror returned in glory to Athens, and had stood
upon his right hand when Alcibiades restored the procession by
land in celebration of the Eleusinian Mysteries. I recall vividly
his appearance, at Samos, upon Alcibiades’ recall from exile to
the fleet. The moment was incendiary, with twenty thousand
sailors, marines, and heavy infantry, distraught for their own
e and the survival of their country, enveloping the mole they
called Little Choma as the longboat touched and Polemides stepped
off, shielding his charge from the mob which seemed as ripe to
stone as salute him. I studied Alcibiades’ expression; nothing
could have been clearer than that he trusted the man at his
shoulder absolutely with his life.
It was this Polemides’ duty now, some seven years subsequent, to
draw the victim out and with his cohort, the assassin Telamon,
perform the slaughter. For this his fee was a talent of silver
from the treasury of Persia.
Of all this the man informed me, concealing nothing, within the
first minutes of our initial interview. He did so, he stated, to
ensure that I — whose family shared bonds of marriage with the
Alcmaeonids, Alcibiades’ family on his mother’s side, and myself
through my devotion to Socrates, whose link to Alcibiades was
well known — would know the worst at once and could pull out, if
I wished.
The actual indictment against the man made no citation of
Alcibiades.
Polemides was charged in the death of a boatswain of the fleet
named Philemon, who had been murdered some few years prior in a
brothel brawl at Samos. A second impeachment was preferred
against him, that of treason. It was under this rubric, clearly,
that the jurors would read that more consequential slaying. Such
obliquity was not uncommon in those days; yet its indirection was
compounded by the specific statute under which his accusers had
brought him to trial.
Polemides had been arraigned neither under a writ of eisangelia,
the standard indictment for treason, nor a dike phonou, a
straight charge of homicide, both of which would have permitted
him to elect voluntary exile, sparing his life. Rather he had
been denounced (by a pair of known rogues, brothers and stooges
of acknowledged foes of the democracy) under an endeixis
kakourgias, a far more general category of “wrongdoing.” This
struck one at first as preous, the issue of prosecutors
ignorant of the law. Further reflection, however, revealed its
cunning. Under this category of indictment, the accused may not
only be imprisoned before and throughout trial, without option of
voluntary exile, but denied bail as well. The death penalty still
obtained, and the trial would take place, not before the Council
or Areopagus, but a common people’s court, where such terms as
“traitor” and “friend of Sparta” could be counted upon to inflame
the jurors’ ire. Clearly Polemides’ accusers wanted him dead, by
the right hand or the left. As far as one could predict, they
would get their wish. For all those who hated Alcibiades and
blamed him for the fall of our nation, yet many still loved him.
These would raise no remonstrance to the execution of the man who
had betrayed and slain their champion. Still, Polemides observed,
his accusers were, he was certain, of the site party — those
who had conspired with their country’s enemies, seeking to
purchase their own preservation at the price of their nation’s
ruin.
As to the man Polemides himself, his appearance was both striking
and singular, dark-eyed, of slightly less than average height,
extremely thick-muscled, and, though well past forty years, as
lean through the middle as a schoolboy. His beard was the color
of iron, and his skin despite imprisonment retained the dark
copper of one who has spent much of his life at sea. s of
fire, spear, and crisscrossed the of his arms, legs,
and back. Upon his brow, though bleached by exposure to the
elements, stood vivid the koppa slave brand of the Syracusans,
token of that captivity endured by survivors of the Sicilian
calamity and emblematic of unspeakable suffering.
Did I abhor him? I was prepared to. Yet in the his clarity
of thought and expression, his candor and utter want of
self-exoneration, disarmed my prejudice. His crimes
notwithstanding, the man appeared to my imagination much as might
have Odysseus, stepping forth from the songs of Homer. Nor did he
comport himself in the brutish or insolent manner of the soldier
for hire; on the contrary his demeanor and self-presentation were
those of a gentleman. What wine he had, he proffered at once and
insisted upon vacating for his guest the solitary stool his cell
possessed, pillowing it for my comfort with the fleece he used to
bundle the chamber’s single bare pallet.
Throughout that initial interview he performed as we spoke
various calisthenics intended to maintain fitness despite
confinement. He could place his heel upon the wall above his head
and, standing flat on the other sole, set his forehead with ease
upon his elevated shin. Once when I brought him some eggs, he
placed one within the cage of his fist and, extending his arm,
challenged me either to prize his fingers apart or crush the egg.
I tried, employing all my strength, and failed, as he grinned at
me mischievously the while.
I never felt afraid with the man or of him. In fact as the days
progressed I came to embrace a profound sympathy for the fellow,
despite his numerous criminal deeds and lack of repentance
therefor. His name, Polemides, as you know, means “child of war.”
But he was not a child of just any war, rather one unprecedented
in scale and duration and distinguished beyond all previous
conflicts by its debasement of that code of honor, justice, and
voluntary restraint by whose tenets all prior strife among
Hellenes had been conducted. It was indeed this war, the first
modern war, which forged our narrator’s destiny and directed it
to its end. He began as a soldier and ended as an assassin. How
was I any different? Who may disaffirm that I or any other did
not enact in the shadows of our private hearts, by commission or
omission, that same dark history played out in daylight by our
countryman Polemides?
He was, like me, a product of our time. As to the harbor, high
road and low follow their several courses along the shore, so his
path had paralleled my own and that of the main of our
contemporaries, only passing through different country.
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