Tides of War Read Online Free PDF Page B

former this evening when I approached. He was celebrating with his tentmates.
    Any encampment massed upon one site for a prolonged interval becomes, as you know, Jason, a city of its own. Its market becomes the agora, its training fields the gymnasium. The
polis,
battling boredom, throws up its own diversions and distractions, its characters and its clowns. There is a good part of town and a bad, a neighborhood oneenters at his peril and a precinct of privilege and fame, which exercises its spell over all. Invariably one tent establishes itself for the brilliance of its occupants as the epicenter of the camp.
    Alcibiades’ tent, Aspasia Three (the main streets of the seven fortified camps ringing the city had been named each after a famed courtesan of Athens), had become this nexus. This was in consequence not alone of his celebrity but of the wit and converse of his tentmates, who included in their number of sixteen your own master Socrates (renowned then less as a philosopher than a doughty and stalwart campaigner, forty years of age), the celebrated actor Alcaeus, Mantitheus the Olympic boxer, and Acumenus the physician. These fellows were the most fun. Everyone wanted to be with them. An invitation to dine at Aspasia Three was more highly prized than a decoration. For that reason I had avoided Alcibiades, not wishing to push myself uninvited upon him and also because I judged the status of our friendship to be cordial but remote.
    Now, however, the gravity of my situation compelled me to come forward. I waited till that hour when the evening meal would be concluded, then hiked the mile to Aspasia Camp, seeking only a few moments of Alcibiades’ time, perhaps to speak with him outside the tent and get him to put in a word for me with the brass. I had thought I could simply rap at the post and get it over with.
    To my surprise, and in contrast to the other snug-battened precincts of the camp whose lanes stood dark and vacated save the odd trooper dashing from one shelter to another in the cold, the court fronting Alcibiades’ tent burned bright with torch and brazier, the intersection of the lanes milling gaily with a motley of off-duty officers and infantrymen, wine sellers, jugglers, sweets bakers, a party of acrobats in midperformance upon a stage of logs, and a professional fool, not to mention a number of gap-toothed trollops from the whores’ camp, loitering in high spirits. The aroma of spitted meat augmented the cheer; bonfires blazed upon the earth, which had thawed and was churned by the press of celebrants. As I wedged through the crush, the tent flaps parted and there emerged to the air the most dazzling specimen of womankind I had ever seen.
    Her hair was russet; her eyes of such violet they seemed to flash like diadems in the torchlight. She was mantled crown to toe in sable andescorted by two cavalry officers, six-footers, clad in the ermine-fringed cloaks of the enemy. Of the besiegers none attempted to lay hands upon them; in fact our lads drew the party’s mounts before them, boosting them onto the horses’ backs. The lady trotted off not in the direction of the city, but up the slope toward that bluff called the Asclepium where, I later learned, a cottage of spruce had been erected for her use and her bodyguards’.
    “That’s Cleonice,” a fried-onion vendor volunteered. “Alcibiades’ girl.”
    I would doubtless have remained marooned on the doorstep all night had not my host’s cousin Euryptolemus chanced to pass, seeking the tent, and, recognizing me, tugged me forward. He informed me in merry spirits that the gentlewoman Cleonice was the wife of Machaon, the wealthiest citizen of Potidaea. Alcibiades had initiated a liaison with the lady, seeking through her husband to facilitate the betrayal of the town from within. “Now she’s fallen in love with him and refuses to go home. She even claims to be carrying his child. What can one do?”
    Euryptolemus, whom his companions called Euro,