Read Online Tides of War by Steven Pressfield - Free Book Online

‘Child of War’ indeed! What in heaven’s name was your father thinking, and his wife to accede to such whim?”
    She decried as always the untimely passing of my mother. “Your father would not remarry, yet he was overwhelmed by the three of you young ones and the care of the farm. That is why he sent you abroad for your schooling. That and the fear that I might pamper you soft.”
    She took my callused fists in hers. “As a babe you had hands plump as a goose’s breast and soft sweet curls like Ganymede. Now look at you.”
    She insisted on preparing my lunch. I fetched bowls from the high shelves and charcoal from the shuttle. I could feel her eyes upon me, missing nothing.
    “You have suffered a skull fracture.”
    “It’s nothing.”
    “By the Holy Twain! Do you think I have learned nothing all these years?”
    She had sounded each campaign I had served in, upbraiding me now for volunteering when I might have taken ship home a year and even eighteen months earlier. She knew the names of each of my commanders and had interrogated all, if not in person, then their lieutenants, and if not these, their mothers and sisters.
    “What derangement possesses you, Polemides, to step forth undraftedbefore the line? You have not been stoned!” She meant conscripted, summoned from the
katalogos
to assemble for induction before the tribal stone. “Do you volunteer just to break your sister’s heart and mine?”
    She spoke of Meri, whose betrothed, a lieutenant of marines, had lost his life at Methymna. My sister remained a virgin, seventeen now, with only the slenderest dowry, thanks to our straitened case. How many other maidens languished thus, all young men called to war?
    My aunt did not wish me to shun hazard, she insisted, only to serve with prudence and forethought. “The aim of your education at Sparta was to inculcate virtue and self-command, not to train you for the warrior’s trade. You are a gentleman! By the gods, do you feel no call to the land?”
    I squirmed.
    “Your brother displays even less attendance than yourself. And your cousins care only for actors, horses, and their own good looks. Who will preserve us, Polemides? Who will keep the land?”
    “It’s all moot, isn’t it, Aunt? With Spartan companies roasting stew over the sticks of our beds and benches.”
    “Don’t dish that cheek to me, boy. I’ll still put you over my knee and fan your biscuits!”
    She made a prayer and set the pot upon the coals.
    I had two cousins, Daphne’s grandsons, Simon and Aristeus, who had grown up on horseback; they had distinguished themselves with the cavalry and acquired, my aunt now informed me, a certain dubious celebrity. Did I know that they had taken to carousing about town with that pack of dissolutes and dandies that make up to the coxcomb Alcibiades? “I have seen it with my own eyes,” my aunt declared. “Your cousins dine with playwrights and whores.”
    “The best playwrights, I’m sure.”
    “Yes. And the most accomplished whores.”
    She had observed this mob herself one dawn, she reported, as she stood opposite the Palladium in procession for the City Dionysia, awaiting the trumpet. “Here they came in a pack, self-crowned and gamboling like satyrs, inebriated from some all-night debauch. And there my Simon and Aristeus! Do you know the baker’s emporium on the corner by the General’s Bench? When the postulants emerged with the holy offering, these sots waylaid it for their dinner! Yes, and caroled for us ofthe procession as well. All of them, your cousins included, disporting themselves in ribald mockery of heaven!”
    My aunt reprehended the profligacy of that whole crowd, but before all its champion, Alcibiades. He had brought home from the north, she narrated, his bastards by that alien tart Cleonice—two boys—and set the lot up in apartments of the same quarter as his own, upon a lane down which his legitimate daughters by his wife Hipparete must pass each day on their