Read Tides of War for Free Online

instructed me to wait while he ducked inside. Moments later I heard Alcibiades’ laughter; the flaps parted and I found myself tugged clear of the mob and welcomed to the warmth within. “Pommo, my friend, where have you been keeping yourself? Not alone in the woods with those innocent boys!”
    Alcibiades, I was informed, had appointed himself master of revels. He sat upon the bench of honor, with his crown before him, cheeks flushed with wine. He had been wounded; beneath his tunic one could see his wrapped ribs. He introduced me as his mate of the Boilers and ordered a seat and a bowl of wine. He had heard of my troubles. “Is it true you called your commander a pimp?”
    My arrival had interrupted a discourse; I sought to deflect attention from myself and let the talk resume. The party would not hear of it. I was asked by the Olympian Mantitheus to state my objections to a little harmless ash-hauling. I replied that such acts were far from innocuous, but degraded the morale of the youths in my charge.
    “I have a younger sister, Meri,” I found myself appending with passion. “I would eviscerate the man who so much as laid a hand on her garment absent my father’s leave. How then may I stand by and watch other maidens despoiled, even the daughters of the enemy?”
    This elicited an ironic chorus of “Hear, hear.” To my surprise the advocate who sprang to my defense was Alcibiades. His posture was greeted with amusement both wry and derisive, which he endured with good nature. “You may laugh, gentlemen, to hear me, whose reputation as a seducer of women is not inconsequential, take up the cudgels in behalf of the fair gender. But I of all may claim to know how it feels to be female.”
    He paused and, turning to me, declared that I must set aside all concern regarding the charges lodged against me. Strings would be pulled. For now I must drink, not moderately as the Spartans, but deep, Athenian-style, so as to overhaul the company which had got the start of me. Otherwise, my host asserted, the jests would not seem as droll or the discourse as profound. He turned to his companions and resumed.
    “Consider, my friends, that a beautiful youth is much like a woman. He is paid court to, flattered, celebrated for virtues he does not yet possess, and in general acclaimed for qualities which are not of his own making but accidents of birth. And do you not smile, Socrates, for this is much to the point of that matter upon which you were presently discoursing. I mean the disparity between the true self of the political man and the
mythos
he must project to participate in public life. I was stating, nor did you impeach its veracity, that I or any other who enters politics must be two: Alcibiades, whom my friends know, and ‘Alcibiades,’ that fictive personality who is a stranger to me but whose fame I must fuel and fashion if my influence is to prevail in the arena of policy.
    “A beautiful woman is in the same fix. She cannot but perceive herself as two creatures—the private soul known to her intimates and that external proxy presented to the world by her good looks. The attention she receives may be gratifying to her vanity, but it is empty and she knows it. She comes to resemble those urchins during the Festival of Theseus who wheel painted barrows with bulls’ horns on the front. She recognizes that her admirers love her not for herself, that is, the wheeler, but for that fancy she wheels before her. This is the definition of degradation. It is why, gentlemen, I came very young to despise those suitors who paid court to me. I recognized even as a child that it was not myself they loved. They sought only the surface, and for reasons of their own vanity.”
    “And yet,” Mantitheus the boxer put in, “you do not rebuff the advances of our comrade Socrates, nor reject the friendship of ourselves, the remainder of this company.”
    “That is because you are my true friends, Mantitheus. Even were my face as