The Lover of Soldiers

By Tom Gill

Cineas of Athens is a well-educated, hero-worshipping young man. He lives in a world where Alexander the Great's surviving generals battle for kingdoms of their own within Alexander's conquests. Cineas leaves his stodgy family behind and joins the mercenary army of glamorous Demetrius the Besieger at his fortress of Acrocorinth. "Three months later," Cineas recalls, "I was in Asia…."

Following the armies there, he fights as a pikeman at the enormous Battle of Ipsus. From there Cineas travels through Syria to Egypt, where he beds a royal princess and joins up with the exiled King Pyrrhus. Pyrrhus is the monarch of the petty kingdom of Epirus on the Adriatic Sea.

Pyrrhus aspires to rule the world, too. But, for a generation, it is Cineas who does his best to make that happen. Through battles and intrigues, cavalry charges, assassinations and liaisons, peaceful philosophy and murderous combat across the Ancient World, Cineas follows Pyrrhus' cause loyally.

In the end, King Pyrrhus is overwhelmed in defeat. It is left to his last friend Cineas to conduct his funeral rites. Cineas has now, he says, "been everywhere and done everything—except talk over our conquests with the King of the World. But then," he concludes, "I was always the talker, and Pyrrhus might not really have had that much to say after all…."

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Nov 27, 2019
• ISBN: 9781543995824

Book preview

SYRACUSE

PROLOGUE—SYRACUSE

A lot’s happened since Alexander died in Babylon.

It’s curious how times have changed, and how changed are my fellow men.  When my father was young, my native city of Athens was a powerful place, with fleets and armies to command.  Half the trade of the Levant came to its port.  Nowadays, Athens is only a sleepy university town, full of students and other beggars, living on memories.  The Piraeus is as busy a harbor as ever, but the trade is carried in Rhodian bottoms.  All that remains is the great legacy of the past—and the philosophers who trade on it. 

In my youth in Athens, I’m quite sure I never heard anyone mention the name of Rome, and I certainly couldn’t have told you where the town lay.  In my old age in Syracuse, which is at least as Hellene as Athens still, they gossip of nothing but Italian politics and the everlasting Senate and People of Rome.

Don’t mistake me though.  I’m not one to regret vanished glories, and I never really had much to do with the Athenians, anyway.  In fact, for most of my years I’ve been known as Cineas the Thessalian.  That’s one of the quirks which time conspires to produce.  The people of Thessaly are as noted for their horsemanship as the rustics of Boeotia are celebrated for their stupidity.  My nickname has earned me a Scythian’s share of riding, and I have led (or at least, closely followed) dozens of desperate cavalry charges more or less astride the spine of that untrustworthy beast, the horse.  It’s said that if you give a dog a good name, it becomes everyone’s pet, and so it is with nicknames.  If you are called Thessalian, people expect you to ride.

So, having endured much in a life of unparalleled adventure, I am content now to sit in this comfortable villa outside the great walls of Syracuse and meditate on the past.  I don’t have to teach rhetoric or drill cavalrymen any more.  I’m a citizen of moderate standing here, reasonably respectable, politically harmless, and comfortably rich.

Sicily is at peace now since the Romans chased out the Carthaginians a few seasons back.  It’s queer, you know.  We Hellenes schemed and fought for two hundred years to send those greedy Levantines back to Africa where they belong.  But then, along come these greasy Italians and settle the issue in a generation.  At first, I took a close interest in the Romans’ war with the Punics, as they called them.  But I lost interest after ten years or so.  In my fighting days, wars were settled more quickly than that.  If an enemy proved unreasonably obstinate, we looked for a more tractable foe elsewhere.  Not so these Romans. 

My old friend King Pyrrhus of Epirus gave up the Carthaginians as a bad job after a couple of campaigning seasons.  The Romans came back to the bloody labor for twenty-three—or was it twenty-four?—years.  A lifetime for many a farm boy gone for a soldier.

Hiero, who’s the current tyrant of my adopted city, is still collecting civic crowns from his Syracusans for the shrewd way he brought the Romans into Sicily to fight battles for Hellenes and drive out Carthage.  I remember I had occasion to deal with young Hiero when he was starting out in the world, though I don’t suppose he would enjoy being reminded that I knew him when.  Still, I could tell him a thing or two about these Romans.

You see, I’ve fought these backwoodsmen before and I know they’re here in Sicily to stay, whether Syracuse wants them or not.  Twenty years ago I might have wanted to do something about this.  Now, I’m too old to care.  The independent city was dying when I was born, and I saw it go under.  These sweaty little Italians don’t fit my Hellene ideal of the beautiful and virtuous, but they bring stability to a wild world.  I can’t choose my rulers anyway, or I wouldn’t have Hiero, so I’ll settle for law and order.  At least, the Romans are good at that.  They’re full of stern military virtues, too, as Pyrrhus remarked in the old days.  He always did love soldiers.

Trade still flows.  My bankers in Alexandria tell me my investments in the Spice Coast trade are flourishing.  I watch the dividends come sailing into the harbor of Syracuse, where history used to be made.  Time passes swiftly for an old man.

Still, I’ve led a heady life of excitement.  I’ve drunk the wine unwatered, as they say.  I’ve been the intimate of kings, shaped high policy, intrigued with beautiful women, fought desperate combats, pillaged rich cities, and fled for my life.  I also contrived to put aside a little coin for my old age, too.  It’s true that this life forced me to spend a great deal of time on horseback, but if I hadn’t ridden with the aristocrats, I would have trudged with the hoi-polloi.  I have bowed legs like a Scythian, but no regrets.

A bit ago, I mentioned my friendship with the great King Pyrrhus.  I’ve traded on chance acquaintances often enough in my time, but in this case, it’s no pose.  I was a friend to Pyrrhus, perhaps his only one.  The King and I sometimes shared the same woman and often got drunk together.  We campaigned together season after season.  During his lifetime (not so long ago, really) he set the world by the ears from Italy to Egypt.  But now, when I mention his name, most people can’t place him, and don’t care to swap memories with an old bluffer like me, even if they could.  Pyrrhus might have changed a lot of things, but today he’s a forgotten man, and his deeds are lost.

I think this is because King Pyrrhus was overshadowed before he was born by the great Alexander, who conquered Persia and the East all the way to India.  After Pyrrhus’ death, the flood of Romans threatens to submerge the world.  Pyrrhus and I, well, we belong to the generation in between.

Nevertheless, King Pyrrhus was a very great and peculiar man, who lived in remarkable times.  I’ve set myself the task of recounting his deeds in my old age to record the memory of those eventful days.  Perhaps if I did not do this, some competent historian would, but it would be a singular scholar indeed who could follow me from bed chamber and tavern to council board and battlefield.  A competent historian might get his dates straight, and could probably invent some moving speeches to put in Pyrrhus’ mouth, too.  But, he couldn’t tell you much about the imposing but sometimes rather pitiful and ridiculous figure of the late King of Epirus—and would-be King of the World.  I have read the Journal of King Pyrrhus (dry stuff), and his supposed Memoirs (stitched together by a paid hack while the army wintered in Italy).  Both are lacking.  A competent historian, I should add, might also wrongfully neglect the important part I played in shaping the world as well.

Very well, then.  I will take up the historian’s task with a scribe to copy and a servant to jog my old memory.  I will begin in Athens with my youth, and not in Epirus with the King’s.  For this is the history not only of Pyrrhus, but that, too, of Cineas, who was a fairly remarkable fellow in his own right.

ATHENS

In the city of Athens my ancestors had the reputation of being good patriots, which is to say they toed the party line of whichever faction happened to be in power.  Under the rule of the Thirty Tyrants, they soberly welcomed the rule of law and order.  When democrats ousted the tyranny, they discovered several good reasons for poisoning Socrates.  A knack for landing on one’s feet is a useful skill to have, let me tell you.

My family were thus conservative, respectable Athenian citizens of long standing and moderate wealth, but no great political eminence.  None of us had ever held an archonship, or been elected to the board of generals.  My father was well thought of in Alexander’s time and had grown sons.  I was a child of his middle age, and born in faraway exile.

Now when Alexander the Macedonian departed on his march into Persia and the East, he left Hellas behind him pacified from Chalcidice in the north to Cythera in the south.  Not that Hellenes had given up their time-honored pastime of going for each others’ throats, of course, but the free cities were thoroughly cowed by Alexander’s ferocious reputation and the hard-bitten field army he thoughtfully left behind to garrison every fortress.  The citizens grumbled, but nobody reached for his armor until the fever carried off Alexander in far-off Babylon.  Then, there was a revolt against the Macedonian garrisons.

Athens financed her share of this rebellion with six thousand talents’ weight of bullion and coin destined for the hoard of Macedonia but seized in the Piraeus harbor by Athenian patriots.  I’ve plundered pay chests myself, so I’m not ashamed to tell you that my father was one of those who thought up this scheme, and my older brothers were among those who actually laid hands on the money.

In the end, of course, it made no difference.  The revolt of the Hellenes was crushed.  One of my grown brothers was killed in the once-renowned siege of Lamia, and the other enlisted as a marine just in time for the sea-fight off the island of Amorgos.  He sank like a talent of Pentelic marble in his armor when attempting to board an enemy warship during that battle.

Bye and bye, Athens made peace and a Macedonian garrison took over the hill of Munychia above the Piraeus.  Lists of the proscribed appeared, and Father’s name was right at the top.  He was lucky enough to escape the purge by retiring to some family lands in Thessaly.  There, feeling keenly the loss of two sons, or maybe just feeling randy, he sired me in a bleak farmstead out in the wilds, thus earning me my nickname of Thessalian.  I was born a couple of years after Amorgos, which used to be a famous battle and was handy for dating later events.

Presently, peace came again to Hellas for a while, though Alexander’s surviving generals were still wrangling over the division of his empire.  The Macedonian garrison on the Munychian hill declared for Cassander and Athens summoned her exiles home with a general amnesty.  Sharp-faced Cassander represented the faction of wealth and privilege (that is, if he represented anything but himself), and Father thought that one Macedonian bandit was as good as the next, so he returned to Athens in time for me to grow up there.

I have little recollection of those early years.  I suppose I played about the agora and made a nuisance of myself with the servants, as boys will.  I was a frivolous, scatter-brained youngster, and not the apple of my father’s eye.  He was well into middle age at my birth and found me a mistake, I suspect.

I have one memory that would date from about this time.  I was dawdling about our little courtyard, squashing bugs by the anthill under our ash tree, or something.  It was a hot day in Athens.  Over in Asia Alexander’s generals were at daggers drawn.  My father and another gentleman swept in, taking a seat on the bench beneath the ash, talking constantly and very agitated.

I’ve supported the man right along, Father was saying.  But this!  It’s like something you’d read about at the court of Persia….

Barbarity!  Barbarism!  That’s just what it is!  That’s the whole idea of it! chimed in the other gentleman.

Their conversation caught my ear and I eavesdropped eagerly, with a boy’s natural interest in barbarous behavior.  The two of them ranted on repetitively for some time without giving me a clue to the subject of their distress.  So, at last, I summoned enough courage to speak up.

What’s happened, Father, I asked, gazing at his empurpled face.  I expected to be told not to bother my elders, or to go back to my anthill, but Father was so upset that he actually answered me.

You may not understand, son, but—Cassander’s done away with Roxane and little Alexander—murdered them, is what’s happened, boy!

I pondered this gravely.  It seemed quite important to the grown-ups, so I tried to understand, but failed.

Hippocleides doesn’t care, I finally grinned.  That was a proverb we were learning in school, and I was quite proud of myself for being able to repeat it, whether it was appropriate at the moment or not.

My heir…, Father explained resignedly to his crony, and they both withdrew into the house.

I suppose I had overheard some gardener or cooking woman reciting the tag-line of the well-known fable, how the party-loving Hippocleides had danced away a rich wife and a life of ease with the same heedless words.  The story must have stuck in my mind, for with the same remark I dismissed the news that the ruler of Hellas had just executed the great Alexander’s Persian queen and his legitimate male heir, who was not much older than I.  Now, I can see why my decent, conservative father must have been upset.  Statesmen hadn’t murdered women and children in his day.  But, honestly!  What could he have expected a nine-year-old to know of such tangled affairs?

The wars dragged on fitfully, while I pursued my education at the same pace.  Our family was not grand enough to place a son in the scholarly corps of ephebes, but I was well-schooled just the same.  In the arts of a gentleman, I mean.  I gained my warlike training in a school much tougher than the ephebate mililtia of Athens.

We memorized everything in those days.  I hated it, but if today I can turn a graceful literary compliment, or produce the apt quotation, I owe it this early training.  The poets of the Cycle made up most of our curriculum.  Our teachers were forever praising Homer.  I found the Iliad too long, but generally a good piece of work, though my boy’s taste preferred the gorier bits of the Cycle.  My favorite was the Sack of Ilion by Arctinus of Miletus, with its bloody descriptions of vengeance.  Nowadays, I like to have peaceful Hesiod or some smutty mime read to me.  Tastes change, don’t they?

A respectable familiarity with literature eventually rubbed off on me, though, and we went on school visits to the Portico of Frescoes every year to see the spoils taken from the Persians at Marathon, and to view Micon’s famous painting of the event, so I grew up a good little Athenian patriot.  Drawing, music, and dancing as subjects were just going out of fashion, then, so I learned to sketch, but not to dance much.  Music, to me, was what the flutist played to keep the troops in step.  Still, I managed to become quite a tiresome little pedant in my ‘teens.

I trained for athletic competition, too.  We all had to.  Professional athletes were much better at the sport they concentrated on than were we amateurs, but playing the game was an important part of a gentleman’s education.  I learned to run and wrestle; I outgrew my puppy fat, and for the first time felt the weight of a weapon in my hand and a shield on my arm.  I grew taller and stronger.  My voice changed.  I began to moon after serving girls.  In truth, I was changing from an exasperating small boy to a young lout ready for serious mischief.  And the wars had cast up a hero just to suit my tastes.

I was thirteen or fourteen years old then.  Cassander’s scowling garrison still held the Munychia.  There was war everywhere in Hellas and the East when Demetrius the Besieger came to Athens.

He wasn’t called the Besieger then, though.

He’s a bandit, and an adventurer and the son of a treacherous, old brigand! was how Father had described him.  But we schoolboys knew Demetrius as a famous soldier, a young rake, a disturber of the established order, and no respecter of age or persons.  Father grumbled about the state of things and how Demetrius and his disreputable sire, old Antigonus One-Eye, were trying to set up a new tyranny and reunite the great Alexander’s empire.  As well be ruled by Dionysus! he bellyached, meaning the god of wine and orgies.  As you might expect, we boys saw this altogether differently.

But Cassander will look out for us, you see if he doesn’t, Father concluded.  Demetrius won’t dare show his face in Athens.

I was in school—did I tell you I studied at the famous Lyceum?—the day that the Besieger came to my home town.  We schoolboys were drowsing over the lecture when the sweeper burst into the study hall shouting:

Demetrius has landed at the Piraeus!  The whole harbor is covered with his ships!

Outside, everyone was shouting and scurrying.

Class was dismissed at once, and we boys were on our feet and pelting for the Piraeus—a four-mile run, but we were young and fit, back then.  Everybody was going with us and most seemed to have a head start.  There was chaos between the repaired fortifications of the Long Walls.  Soon, I could see the harbor, with a fleet riding to anchor in the roadstead.  A few stadia more, and I noticed the grim state of the fort on Munychia.  It was closed up, with Cassander’s armed mercenaries moving about conspicuously on the battlements.  They meant to hold the place, obviously.

The quayside was littered with cast-down shields, abandoned by the native Athenian levy.  Demetrius had eluded his enemies at sea and slipped into the Piraeus at once when he found the port undefended.  Nervous citizen spearmen had hastily assembled, but Demetrius, instead of attacking them, made a graceful speech and had his herald proclaim that Athens and all Hellas were free from that moment by his grace and that of his father, rulers of Asia.

Demetrius’ hard-handed mercenary pikemen were landing from their ships and mingling with the Athenian hoplites when I arrived, panting after my dash through the harborside alleys.  I expect the well-to-do citizen militiamen were glad enough to escape a battle on short notice.  The ordinary folk, of the sort who might sell sausages in the streets or pull an oar in a fighting vessel, were wild with delight.  To them, freedom meant the restoration of the democracy and the chance to plunder the rich.  The lowly were about to rise up and the high to be cast down.  That sounded good enough to me so I shouted and capered with the rest.  It was a good chance to get out of school, too.

Presently a larger vessel edged up to the dock and tied up bow and stern to the bollards.  Someone pointed out a tall figure under the stern hangings as Demetrius, son of Antigonus.  He didn’t look at all a bandit.  He was dressed in glittering armor, and striking a heroic pose.  Demetrius must have been well pleased to secure Athens without a spear raised against him.  It was some achievement in those days.  So, that was my first glimpse of the fabled Besieger, but, as I shall relate, by no means my last.

Now there was a change of government in Athens.  The oligarchs were out, the democrats took office, Cassander withdrew his mercenaries, and Father was glum about the whole thing.

Well, Cineas, it’s our fate and we must abide it, he grumped to me.  We’re ruined now for certain.  I’ve followed Cassander these ten long years—and we’ve prospered—but I’m too old to leave Athens now.  Let these Macedonians fight among themselves.  I shan’t go into exile again."

Nor shall I, I promised loyally, but Father wasn’t paying attention.

All in all, we may not be too badly off, he continued.  You’re enrolled in a good course of study, and may yet make something of yourself.  I should advise diligence, my boy.  Now, run off with you.  I have affairs to mull over.

Despite the excitement, my education continued.  I studied public speaking under the noted orator Demochares.  Down by the bay of Phalerum, I practiced speech-making, with a tasty mouthful of pebbles, declaiming against the foaming sea-beach.  That made for clear enunciation, my teacher claimed.  Parents were no doubt impressed, not having to swallow great gulps of grit and spit as we students did.  Nonetheless, I have been an effective speaker all my life and I developed the brass lungs which are necessary for any successful orator—or cavalry commander, for that matter.

There was a new teacher lately come to Athens, too, about that time, a certain Epicurus from Samos, who had set himself up in a rival school to the Lyceum.  At the time, I remained loyal to the austere philosophy of the older school.  But, times change, and I’m a pure Epicurean nowadays, have been for years.  I’m told that I’m the sort who gives the school a bad name.

The year I turned sixteen, I think it was, Demetrius sailed away to besiege the stiff-necked island city of Rhodes.  It was another move in the everlasting wars.  He and old One-Eye were calling themselves Kings now, and the Athenians had voted to make them divine as Savior Gods as well.  That was a very un-traditional precedent, which scandalized the devout, but it turned out meaningless in the end—just another empty title.  I remember watching Demetrius and his stately navy sail away.

Good riddance to bad rubbish, was my Father’s farewell.

My mother died shortly afterward, in her sleep.  There’s no more about her in this history, but she was a fine, upright Athenian matron, and I’d like that much remembered.

All the time Demetrius lingered in Hellas, Cassander had been lurking just over the northern horizon in Macedonia, waiting for his chance to pounce.  Demetrius and his oar-jockeys were hardly hull-down when we heard the news that Cassander’s mercenaries were rooting up the vines in the back country, and planning to invade Attica.  The Assembly met and decided to stand by the Savior Gods, and their first season’s campaign was actually a success.  My school friends and I were wild to join the city hoplites, but we were too young, responsible citizens told us.

  Next season, Cassander began to make war in earnest, and after a couple of defeats by his brusque mercenaries, we Athenians were shut up in beleaguered Athens.  By that time there were no more high-flown objections to boys in their teens putting on armor.  The press gangs enrolled the lame, the halt, the infirm, the babes, and the aged in the ranks.  Cassander’s hooligans prowled outside the gates and tore up the farms round about (ruining the last of Father’s orchards in the process) but they didn’t get over the wall.  I suppose Cassander’s soldiers cared no more for hopeless fighting than any other mercenary, and didn’t like the obvious strength of the Long Walls and the Acropolis.  Cassander didn’t press his luck, but merely tightened his blockade by land and sea.  Athens went hungry.  I’m glad Mother didn’t live to see it, and there are some other things which happened about this time I’m fairly content she never knew of, as well.

It’s curious now.  When I decided to begin this memoir, I vowed I would preserve the etiquette of my youth and not recount every time I washed my spear, as the Spartans so inelegantly put it.  But, the world has grown very much more wicked in my lifetime.  Nowadays, even well-born Athenian matrons think nothing of having one of that scandalous young Herondas’ stories about dildos read to them after breakfast, and I’m told that in the theater over in Rhegium recently a wandering troupe of players even enacted The Passion of Queen Pasiphae with a live bull!  I don’t suppose the world will get any worse if I add a little spice to my own recollections.  I’m not pretending to be literary, but am merely writing to amuse myself, anyway.  Truth to tell, a little smut might well encourage sales in this fallen world, should I decide to publish.  I could use the money, and I also find some memories too delicious to pass over.  I’d best get them written down, ignoring the blushes of my very proper secretary, before my old mind forgets the incidents altogether.

You will recall that Cassander’s siege was at its height, and the town council resolved that all private stores of food should be voluntarily turned over to a common reserve.  No one paid any attention to this, of course, so to enforce the decree bands of soldiers were detailed to scour private houses for hidden grain.

On one particularly hot, sticky, and boring day six of us under a file-leader named Gyllus were excused duty on the wall and assigned to ransack some of the houses in the foreign quarter.  Everyone suspected the treacherous resident foreigners of hoarding more than upright citizens.  It was a fairly well-to-do neighborhood Gyllus led us to, with several substantial houses, just off the street of the goldsmiths.  One by one, Gyllus dropped his search party off with instructions to thoroughly inspect kitchens and storerooms.  At last only he and I were left, before the last house in the lane.  It was a tidy, prosperous-looking place, with servant’s quarters out back and a broad tamarisk tree shading the courtyard.

This was old Philemon’s house, Gyllus told me.  I’ll be out back in the domestic quarters while you rummage through the place.  Be thorough.  Take your time, all the time you want, Cineas, he continued, with a wink.  And, don’t be too hard on his widow.  When you’re finished, wait out in the street till I come for you.

With that, Gyllus strolled off whistling toward the back of the house.  Enviously, I supposed he had some kitchen wench waiting for him.  He was one of those swaggering, well-kept officers you read about in Archilochus, the kind that get all the women, but are never to be found when spears are leveled.  I never liked him personally, but as I grew older, I came to admire his style.  Gyllus did have that.

Philemon had been a resident foreigner of long standing, a Cypriot or something, grown wealthy enough in the sausage trade to marry into a family of citizens who had fallen on hard times and taken to bartering their daughters.  That was fairly common in those days, although most respectable Athenians thought it a crime against nature and a great come-down for the girl.  Philemon had gained some modest notoriety by being the first man killed in the siege, on the very first day, by falling off the wall and breaking his neck.  I suppose the unaccustomed weight of his shield must have overbalanced him.  Had Philemon been a citizen, even this death might have made him a hero, but as it was, I saw him as just another greasy foreigner with a shrewish widow whose ill-will I would have to endure while Gyllus—curse him!—stallioned away in the servant’s quarters.

I stood there watching him stride away arrogantly, feeling awkward and hopeless and randified as only a sixteen-year-old with borrowed armor and a constantly swollen penis can.  But I knew I had to get on with it, so at last I slouched across the shady courtyard and rattled my spear against the door-post.  The beefy, surly doorkeeper admitted me into an anteroom, and presently a decrepit house steward appeared to see what I wanted.

He assured me, with every appearance of guilt, that the household had absolutely nothing left, no, not a bean or a fig, but I was in no mood to take any doddering old greybeard’s word for anything.  I had the right to be officious—it can be rather fun, you know—so I prodded him along with my cumbersome pig-sticker as he led me reluctantly through the house.  There were the remains of a substantial meal in the kitchen, and loaves in the oven, so I knew I was on the right scent.  Presently, we came to a cellar trap door with a stairway leading down.  I called for a lamp and descended the few steps, with the greybeard tottering along behind me.

We were in a large, cool, underground storeroom, floored with flagstones.  And, sure enough, there were jars of olive oil, stone crocks of dried lentils, shelves full of leeks and pickled eggs lining the walls, grain in sacks on the floor, and what looked like a dozen fat hams hanging from a low, wooden rack in one corner.

Sir, I promise you, we have no more than we need to feed our poor household! squealed the steward.  Oh, no!  Please, sir, no!

We’ll soon see about that! I replied, levering up one of the flagstones most unmilitarily with the blade of my spear.  The stone fell back with a thump, revealing a dark cavity in the wavering lamplight.  I set the lamp on a shelf, knelt down and plunged my hand into a hidden pot full of barley meal.  Laying aside my spear and taking off my helmet, I pulled up another flagstone with both hands—amphorae of wine or honey under that one.  There came an imperative, bad-tempered shriek from the top of the stairs to accompany the crash of falling stone.

Argus!  What is that noise?

A tall, heavy woman was outlined in the light at the top of the steps.  Her commanding voice identified her as the mistress of the household, the late, lamented Philemon’s widow.  The steward was clearly terrified of her.

Oh, madam, madam, he stammered, as she descended the cellar steps.  This young man, he is with the army—I couldn’t stop him!  I—

Yes.  Quite.  I can see for myself, Argus.  She silenced the old fellow with a careless gesture, taking in the uplifted flagstones at a glance.  Coolly, she looked me up and down, with a frankness which would have shocked me in a maiden, but which for the moment did not appear so unseemly in an old married lady, and a widow as well.  The lamplight, I’m sure, flattered her face, which was rather plump-jawed—no doubt from dining well on hoarded food while real Athenian patriots went hungry. 

But, good food had gone to her breasts and hips as well, and her charms were very evident despite her long, sleeveless robe.  It didn’t take me a moment to notice how closely it clung to her figure.  Her hair was dark and done up with a bit of white wool.  In hopeless adolescent fashion I took note of all this unattainable flesh, of course.  It never occurred to me that I was in quite a strong position, or that appetites of the flesh ever agitated respectable old married women.  I supposed she must have been all of twenty-five years old.

Oh, madam, madam, madam, the distracted steward babbled.

Leave us, Argus, she said curtly.  Close the door behind you, and do not come down again until I call.  The door banged behind him as he scurried painfully up the steps.  The lady of the house and I were alone in the storeroom.  There was a hush.

  My name is Kore, she said, at length.  I am mistress of this household, since my husband’s death.  You are…?

C-Cineas, I gulped.

You seem very young for a soldier, Cineas.

I’m—eighteen. I said untruthfully, my voice breaking as it still did occasionally and unpredictably.  She was strolling around me lackadaisically, scuffing her slippers most immodestly as I stood rooted to the flagstones.

As a soldier, you must have known many women, she said confidentially.  You’re a handsome lad, you know.

Naturally I had no idea what to say to that, so she went on for me, quite businesslike, at first.

We…find ourselves in an awkward position, Cineas.  You have discovered something I don’t wish to share with my neighbors, who have big…appetites. She tugged at her wool fillet and her hair tumbled down around her face and shoulders.  It was wondrously shining, dark and thick. 

There, she said.  That’s more comfortable.  I wish there was some way to persuade you not to…expose…my little secret.  I do so hate unpleasantness, don’t you?  Isn’t there something we could agree upon?  Just between the two of us?

I shook my head, not willing to have my voice squeak again.

Oh?  No?  Perhaps if I tell you another secret….  Well, Cineas, you probably already know that women develop—appetites, too.  Did you know that?—of course, you did.  And a widow’s are sometimes very great; indeed, not to be denied, even.  You can’t possibly imagine how lonely I’ve been since poor Philemon died.

She dropped her eyes pointedly toward my crotch, where the leather military kilt I was wearing was suddenly bulging outward.  I stood thunderstruck with lust, embarrassment, and disbelief.  Kore stepped up close to me—she was nearly my height as I was not yet full-grown—and without so much as a by-your-leave, she reached up under my kilt and grasped my painfully erected penis as if it were no more than a blood sausage.  Her fingers curling around me felt cooler than wet leaves as she slowly stroked me up and down.

Lady, I—

But any protest I might have steeled myself to make she strangled in my throat by pressing her open mouth against my stiff lips.  I would probably have tried to stammer something else, but when I tried to open my mouth the widow’s warm tongue slid inside.  It felt strange and revolting—for about two heartbeats—and then my hands flew to her amazingly heavy breasts and we were kissing as if I had been doing it all my life.  She pressed herself forward shamelessly, nudging her breasts into my feverish clutches.  Her own hands stayed busy for a moment, one between my thighs, the other clamped against the back of my neck, forcing my mouth down on hers.  I was practically slobbering by the time she let loose, and Kore was breathing deeply herself.

"Well, you are a soldier, she exhaled, pushing back her hair with both hands.  Those big udders of hers heaved enticingly.  I had been thinking about them ever since she appeared at the top of the stairs.  Hurry, she commanded.  We won’t have very long down here!"

She led me stumbling to the corner where the heavy wooden racks of hams stood.  I fumbled at her breasts through the folds of linen hiding them and she never released her grip on me as we moved.  Turning swiftly away from me with a last sobbing kiss, she bent over the ham rack, set her feet well apart, and drew her robe up to her waist.  Her plump buttocks glistened in the flickering beams of the lamp, like the wet dorsal humps of two dolphins, pressed together in the sea.

I blundered forward instinctively, but with no great certainty as to what I should do next.  I pulled up my kilt and ground my straining loins against her backside, which was as glowingly warm as her hands had been cool.  For a moment I could think of nothing else to do, but Kore had not forgotten her purpose.

Enter me! she hissed impatiently.  Put it inside me, you fool!  Ahhh—ah!—yes…oh, yes….

She reached back between her thighs and once again grasped my penis.  There was a brief, unbelievably pleasurable moment while she rubbed the crown of it against some wonderfully soft, warm, and increasingly slippery niche between her own legs, and then I slid inside her clinging well as easily as I might have pushed one of her ex-husband’s sausages into her open mouth.  She braced herself solidly against the ham rack, threw back her head, and pumped her buttocks frantically against me.  All the while she made wordless, groaning noises, as if she were in agony, but I knew perfectly well, even at sixteen, that she was not in any pain.

The heavy wooden rack she was clutching rocked and rattled against the cellar floor as the dangling hams swayed violently back and forth.  I looked down below my belly and saw my penis disappearing inside the widow Kore like a naked ferret squeezing into a mouse’s burrow.  And then suddenly my penis seemed to grow long enough to reach up into her belly, and thick enough to split her open like a gutted mackerel.  I lunged forward brutally, clutching convulsively at those wobbling breasts of hers.  She tossed her head again, her hair flying like a horse’s mane.  All at once, I was spouting floods of semen into her, and then we were collapsing onto the floor in a heap of wet, sticky flesh.

After emptying themselves, I have found, men are usually rather amazed at what they have just done, and at sixteen years old, I was appalled.  I had some crazed idea that I had committed a rape on a respectable matron.  I was both embarrassed and terrified.  Suppose she called for help, and raised the household?  I did not realize until years later that Kore knew exactly what I was thinking and had merely been mixing in a little pleasure with her daily business of preserving hearth and home in perilous times.  That the act had been pleasurable for her was a bonus I do not think the lusty widow expected.  She lay sprawled and rather unlovely for a moment, her disheveled hair covering her face, her naked breasts heaving, and her robe still bunched about her waist.  I stared at the little patch of damp fur between her splayed thighs before she recovered herself.  It did not look nearly so inviting, at that particular moment, as I had imagined it only a few heartbeats before.

Presently, though, she sat up beside me, squirmed her legs under her, and coolly kissed my unresisting mouth.  She stood up, her robe falling decorously again to her ankles, as if nothing had happened.  I scrambled to my feet as well, feeling as sticky and unclean as if I had bathed in honey.  I felt for a moment as if I never wanted to touch another woman again, and wondered if the remainder of life’s mysteries would turn out to be as cruelly painful as the emptiness I felt just at that moment.  But then the widow raised her arms to gather her hair again, her big breasts bobbed against her robe, and I felt a reassuring stir of renewed interest in every aspect of life.

We must keep this our secret, Cineas, my darling, she said in a low, positive tone.  No one must ever know what happened between us here today.

No, lady, I agreed wholeheartedly.

Now, help me replace these flagstones.  You are welcome, of course, while this dreadful siege lasts, to come here any time you need a meal.  She giggled then, wriggling her teats inside the bodice of her linen drapery.  She stepped up closer to whisper in my ear.  And you are welcome to visit me after dark tonight, or any evening.  Do you understand?  I shall instruct the doorkeeper to admit you at night.  He will be jealous, but I am the mistress of this house.

He wouldn’t—he won’t—call the watch? I stuttered.

He wouldn’t dare, Kore assured me.  Now, Cineas, kiss me—just once.  Then take your spear, and go quickly.

So, as it turned out, it was Gyllus who ended up waiting for me. 

Took our time, did we? he grumbled.  Of course, I reported that a thorough search of the widow Kore’s house had revealed no hidden food.  He took my word for it.  By the time our little detachment returned to its station on the wall, I was feeling very much better, and no end of a lover.  It did not occur to me until years later to consider just what Kore’s slave doorkeeper would have to be jealous of.

In her cellar I had felt utterly spent and sure that it would take days for my limp organ to recover.  But we had hardly reported back to the ramparts when I felt a renewed interest in the widow’s charms.  I was itching to be off as soon as darkness fell, but Cassander was inconsiderate.  A few of his men tried to seize a tower near the Propylon Gate about the third hour of the watch.  Our generals thought this a prelude to a pre-dawn assault, so we remained at stand-to under arms until cock-crow, with bundles of straw ready to set afire and pitch into the ditch below.  Nothing happened, so we slept all the following day, and I could only slip off again that night.

Kore was as good as her word and the jilted doorkeeper admitted me near midnight with hardly a challenge.  She met me in the darkened anteroom, and silently led me below ground to the cellar again.  I never did see her bed-chamber.

Where have you been, my darling, my sweet? she whispered between slow kisses in the musty dark, her hand unerringly finding its way to my crotch.  I was so worried about you….

While Cassander’s siege lasted, I visited the widow as often as I got the chance.  She always used me as secretly as was possible in a house full of gossiping slaves, down in the cellar where, after a time, she was considerate enough to lay a pallet.  Usually we coupled in pitch darkness and only on one or two occasions did she bring a lamp.  The experience was almost purely confined to the sense of touch for her, but it gave me the desire to see, taste, and hear as well.  I never actually saw those firm, round breasts of her naked again, although I knew their every contour and protuberance by touch.  Kore was quite selfish and only wanted to be mounted as she desired, without thought for me.  Most often, she had me in the same way as on our first day, standing with her back toward me, bent over—although once or twice she knelt on the pallet while I plunged away between her buttocks.  I suppose she saw me as some peculiarly animated pleasure tool, well-shaped for her purposes, to be used as needed and cast off when worn out.  I sometimes reflected that this was a very disrespectful way for a mere female to treat a man, but mostly, it didn’t bother me a bit.

So you see I had plenty to think about while Cassander and his Macedonians besieged dear old Athens.  A fast blockade-runner slipped past his fleet to sail for Rhodes and warn Demetrius of the city’s plight, but help didn’t come.  Now and again a trader would slip into the Piraeus with news.  I heard that the Besieger was coming; was dead; was victorious before Rhodes; had been murdered by a jealous husband.  Food grew more and more scarce, until even Kore and I were living only on leeks and love.  Father contracted a coughing sickness, and it killed him.  They excused me from duty on my section of the wall the day he died.

I was now an orphan of almost seventeen in a besieged town.  I soon found out that my father’s legacy consisted of uprooted vineyards, ringed fruit trees, and unsettled lawsuits.  I was practically destitute.  Father had been right—the change of government had, indeed, ruined us.

Before everyone starved though, Demetrius sailed back to Athens with a fleet of three hundred and thirty vessels and chased Cassander back to Macedonia.  They patched up a truce and the Athenians gratefully picked up civilian life again.  I turned in my borrowed arms, but just couldn’t go back to my studies.  It occurred to me that I had little future in Athens anymore.  I had no powerful relatives and no influence with the stuffy democrats who controlled the public payroll.  My private means were almost exhausted.  The sale of ruined land to speculators brought me some ready cash, but I couldn’t live long on that.  There was no work that I could do and still maintain my position as a gentleman.  And, anyway, I knew no trade.  Skilled labor was out of the question.  Youths of my upbringing studied oratory and philosophy, not smithy-work or glass-blowing.  I couldn’t bring myself to seek jobs as a clerk, and had no talent for the arts.  Even pulling an oar, the traditional refuge of the poor and unlucky, was not possible for me.  After Amorgos, Athens had no navy worth mentioning.  In the ceremonial vessels, what few berths there remained went to good democrats with the right connections.

In truth, I was at loose end.  No one owed me a living.  I could do nothing but speak well and fight.  A Hellene gentleman with such an education, but without money, was fitted for nothing else.

Nothing but fighting!  Of course!  I could fight!  Why not go off to the wars?  Why not fight for the cause of the