At the first sling-shot from the now-charging Kurds, the men erupted in a massive roar, echoed by the Rhodians picking their way gingerly behind us through the water, and the Hellenic troops eagerly watching the action on the heights above the far bank. The deafening bellow hit the startled Kurds like a blast from an open furnace, and they falteringly careened to a halt and stared. As the Greek salpinx blared, the hoplites sprinted through the gravel straight at the enemy lines in a massed charge worthy of Plataea. The lightly armored Kurds did not wait to test our mettle in hand-to-hand fighting. Spinning in terror, they dropped their weapons where they stood and began clambering hand over hand back up the steep banks which they had just charged down only moments before. As soon as Xenophon saw that the Kurds had turned, he ordered the salpinx to sound a general retreat, and the Greeks, needing no further encouragement, themselves skidded to a halt, and again in a frenzied sprint, went tearing in the opposite direction back toward the river, leaping into the water and wading frantically for the other side.

For a moment Chirisophus' troops on the far heights had an unprecedented view of the two armies, thousands of men, their front lines barely yards apart, both simultaneously fleeing each other in terror, and they roared out their laughter and encouragement to the splashing hoplites. The Kurds finally realized they had been tricked, and it was with no small effort that the Kurdish officers succeeded in reversing their men's course to give chase to the fleeing Greeks.

At this point, however, Chirisophus' peltasts, who had been waiting on the far bank for just such an emergency, themselves charged into the water, javelins at the thong and arrows at the string. They met Xenophon's troops midstream and covered their retreat with a withering fire straight into the faces of the baffled Kurds, who again were forced to halt their charge and retreat in chaos. To cheers from the spectators above, the entire army was able to complete the terrible crossing with scarcely a single casualty, except for a few overeager peltasts who gave chase to the Kurds beyond the midpoint of the river and were cut down upon their arrival at the other side.

For once, the gods had been with us.

In vain, man's expectations, in vain, his boastful words.

God brings the unthought to be,

As here we see.

– EURIPIDES

THE AGONY OF hatred, the ecstasy of love. Trite notions, easily separable into their distinct, almost opposite component parts, sung of by poets and wept at by lovers from time immemorial and undoubtedly for a hundred generations to come. The ecstasy of hatred, the agony of love. A no-less-common state of affairs, though comprehended by fewer numbers, perhaps only the Clearchuses among us: the impetus behind the movers of the world, the creators and killers and bestirrers of humanity. Again, they are sentiments easily divided into their identifiable and perfectly contrasting elements, like gold so assayed by fire as to congeal into pure, glistening droplets, distinguishing itself from the surrounding slag.

Pain, denial, triumph, tears, passion, revenge, betrayal, rapture. To which condition do we ascribe these emotions and motivations, to hatred, or to love? The admixture becomes more dense, more difficult to define, and the two seem to meld seamlessly into each other. Although the two perfect, unalloyed extremes may be easily distinguished, and unskilled poets and petty philosophers will make much of their facile ability to do so, the twilight region between the two, that murky area that incorporates irreducible elements of both, or perhaps of a third component newly created by the commingling of the others, is much less easily described. War and hatred are evil, love sublime. And yet: there are good men who could, if they wished, live in peace but who choose instead to fight; who could live a life of ease, but instead enjoy hardship; who could derive joy from lavishing riches on their beloved, but instead spend their wealth on warfare, toiling under the command of Ares rather than of Aphrodite, and even putting the former in the service of the latter.

Such is the complexity of humanity, which at times confounds even the gods, and ultimately prevents them from being mere celestial puppeteers, from representing the earth as a malleable stage set. The world in which men live and act, although not totally inexplicable, is not completely rational either. Reason and folly, the foreseen and the unexpected, madness and calm exist side by side, not only between two individuals but within the same person as well, all to different degrees. The contradictions of life, the simultaneous sorrow and relief at parting, the destruction inherent in creation itself, all these befuddle the mind, as well as illumine it. In my memoir thus far I have written of war and love as two separate entities, unrelated to each other, perhaps even in direct defiance of each other, one the sickness and the other the cure, each pushing and struggling like wrestlers for whom the dusty ring holds room for only one champion. It is time to move beyond such shallow poesy, for this is not life, nor is it my story.

THE WINTER, WHICH had long been threatening the army with graying skies and freezing temperatures, finally descended in all its fury. Just as a long-awaited battle, when it finally arrives, is more a source of relief than a cause for fear, so too, at least at first, was the vicious cold of the winter we had so long dreaded. When it arrived the army was actually billeted under shelter, in comfortable barracks and huts surrounding the palace of Tiribazus, King Artaxerxes' satrap and governor of southern Armenia, who had grudgingly agreed to a truce provided that we not burn his villages and that we take only the supplies we needed. We had secured food and comfortably settled in for a few days to tend to the sick and injured, which in truth included all of us, and to reorganize our supplies. The first night we were there Zeus dropped two feet of snow on our roofs, and over the next few days several feet more, raising the level of the drifts up to the eaves of our low huts and keeping the men and animals practically immobilized in the cluster of villages into which we had moved. Not a word of complaint was heard, however. In fact, the silent snow muffled all words completely, and as I trudged out on my rounds, bearing messages between Xenophon and the captains and beating a path to the tiny woodshed occupied by Asteria, the only other humans I saw were Chirisophus' and the captains' own couriers, bundled, like me, in skins in a fruitless attempt to ward off the bitter cold. Rumors flew among the men that the army would remain here for the winter, that further travel in the snow beyond this point would be suicidal. Xenophon and Chirisophus, despite their reluctance to delay their stay among the enemy for any longer than necessary, were seriously discussing this option. Trudging through the snow to Asteria's hut to discuss this news with her, and wondering why she had not sought me out as often lately as before, I was surprised at the number of tracks I found in the snow leading to her entrance. Normally Asteria picked the most secluded shelter possible in which to make her bed, an isolated pigsty or chicken coop known only to me and a few of the Rhodians. This time, however, the path to her coop was as heavily traveled as the road to Delphi. Turning the corner around a rocky outcropping behind which her little stone hut was hidden, I was taken aback to find at least thirty Rhodians milling about outside the shelter in various states of limping dishevelment, attempting to keep warm by standing around several campfires that had been built. Other boys were passing in and out of the hut, lifting the stiff, heavy hide she had hung for a door, which had now frozen to the thickness and consistency of a board.