Virtues of War by Steven Pressfield

make it in seven. The column drives south, impelled by anger. Our garrison commander at Thebes was a well-loved fellow, Amyntas, called Abrutes, “Eyebrows.” Here is his story. His wife Cynna bore only daughters, four without a son. The man pledged his estate to the goddess if she would send a boy child. She did, but fever carried the lad off in infancy, crushing Abrutes and, of course, impoverishing him. It chanced that he had a brother and a cousin whose wives both gave birth to sons at the same time and who had other healthy boy children. Each without the other’s knowledge came to this officer and offered their newborns. The men arrived at Abrutes’s house within minutes of each other. All were so struck by the coincidence that they dropped to their knees, worshiping heaven. Within a year Abrutes’s wife delivered triplets, all boys. So our good fellow had gone in a matter of months from a state of desolation without male issue to the father of five strapping lads. They all grew straight and strong (they were ten and eleven now) and he loved them and was proud of them, and they of him and of his post as garrison commander at Thebes. The Thebans slit his throat and hung him on a hook. His executive officer was a captain of Anthemos named Alexides. The Thebans flung him, bound, from the battlements above the Ismenian Gate and left his corpse for dogs and crows.
    The army presses south at a furious pace. You can tell when men truly rage because they are silent. Reports of wider revolt reach us on the march. Insurgents exiled by Philip have returned to Acarnania and been welcomed; our garrison in Elis has been expelled; the Arcadians annul their oaths, marching to Thebes’s aid; Argos, Ambracia, and Sparta make plans to rise. At Athens, we learn later, the demagogue Demosthenes has appeared garlanded in the Assembly; he has even produced an eyewitness who claims to have seen my dead body. The city boils over with jubilation.
    On the trek, men sign to me, thumb across the throat. They want Athens. Antigonus One-Eye cites Athens’s outrages of our country in the past—the fates of Eion, Scyros, Torone, and Scione, where all adult males were massacred and women and children sold as slaves. Athens’s fleet is three hundred, Antigonus reminds me; she cries poor but, dosed with courage, could prove the dagger in our back when we march on Persia.
    My daimon does not want Athens. Athens is Greece’s jewel. Who razes her stands with Xerxes in infamy.
    Six days past Pelinna, we strike the Boeotian frontier. Dawn fourteen, the army appears before Thebes. The city is paralyzed with terror. Our forces surround the walls, sealing off all escape from within and all reinforcement from without.
    Still the Thebans will not quit. They raid our camp under cover of truce. The men of our garrison remain in their hands, trapped in the citadel Cadmea. The foe threatens to spit them over coals if I don’t withdraw. Meanwhile he sneaks couriers out, calling on all Greece to rise, now, to shuck the yoke of Macedon.
    I parley with the enemy, hoping for accommodation. He will not give it. Next noon Perdiccas on his own makes a rush on the Electra Gate. The Thebans resist; I must send the archers and three phalanx brigades, then follow myself at the head of the Royal Guards. The foe cracks at the Cadmea. We are in the city now. One push and Thebes will fall.
    Antipater reins beside me, in the square beneath the Thebiad, with Amyntas and Antigonus One-Eye. “You are reluctant, Alexander, to order the destruction of so famous a city. You would not be remembered as the man who fired the birthplace of Heracles, native state of Oedipus and Epaminondas. That is past. Piss on it!”
    I am at war not with Thebes, I see, but with my daimon.
    â€œShow clemency,” Antigonus warns, “and you lose the army!”
    Hephaestion confronts him: “Command a massacre and we lose Alexander!”
    I listen.
    I