‘Fortuna opes auferre, non animum, potest.’—SENECA.
‘Fortune may carry off our wealth, it cannot rob us of our
daring.’
ON his return to Thurii Alkibiades found Kryptos had indeed gone and
taken the _Eros_ with him. So he waited there for news from Athens. It
was not long in coming. He heard how, as soon as it was known that he
had escaped at Thurii, the dikasterion, in his absence, had sentenced
him to death and confiscated all his property.
‘But I will show them I am still alive,’ he said. No one ever kept a
promise better.
As he was dead to his country by his country’s act, his country became
dead to him. Great as had been his devotion to that country in the past,
great as it would ever have been, had she been worthy of it, great as it
was yet to be proved to be in the distant future, at this time the one
thought which engrossed his mind became how to make his revenge as
overwhelming in its destructive consequence as her injustice had been
great to him. It was so complete and terrible that the vengeance of no
man has been like to it in the history of the ages.
He despatched Agrestides to Messana with information to the chiefs of
the Syrakusan party of the agreement he had made with their opponents to
open the city gates to the Athenian army. With the rest of his
companions he sailed for Elis and landed at Kylléné.
This Agrestides, who was trusted with the message to the leaders hostile
to the Athenians at Messana, was one on whose judgment and quiet
sagacity Alkibiades had found he could implicitly rely. He was
originally a poor Arkadian shepherd boy, troubled with the wandering
spirit which has driven many another boy to leave his home and happy
solitude, to be tossed about on the world’s wide waves, to hope, and
long, and travel, to see many lands and divers peoples, and die at last
unknown, unrecognised, and be buried amongst strangers. He could not be
contented to tend his sheep in the peaceful valleys of Arkadia. The
spirit of unrest, of adventure, which came over him, he could not
resist. The desire to be elsewhere, to get past the mountains which shut
in his native plains, grew into a force which became ever more and more
resistless. The constant itching to be gone spoilt all his happiness.
When the father and the mother and all of them were there, in the small
family festivities, the temptation haunted him. In the gray morning
light, when the others were asleep, he would gaze where the coming sun
began to tinge the clouds, and the longing to be there where the sun
rose saddened his days, and when it set over the distant hills his fever
to be away, to see the world, to leave his uneventful life, burnt into
his brain.
He dreamed at night of other lands, and strange great cities, and the
unknown, mysterious sea he had heard men talk about who had actually
been on it. So he left his sheep, and his mother, all his people—only
his brother knew for certain he was going and reaching Korinth, he got
on board a merchant ship that traded with the East. He soon became a
skilful sailor. He had strength and endurance, as well as an
intelligence and shrewdness about him; and getting to Athens, he was in
time noticed by the captain of the _Eros_, and engaged to serve with
him.
From the time he first saw the owner of this wondrous craft he looked on
him with awe and reverence. It so happened that he was able more than
once to be of service to his lord. So when the _Eros_ set out for
Sicily, Agrestides—‘Aglestides’ his master, who was in the habit of
lisping, always called him—was promoted, and kept in close attendance on
the strategos. The Arkadian was captivated like the rest—the feeling of
awe changed to one of loyal, distant, enthusiastic love, intense
devotion. But what could the poor sailor say or do to show his
admiration? One day, perhaps, he might do something. He might even save
his hero’s life. Perhaps he might—best of all—show his affection by
giving his life for him. He had both his wishes.
It was mid October before Alkibiades reached the mainland of the
Peloponnesos. The people, when they heard who it was, went down in
crowds to meet him. He made a triumphant entry into Elis, where, too,
the people thronged to see the far-famed conqueror at the Olympic games,
as though he had been some mythic hero of antiquity, who had come in
this disguise to visit them, greater in disgrace than most men in
prosperity.
He did not stay long in Elis. Plans were forming in his teeming brain,
and must not be delayed. He sent to the Kings and Ephors of the Spartans
for a safe-conduct to their capital, telling them that he might be able,
as their friend, to do them greater service than, as their enemy, he had
done them injury. The Lakedaimonians eagerly invited their old opponent
to come to them at once; he as eagerly left the Eleian capital for
Sparta. Before the winter had set in he found himself, for the first
time, among that hard and rugged people.
They were curious to see one of whom they had heard so many strange
accounts. Great was their wonder when they beheld the grave severity of
his demeanour. They had been told tales of his fabulous luxury and
extravagance—tales which had not been lessened in the telling. He
dressed himself as the plainest citizen there. The flowing purple robe
we last saw him wear in the house of his good friend Eumanthes he left
behind at Elis. These simple-faring folk had heard tell of his many
cooks, the battery of copper saucepans, and other paraphernalia of his
kitchen, which must be taken with him even to the wars; they saw him
eating at the common table of the coarse food of Sparta. They had been
scandalized at the description of his costly baths of curious perfumes;
they saw him bathing on winter mornings in the frozen river. And this
went on for many months while he was carrying out his great designs. He
met the leading men in council frequently, and showed them how they
might advance their state while humbling Athens.
Before the spring came he heard how things were going on in Sicily—how
Nikias had tried to enter Messana, and found, to his astonishment, that
the gates were not opened to him; how that then he had gone back to
Naxos and Katané, and wasted all the remainder of the autumn and winter
doing nothing—wasting precious time and Athenian treasure while Syrakuse
was strengthening her defences.
All this while he had his agents at work in Korinth. Late in the spring
of 414, hearing that Nikias had at length made up his mind to attack
Syrakuse, that his ships had entered the bay of Thapsos, and that his
troops were on the hills above the town, he got leave to address the
Lakedaimonian assembly. He found an audience very different from that
which had so often been moved by him at Athens. Only members of the old
Lakonian families sat here, who were intensely conservative; it was no
easy task to gain their confidence.
He began in a diffident, half-apologetic strain, open and unaffected. He
reminded them that his ancestors for many generations had been the
‘proxenoi’ of Sparta, their friends and agents; that no important
business of their state had had to be done in Athens but his progenitors
had aided them, and that none of their citizens ever became entangled in
their private affairs but his progenitors had come to their assistance;
and he impressed upon them that on his entry into public life he found a
democratic Constitution had been long established. Was it for him to
upset that Constitution? ‘And after all,’ he asked, ‘what is the first
reason for the existence of a democracy but to oppose and ward off
tyranny? Such as I found it I adopted it, and did my best to make it
perfect. I and my ancestors before me found ourselves placed at the head
of a democracy because of our known hatred of a tyranny. For, as amongst
you it is your ancient oligarchy which saves your land from despotism,
in Athens it is democracy which wards off this danger. We have striven
to teach the people to rule themselves with moderation, that so they
might conserve the Constitution as it came to them, in its grandeur and
its liberty, that so they might stop the first efforts of a tyranny to
raise its head, or scheme to bring about a revolution. It is these
insidious foes we have ever fought; it is to them I owe my exile.
Democracies may have many faults—I know it more than anyone. Would it
have been right in me to attempt to overthrow a long-standing
Constitution while you and other enemies were at our doors?
‘Having said so much about myself and my own conduct, will you permit
me, oh ye Lakedaimonians, to give you some practical advice and
information? We did not sail to Sicily merely to assist the Egestæans or
the Greek colonists. We intended, and the Athenians still intend, if
they can, after completely subjugating Sicily, to turn their forces upon
Italy. Sicily won, Italy would soon be theirs. Enriched by the
contributions they would force from those lands, they could attack
Carthage and her dependencies. If the Athenians succeed there, then, by
the spoils of these rich peoples, they will be able to enlarge their
fleet till it becomes larger than those of all the world together. With
such a fleet it is intended to blockade the hostile ports of Greece, to
become rulers of the Peloponnesos and of the whole Grecian land, and
masters of the world. Such is their intention.
‘Remember, you are hearing of these designs from the mouth of one who
helped to form them, from one who did something towards carrying them
out. While I was in Sicily, I saw a good deal of that country, and I
tell you plainly, if you do not act at once, Syrakuse must fall, and
with it Sicily, and all the other plans and hopes of the Athenians may
be accomplished. Then you will have to look to your home. It will be too
late to think of Sicily or your allies. Furnish, then, your ships
without delay. Fill them with your bravest hoplites. Above all things,
put over them your ablest general.
‘I will tell you one thing more. If you wish to drive the Athenians from
Sicily, if you wish to frustrate their designs, if you wish to weaken
them at home, you must attack them in their own country. You must take,
and you must fortify, Dekeleia, in Attika. That is what the Athenians
dread the most; that is the most deadly blow you can aim at them. It
would take long to enumerate all the advantages you will gain thereby.
The Syrakusans will be encouraged to hold out against their besiegers.
It will prevent the Athenians sending reinforcements. They will want all
their men to protect them at home. It will stop a great part of their
supplies of food coming from their fertile fields. It will stop the
silver coming from the mines at Laurion. It will, by degrees, detach
from Athens the islands and towns which are now allied to her by the
treaty of Delos, but which love her not. Many of these, even now, are
looking for the first opportunity to shake off her heavy imposts and
ally themselves to you. It will turn the wavering who have not yet
determined to which side to look for help. It will close her tribunals,
to which the islands and the smaller states dependent upon her are now
obliged to take their causes, and she will thereby lose the large
revenues she now receives from the fees paid to her by those litigants.
‘Do not suspect the advice I tender you, nor fear, because I counsel you
against my country, that my advice is insincere. I would not wound my
country, but my country’s secret enemies, who, by abusing the power of
her laws, thrust out her truest friends from her. I seek not to destroy
my country; I seek only to regain her. He shows his love of country most
who does what in him lies to purge his country of her enemies at home,
and to force her to receive again those true sons who have been driven
from her by her foes. To gain this end I will spare no pains, avoid no
labour, fear no dangers, in your service. Just as I inflicted great
injury upon you as your opponent in open war, so now as your friend I am
able to be of the greatest service to you. By following the twofold
counsel I have given you, you will gain peace at home and the empire of
all Greece, which will freely give herself to you without restraint.’
The sincerity of his avowal that he wished to use his present hosts as a
means to recover his rights at home; the obvious wisdom of his counsel;
the simple eloquence of his whole address, without ornament or flowers
of rhetoric, won the confidence of the plain Lakonian people. Indeed, he
knew his audience. His apology for the democratic part he had played at
home was a masterpiece of pleading, showing how the party of popular
freedom at Athens and the strict oligarchic government of Sparta had the
same end in view—the hatred, the apprehension, of anything approaching
to a despotism; while his plain, pathetic peroration, in which he stood
forth as the true friend of Athens, softened towards him the hardest
heart, and the most suspicious intellect of his Spartan audience.
His words, as far as we can find trace of them, give little notion of
the grave solicitude with which he mixed up his cause with that of his
hearers, and brought vividly before them his earnest hopes, his
heartfelt wrongs. His success is another proof—though no proof is
wanting—of the injustice of the charge brought against him by his enemy
Thukydides, that he had tricked and meanly cheated the Spartan envoys
while they were guests of his at Athens. For he was trusted, and his
honest declaration won its end. It vanquished fears and hesitations, and
persuaded the Lakonians to join with the Korinthians in sending aid to
Syrakuse.
This aid came just in time. As long as Lamachos lived some little energy
was shown by the Athenians, in spite of the sluggishness and cowardice
of Nikias. When the large force under the two remaining generals at
length came upon Syrakuse, the citizens could hardly hope to hold out
long against it. But Lamachos was killed in an engagement, and from that
time Nikias did little but beg for more money, more ships and men from
home. Syrakuse, however, was reduced by force of the numbers of its
besiegers to the last extremity. It was on the point of surrendering
when Gongylos, the Korinthian commander, who had been despatched to
Sicily on the advice of Alkibiades, was allowed, by the negligence of
Nikias, to enter the port of Syrakuse. He persuaded the people to remain
firm a little longer, for a Korinthian fleet was on its way, and
Gylippos, a Spartan general, was even now landing in Sicily. By the like
negligence of the unfortunate Athenian commander, Gylippos was allowed
to land on the north coast of Sicily, march unmolested through the
island, and at length enter Syrakuse, almost surrounded, as it was, by
the besiegers’ works.
Gylippos almost immediately took the field against the Athenians.
Athens, entreated by the desponding Nikias, in the following autumn sent
out to him a force even larger than the first, with seventy-five ships
and two more generals. All was of no avail. Disaster followed on
disaster, relieved by few and, for the most part, unimportant gains.
Before the summer of 413 was over Alkibiades heard that such of his late
comrades as had not been either killed in battle or drowned in their
shameful flight, lay starving and rotting in the Syrakusan quarries,
into which they had been thrown by their victorious enemies. The
splendid fleet with which two years before he had set out from Athens,
together with its reinforcements, had been destroyed by his new-found
friends, and his colleague Nikias, the unhappy cause of all the evil,
had been taken prisoner and put to death.
So far his prophecy made to the Spartan assembly had come true. The rest
was to be verified.
His other counsel had been acted on. The Spartans, under Agis, had taken
and fortified Dekeleia, and were overrunning Attika. Athens could see
from the Akropolis the rising walls threatening her with immediate
danger. The citizens were forced to live prepared to fight at any
moment. Their fields were ravaged, their commerce well-nigh ruined, the
mines shut up, even the tribunals closed. The allied towns from which,
by the terms of the confederation of Delos, she was to receive a great
part of her revenues were falling from her or growing luke-warm in her
cause. The neutral states were looking to her more successful rival, and
yet the vengeance of Alkibiades was not satisfied.
In the autumn embassies came to Sparta from Tissaphernes, satrap of the
Persian King in Ionia, and from Pharnabazos, satrap of the country near
the Hellespont, offering alliance against Athens. Alkibiades advised the
Spartans to postpone all thought of carrying their arms to the
Hellespont, but he saw of what advantage an alliance with Tissaphernes
would be in carrying out his present plans. An alliance was therefore
concluded between Lakedaimôn and the satrap of Ionia. By the terms of
this treaty, which was soon after ratified by both parties, the Persian
was to bring a large fleet to aid the Spartans, and to pay the wages of
those employed on board the Spartan fleet.
At the same time an offer of alliance came from Chios, the richest and
most important of the Grecian islands, near the continent of Asia Minor.
Chios was still nominally a member of the confederation of Delos, in
alliance with, and bound to pay an annual tribute to, Athens. The
Spartans knew the strength it would give them if they could cut away
this strong support from their opponents. They promised to send a fleet
of forty triremes to aid Chios in her revolt, and to act in concert with
her new ally and ancient enemy, the Persian. In the spring of 412 these
ships, with those of others of the Spartan allies, reached Lechaion, the
western port of Korinth, and were hauled over the isthmus to Kenchreia,
the eastern port, where they lay, ready to start for Chios as soon as
the Isthmian games were over.
In the meantime the Euböians had made the like offer of alliance to
Agis, the Spartan king, at Dekeleia, and asked for the same assistance
against Athens. The required help was promised. Before this aid could be
given, and while Agis waited for reinforcements for that purpose, Lesbos
revolted, and prayed the same aid from Agis. A small force arrived at
this time from Sparta, and was sent on at once by Agis to help the
Lesbians.
But while this conspiracy was going on against her Athens was not idle.
Like a lion brought to bay, she roused herself as dangers quickened
round her. Her army gone, her great fleets sunk or burnt at Syrakuse,
her food-supplies diminished, her revenues almost destroyed, without
money or allies on whom she could depend, the whole state in mourning
for the sons who never could return to her again from that sad Sicilian
expedition, the islands and the tributary towns which she had rescued
from the Persians, and guarded from their other enemies, revolting from
her, or gone right over to a foe who was plotting with those very
Persians to destroy her utterly, she rose majestic in her grief; the
word ‘surrender’ was not so much as named—never breathed by any citizen;
the idea of compromise was never for a moment entertained. Each blow as
it came quick upon her roused her to fresh vigour. The ingratitude, the
shameless ingratitude, of those small states, of which for nearly sixty
years she had been the constant safeguard, might burn into her soul, but
it did not shake her. In the past, perhaps, she sometimes domineered
over them in her pride, and taken large tribute from them in the days of
her power. But she protected them from ever-prowling enemies, and gave
them back more than she took from them. And now—now in her distress—they
were deserting her, going over to an enemy who, for his own immediate
and selfish purpose, was not unwilling to undo what the pan-Hellenic
federation had done, and it seemed that Marathon and Salamis had been
fought in vain.
Well, let them go if they must go; she, to her last ship, to her last
timber, to her last man, to her last drachma, she would still fight,
and, if the gods decreed it, she would die fighting. As long as her
liberty should last and her democracy should remain, she would never
lose her courage.
That was a country to be proud of, a race to boast about. Did her great
son far away in Lakedaimôn, while he was counselling, directing all the
movements of her foes against her—did he ever in his heart feel a secret
pride that he was sprung from her? Was his just wrath ever so little
cooling, or did it still burn so fiercely that he could not see her
glory?
The Athenian Ekklesia decreed the creation of a new fleet, the
suppression of every expense not actually necessary, the immediate
fortification of Sounion, to prevent her corn supplies from being cut
off by sea, as they had been by land. Aristokrates was sent to Chios,
where the oligarchic party was expecting every day the arrival of the
promised Spartan fleet. There he demanded assistance according to the
terms of the treaty of Delos. They delayed him as long as they could,
and until they began to despair of aid from Sparta. The democratic party
at Chios, as in other places, still clung, though coldly, to the
Athenian alliance. At last they provided seven triremes fully manned.
With these Aristokrates hastened back to Athens. Adding them to some
thirty others, which were all the Athenians could get together, they
determined to stop, if possible, the joint fleet of Sparta and her
allies from leaving Kenchreia. That fleet had got into the Saronic Gulf
before the Athenian and Chian ships came up with them, but was then
forced to take refuge in another Corinthian port. There the Athenians,
having landed some of their hoplites, attacked the enemy by sea and
land, slew many of them, including their admiral, and blockaded the
whole fleet.
On news of this disaster reaching Sparta, the new friends of Alkibiades
were for giving up the expedition at once, and would have done so but
for him. The oligarchic Lakedaimôn did not, at this period, prove itself
so steadfast in misfortune as its democratic sister in Attika had done.
But the determined spirit of Alkibiades moved amongst the Spartans
indefatigably. It needed, indeed, all his energy and power of persuasion
to keep them up to their engagements with the Persian Tissaphernes and
with Chios.
‘Let me go off at once to Chios before news of the blockade of your
fleet is known. They will trust me more than anyone. The picture I shall
draw of the Athenian distress, and the readiness you will show by
sending me to their assistance, will so encourage them in their revolt
that this slight reverse on the Korinthian coast will not endanger our
great plans.’
He worked privately, too, among the Ephors, especially with his friend
and relative Endios, who was not fond of Agis. He put before him the
advantage he would gain personally over his rival if he obtained the
whole credit of making and carrying out the treaty with the Persian
king.
He again prevailed, and started off at once with Chalkideus, one of the
ablest of the Lakedaimonian admirals, and only five triremes for Chios,
leaving Agrestides behind to look after his affairs at Sparta. The
voyage was unusually rapid; it was too slow for his impatience. For more
than two years he had been living inactively at Sparta. Since November,
415, to this the early spring of 412, his life had not been quite what
he would have chosen. The frugal fare and the simple Spartan life was
all very well, but two years and a half of it was quite enough for him.
There were none of the gay Athenian spirits there, no banquets, no
symposia, no fun or frolic—all heavy, dull, rude decorum. What little
amusement he did get, if report says truly, nearly cost him his life.
But we cannot trust all that report says of him during those two years
and a half at Sparta.
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