‘I am rapt, and cannot cover
The monstrous bulk of this ingratitude
With any size of words!’
TIMON OF ATHENS.
In the pleasant isle of Samos there were many and great misgivings
amongst the Athenian generals and the high-born, delicately nurtured,
intellectual Greeks who at this crisis were serving under them. Sailors
are generally conservative; they were often known to be oligarchic,
sometimes even monarchic. The officers and many of the men in the fleet
at Samos were no exception to this rule. Pressed to serve among them, in
this last extremity of their country, were not only many of the
‘aristoi,’ the better sort, who formed the bulk of the aristocracy, but
some even of the ‘beltistoi,’ the very best of all, the very highest of
that favoured class who divide mankind—that is, the gentle portion of
mankind, the rest not counting into the good—that is, the well-to-do and
worthy citizens of some estate, the better, and the best, in which last
class they place themselves.
Somehow this self-complacent distinction has at different times been
adopted by various ranks and classes, and the highest in the social
scale have been the most apt to consider themselves entitled to have
applied to them the predication of an adjective, with its varying
degrees of comparison, which other simpler folk suppose should be kept
exclusively to denote an ascending scale of virtue.
The high-born sailors who lay inactive all this time at Samos had fallen
into this convenient way of classifying their compeers and themselves,
as their fathers had done before them. They were of the good, the
better, and the very best, and they loved not the unclassed, the mere
‘hoi polloi,’ who actually ruled at Athens. They had often wondered how
a gentleman like Alkibiades, who, they all admitted, was, by right of
birth, one of the beltistoi, could, even in name, belong in politics to
the party of that huge collection of undistinguished, indistinguishable
human beings, ‘that balmy mass of puffed-up froth’ which called itself
the demos. His ancestors certainly had set him the example; his family
had belonged to that side, and had led these ungovernable masses, and
perhaps that made a difference. There is something conservative in doing
as your ancestors have done. He knew best. He was the cleverest man in
Greece, and ought to know. But for the life of them they could not
understand it. They could not believe that he really cared for tailors,
and tinkers, and cobblers, and water-carriers, the riff-raff of the
town.
Their hearts had yearned towards him when they saw him at Miletos
leading the poor Milesians and beating the stupid Argives. Some had
caught sight of him one day on a Spartan trireme passing by Samos,
defying the Athenians to come out into the open sea and fight. He stood
there on the high deck of the Spartan ship defying them cheerily,
dressed no better than a common Spartan. They recalled a day, three
years ago, when he stood on his own good ship the _Eros_, with its
purple sails,—the god Eros wrought in silver upon them, as it went
proudly at the head of the fleet, which they thought was going to subdue
the world, ‘and would have done so, had they left him alone, before his
enemies brought those silly charges against him in his absence, and the
sillier demos swallowed them.’ The _Eros_ had been taken into the
service of the state—indeed, was there at Samos,—though its purple sails
and silver gods of love had long been sacrificed to the necessities of
Athens.
These necessities were becoming serious. It was very well for the
Spartans to stay shut up at Miletos or Rhodes. The Spartans were
maintained by the Persian satrap. Tissaphernes paid regularly a whole
drachma a day for every sailor in the Spartan fleet. They had all the
ports and rich towns on the Ionian coast to victual in, ‘while we have
only Samos we can call our own, and three oboloi a day per man, paid at
long intervals, and the gods alone know how long even that pittance will
last.’ So said the sailors. And, indeed, an army of some thousands, with
one hundred and twenty triremes and their crews, cannot be kept for
nothing. Each day news was expected from Athens that she could do no
more, that the last obolos of the reserve of the ten thousand talents
laid up by Perikles was gone, and that they must shift for themselves in
future.
Besides these many causes of complaint, the sort of general the demos
had sent out to them did not tend to make them love the demos any
better. Phrynichos was universally distrusted and disliked. Sprung from
the lowest class of the people, he had made his way upward by the basest
means. He had been one of those, the most odious of mankind, who gained
a living by bringing accusations against citizens to the
dikasterion—sycophants they were called at Athens. At all times and
places the office of delator has been held in horror and contempt,
though it has not seldom raised those vile enough to adopt it as a
calling, to wealth and even civil dignity.
This calling was little known in Greece, and in that respect, democratic
Athens shows its moral superiority to imperial Rome. But Phrynichos
succeeded and grew rich. He grubbed together enough money to make
himself conspicuous, and he had sufficient cunning to mislead the
people. Of genius or capacity to lead a senate or an army, he had none,
but he was great in intrigue. Cunning is ever the mark of littleness of
mind, and generally ends by destroying the possessor of that gift; so it
was with Phrynichos.
Vague rumours, too, had reached the Athenians at Samos from time to time
of a huge fleet—of three hundred sail, it was said—lying at Aspendos,
waiting the orders of the Great King to come into Ionian waters to
destroy them. They cared not much for Persian ships or Persian sailors,
but three hundred long-ships added to the large fleet the Spartans had
already—what could even Athenians do against such odds? It was all the
fault of this infernal demos; but for them there would have been no
quarrel with the Spartans. Even the demos must see to what their rule
had brought the state, and any change would be accepted rather than the
starvation which now threatened them. The demos, though it loves
shouting, haranguing, or listening at its Ekklesia, does not love
starvation. So something must and should be done to change all this.
Thus thought and spake to one another the well-to-do Athenian sailors,
as they lay idling away their time, after the manner of sailors, in the
fair port of Samos.
Not far off, at Miletos, on one of these evenings, Alkibiades was
supping in the frugal Spartan fashion with his friend Astyochos, High
Admiral of the Spartan fleet, when they were suddenly interrupted in
their conversation by a messenger who had just arrived from Kaunus,
bearing an urgent despatch from the commissioners of Sparta.
The two friends were talking of their future plans and movements, both
complaining of the delay which kept them there in idleness, wondering
when help would be sent from Lakedaimôn, and if the Persian fleet would
ever really come to their assistance, and what it would be like when it
did come. They had heard that commissioners were to be sent from Sparta.
Astyochos asked what on earth commissioners were to be sent for; he
cursed the commissioners and their interference, and the changes in his
well-laid plans which these men, ignorant of warfare, would be sure to
make. As soon, however, as Astyochos had glanced at the message which
was thus suddenly given to him, he bade his friend good-night, for next
day early, he said, he would have to start for Kaunus with the fleet.
Alkibiades went back to his lodgings in the town. On his way a stranger
met him, and followed him along the street and into his room. The
Athenian turned round hastily upon him and grasped a weapon. They stood
face to face.
The stranger removed a weather-beaten sailor’s cap—there was Agrestides.
The exclamation of surprise that Alkibiades was about to make was
stopped by the strange and agitated look of the newcomer. They sat down
upon the plain, hard couch. Agrestides, trembling with emotion, told the
message of warning which Endios had given him.
He noticed the hard smile upon the face of perfect beauty. It came for a
moment and was gone.
The open-hearted sailor, for all his knowledge of his master, could not
help feeling astonishment at the cool reception of the news which he had
brought, the terrible nature and effect of which had not been absent
from his mind by day or night since it had been entrusted to him at
Sparta.
‘Get you as swift a horse as you can find at once. Meet me outside the
eastern gate in half an hour. Let no one think that you have seen me.’
Agrestides went out. Alkibiades put on a Spartan sailor’s dress, got his
horse himself, and in less time than he had mentioned was out of Miletos
by the eastern postern.
Agrestides was there before him. They went for some distance in an
easterly direction, and then, turning sharply to the south, struck the
road to Teichioussa. They rode in silence through the night. Alkibiades
knew the road. He had lately been that way when he saved Miletos for the
Spartans. Before dawn they were at Teichioussa. There he found some
Persians he knew, and learnt from them that Tissaphernes was at
Magnesia. After a short rest he got fresh horses and a Persian robe, and
the two set out again.
Throughout the past night’s ride along the solitary road Alkibiades had
spoken no word. His companion could not see his face. There was that
within him for which no words of human language have been found. For all
his faults—and by this time those who have followed his career thus far
may perhaps think he had some,—there lay beneath them all a well of
generosity. Among the varying qualities which went to make up that
mixture of divergent sentiments which we call his character was an
overwhelming, innate love of justice. When that was outraged, there
arose within him the deadliest and most enduring desire for revenge. He
enjoyed life enormously, and had that keen pleasure in the mere
consciousness of being, which others, less gifted, cannot imagine, and
he wished that all other men should enjoy their lives. He loved his
ease, his happiness, his indulgences; he wished that others should be
happy; the idea of happiness was, for the most part at that time,
confused with pleasure and indulgence. But above all this there was a
loathing of, a nervous shrinking from, anything which in any way could
be regarded by anyone as a taint of cowardice. ‘I would rather die than
be a coward,’ he had once said to Sokrates while he was an ardent,
dreamy boy. These are nearly the first words we find recorded of him.
When he once saw another boy of nearly twice his size taking by force a
smaller boy’s playthings from him, he rushed at him in such fury that he
had thrashed and smashed him before the bully had recovered from his
astonishment. It was this generous love of right as much as his
extraordinary gifts of intellect and beauty and excellence in all manly
exercises which had made him an uncrowned king among the boys of Athens,
and would have left him king of men throughout his life had not the
spirit of injustice been too strong for him.
And now, as he rode silently through the dark night to Teichioussa, his
wrongs came over him in their intense reality. It was only the old
determination still—to die rather than be, or be thought to be, a
coward—which prevented their weight from overpowering him. It was not
vindictiveness. You may call it pride, vanity, spirit of revenge, or
what you will, but it was rather a burning sense of wrong, whenever he
found that wrong was being done, and a determination to set it right; a
determination to be stopped by nothing till he should have conquered the
injustice, at whatever cost; a stubborn resolve to set himself right in
the eyes of men—this is what has been mistaken in him for
vindictiveness, and by those who have not read his character below the
surface, for selfishness and vanity. In fact, when a great deed was to
be done, however much it clashed with self-interest and vanity, no one
showed a greater disregard of self than he did.
In a sense this was in itself a species of pride or even vanity. He had
his share of both. In what great human action is there no admixture of
vanity? Is there, or has there ever been, a man who, when doing the most
unselfish, self-denying, humble work of charity, has not some far-hidden
and scarcely conscious sense of behaving rather better than some others
would have done? Has there ever been anyone who would devote his whole
existence to alleviate the sufferings of others if he were quite certain
that no one would ever know what he had done, and that he would never
get any possible reward, of any sort, for doing it?
We are not defending him in all he did. We only seek impartially to
analyze the feelings which had moved him in the past, and were now again
to do so, and to rescue his memory from the injustice that has been done
him by those who imagine him to have been a mere voluptuary, and who,
not able to understand his character, mistake his apparent carelessness
for flippancy, and are led away by contemporary writers whose personal
hostility to him has made them seek to depreciate, and even to distort,
where they cannot deny, the heroic actions which they are forced to
admit.
Against his natural inclinations and sympathies he had adopted the side
of the populace at Athens. Having chosen it, he fought repeatedly for
them, and would have gone on fighting for them, had they been true to
him, as he would have served his country’s cause for ever if it had let
him.
He had advised a war against a power which was domineering over smaller
states and cities allied with his country in Sicily. If he had been
allowed to finish the war which he had strongly advised and prosperously
begun, it would, as far as we can see, have redounded to the honour and
glory of his country. He had given his whole energy to the conduct of
the war; he was, he believed, about to bring it, in spite of the
difficulties in his way, to a successful end. He was recalled while
striving for this object, and doomed, without a spark of evidence worthy
of a sane man’s belief, upon a silly, trumped-up tale, to die a
shameful, a malefactor’s death. He knew he had been cursed by an
interested hierarchy. He knew a stone had been set up in Athens
recording his sentence and disgrace. The thought of that stone lie was
never absent from his mind through all the weary time he lived at
Sparta. Thenceforward, while that stone stood there, there never passed
a day without a renewal of his vow that it should be cast down by the
will and deed of those who had set it up, that the same voices which had
ordered the lie to be engraved upon it should order its obliteration,
and that the tongues which cursed him should recall their curse. Any
other life but one devoted to this end and object would have appeared to
him a life of cowardice. He declined to live in that condition.
Then when, in order to gain this end of his existence and to teach a
salutary lesson to the workers of injustice, he had sought the help of
Spartan enemies of Athens, and had promised to spare nothing in their
cause, and they had accepted his assistance and made use of him, he kept
his word to Sparta. How well he kept it she knew, and so did Athens. He
would have kept it to the end, as throughout his eventful life he was
ever true to whatever he had promised or had undertaken.
He had counselled the Spartan oligarchy, and told them what would come
to pass if his advice was taken. They took his counsel; every word came
true. His influence and power had gained for them the allies he had
detached from Athens. Day and night he thought and worked, and fought
and won, for his new associates. In the midst of his, and their, success
came this second blow, as that other one had come before.
Perhaps we can grow accustomed to the hardest fortune by degrees.
Succeeding sorrows, though on less grievous, seem to affect us less than
the first great sorrow did. We do not grow callous, but we seem to get
accustomed to them. This second stab was not felt so keenly as that
other; at all events, it was not from his own people that it came. His
vengeance, or rather the vindication of his fame from a suspicion that
he could live without punishing this Spartan evil-doing, was no less
startling and complete.
Through the long dark ride a nightmare of oppression had hung over him.
He tried to shake it off; it came again, heavier and more oppressive.
Had he no friends, no one on whom he could rely? Were all mankind
alike—all unjust, all plotting for his death, all, especially those he
deserved most thanks from, banded together for his destruction? His mind
was in a state of high excitement and exaltation, by the time he got to
Teichioussa. During their short stay there he had not slept, he had not
rested; the nightmare was still on him, pressing the life out of him,
just as the Spartan commissioners, or perhaps his friend Astyochos, or
some purchased assassin, would have done, if they could have caught him
at Miletos.
He rose to rid himself of this intolerable burden. He roused Agrestides;
he had almost forgotten Agrestides and gone off without him. The honest
sailor’s face cheered him as he looked at him for a moment, fast asleep,
worn out by bodily fatigue. He woke him. Agrestides sat up and gazed
round, half awake. He saw by the worn face of Alkibiades that he was
suffering. A tear fell down the rough man’s cheek. His master noticed
it, comprehended what it meant. All mankind, then, were not in league
against him; there was at least this one who was true. There might be
many others that he knew not of.
So they journeyed together. First, along the valley which they had
passed through the night before, on to the reach of sea not far eastward
of Miletos, then to the winding banks of the Maiandros, and through the
rich and pleasant land by which it flows. Agrestides told all he knew of
the conspiracy, and how he had been sent by Endios to warn Alkibiades of
his fate and frustrate his enemies’ designs. Alkibiades had forgotten
Endios. There was then another faithful friend that he could count upon.
He had put off the Spartan sailor’s dress, and wore a Persian robe of
some magnificence which he had obtained at Teichioussa. His spirits rose
again as he went on. With the bright, genial sunshine he had come out of
the dark horror of the past night, and was living in the future, cheered
by the new plans that he was already forming, with a double purpose—to
get back in honour to his country and to punish Sparta.
------------------------------------------------------------------------