Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen

The ephors were persuaded. A small fleet was assembled. The first group of ships to set out blundered into the Athenian fleet and were defeated. The commander was killed and the surviving ships blockaded off Epidaurus. The Spartans hesitated. Many were so discouraged by this first setback that they were ready to abandon the venture entirely, but Alcibiades succeeded in holding them to their purpose. A second group of five ships, commanded by the Spartan Chalcides but with Alcibiades on board as mastermind, dashed to Chios, arriving before the news of the first group’s defeat. Any seaman they encountered on the voyage was arrested and taken with them to ensure secrecy. They sailed up to the city while its Council was sitting. Alcibiades and Chalcides disembarked and marched into the assembly. To the consternation of the pro-Athenian party they announced that they were the vanguard of a Peloponnesian fleet (but omitted to mention that the rest of the aforesaid fleet was trapped several hundred miles away). The ruse was successful: their opponents capitulated. First Chios, then the neighbouring cities of Erythraea and Clazomenae, switched allegiance and prepared to resist the Athenians.

The suborning of Chios was a brilliant coup. It bears all Alcibiades’ trademarks: swiftness, audacity, a dependence on his own charisma and histrionic powers, flamboyant deception. Like the great runner Achilles he knew the value of speed, the way an army, or even a man, appearing where the rules of probability decree they cannot possibly be, can be as shocking and awesome as a supernatural apparition, demoralizing opposition and lending fresh courage to allies. Later that same year, after fighting all day in a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to repel the Athenians at Miletus, Alcibiades took horse and galloped southward through the night to meet the Peloponnesian fleet as it came into harbour and urge its captains to turn and sail on till morning. At dawn the next day, thanks to his despatch, the fleet appeared off Miletus and the Athenians slunk away ‘without realizing the fruit of their victory’. A masterly manipulator of the facts with which circumstances presented him, Alcibiades was one who could conjure up an illusion of victory, and use it to make that victory real.

His cunning and theatricality as a commander have their parallels in the political games he was obliged to play throughout the last ten years of his life to keep himself alive and in command. He was instrumental in the making of a treaty between the Persians and the Spartans that heavily favoured the former. There were suspicions in Sparta (quite possibly justified) that he was not a faithful servant to his adopted masters, masters who had a reputation for summarily and secretly killing those inconvenient to them. ‘The most powerful and ambitious of the Spartans were by now both jealous and tired of him,’ says Plutarch. After the battle of Miletus the Spartan admiral received orders (probably originating with King Agis) to have Alcibiades put to death. Somehow, possibly warned by Queen Timea, who was so recklessly in love with him that in private she called her baby son by his name, Alcibiades heard of the order even before the admiral received it. A condemned man now in both halves of the Greek world, he slipped away from the Peloponnesian fleet and, turning his back not only on his native city but on his native culture, took refuge with the Persian Satrap Tissaphernes at Sardis.

The Satrap received him well. Plutarch describes Tissaphernes as one ‘who was naturally inclined to malice and enjoyed the company of rogues, being anything but straightforward himself’, adding that he ‘admired intensely Alcibiades’ versatility and exceptional cleverness’. The Persian and the Athenian, two schemers and conjurors with the truth, became – apparently – fast friends. Once again Alcibiades played the chameleon, adopting (possibly with more enthusiasm than he had adopted Spartan asceticism) Persian luxury and Persian pomp. Once again his extraordinary charm worked its spell. ‘Even those who feared and envied him could not help taking pleasure in his company,’ writes Plutarch. Tissaphernes was so delighted with his guest that he named a pleasure garden ‘decorated in regal and extravagant style’ after him, one ‘famous for its refreshing streams and meadows and pavilions and pleasances’. Alcibiades ‘became his adviser in all things’, says Thucydides. But his position was terrifyingly insecure, dependent as it was on a web of deceptions. Tissaphernes welcomed him initially on the understanding that he offered advice on behalf of the Spartans, the people who in fact now sought his death. Over the next year he was to play a perilous game of bluff and double-bluff with Persians and Greeks alike, borrowing others’ authority to cloak his real situation, which was that of an impotent and resourceless fugitive, and seeking to impress each party by laying claim to vast influence over another who at best distrusted him, at worst wanted him dead.

Achilles, rejected by his own people but still the inveterate enemy of their enemies, prayed that Achaeans and Trojans might cut each other to pieces, leaving no one alive but himself and his beloved Patroclus to stride together across the corpses into the shattered ruins of Troy. Alcibiades, doubly rejected and doubly a renegade, gave Tissaphernes advice that echoed Achilles’ ferocious wish: ‘Let the Hellenes wear each other out among themselves.’ The Persian had been subsidizing the Peloponnesian fleet. Alcibiades suggested that he reduce the level of his support, lest the Spartans become a colonial power potentially as troublesome to Persia as Athens had been. The advice was shrewd. It was typical of Alcibiades, who preferred guile to bloodshed. It forcefully expresses his disengagement from all things Greek. It also, paradoxically, marks the beginning of his return to Greece. In Thucydides’ opinion, he ‘gave this advice not only because he thought it was the best he could offer, but also because he was looking out for a way to be recalled to his own country’. He must have been acutely aware of the precariousness of his position in Sardis. Sparta was now closed to him. Tissaphernes’ favour offered him a chance of returning to Athens, where he had once been so popular and influential, where in times gone by the young men had imitated his sandals and their elders had looked to him to win for them an empire in the West. That chance depended on his ability to persuade the Athenians that he might be able to come back to them, not as the impotent exile he really was, but as one who could call on all the vast resources of Persia’s Great King and who might, on his own terms, use those resources to Athens’ advantage.

The Athenians, in his long absence, had had cause to question their wisdom in rejecting him. After his recall from Sicily, Nicias was left in the unenviable position of commanding a massive and aggressive campaign he himself had advised against from its inception. Irresolute, in pain from a diseased kidney, repeatedly terrified by ominous portents, he dithered and procrastinated through a war that ended in horror. The survivors straggled back to Athens, months or years after the final defeat, to recount their terrible experiences. They told of the repeated slaughters, of the infernal scene at the River Assinarus, where parched Athenians trampled over corpses to get a palmful of water fouled by their own compatriots’ blood, of the months after the surrender during which the survivors were held in the quarries outside Syracuse, with no room to move or lie down so that those many who died remained wedged upright among the living, of their subsequent enslavement. Initially, they were met with incredulity. The Athenians at home ‘thought that this total destruction was something that could not possibly be true’. Next, the citizens turned murderously on those who had advocated the expedition and on the prophets and soothsayers who had promised success. Happy for Alcibiades, perhaps, that he was absent then. But over the next months and years, as Alcibiades was seen to serve their enemies so effectively at Chios and Miletus, suborning colonies just as he had intended to do, on Athens’ behalf, in Sicily, there must have been some of his fellow citizens who asked themselves what might have happened if only they had trusted him, if only he had been allowed to stand trial and clear his name, if only he had not been recalled. It is easier to admit to one’s own errors than to believe oneself helpless in the hands of a malign providence. There were many in Athens who blamed themselves, collectively if not personally, who believed that in turning against Alcibiades they had brought about their own downfall.

In the winter of 412–411 BC, when Alcibiades was with the Persians, the Athenian fleet was based at Samos, less than a mile off the coast of Asia Minor. Somehow, without Tissaphernes’ knowledge, Alcibiades communicated with the Athenian commanders there, first by letter and subsequently in secret meetings on the mainland. He intimated to them that if the democratic government in Athens were replaced by an oligarchy he would be able to persuade Tissaphernes to alter his policy. He would talk the Persian into supporting Athens, into paying their men and calling on the Phoenician navy, then supposedly lying inactive to the south, to fight alongside them. All this, Alcibiades suggested, he would do, if they could secure his pardon and restore him to his lost command. Most of the commanders, at least, believed him. One of them, Pisander, was to tell the people of Athens that for the sake of a Persian alliance they ‘must bring Alcibiades back, because he is the only person now living who can arrange this for us’. Once more Alcibiades had succeeded in presenting himself as one uniquely gifted, able, as no one else was, to alter destiny.

The Athenian commanders on Samos sent a delegation, led by Pisander, to Athens to advocate his recall and the change of constitution Alcibiades had demanded. With some difficulty, they made their case. Devastated by the calamity in Sicily, Athens was no match for Sparta. Without Persian support, it was in danger of extinction, not only as a colonial power but even as an independent city-state. The citizens were persuaded that the sacrifice of their cherished democratic rights, at least temporarily, was necessary for their very survival. The Assembly authorized Pisander and ten companions to negotiate with Alcibiades and Tissaphernes. They travelled back east to Sardis, where the Satrap, with Alcibiades at his side, received them. Alcibiades spoke for his protector-cum-employer. To the Athenians’ angry astonishment he made demands to which they could not possibly accede. Bitterly disappointed, Pisander – an ambitious man with no love for the democracy – resolved to forget Alcibiades and seize power on his own account. He returned to Athens where he and his co-conspirators staged a coup d’état. They established a savagely repressive oligarchic regime known as the Four Hundred. For three months they held power, imprisoning and murdering any who opposed them. In Samos meanwhile, the Athenian navy, under Thrasybulus and Thrasyllus, both of whom were long-time associates of Alcibiades, swore to uphold the democracy, thus effectively splitting the Athenian polis into two opposed parts – an unprotected city and a homeless armada. Thrasybulus, who had been from the first an enthusiastic advocate of Alcibiades’ recall, with some difficulty persuaded the mass of soldiers and seamen to agree to it. At last, with their consent, he crossed to the mainland and brought Alcibiades back with him to Samos. Four years after his life had been declared forfeit and his name had been cursed by every priest in the city Alcibiades was back among Athenians, albeit not actually in Athens. The troops elected him a general ‘and put everything into his hands’.

There is much that is baffling about these events, not least Alcibiades’ insistence on the overthrow of the Athenian democracy, which is inconsistent, not only with his subsequent acceptance of Thrasybulus’ invitation to become commander of the democratic forces, but also with his entire political history. But though the intricacies of his machinations during this tumultuous year will probably never be satisfactorily unravelled, his main strategy is clear. It was that of the confidence trickster so audacious that he gets away with his sting precisely because of its enormity. By the time Pisander’s delegation came to negotiate with him and Tissaphernes he had lost what influence he had had over the Satrap. The Spartan commander had contrived to let the Persian know that Alcibiades was communicating secretly with the Athenians. Tissaphernes may still have enjoyed Alcibiades’ company, but he no longer trusted him or acted on his advice. It is probable that Alcibiades deliberately aborted the negotiations with Pisander in order to avoid letting the Athenians perceive quite how impotent he really was. Thrasybulus saved him just in time from a potentially lethal situation. (Tissaphernes might well soon have found it expedient, as another Satrap was to do six years later, to trade Alcibiades’ life for the Spartans’ goodwill.) And yet, totally powerless as he was, dependent for his very survival on a foreign magnate who owed him nothing, he presented himself to the Athenians, oligarchs and democrats alike, as one who could dispose of the power of the greatest empire on earth. It is a measure of his astonishing nerve, of his indomitable charm, and of the potency of the glamour that had come to surround his name, that they appear to have believed him.

On Samos he spoke to the assembled Athenian forces, proclaiming that he, Alcibiades, had saved them, giving them, as Thucydides remarks drily, ‘a very exaggerated idea of the strength of his influence with Tissaphernes’ and assuring them that, thanks to him, the Satrap would never let them go short of supplies, ‘not even if he [Tissaphernes] had to sell his own bed’. His speech was a pyrotechnical display of rabble-rousing optimism. He flattered and excited his hearers. He assured them of imminent victory. By the time he had finished speaking ‘there was not a man who for anything in the world would have parted with his present hopes of coming through safely and of taking vengeance on the Four Hundred’. Intoxicated by the presence of their charismatic lost-and-found leader, the men were all for sailing on Athens directly. Alcibiades dissuaded them. Delegates arrived from Athens bearing placatory messages from the oligarchs. The troops would barely give them an audience and again, infuriated, cried out that they would sail on their own city and drive out the Four Hundred. Only Alcibiades’ presence averted what would have been a catastrophe for Athens. Once again he refused, as he had done at the time of his recall from Sicily, to play the mutineer. Such was his ascendancy over the troops that his oratory prevailed. ‘There was not another man in existence’, wrote Thucydides, ‘who could have controlled the mob at that time.’

Just as he had used his supposed influence over Tissaphernes to win him authority over the Athenians, now he used his new authority over the Athenians to revive his influence over the Persian. His first action as an Athenian general was to revisit Sardis, making a display to Tissaphernes of his new status and to the Athenians of his supposedly close relationship with the Satrap. It was a game he continued to play until, in 410 BC, the emptiness of his hand was brutally exposed. The Satrap happened to be in the neighbourhood of the Athenian fleet. Alcibiades, still feeling the need to make a parade of his supposed friendship with Tissaphernes, visited him at the head of a princely retinue and bearing splendid gifts; but Tissaphernes had received new orders from the Great King: he was to give the Spartans his unequivocal support. Alcibiades’ pompous visit gave him a welcome opportunity to demonstrate his zeal. He had his visitor arrested and imprisoned in Sardis. Alcibiades got away after only a month, claiming that Tissaphernes was still sufficiently devoted to him to have connived at his escape, but he could no longer plausibly lay claim to any influence over Persian policy.

Fortunately for him, he no longer needed to. During the four years after his recall to Samos, he won, or helped to win, a series of brilliant victories for Athens in their struggle with the Peloponnesians for control of the Aegean and the Hellespont. By degrees, as one success followed another, his mystique became so potent that his followers felt themselves glorified by it. By 410 BC, according to Plutarch, ‘the soldiers who had served under Alcibiades were so elated and confident that they disdained to mix any longer with the rest of the army: they boasted that the others had been defeated time and again, but that they were invincible’. Though he was only one of several Athenian commanders, and though Thrasybulus, for one, was his equal in military talent, Alcibiades was the most dazzling. It was he, not his peers, who addressed the troops before a battle; and it was he to whom glory accrued. As Cornelius Nepos remarked, ‘Thrasybulus accomplished many victories without Alcibiades. The latter accomplished nothing without the former, and yet he [Alcibiades], by some gift of his nature, gained the credit for everything.’

For Athens, as for Sparta, his swiftness in action was astonishing. At the battle of Abydos in 411 BC his arrival with eighteen ships after racing north from Samos proved decisive. As he came into view, ‘the Spartans turned and ran for shelter’, records Xenophon. A year later, before the battle of Cyzicus, he gained a crucial lead by galloping overland across the Gallipoli peninsula. During the battle itself he played the decoy, luring the Spartans out into open sea where his colleagues, Theramenes and Thrasybulus, could close in on their flank. When the Spartans saw the trap and attempted to retreat Alcibiades nimbly turned his ships and pursued them back to the shore. Cyzicus, a great victory for Athens, was a cooperative action, but it was Alcibiades, the fleet, the daring, who won most of the acclaim.

His Puck-like propensity for appearing where he was least expected was theatrical. So were his other gifts, for dazzling the eye and mind with his presence, for conspicuous courage, and for subterfuge. At Selymbria in 408 BC his arrangement with the friendly factions within the city, who were to show a lighted torch at midnight to signal that they were ready to open the gates and rise in support of him, was botched. The signal was given early, before Alcibiades’ army was prepared. Determined not to miss his opportunity, Alcibiades dashed into the city, followed by only fifty men, to find himself surrounded by the entire Selymbrian army. He was trapped. At any moment he could have been killed or captured. Coolly he ordered one of his men to a sound a trumpet and another to make a formal proclamation forbidding the Selymbrians to take up arms. The Selymbrians, bewildered by a performance so inappropriate to the reality of the situation, believed the performance and discounted the reality. Nervous and disoriented, afraid perhaps that the rest of the Athenians had already entered the city (impossible to be sure in the darkness), they failed to use their advantage. Stupefied by Alcibiades’ effrontery, they parleyed with him until his army at last came up and their surrender was assured.

In the same year he won the greater prize of Byzantium by similar sleight of hand. Again, he made contact with people within the city who were ready to betray their Spartan masters. The Athenians had been blockading the harbour; but on the appointed day, their fleet sailed away, or seemed to do so. At the same time, Alcibiades’ army, which had been besieging the city on the landward side, withdrew far enough to be out of sight. When night fell, the army silently returned, while the Athenian fleet sailed back into harbour and attacked the Spartan ships there ‘with a great deal of shouting, commotion and uproar’. The Spartans and their supporters raced down to the waterfront. Meanwhile Alcibiades’ Byzantine allies placed ladders against the walls allowing his men to flood into the city and to overwhelm its defenders. The decisive moment of the battle came when Alcibiades, who understood the strategic value of magnanimity, had it proclaimed throughout the city that the Byzantines would not be harmed, and a decisive proportion of the population abruptly changed sides.

The Athenian troops adored him: he had yet to test the temper of the Athenians at home. Pisander’s oligarchy was short lived. The politically moderate government of the Five Thousand that replaced it endorsed Alcibiades’ command and invited him to return. But he waited another four years before he risked re-entering the city from which he had been outcast, in which his name had been anathematized and he himself condemned to die. When he finally returned he did so as the victor in a war that had made the Hellespont, at least temporarily, an Athenian lake. As Plutarch explains, ‘he had thought it best not to meet [the Athenians] empty handed, without any positive achievement to his credit and owing his recall to the pity and good nature of the people, but rather to arrive in a blaze of glory’.

Two hundred years later Duris of Samos, who claimed to be Alcibiades’ descendant, wrote an excited description of his return to Athens, at the head of a great fleet of ships decorated from stem to stern with captured shields and trophies, with flute players and actors timing the oarsmen’s strokes, and with Alcibiades’ own ship rigged with purple sails ‘as though he were leading a crowd of revellers after some drinking party’. More reliable sources give a less festive but more dramatic account. Thrasyllus went ahead with the main body of the fleet while Alcibiades, with only twenty ships, delayed. Perhaps he calculated that it would be to his advantage to let the bulk of the fighting men, who adored him, arrive in the city before he did, and to give them time to spread tales of his prowess among the citizens. He stopped to raise money (conscious as ever of its usefulness in procuring popularity) and sailed for Athens only after he had received word that the Assembly had expressed its approval by electing him general once again. Even then he was apprehensive. It is unclear from the ancient sources whether the death sentence against him had ever been formally revoked: he still had many enemies in the city. Arriving at Piraeus, he anchored close to the shore and scanned the waiting crowd. Only when he had picked out a group of friends, including one of his cousins, did he feel safe enough to land. He came ashore surrounded by a bodyguard ready to fight off any attempt at arresting him.

His caution must quickly have given way to triumph. His return was greeted with wild scenes of celebration. This homecoming was his apotheosis, the moment when the Athenians received him as though he were one of Plato’s men of gold, a quasi-divine hero who could lead them forward to a glittering future. A vast crowd, near-hysterical with joy, had gathered on the waterfront. According to Diodorus Siculus, ‘all men thronged to the harbour to catch sight of Alcibiades, the slaves vying with the free so that the city was entirely deserted’. The entire crowd, alight with enthusiasm, escorted him back into the city, yelling out their exultation as they went. People struggled to get close enough to embrace him and to crown him with garlands. Many wept ‘for they reflected that they would never have suffered the Sicilian disaster or any of their terrible disappointments if only they had left Alcibiades in command’; but their regrets were mingled with rejoicing, for according to Diodorus, ‘practically all men believed’ that with his return from exile ‘great fortune had come again to the city’.

Carried on the wave of the jubilant throng, Alcibiades made his way to the Pnyx, where he spoke to the full Assembly. He was a magnificent figure, his beauty, according to Plutarch, being as great in the prime of his manhood as it had been when he was a boy, ‘lending him extraordinary grace and charm’. He was also a brilliant player on others’ emotions. Shrewdly, he chose to be magnanimous, to blame no one for his exile. Instead, with tears in his eyes, he spoke of ‘ill-fortune’ and the ‘evil genius that had dogged his career’. Many listeners wept. Others cried out angrily, just as if, remarks Cornelius Nepos drily, ‘it had been another people, and not those who were then shedding tears, that had condemned him for impiety’. He ended his speech with rousing optimism, promising Athens a splendid future. His audience applauded ecstatically. His confiscated property was restored to him. The stele recording his disgrace was taken down from the Acropolis and thrown into the sea. The priests were commanded to solemnly revoke the curses they had once cast on him. He was crowned with a golden crown and appointed general with absolute authority by land and sea (a title which only his guardian Pericles had held before him). For years – in Sparta, in Sardis, in Samos – he had been claiming superhuman powers for himself. Now, at last, unreal as it still was, that claim was believed by his compatriots. Alcibiades was acclaimed throughout the city as the man who could make Athens great once more.