Nor was Alcibiades the only man so charged, but scores and even hundreds, of all parties, fell under the informer's suit. For the scale of the desecration was so vast, the people believed, as to have been perpetrated only by a coalition, or coalitions in collusion with others of like minds, with intent to overthrow the state.
Rounds of arrests began. An informer of one faction would come forward, naming fifty or seventy or even a hundred. At once a second stooge materialized, as spokesman for the accused faction, to denounce those who had denounced his own.
In terror the people threw them all in jail. Arrests went on for days, enacted not by officials observing due process, but by armed posses snatching their victims off the street and even from their own homes. The agora stood vacant; none dared enter for fear of arrest. Appeals to the courts went unheeded; the magistrates were terrified of being hauled off themselves. Such was the chaos in the Assembly that sessions were not merely adjourned in disorder but suspended entirely. Nor did this reign of terror abate with time but, fueled by its own excesses, heightened and intensified until it had set the state at the very threshold of anarchy.
What had driven the city mad?
In my view it was Sicily-the people's fear of this epochal enterprise, and fear of its author and his equally monumental pride.
Remember, my grandson, that Alcibiades possessed no dearth of enemies. Like a lightning rod, his ambition drew the mistrust and hatred of both democrats and oligarchs. The aristocrats feared him as a traitor to his class. He had sold out his kind, they believed, to pursue his ambition as champion of the masses. In the nobles' view, the Sicilian expedition boded nothing less than their own extinction.
Should Alcibiades return victorious-which he doubtless would, backed by this insuperable fleet-what would be his first act upon setting foot ashore? With the mob's blessing he would set himself up as tyrant. Nor would he tarry long to make his second move, the gentry believed, namely to strip them of their power or put them to death. Such were Alcibiades' enemies of the nobility.
Of the commons his foes were equally virulent-those halfpenny rogues who had ridden to fame on the backs of the multitude, before he had snatched this constituency from them. Hyperbolus, the arch-demagogue, whom Alcibiades had conspired successfully to exile; Androcles, his successor, who nursed a bitter grudge to requite his friend; Cleonymus, that most arrant of wretches; Thydippus, Cleophon, and the great thug Archedemus. What characterized these villains was beastlike cunning and shamelessness. No outrage was beneath them. They knew how to play to the people's baser motives and would stay at nothing to achieve their ends.
Which brings us back to the mad stunt of defacing the statues of Hermes. Who could do such a thing? Both extremes possessed equal incentive-and equal want of scruple. And why would the people react with such hysteria?
In Polemides' account of the Sicilian disaster he relates a tactic employed by the enemy when harrying the mass of our army in its retreat. The foe would launch his attacks not along the entire column, but concentrated upon one point of the rear guard. His object was to incite a panic in one sector which would be communicated, as occurs so frequently in large bodies of men, to the rest.
A city can panic too. A polity may go to pieces.
The evil of panic is this: that even the brave man is powerless to stand against it, but is either overrun where he stands or swept up in flight, indistinguishable from the coward.
I had an acquaintance in those years named Bias, a ship's executive officer, thrice-decorated, whom all knew to be blameless of wrongdoing. He was arrested nonetheless and sentenced to death. In desperation he resorted to the following gambit: he confessed to crimes he had not committed and, granted immunity, promised to name the names of his coconspirators. He then cited only those who had already been denounced by others, or had fled the city and were safe. It worked; he was released. But one of the men he had named, Epicles the son of Automedon, had not yet got clear; he was arrested and executed.
Grief-stricken, Epicles' brother Polites marched to Bias' house and, hauling him forth to the street, slew him in broad daylight, daring any to bring charges.
Such extremities, multiplied a thousandfold, had now seized the city. Suppose your friend tugs you aside and asks as a friend,
“Tell the truth: do you have information about the guilty parties?”
If you do and confess, your friend may inform against you, under pressures you cannot know. So you tell the truth as it were a lie, or a lie as it were the truth, and he performs the same. Thus friend becomes dissevered from friend, even brother from brother, for in the atmosphere of terror and mistrust, one could set faith not even in his own kin.
In the end, after all stool pigeons had sung and informers wriggled clear of the rack, it came to light that one political club of a hundred members had carried out the mischief. In my opinion it was damn stupidity. They struck out as children in spite, owning no notion of the evils their heedlessness would unleash.
Recall the insight of Euryptolemus, reported by our client Polemides, from that evening at the harbor tavern, Fair Wind. Two currents were at war for Athens' soul, he professed: the ancient ways, which revere the gods, and the modern, which make the city itself a god.
It was the ancient ways which now rebelled. These cracked-pate young aristocrats had defaced the city's divinities by night, and this struck the fear of God into the masses. That bulwark which understays any society, the simple God-fearing soul of its people, quailed and broke before this affront to heaven.
Now their audacity to mount this spectacular overseas enterprise became, to them, that pride which calls down the wrath of Olympus. Their nerve failed. They recalled the Plague and the death ships coming home with the ashes of their sons. Staring at the shattered statues of Hermes, who escorts men to the underworld, they felt dread of hell and terror of the Almighty. The Sicily fleet seemed now an armada of doom. They recoiled before the scale of their own ambition and, inflamed by those with motive to profit thereby, struck out at its author.
Numbers had now been executed. Scores more moldered in prison; hundreds had fled the city entire. Yet Alcibiades' enemies dared not arrest him, such was his backing with the fleet and the army, the foreign sailors and the allies. Instead they sniped with rumor and defamation. An indictment for treason was being prepared, they said. Reports were published that Alcibiades stood in league with Sparta to conduct the fleet to destruction. His foes calumniated the memory of his father and grandfathers, citing the Lacedaemonian derivation of their names, and Alcibiades' own, and blackening even their heroic deaths in battle against the Persians by recalling that these actions had been fought in alliance with the warriors of Sparta. Not even the memory of Alcibiades'
Lacedaemonian nurse Amycla was spared. Even as a babe, his foes testified, Alcibiades had “suckled at the breast of Sparta.”
My comrade the younger Pericles, in concern for his kinsman, went seeking him one morning.
“It was still early, that hour when shadows are long and the market vendors have not yet set up their stalls, when we came upon him, Orestiades and I, in the Lyceum. The square was deserted; he was with Socrates, the pair obscured in the early mist, beneath the plane tree that grows out of the hillside above the fountain. So locked were they two in converse that my companion and I drew up at a distance, not wishing to intrude.
“Alcibiades stood before the philosopher in a posture of abjection. I had never seen him so chastened or contrite. His head hung; tears streamed down his face. Socrates had one hand placed in kindness upon the younger man's shoulder. He was speaking to him quietly but with force. At once Alcibiades dropped upon one knee and buried his face in his master's cloak. Even at a distance my mate and I could see his shoulders shudder as sobs wrenched from his breast. We withdrew at once, neither wishing to be seen nor to let our friend know that he had been.”
Despite his insistence upon being tried without delay, Alcibiades' enemies conspired to have the arraignment p
ostponed.
They knew if they gave their rival the chance to speak before a jury, he would sway the people to his side. His enemies wanted Alcibiades gone, at sea with the fleet, so they could try him in absentia, where he could not speak in his own defense.
Throughout this ordeal Alcibiades maintained his rounds of exercise and attendance upon the fleet. I was present one morning at the expeditionary offices, housed temporarily in a dockside warehouse, when Alcibiades arrived. He was alone save his trainer; they had come straight from the gymnasium, their flesh still mottled with the dust of the wrestling pit. Alcibiades was clearly distraught.
“What more do the people want of me? I have donated all I own to the city, my fortune to the last obol, and now they defame even the memory of my fathers!” He was desperate to have his day in court. Let the demos convict him now and wake to their folly when he was dead.
“I can't take this anymore. I can't take it!”
His hair was tangled and matted with sweat. He paced barefoot and bare-chested, appearing, one could not but envisage, as Achilles in his tent before Troy, storming in rage at his maltreatment at the hands of Agamemnon. At one point his shoulder brushed a stack of crockery, sending several vessels crashing to the floor. “Let them charge this to my account as well!”
To deflect Alcibiades' attention onto less doleful matters, an officer presented several documents of the Admiralty which required Alcibiades' approval and which confirmed the readiness of the fleet to sail. This sight seemed only to aggravate the man's distress.
“Who is to blame for this?” He wrung his fingers through his hair. “None but myself. No one but me.”
A number of ship's captains had entered through the wharfside portals and now collected about their commander, attesting their loyalty. Tears stood in Alcibiades' eyes; for a moment it seemed he would be overcome. Then, regarding the dismay upon his colleagues' faces, he was struck by the comic aspect and burst into a laugh.
“Cheer up, my friends; our enemies have stabbed me only with the pen. I bleed ink, not blood.”
He strode onto the wharf, followed by the officers, and dove from its planks into the bay. A cheer arose; hands hauled him dripping forth. A cloak was set about his shoulders. The men surrounded him.
“To hell with these jackals,” a captain named Eurylochus spat.
“Let the sea wash their lies from our backs.”
Another trierarch, Patrocles, seconded this with passion. Forget the trial, he urged Alcibiades, embark now with the fleet. “God made no anodyne like victory.”
Alcibiades drew up, clearly aware of the resonance of this man's name and its forebear of glory, the beloved companion of Achilles.
“Patrocles, my friend. Is your name an omen? Will my wrath, as Achilles', be the cause of your death and my own?”
The moment hung like a sword from a strand. Then, from the men as one:
“Sicily!”
Alcibiades regarded them. “Shall we sail, brothers, with enemies at our backs?”
“Sicily!” his mates resounded, more ardent.
There beyond his shoulder the vessels of the fleet awaited in their slips or rode to anchor, line after line filling the harbor, while he whose will and ambition had summoned this armada into existence and elevated it to its pitch of readiness drew up gravely, weighing in his heart this decision which necessity and his own fate had forced upon him and his country.
“Sicily!” the officers cried, and again: “Sicily!”
Book IV
SICILY
XVIII
A DISLOCATION OF RECALL
Before Sicily [Polemides resumed] I had never fought as a marine. The sea fighter's skills were new to me. I knew nothing of two-and-ones or concentrics, the breakthrough or the cutback; I had never thrown a javelin from a kneeling position or dashed forward along a trireme deck, that my weight and my comrades' decline the drive of the ram and cause her to rip the foe more lethally beneath the waterline.
I have had a nightmare here in prison, the same repeated eve upon eve. In the dream I am in Sicily, the Great Harbor of Syracuse.
Of our hundred and forty-four warships, the Athenian and Corcyrean fleets combined, under fifty remain, fit to fight. These have fled to the strand beneath the Olympieum and are thrown up in disorder behind the palisade. Syracusan and Corinthian warships drive at us; the axes of their marines assault the towers bearing the massive drop-weight “dolphins,” while their archers sling ironheads upon us in the water.
Out in the harbor our ships are burning and going down. Along the shore the enemy infantry waits. Where I am, on the palisade, the foe keeps coming. Ram and back water, ram and back water.
These sons of whores are good. Even after ten hours, their blades bite in unison. I am flung rearward into the backwash. The surface is choked with arrow-shafts, marine javelins, and shivered oars.
My strength fails. A ship passes over. I'm going down for good when I wake in terror.
It has been my experience that in certain instances of battle or other moments of extreme peril, reality as it is normally experienced becomes supplanted by a dreamlike state in which events seem to unfold with a stately deliberateness, a retardation almost leisurely, and we ourselves stand apart as if observers of our own peril. A sense of wonder pervades all; one becomes vividly, preternaturally aware, not alone of danger but of beauty as well.
He sees, and keenly appreciates, such subtleties as the play of light upon water, even such surface incarnadined with the blood of comrades dearly loved, or his own. One is able to observe to himself, “I am going to die now,” and absorb this with equanimity.
My brother was fascinated by this phenomenon of dislocation.
Its stem, he maintained, was fear. Fear so overpowering that it drives the animating spirit from the flesh, as in death. In those moments, Lion believed, we actually were dead. The element of soul had fled; it must find its vessel of flesh and reinhabit it.
Sometimes, Lion professed, the soul did not wish to. It was happier whereto it had vacated. This was battle madness, mania maches; the lost soul, the “thousand-yard stare.”
Lion believed that ambition, too, could drive the soul from the body, as could passionate love, greed, or possession by wine and drugs. He warranted that certain forms of government, or misgovernment, could deprive entire populations of their soul. But I drift apart from our tale.
You must bear with me, my friend, if recollection of those days passes before the inward eye as flotsam and marine debris, untethered to the moorings of time. This is how Sicily stands, or drifts, within my recall-as neither dream nor reality but some third state, recaptured only in snatches, as a battle glimpsed through smoke upon the water.
I remember the eve of Alcibiades' recall. This was at Catana in Sicily, three months gone from Athens. Lion and I had embarked in posts not directly under our commander, but he had ordered us and others of long-standing acquaintance seconded to his party. He wanted men he trusted. And he wished to present the most concerted corps of companions when he opened negotiations with the Sicilian cities.
Naxos came over at once; Catana after a little knuckle-busting.
Messana lacked only a nudge. He took a deputation of four ships to Camarina, which, though Dorian, had been Athens' ally in the past and which, our commander's agents now claimed, was ripe to fall.
She sealed her gates, however, refusing even to let us land.
Alcibiades ordered the tiny flotilla back to Catana. When it got there, the state galley Salaminia was waiting, with the orders revoking his command.
I was in Alcibiades' party when Salaminia's master approached, accompanied by two summoners of the Assembly. These were both men of Scambonidae, Alcibiades' home district, known to him, so as not to provoke his defiance. All were unarmed. The officers presented their papers and commanded him to accompany them to Athens, to stand trial for impiety, profanation, and treason.
All expressed regret at the unfortunate nature of their errand
. If Alcibiades wished, he need not return a prisoner aboard Salaminia but follow in his own ship. However, he must embark at once, no later than morning.
That night one spoke of nothing but the prospect of a coup.
Nicias and Lamachus called out the marines, myself and Lion among them; we were posted eight to a vessel and by companies at arms up and down the strand.
Years later I served aboard Calliope with the younger Pericles.
Alcibiades' executive officer Antiochus had been his mentor in naval warfare. Antiochus had told him, Pericles recounted, that Alcibiades, anticipating his recall for trial, had for months been orchestrating a campaign via post and through allies at home whose object was to have the charges against him reframed and the indictment of profanation, the only one he truly feared because of the passionate outrage it evoked among the people, dropped.
This goal, letters received two days previous confirmed, had been effected. Such was the news Alcibiades had been hoping for.
Against these reduced charges he was certain he could prevail, defending himself in person before the Assembly. Now on the strand at Catana, however, the summoners informed him, apparently in ignorance of the consequences, that the profanation charges had in fact not been dropped. Alcibiades had been double-crossed, and with brilliance, too late in the game to reply with a counter.
Among Alcibiades' counselors, Mantitheus, Antiochus, and his cousin also named Alcibiades lobbied most vehemently for a coup, dissent voiced by Euryptolemus and Adeimantus. Those who championed this supreme stroke urged Alcibiades to seize command of the expedition here and now, imprisoning or if necessary putting to death all who refused to take his side. Nor did these radicals quit there. They proposed abandoning the Sicilian campaign where it stood and setting sail with the entire fleet for Athens, where Alcibiades, backed by army and navy, would declare himself master of the state.
Tides of War, a Novel of Alcibiades and the Peloponnesian War Page 16
