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 other 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 stelae recording his disgrace were 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 that claim, unreal as it still was, was believed by his compatriots. Alcibiades was acclaimed throughout the city as the man who could make Athens great once more.
The extravagant joy which attended his homecoming was followed by an even more impressive demonstration of his rehabilitation. The grandest spectacle of the Athenian religious calendar was the procession which escorted the sacred objects and the image of the god Iacchus from Athens to Eleusis, some fourteen miles away, for the annual celebration of the Mysteries. The marchers included young men about to be initiated, initiates wreathed with myrtle, and long-robed priests. Bands of flute players, dancers, and hymn-singing choirs accompanied the procession, which halted frequently along the route to make sacrifices and to perform sacred rites. Holiday and awe-inspiring spectacle at once, the ceremony held profound significance for all Athenians, but for several years it had not taken place. The presence of the Spartan garrison at Decelea, in the mountains overlooking the route, had rendered it too dangerous. Instead Iacchus had been carried by boat to Eleusis with a small escort and none of the usual attendant ceremony, a compromise sadly emblematic of Athens’ reduced and endangered condition.
Alcibiades—the traitor who had advised the Spartans to fortify Decelea, the blasphemer who had repeatedly made a mock of the Eleusinian Mysteries and who had been condemned to death for doing so—seized the chance to demonstrate his reformation with an operation exactly designed to erase his past sins. Scrupulously devout now, he first consulted the priests before announcing, with their approval, that the procession would take place. He posted lookouts on the hilltops all along the route, sent out an advance guard at daybreak to clear the way, and then, surrounding the procession with his troops, escorted it to Eleusis and back. Had King Agis led out an attacking force from Decelea, Alcibiades would have been able to make a parade of his military skills and his loyalty, fighting, in sight of all Athens, to defend the sacred mysteries. As it was, the procession went and returned unmolested. The participants had walked, according to Plutarch, “in solemn order and complete silence.” Throughout the thirty-mile round-trip journey they must have been in a state of mingled terror and exaltation. When they returned safely to the city, their relief, and that of the watching citizens, was expressed in further outbursts of rapturous acclaim for Alcibiades. The poorer classes especially were convulsed by an “extraordinary passion” for him. The troops were exultant, boasting once again that under his command they were invincible. The one-time blasphemer was hailed as “a high priest and an initiator into the Mysteries.” It seemed there was nothing he could not do.
To live in a democracy is not easy. The freeborn adult male citizens of fifth-century Athens were obliged to accept responsibility for their own destinies. There was no tyrant whom they could reproach for their misfortunes or fatherly autocrat on whom they could rely for protection. They were expected to participate in the making of crucial policy decisions. If those decisions proved to have been bad ones, there was no person or institution outside of themselves that the citizens could blame for their ill consequences. Nor was there any all-powerful authority who could erase their mistakes and comfort them in their troubles. Many people, in Athens in Alcibiades’ lifetime as well as in the numerous modern democracies where demagogues have become dictators, longed to be reduced once more to the condition of infancy, to be made free of the wearisome responsibilities of independent adulthood.
In Athens political debate was urgent, incessant, bafflingly inconclusive. The political process was obstructed and complicated at every turn by envy, by corruption, and by the blackmailers who made a living by threatening to expose it. The tenure of any office was brief. There was no certainty, no continuity, no easygoing reliance on precedent. Every principle, and every practical detail, was to be debated and voted upon. This edgy insistence on examining every question afresh each time it arose is one of the things that made Athens so exhilarating a society, which gave it its extraordinary intellectual and political vitality. But it imposed a burden on the citizens which exasperated or frightened many, and which others found simply too great to bear. In the summer of 408 BC, when Alcibiades descended on Athens surrounded by the golden aura of the conquering hero, as splendid as one of those godlike men whom Aristotle judged fully entitled to enslave their fellows, there were many who entertained the fantasy of surrendering their exhausting freedom to him. People came to him and begged him to “rid them of those loud-mouthed wind-bags who were the bane of the city,” to silence the ceaseless, bewildering play of argument and counterargument for which the entire city was the stage by seizing absolute power. In an extraordinary frenzy of self-abasement people begged him to make himself dictator, to “sweep away decrees and laws as he thought fit,” to overturn the constitution and wipe out all opposition so that “he would be free to handle affairs,” thus relieving the demoralized and insecure citizens of the awful burden of their liberty.
Alcibiades did not respond to the invitation. He had work to do elsewhere. The Spartan fleet under its formidable new commander Lysander was lying at Ephesus, a menace to the Athenian colonies. The Assembly granted Alcibiades all the men and ships he required, even allowing him the unprecedented honor of choosing his own fellow generals. Their generosity was expressive of the people’s adulation of their new commander in chief. Besides, the Assembly’s more thoughtful members were probably anxious to speed him on his way. “We do not know what Alcibiades himself thought of a dictatorship,” writes Plutarch, “but certainly the leading citizens at this time were frightened of it.” They mistook their man. The insatiable ambition Socrates had seen in his disciple was not for stay-at-home executive power, but for world-bestriding glory. Soon after the Eleusinian festival, just four months after he had entered the city, Alcibiades left Athens forever.
He had seduced the people and alarmed the leading democrats, but he had not won over the gods. The day on which he landed in Athens to be so rapturously received was the unluckiest of the year, the day when the image of Athena on the Acropolis was veiled for secret purification rites. Perhaps those citizens hostile to Alcibiades pointed out the inauspicious circumstance at the time, to be ignored by the ecstatic majority. Perhaps it was only with hindsight that people were to remember it as a sign of what was to come. At the zenith of his popularity the city’s patron goddess turned her face away from him. Only months later the city’s people were, as though in imitation, to withdraw their favor.
“If ever a man was destroyed by his own high reputation,” wrote Plutarch, “it was Alcibiades.” He was now expected to work miracles, and when he failed to do so the lethally volatile democratic Assembly began to grumble and to doubt his loyalty, “for they were convinced that nothing which he seriously wanted to achieve was beyond him.” He sailed to Andros, where he established a fort but failed to take the city. When he arrived at Notium in Asia Minor, across the bay from the Peloponnesian fleet at Ephesus, he was unable to lure Lysander out of the safety of the harbor. The oarsmen began to defect: the Spartans, now subsidized by the Persian Prince Cyrus, were able to offer them 25 percent more pay than the A
thenians. Alcibiades, foreseeing a long and expensive wait before he could force a decisive engagement, sailed off to raise funds elsewhere, leaving the main fleet under the temporary command of Antiochus, the pilot of his ship. It was a controversial appointment. Antiochus was a professional sailor, not one of the aristocratic trierarchs or amateur ship’s captains who, though probably less competent, were his social superiors and who would have seen themselves as outranking him. He had known and served Alcibiades for nearly twenty years, ever since that long ago occasion when he had caught his future commander’s errant quail for him in the Assembly. Alcibiades’ decision to place him in command was audacious, unconventional, and, as it turned out, calamitous. In Alcibiades’ absence, in defiance of his explicit order, Antiochus provoked a battle for which he was totally unprepared. Lysander put the Athenians to flight, sinking twenty ships. Antiochus was killed. Alcibiades raced back to Notium and attempted, unsuccessfully, to induce Lysander to fight again. Only a brilliant victory could have saved him, and it was not forthcoming.
When the news reached Athens all the old accusations against him were revived. He was arrogant. He was depraved. He was untrustworthy. The people who only months before had been ready to give up their political rights for the privilege of being his subjects now turned on him with a fury as irrational as their adulation had been. It was alleged that he intended to make himself a tyrant. It was pointed out that he had built a castle in Thrace—why, asked his accusers, would a loyal Athenian need such a bolt-hole? His appointment of Antiochus, unquestionably a mistake, was presented as evidence of his wicked frivolity. “He had entrusted the command,” said one of his accusers, “to men who had won his confidence simply through their capacity for drinking and spinning sailors’ yarns, because he wanted to leave himself free to cruise about raising money and indulging in debauchery and drunken orgies with the courtesans of Abydos and Ionia.” He was accused of accepting a bribe from the king of Cyme, a city he had failed to take. None of the charges against him were substantiated. They did not need to be. After all, in 417 BC, the Athenians had come close to banishing him by ostracism for no reason at all except that he had grown too great. Now new generals were elected, one of whom was ordered to sail east and relieve Alcibiades of his command. On hearing that his city, which he had so grossly betrayed but to which he had since done such great service, had once again rejected him, Alcibiades left the fleet, left the Greek world entirely, and, Coriolanus-like, sought a world elsewhere. Taking only one ship, he sailed away northward to Thrace, where he had indeed had the foresight to acquire not one but three castles.
There, among the lawless barbarians, he recruited a private army and embarked upon the life of a brigand chief, a robber baron, preying upon his neighbors and taking prisoners for ransom. Adaptable as ever, he assumed the habits of his new countrymen, winning the friendship of the tribal chieftains by matching them, according to Cornelius Nepos, “in drunkenness and lust.” Perhaps, as the historian and novelist Peter Green has suggested, this was the debauchery attendant on despair, but perhaps it was the zestful beginning of yet another new life. We shall see how Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar, the Cid, another hero who grew too great for the state he served and was therefore outcast, was to begin again as a bandit in the badlands of eleventh-century Spain and ultimately to make himself prince of a great city. After two years in Thrace Alcibiades was to boast that he was treated there “like a king.”
In Athens meanwhile, as disaster followed upon disaster, he gradually acquired the mystique of a king over the water, a once and perhaps future redeemer of his native city. A year after the beginning of his second exile Aristophanes had a character in The Frogs say of him that the Athenians “yearn for him, they hate him, but they want to have him back.” Just once more his history touched theirs, in an encounter which yet again identified him as the man who could have saved Athens if only Athens had allowed him to do so. In 405 BC, on the eve of the disastrous battle of Aegospotami, he appeared, a troubling deus ex machina, in the Athenian camp. The Athenian and Spartan fleets were drawn up facing each other in the narrowest part of the Hellespont, the Athenians being on the Thracian shore, only a few miles from his stronghold. Alcibiades, uninvited and unexpected, came riding in and demanded a meeting with the generals. He pointed out to them that their position was dangerously exposed, and too far from their source of supplies. He advised them to move and he offered them the armies of two Thracian kings on whom he could rely. The Athenian generals would not so much as listen to his advice. Perhaps they remembered how he had once offered to deliver Persian money and Phoenician ships and failed to do so. Perhaps they thought of how Thrasybulus had been eclipsed, and, as Diodorus suggests, were jealously protecting their own reputations, fearing “that if they were defeated they themselves would get the blame, but that the credit for any success would go to Alcibiades.” Whatever their motives, they turned him away rudely, saying, “We are in command now, not you.” As he rode out of the camp Alcibiades told his companions that had he not been so outrageously insulted the Spartans would have lost all their ships. Some thought this boast mere bravado, but many, including some modern historians, have believed him. Rejected for the third time, he galloped away. At Aegospotami the Athenian fleet was utterly destroyed. The survivors, including all but one of the generals, were slaughtered. A few months later Athens fell.
For the last year of his life Alcibiades was a fugitive. The Spartans still wanted him dead. Their victory rendered coastal Thrace unsafe for him. He withdrew into the interior, leaving behind the bulk of his possessions, which the neighboring chieftains promptly looted. As he traveled inland he was set upon and robbed of his remaining belongings, but he managed to escape capture and made his way, armed now only with his reputation and his miracle-working charm, to the headquarters of the Persian satrap Pharnabazus. Once more, as when he arrived at Tissaphernes’ court, “he so captivated Pharnabazus that he became the Persian’s closest friend.” Graciously the satrap granted him the Phrygian city of Grynium and all its revenues. He had found a refuge, a protector, and an income. But, characteristically, he wanted more. He was in his forties, his prime, and his ambitions were still inordinate, his conception of his own potential still as extravagant as the awe he inspired. He resolved to make the formidable journey eastward to visit the Great King Artaxerxes II at Susa. He would have had in mind the example of Themistocles, the victor of Salamis, another great Athenian who, half a century earlier, had been banished and condemned to death by the city for whom he had won great victories, and who had been received with honor by a Persian king. Besides he had information that Artaxerxes’ brother Cyrus, who was closely associated with the Spartan Lysander, was plotting to usurp the Persian throne. Perhaps he hoped to foment war between Persia and Sparta, a war in which he might play a glorious part as the liberator of Athens.
He asked Pharnabazus to arrange an audience for him with the Great King. Pharnabazus demurred. Alcibiades set out anyway. He halted one night in a small town in Phrygia. There, while he lay in bed with the courtesan Timandra (whose daughter Lais was later said to be the most beautiful woman of her generation), hired killers heaped fuel around the wooden house in which he was lodged and set fire to it. Waking, Alcibiades seized his sword, wrapped a cloak around his left arm for a shield, and charged out through the flames. His assassins backed off, but from a distance they hurled javelins and spears at him until he fell. Then they closed in and hacked off his head before departing. Timandra wrapped his decapitated body in her own robe and buried it, or, according to Nepos, burned the dead Alcibiades in the fire which had been set to burn him alive.
Even his death, wretched as it was, is evidence of Alcibiades’ extraordinary charisma. One story goes that the killers were the brothers of a girl he had seduced, but most of the sources agree they had been hired by Pharnabazus. The satrap had been persuaded to violate the duties of the host, and his affection for the man who had so captivated him, by the urgings of the Spartan Lysander
, who had threatened that if he did not hand over Alcibiades, alive or dead, Sparta would break off its alliance with Persia. Lysander, in turn, was responding to pressure from Critias—the man who long ago had sat with Alcibiades at Socrates’ feet, and who was now the leader of the puppet government which the Spartans had installed in Athens. Such was the potency of Alcibiades’ reputation, so widespread the hope that he might yet come to save his city, that while he lived, complained Critias, “none of the arrangements he made at Athens would be permanent.” In those dark days for Athens it was not only the oppressed democrats who ascribed to Alcibiades the power to turn the course of history single-handed. His enemies feared him, or feared the legend he had become, ascribing to him, or to it, superhuman powers. He was a man without a state, without an army, without a fortune, without allies, but he was also a human phoenix, one who had repeatedly risen from the ashes of disaster in a flaming glory all of his own making.
Alcibiades’ talents were never fully put to the test. His career was a sequence of lost opportunities. Perhaps, given the chance, he might have won the war for Athens. Certainly Thucydides, who was as judicious as he was well-informed, believed that the Athenians’ failure to trust Alcibiades
(for which Alcibiades, who had failed to win their trust, was partially to blame) brought about the city’s undoing: “Although in a public capacity his conduct of the war was excellent, his way of life made him objectionable to everyone as a person; thus they entrusted their affairs to other hands, and before long ruined the city.” But great reputations do not flourish, as Alcibiades’ did in his lifetime and afterwards, on the foundation only of what might have been. It is possible that his career, thwarted, dangerous, and isolated as it was, was one precisely suited to his particular genius. He was an actor, a seducer, a legend in his own lifetime and of his own making, a true con artist, one whose self-invented myth was a creation of awesome grandeur and brilliance, a man who owed the large place he occupied in his contemporaries’ imagination not to any tangible achievement, but simply to the magnitude of his presence.
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