Before setting out again for the front, Alcibiades brought off a typically ostentatious propaganda coup. The Eleusinian cult was extremely important to Athens’s self-image and to its relationship with the gods, but, since the Spartan fortification and occupation of Deceleia, an essential aspect had been curtailed, as initiates skulked by boat along the coast to Eleusis, rather than enjoying the full roster of ceremonies involved in the proper land procession. But as a symbol of acceptance of his role as an official Athenian general, and in repentance for his earlier transgressions, Alcibiades provided an armed guard for the procession and it went ahead without interference from the Spartans.
At the same time, however, Alcibiades’ enemies were hard at work. His popularity was so great that it was easy for them to claim that he still desired tyranny. And so his friends saw to it that he was bundled off again to the Aegean, burdened by the heavy weight of Athenian expectations, with a substantial force of fifteen hundred hoplites, 150 horsemen and a hundred ships under his command – about the same size as the first wave to Sicily, which Alcibiades was to have commanded. It was as if the Athenians were apologizing for depriving him of his earlier moment of glory.
But there was little for him to do. The Spartan fleet, such as it was (though there was a major rebuilding programme going on), was pinned in Abydus and Chios, and Alcibiades had to keep his troops off Persian territory in order not to jeopardize the embassy to Darius, which had still not returned from its distant destination. But the embassy came to nothing: even as it was on its way to Susa, it met a Spartan delegation on its way back, who no doubt took great delight in informing the Athenians that it was they who had secured Persian support for their side. The king was sending his younger son, Cyrus (still only sixteen years old at the time), to Asia Minor to make sure that the Spartans won the war. The new Spartan commander in the region, Lysander, as good a diplomat as a field commander, ingratiated himself with Cyrus, to make sure that he kept his promise to supply the Spartans with pay better than either Tissaphernes or Pharnabazus had done.
As rapidly as Alcibiades’ star had risen, so it fell once again. His enemies in Athens loudly denounced his failure and began to reverse the swing of the pendulum of popular opinion: not only had he achieved no military successes that year, but the emptiness of his promises as regards the Persians had finally been exposed. The Athenian people were uncertain. In their hearts, they knew they were losing the war, and this made them desperate. The problem was that it looked as though their saviour would use his charisma and popularity for tyrannical purposes.
Early in 406 Alcibiades left the fleet at Notium in the hands of his lieutenant, who was tempted into a battle with Lysander, and was soundly beaten, with the loss of fifteen ships. Along with a minor setback on land at Cyme, this was enough to shatter the fragile myth of Alcibiades’ invincibility, on which his prestige at Athens depended. His enemies said he spent his time whoring instead of fighting; they said he wanted Pharnabazus to install him as tyrant of Athens. Cleophon called for Alcibiades’ deposition and impeachment and, just a few months after his triumphant return, Alcibiades prudently withdrew to his minikingdom on the Thracian Chersonese (the Gallipoli peninsula). The Athenians banished him once again. Those who deal with spin rather than reality are eventually unmasked; Alcibiades wanted to be the meteoric hero Achilles, but turned out to be wily Odysseus.
Alcibiades’ connections with Thrace are obscure, but they may date back at least to 416, when in his play Baptae, one of the targets of which was Alcibiades, the comic poet Eupolis referred scathingly to Athenian baptae (‘dippers’), or practitioners of the ecstatic rites of the Thracian goddess Kotys or Kotyto. At some point an Odrysian warlord had given him estates and castles on the Chersonese, where he now went. If he could not be top dog in Athens, he could at least rule his own domain as a kind of piratical princeling. He never saw Athens again.
THE END OF THE WAR
Having got rid of the man who, for all his waywardness, was one of their chief military assets, the Athenians continued on the same self-destructive course. A few months later, two of the Athenian generals for 406, including the capable Conon, found themselves blockaded, with almost the entire Aegean fleet of seventy ships, in Mytilene on Lesbos. The Spartan commander Callicratidas was fulfilling his promise to ‘stop Conon having his way with my sea’. A ship broke through the blockade to take an urgent message to Athens for reinforcements, and it was a sign of Athenian desperation that for all their consciousness of status they offered full citizenship to any slave or metic who would help defend the city by manning ships; even men of the cavalry class put aside their harnesses and took to the oars, and all the remaining eight generals accompanied the fleet. And it is a measure of their resourcefulness that they managed within a month to put together a fleet of 110 ships.
When this fleet, further reinforced by forty allied ships, was spotted by Callicratidas, he left fifty ships to continue the blockade at Mytilene and sailed out with the rest, still some 120 ships, to do battle off the Arginusae islands (a group of small islands between Lesbos and the Asia Minor coast). It was, in the opinion of at least one ancient historian, ‘the greatest sea battle ever fought by Greeks against Greeks’. The Athenians crushed the Spartans and then divided their own forces: while the generals sailed to the relief of Mytilene, Theramenes and Thrasybulus, as trierarchs, were detailed to pick up survivors from the twenty-five or so Athenian ships that had been lost. A storm prevented their doing so, but it was nothing compared with the storm that broke over their heads back in Athens.
Disheartened by the loss of as many as five thousand men, the Athenian people stripped the eight generals of their positions and summoned them home to give an account of their actions. This was relatively normal procedure in democratic Athens, but two of the generals chose self-imposed exile over what might greet them back home. The remaining six (who included the same-named son of Pericles) gave their report to the Council and, whatever else they said, they tried to save themselves by pinning responsibility for the failure to pick up the survivors on the two trierarchs. Theramenes and Thrasybulus launched a furious counter-attack: they simply read out the official report sent back to Athens immediately after the battle by the generals themselves, which showed that the storm was the only reason for the failure to recover the floundering sailors. The generals responded that in all fairness, then, they could not be blamed either, since the storm was responsible.
The next day a festival caused a lull in these tense proceedings, and Theramenes resorted to sly tactics. He had the relatives of the dead mingle among the crowds at the festival in their mourning clothes, and whip up anger against the generals. When the Assembly reconvened after the festival, he had one of his stooges introduce the proposal that the assembled people should immediately proceed to a verdict on the generals, since they had heard all the evidence and the speeches at the previous Assembly. Others argued that this was unconstitutional and they had a good case: the speeches the generals had previously been allowed fell well short of the length allowed at a proper trial; they should be tried, one by one, in a court, not by the Assembly. Even by the generous standards of the Athenian legal system, Theramenes’ proposal should have been tolerable only if the generals’ guilt was so evident that normal rules could be set aside. But his tactics had worked well, and the mass of the people, presumably prompted by more of his stooges, cried out that ‘it was intolerable not to let the people do what they wish’. They also silenced the generals’ supporters by threatening to include them along with the generals in the mass guilty-or-innocent verdict.
This was the culmination of decades of popular sovereignty: the people should be allowed to do whatever they wanted to do, even if it was unconstitutional bullying. As it turned out, it was the last gasp of such radical democracy, but that was no consolation to the victims then. The final stage of the frenzy saw the proposal – for an immediate verdict on all the generals – put to the vote. It was always the job of the cha
irman of the prytany to do this, and on this particular day Socrates was the chairman. He of all people was bound to resist: as one who believed that it took both time and calm reasoning to reach the truth, he could not tolerate this hasty procedure. He refused to put the motion to the vote, and had to put up with the abuse of the crowd. But prytany chairmanship lasted only a single day, and it was already late afternoon. The next day a last-ditch attempt to apply common justice was over-ridden, and the Arginusae Six were found guilty and executed. Before long, however, remorse over these hasty actions led to retaliation against some of those who had instigated them.
After Alcibiades’ retirement to Thrace, Athenian naval hopes were pinned on Conon, but Lysander refused to be drawn into another set battle, and preferred to strike in safety against Athens-bound merchant ships and the occasional pro-Athenian town in Asia Minor. Morale was very low among the Athenians both at home and on Samos. When the brilliant Spartan general crowned a series of military and diplomatic victories by taking Lampsacus in 405 and making it his base, the Athenians set up camp at Aegospotami, on the opposite coastline. In the meantime, they gathered supplies from Sestus, twenty-five or so kilometres west down the coast.
Alcibiades’ domain was nearby, and there is a story that he spoke to the Athenian generals at Aegospotami, offering help in the form of Thracian troops, and advice to the effect that their position was risky: the men had to roam far to find supplies, and the anchorage there was not suitable; Sestus would be a better location in these respects, and they could still keep an eye on Lysander from there. In return for the help and the advice, he wanted joint command of the Athenian troops – to be the same kind of freelance commander he had been between 411 and 408, the period of his greatest successes. Naturally, he received a curt brush-off: ‘We are in command now, not you.’
A few days later, as Alcibiades (in this story) had predicted, Lysander attacked when the men were dispersed. Almost the entire Athenian fleet was captured or destroyed, and the Spartans took three thousand prisoners, though many others fled overland, while Conon and a few ships escaped by sea. It was the end of the war, and in short order Lysander dismantled what was left of the Athenian empire; only the Samians held out for a few months, fired perhaps by the recent gesture of the Athenians in granting them citizenship equivalence, in recognition of their loyalty and role in restoring the democracy in 410. Elsewhere, Lysander ordered all Athenian citizens home (to increase pressure on the soon-to-be-starving city), blocked the grain route (partly by threatening any ship’s captain who took grain to Athens with summary execution), and early in 404 appeared with 150 ships off Piraeus itself. No food could get through, and before long Athens was in the grip of a terrible famine. In the besieged city they remembered how they had slaughtered the men of Scione and Melos, and expected the same treatment themselves.
Both Spartan kings took to the field, and Peloponnesian forces camped just outside Athens, within easy view of the walls. Starved of both grain and allies, the Athenians had no choice but to negotiate. There was a division of opinion among their enemies, but in the end Lysander got his way over the ephors (the senior Spartan officials) and Spartan allies: Athens was to lose not all its fortifications – the city walls were to survive – but only the Long Walls that joined the city to the harbour, and the Piraeus defences. Without its lifeline to Piraeus, Athens would never be in a position to recover its empire. Its fleet of warships was limited to a mere twelve; the empire was formally dissolved; the pro-Spartan oligarchs exiled after the coup of 411 were to be allowed back; and the Athenians were, in the time-honoured phraseology, to have the same friends and enemies as the Spartans and to follow their lead by land and sea wherever they might go. The Athenians bowed to the inevitable and accepted these terms. The walls were demolished amid scenes of celebration and the music of pipe-girls: ‘People thought that this day marked the beginning of freedom for Greece,’ remarked Xenophon, betraying his pro-Spartan and oligarchic proclivities.
ALCIBIADES’ MURDER
One person who did not live long enough to see whether or not this promise of freedom was fulfilled was Alcibiades. He was assassinated later in the year in Phrygia, on his way to the new Persian king, Artaxerxes II, partly to find a haven away from the long reach of the Spartans (by betraying to the king details of the intrigues of his brother Cyrus, who would soon launch an attempt, made famous by Xenophon, to seize the Persian throne for himself), and partly, perhaps, to start to build a new power-base from which to continue his mission of seeking international glory. At any rate, that was what his enemies were afraid of: although we will never know who killed him and why – and it may even have had less to do with politics than with a sordid tale of adultery – suspicion falls most readily on the new rulers of Athens, who needed to make sure that Alcibiades could do them no harm, remembering perhaps that he and their rival, Thrasybulus, had long been expedient allies.
Thucydides distributed blame for the downfall of Athens between Alcibiades and the Athenian people. But was Alcibiades responsible for Athens’s defeat? Yes, if we think that Nicias and the Athenian doves in 421 had a chance to make the peace stick for any meaningful length of time; yes, but indirectly, if we think Alcibiades could have conquered Sicily and that this would have won the war for Athens; yes, if we think that his advice to Sparta while resident there was at all significant; yes, given that the oligarchic coups around the empire in 411, which he indirectly triggered, weakened the empire.
But perhaps we should not be focusing on Alcibiades’ actions during the war. After all, Athenian stupidity, over-reaching and incompetence, Persian cash, the brilliance of one or two of the enemy commanders, the plague and the universal hazards and expenses of war were far more potent factors. But this is less important than the fact that, not long before his death, it was widely believed ‘that he alone was responsible for their past troubles, and that anything terrible that happened to the city in the future would likely be initiated by him alone’. And this judgement was due not to anything Alcibiades had done or had failed to do, but to something less tangible. The Athenians were aware that their defeat had in large part been due to internal conflict, and Alcibiades seemed to epitomize and even be responsible for such conflict. His private life and his personal ambitions were so extreme and manipulative that they inevitably provoked reaction, at just the time when Athens could least afford it and needed to focus its energies on winning the war. The ‘Alcibiades syndrome’, as it has been called, is that he preferred personal advantage to public interest, and encouraged others to do so as well.
So Alcibiades – the brilliant, flamboyant, chameleonic, greedy, narcissistic Alcibiades – was dead, but he lived on as an archetype of wasted talent in the minds of Socrates and his associates. The image that remained in the minds of the Athenian people was also of waste, but perhaps it was theirs. Could they have made more use of him? But Alcibiades’ good points came in the same package as his bad points, and so they were always ambivalent: ‘They miss him, they hate him, they want him by their side,’ as Aristophanes said, and summed up the problem in a famous metaphor: ‘It’s best not to rear a lion cub in the city, but if you do, pander to his moods.’ The problem was that pandering to Alcibiades’ moods would have spelled the end of the democracy. Centuries after his death he got the reward he always wanted in his lifetime, when the Roman emperor Hadrian instituted a sacrificial ritual at the site of his murder in Phrygia.
EIGHT
Critias and Civil War
The negotiations that led to the terms of Athens’s surrender were oddly prolonged. Theramenes arranged to be sent to negotiate with Lysander, and let it be known that he was holding a major trump card, which he could not reveal in advance for fear of devaluing it. Whatever it was, it had to be powerful enough to keep Lysander from destroying the city and enslaving the population, which is what the most important Spartan allies were pushing for. It is a measure of Theramenes’ authority in the city in these troubled times that, perhaps som
ewhat gullibly, the Athenians appointed him their ambassador with full powers to make peace, and he set out for Samos, where Lysander was supervising the blockade of the town and port. Theramenes went alone, but Lysander already had notable Athenian exiles in his camp, including Charicles, Aristotle of Thorae and Critias, all previous allies of Theramenes as oligarchs and friends of Alcibiades.
Theramenes did not return for three months, and then came empty-handed, saying that Athens’s fate had to be decided by the proper authorities in Sparta, not by their brilliant but maverick commander. In order to explain his long absence and his failure, he claimed that Lysander had detained him. But it does not seem likely that the ‘detention’ was anything but amicable, and it is distinctly possible that senior Athenian oligarchs had spent the time assembling on the island from their various places of exile, to discuss the immediate future. Since this conference took place under Lysander’s aegis, they must have looked to Lysander to help them to power. And no doubt their discussions were leisurely, because it was in all of their interests to wait until starvation put pressure on the Athenians to come to terms. Theramenes’ trump card was the offer of oligarchic rule in Athens by men who would be loyal to Lysander if he managed to use his influence in the Peloponnesian League to get better terms for them.
Why Socrates Died Page 16
