Heroes: Saviours, Traitors and Supermen. Lucy Hughes-Hallett

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ