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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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.

      The extravagant joy that 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 that 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 Dekelea 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 Dekelea, 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 look-outs 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 Dekelea 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 СКАЧАТЬ