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

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      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, no 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 later 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, corruption, and blackmail. The tenure of any office was brief. There was no certainty, no continuity, no easy-going 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 and gave it its extraordinary intellectual and political vitality. But it imposed a burden on the citizens that 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 counter-argument 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, 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 honour 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 for ever.

      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 favour.

      ‘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 harbour. The oarsmen began to defect: the Spartans, now subsidized by the Persian Prince Cyrus, were able to offer them 25 per cent more pay than the Athenians. 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 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 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, and 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, but 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? The 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, whom he had so grossly betrayed but to whom 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 neighbours 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; or perhaps it was the zestful beginning of yet another new life. We shall see how Rodrigo Díaz, the Cid, another outcast hero who grew too great for the state he served, was to begin again as a bandit in the badlands of СКАЧАТЬ