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

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 Alcibiades that the Athenians ‘yearn for him, they hate him, but they want to have him back’. His history was to touch theirs just once more, in an encounter that 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 Aegosopotami, 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 offered them the armies of two Thracian kings on whom he could rely. The Athenian generals would not listen. 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 Aegosopotami 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 neighbouring chieftains promptly looted. As he travelled 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 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 but who had been received with honour 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 that 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 Sparta would break off its alliance with Persia if Pharnabazus did not hand over Alcibiades, alive or dead. 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 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. He was a man without a state, without an army, without a fortune, without allies; but he was also a human phoenix 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 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.

      Poets of the classical and medieval era imagined Achilles to be a giant. He was born different from others. Statius describes him as a baby lapping not milk but ‘the entrails of lions and the marrow of half-dead wolves’. Pindar, who lived in Athens a generation before Alcibiades, imagined the six-year-old Achilles outrunning deer, fighting with lions, and dragging the vast corpses of slaughtered boars back to Chiron’s cave. In fiction and myth, exorbitant size and prodigious strength were the tokens of the hero. In the real world, Alcibiades, marked out from others by his aristocratic origins, his striking beauty, his intimidating capacity for violence and his inordinate self-confidence, was received by his contemporaries as though he were another such prodigy, a being intrinsically greater than his fellows.

      Such a person is not easily assimilable within any community: in a democracy his very existence is a form of sedition. The dizzying reversals of Alcibiades’ career reflect the constant interplay between his fellow citizens’ adulation of him and their ineradicable distrust of the magic whereby he was able temporarily, but never for long enough, to dominate them. They ascribed to him the potential to be alternately their saviour or their oppressor. They ‘were convinced’, wrote Nepos, ‘that it was to him that all their disasters and their successes were due’. They imagined superhuman power for him: they adored him for it, and they found it unforgivable. Like Achilles, СКАЧАТЬ