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

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СКАЧАТЬ they announced that they were the vanguard of a Peloponnesian fleet (but omitted to mention that the rest of the aforesaid fleet was trapped several hundred miles away). The ruse was successful: their opponents capitulated. First Chios, then the neighbouring cities of Erythraea and Clazomenae, switched allegiance and prepared to resist the Athenians.

      The suborning of Chios was a brilliant coup. It bears all Alcibiades’ trademarks: swiftness, audacity, a dependence on his own charisma and histrionic powers, flamboyant deception. Like the great runner Achilles he knew the value of speed, the way an army, or even a man, appearing where the rules of probability decree they cannot possibly be, can be as shocking and awesome as a supernatural apparition, demoralizing opposition and lending fresh courage to allies. Later that same year, after fighting all day in a desperate and unsuccessful attempt to repel the Athenians at Miletus, Alcibiades took horse and galloped southward through the night to meet the Peloponnesian fleet as it came into harbour and urge its captains to turn and sail on till morning. At dawn the next day, thanks to his despatch, the fleet appeared off Miletus and the Athenians slunk away ‘without realizing the fruit of their victory’. A masterly manipulator of the facts with which circumstances presented him, Alcibiades was one who could conjure up an illusion of victory, and use it to make that victory real.

      His cunning and theatricality as a commander have their parallels in the political games he was obliged to play throughout the last ten years of his life to keep himself alive and in command. He was instrumental in the making of a treaty between the Persians and the Spartans that heavily favoured the former. There were suspicions in Sparta (quite possibly justified) that he was not a faithful servant to his adopted masters, masters who had a reputation for summarily and secretly killing those inconvenient to them. ‘The most powerful and ambitious of the Spartans were by now both jealous and tired of him,’ says Plutarch. After the battle of Miletus the Spartan admiral received orders (probably originating with King Agis) to have Alcibiades put to death. Somehow, possibly warned by Queen Timea, who was so recklessly in love with him that in private she called her baby son by his name, Alcibiades heard of the order even before the admiral received it. A condemned man now in both halves of the Greek world, he slipped away from the Peloponnesian fleet and, turning his back not only on his native city but on his native culture, took refuge with the Persian Satrap Tissaphernes at Sardis.

      The Satrap received him well. Plutarch describes Tissaphernes as one ‘who was naturally inclined to malice and enjoyed the company of rogues, being anything but straightforward himself’, adding that he ‘admired intensely Alcibiades’ versatility and exceptional cleverness’. The Persian and the Athenian, two schemers and conjurors with the truth, became – apparently – fast friends. Once again Alcibiades played the chameleon, adopting (possibly with more enthusiasm than he had adopted Spartan asceticism) Persian luxury and Persian pomp. Once again his extraordinary charm worked its spell. ‘Even those who feared and envied him could not help taking pleasure in his company,’ writes Plutarch. Tissaphernes was so delighted with his guest that he named a pleasure garden ‘decorated in regal and extravagant style’ after him, one ‘famous for its refreshing streams and meadows and pavilions and pleasances’. Alcibiades ‘became his adviser in all things’, says Thucydides. But his position was terrifyingly insecure, dependent as it was on a web of deceptions. Tissaphernes welcomed him initially on the understanding that he offered advice on behalf of the Spartans, the people who in fact now sought his death. Over the next year he was to play a perilous game of bluff and double-bluff with Persians and Greeks alike, borrowing others’ authority to cloak his real situation, which was that of an impotent and resourceless fugitive, and seeking to impress each party by laying claim to vast influence over another who at best distrusted him, at worst wanted him dead.

      Achilles, rejected by his own people but still the inveterate enemy of their enemies, prayed that Achaeans and Trojans might cut each other to pieces, leaving no one alive but himself and his beloved Patroclus to stride together across the corpses into the shattered ruins of Troy. Alcibiades, doubly rejected and doubly a renegade, gave Tissaphernes advice that echoed Achilles’ ferocious wish: ‘Let the Hellenes wear each other out among themselves.’ The Persian had been subsidizing the Peloponnesian fleet. Alcibiades suggested that he reduce the level of his support, lest the Spartans become a colonial power potentially as troublesome to Persia as Athens had been. The advice was shrewd. It was typical of Alcibiades, who preferred guile to bloodshed. It forcefully expresses his disengagement from all things Greek. It also, paradoxically, marks the beginning of his return to Greece. In Thucydides’ opinion, he ‘gave this advice not only because he thought it was the best he could offer, but also because he was looking out for a way to be recalled to his own country’. He must have been acutely aware of the precariousness of his position in Sardis. Sparta was now closed to him. Tissaphernes’ favour offered him a chance of returning to Athens, where he had once been so popular and influential, where in times gone by the young men had imitated his sandals and their elders had looked to him to win for them an empire in the West. That chance depended on his ability to persuade the Athenians that he might be able to come back to them, not as the impotent exile he really was, but as one who could call on all the vast resources of Persia’s Great King and who might, on his own terms, use those resources to Athens’ advantage.

      The Athenians, in his long absence, had had cause to question their wisdom in rejecting him. After his recall from Sicily, Nicias was left in the unenviable position of commanding a massive and aggressive campaign he himself had advised against from its inception. Irresolute, in pain from a diseased kidney, repeatedly terrified by ominous portents, he dithered and procrastinated through a war that ended in horror. The survivors straggled back to Athens, months or years after the final defeat, to recount their terrible experiences. They told of the repeated slaughters, of the infernal scene at the River Assinarus, where parched Athenians trampled over corpses to get a palmful of water fouled by their own compatriots’ blood, of the months after the surrender during which the survivors were held in the quarries outside Syracuse, with no room to move or lie down so that those many who died remained wedged upright among the living, of their subsequent enslavement. Initially, they were met with incredulity. The Athenians at home ‘thought that this total destruction was something that could not possibly be true’. Next, the citizens turned murderously on those who had advocated the expedition and on the prophets and soothsayers who had promised success. Happy for Alcibiades, perhaps, that he was absent then. But over the next months and years, as Alcibiades was seen to serve their enemies so effectively at Chios and Miletus, suborning colonies just as he had intended to do, on Athens’ behalf, in Sicily, there must have been some of his fellow citizens who asked themselves what might have happened if only they had trusted him, if only he had been allowed to stand trial and clear his name, if only he had not been recalled. It is easier to admit to one’s own errors than to believe oneself helpless in the hands of a malign providence. There were many in Athens who blamed themselves, collectively if not personally, who believed that in turning against Alcibiades they had brought about their own downfall.

      In the winter of 412–411 BC, when Alcibiades was with the Persians, the Athenian fleet was based at Samos, less than a mile off the coast of Asia Minor. Somehow, without Tissaphernes’ knowledge, Alcibiades communicated with the Athenian commanders there, first by letter and subsequently in secret meetings on the mainland. He intimated to them that if the democratic government in Athens were replaced by an oligarchy he would be able to persuade Tissaphernes to alter his policy. He would talk the Persian into supporting Athens, into paying their men and calling on the Phoenician navy, then supposedly lying inactive to the south, to fight alongside them. All this, Alcibiades suggested, he would do, if they could secure his pardon and restore him to his lost command. Most of the commanders, at least, believed him. One of them, Pisander, was to tell the people of Athens that for the sake of a Persian alliance they ‘must bring Alcibiades back, because he is the only person СКАЧАТЬ