CHAPTER XIII
‘It would give me pain to tell you of the rumours that are flying about among the people, and the number of discordant and inconsistent opinions held about me.’—Boethius.
‘It would give me pain to tell you of the rumours that are flying about among the people, and the number of discordant and inconsistent opinions held about me.’—Boethius.
AsAlkibiades entered the harbour of Katané, he was surprised to see a well-known ship there, which certainly had not come with the rest—no less a vessel than the sacred state trireme of Athens, theSalaminia. His surprise was increased when, soon after his arrival, and while he was preparing to go ashore to refresh himself after his voyage, Kryptos, the captain of theSalaminia, came on board theEros.
Alkibiades received him with the courtesy due to so high a state official. Kryptos requested to be allowed to speak to him alone. When they had gone beneath the silken awning which served as a sort of state cabin on the stern-deck, Kryptos presented him with a despatch. There was something strange about the old man’s manner. Alkibiades opened it and read:
‘The Senate and the people of Athens to Alkibiades, the son of Kleinias, strategos of the Athenian fleet and army in Sicily.—You are hereby required on receipt of this to return immediately on board your own trireme to Athens, in company with the sacred state trireme, theSalaminia.’
The words grew indistinct for a moment as he read them, but he bowed to the Senate’s messenger, and told him he was prepared to follow whenever he should sail. The captain added that he was charged by the Senate to inform the strategos it was their wish that he should not leave his ship that night, so that he might be in readiness to sail next morning. Alkibiades bowed again, something in the Eastern fashion, and said he would obey in this, as in all other things, the mandate of the Senate.
Amongst the officers of theSalaminiawho had come on board with the captain were some acquaintances of the officers of theEros. They were glad of an opportunity to meet their friends, and while the captain was holding his interview with Alkibiades they hurriedly told what their business was, and something of what had taken place at Athens since the departure of the fleet. They said that the strategos was recalled and hisoffice taken from him. They invited their friends to come and see them that evening on board theSalaminia. Then Kryptos, who had summonses for others in the fleet, came up to them, and they left theEros.
Those who saw Alkibiades when he came out upon the deck of his ship declared there was an awful look upon his face, such as they had never seen before. The younger men approached him.
‘Are you going to suffer this, general? Will you go back now, just as we are about to obtain the greatest conquest yet recorded? Let us send this process-server home again. And when we return victorious the people will forget our treatment of him. They will by that time, too, have found out the injustice of their suspicions, and perhaps have condemned those who have persuaded them falsely of your guilt.’
‘What guilt?’ cried Alkibiades, excited by the word out of his wonted calm.
‘The Senate and the people, moved by the priests of Demeter and the rest of the Eumolpidai, have decreed your recall and the revocation of your appointment on the charge of having divulged and profaned the mysteries of Eleusis.’
‘Ye gods,’ cried Alkibiades, ‘who know myinnocence, Demeter and Persephone be my witnesses that I will be revenged on those who have done me this dishonour! And the people have decreed my revocation? The worse for those who have misled them!’
He spoke with a fierceness so different to his usual gentleness that his friends were terrified. Only Kolyphôn stood forth, known as the Silent One, and mildest of them all.
‘Oh, my strategos, speak but the word, and we will this moment publish through the fleet news of this dishonour done to us. The whole fleet is yours; ‘tis to you it owes its existence. This state trireme shall be sent back with a fitting message to your enemies, a word of courage to your friends. Say but the word, and we will put Nikias on board theSalaminiawith Kryptos, and send him home—the best place for such as he.’
‘Peace!’ said Alkibiades. ‘We must obey the people. Go, you who have been invited on board theSalaminia. When you return, I will speak with you again.’
So he was left alone to ponder upon these things, a prisoner on board the ship he had furnished for the state. He knew that if the expedition was to succeed he must be there to lead it, and that it would break down if he went from it. Heknew the timid, procrastinating character of Nikias—how he could never make up his mind on an emergency, and would allow any excuse to prevail rather than take action. He knew, too, how necessary immediate action was, before the Syrakusans recovered from their alarm and felt their own strength, or learnt the weakness of Nikias, or got help from Korinth or from Sparta. And now he was to go and leave all; and by the time he could come back to Sicily, absolved from this foul charge, as he then believed he assuredly must be, it would be too late.
He thought of the quiet Kolyphôn’s advice to appeal to the whole force. That would be a bold stroke. It might succeed; but it was disloyal to those who had entrusted him with power, disloyal to his colleagues. Was it not treachery to Athens?
Then he bethought him of his power over the Assembly. Had he ever appealed to them in vain? Had he ever failed to move them? Could he fail now? Was he not more popular than ever? Was not his cause more just? Should he not go before them, throw himself upon their sense of right; expose and destroy their enemies and his; tell them what he had done already for them in Sicily against the cowardly advice of Nikias; ask them who was their true friend, he or Nikias;and then—why, then, if need be, die, and let them find out, when it was too late, when Nikias brought back the fleet with nothing to show for all their great expenditure, who it was that had been done to death through their advisers?
What a noble retaliation! Yet, after all, he would be tried, not by the Assembly of the people; they had but voted for his trial. He would be tried by a limited number of dikastai, many of them his enemies, and if the rest had been so influenced, in his absence, by those who were conspiring together to destroy him, would he be listened to? Would he get justice from them?
He saw the depth of the malice of Pythonikos—to get rid of him so that he might work out his machinations without hindrance. He remembered, too, the fickleness of the people—how they had turned on Perikles, after all he had done for them. And religious frenzy! who can stem that when once it rages in its delirious course let loose from rational control?
While here he was, as Kolyphôn had said, master of the situation. The whole of the fleet friendly. Most of the soldiers his own. The Argives and Mantineians cared more for him than for all the rest of the Athenians put together. They had come upon the expedition mainly on his account,while they of Korkyra and the Ionians who had joined the fleet at Korkyra, and made up between them more than half the army, had learnt to look on him as the genius of the enterprise, and knew that the plans they had at heart against Syrakuse could only be carried out under his direction. As for the other generals, they soon had seen that one was a traitor to the cause, the other of no weight, and perfectly incompetent.
These were the thoughts which chased each other through his brain as he paced theEros, waiting for the news his friends might bring him from theSalaminia.
It was late before they returned. There had been much to hear, and what they heard had startled them. Before they had come back, Alkibiades had made up his mind that any attempt to excite the army or the fleet to rebel against the orders of the Senate was too hazardous, and might lead he knew not where. Other schemes, indistinct as yet, and scarcely entertained, began to shape themselves vaguely in his mind. Rejected, they came again, born of indignant rage, of righteous anger. Might he not have a revenge such as no other man had thought of? He clenched his teeth, his hands, determined to resist the suggestions whispered to his maddenedmind. Then he mused again on all his wrongs—the venal, treacherous Senate, the ungrateful, stupid people. He clenched his teeth again, this time in anger. Then the unformed schemes took more decided shape. He let them stay longer in his mind.
He had no further communication that night with his officers when they returned. He retired when he saw them coming, after giving orders to his ship’s master to be ready to set sail the first thing in the morning, and to give him notice when he saw theSalaminiaweigh anchor. All night visions of his past, and visions of his future, crowded on him as he lay awake, and became his dreams when at last he slept.
The brilliant dawn of a bright September morning was breaking over the sea and the fairest island in the world when his ship’s master gave him warning that theSalaminiahad weighed her anchor, and was apparently about to sail. He ordered his captain to prepare to leave the harbour in theSalaminia’swake. Before he appeared on deck theEroswas outside the harbour, theSalaminiasome five hundred yards ahead.
It was a splendid morning, and the soft, fresh, exhilarating air of Sicily breathed upon them as the two fine ships, with oars bending and sailsswelling, swept the Sicilian Sea. Alkibiades joined a group of his friends on deck. He had assumed again his usual careless spirits.
‘And what news from Athens? Has Pythonikos, or Andokides, or my dear brother Kallias—have they accused us before the dikastai, condemned us to death already, and confiscated all our property?’
‘No, Alkibiades,’ answered Kolyphôn; ‘not yet; but if our news be true, they and other enemies you suspect not are likely to do so soon.’
For all his assumed carelessness, a black cloud was seen by all of them upon his face as he called sharply to that other to explain his meaning.
Then they told him all they knew; how that after the departure of the fleet a sadness had fallen over everyone, partly reaction from the excitement of its preparation and its setting out, more from the awe that the outrage to the statues had produced. This feeling had changed to one of wrath and indignation, roused by those who bribed some of the meaner sort to bring false accusations. Then Agaristé, a strange woman, some distant relation of Alkibiades—at least, of the same stock—declared she saw him and Axiochos and Adeimantos make joke of the Eleusinian mysteries in the house of Charmides.
‘This woman’s story,’ added Biôtides, a stout Athenian sailor, ‘was so absurd, Kleibôn said, it would have been treated as an hysterical delusion at any other time, but then it worked the common people into a state of terrible alarm. This was increased when Lydos, a slave, turned, it was thought, unwittingly upon the oligarchic party, and swore by all the gods that he had seen the same thing done in the house of his master, Perikles; and amongst the sacrilegious hands was Leogoras, father of Andokides the orator.’
‘Ha, ha!’ cried Alkibiades; ‘Leogoras, who breeds the finest pheasants in all Greece. I know the old man; and what said his fine son the orator?’
‘Well, the Senate offered ten thousand drachmas and a pardon to anyone who would denounce the spoilers of the images,’ said Kolyphôn. ‘And then—and then a knave named Diokleides came in haste before the Senate and declared that, while he was journeying from Athens, on the night before the images of the god Hermes were cut, he saw about three hundred men close to the theatre of Dionysos, that they then separated into small bands, and that he would know them all again if he saw them. When he came back next day, it seems, he found the reward which had been offered by the Senate, and he went to Andokides,and threatened that if he did not give him twelve thousand drachmas he would denounce him and all his family. Andokides promised the money, but did not pay it, so he and his father were denounced and both imprisoned, besides a number of their relations. But the Senate having promised to pardon them if the son would confess, Andokides made a clean breast of it, and said he had been one of a large number who agreed to cut the statues. He gave the names of twenty-three others, all well-known citizens, as his accomplices. They were taken, condemned, and put to death, except a few who escaped. Andokides himself has got away, and many think those who were put to death, through his evidence, were innocent, and that the famous orator gave them up to shield his friends.’
‘No one seems to know much for certain,’ said Biôtides. ‘The two charges are mixed up together. It is impossible to get at the bottom of it all. But the best thing is that one of the “searchers” appointed by the Senate to find out all about the Hermai is himself denounced as one who was mixed up in it. Some wise men think, so Minesias says, that Andokides meant to lay the whole blame on you, Alkibiades, but was afraid at last, because all men knew he was your greatest enemy, and so mightsuspect him of having had the statues cut himself, which was the truth. Others think it was done only to stop the expedition.’
‘As like as not,’ said Alkibiades.
‘Well, then,’ continued Biôtides, ‘this scoundrel Diokleides was found out. Andokides had sworn there were no three hundred out that night, and that those whose names had been given by the informer were never near the theatre of Dionysos at all. The Senate asked Diokleides how he could tell the faces of the men he said he saw by night. ‘Because it was full moon and very clear,” said Diokleides. Now it happened to have been a new moon and dark that night. So Diokleides was convicted of giving false evidence, and was condemned to death, and serve him right.’
‘A pity all these clumsy conspirators have not been treated in the same way,’ said Alkibiades.
‘But wait, sir. When he found himself condemned he said the whole tale had been made up for him by Amiantos and your relative Alkibiades of the deme of Phegusa. Orders were given at once for their arrest. They both escaped, and Alkibiades, it is said, has gone to Sparta. The people are beside themselves with fear. They know not what to do. Any base informer, it seems, can get the best citizens condemned.The only safe course left, when anyone may be accused, is to fly from Athens. There is small chance of justice for any in Athens now, the people are in such a panic. But, Alkibiades, the worst is yet to come. Thessalos, the son of Kimon——’
‘Ah! what of him? I know the ingenuity of his malicious soul.’
‘Thessalos delivered to the dikasterion a formal accusation against Alkibiades, the son of Kleinias, together with his friends Polytion, Theodorus, and others, of having divulged and sacrilegiously made sport of the Eleusinian mysteries.’
‘And the five hundred dikastai, what said they?’
‘Minesias says the people are in such bewilderment they will do anything. Athens, when they left, was under arms by night and day. “The Boiotians are coming on us!” say some. “The Spartans are at the isthmus,” say others. “The Argives and the Spartans are both coming. Alkibiades has sent them, and has told them how they may take the city”; so many of them run up and down crying. And then the priests of Demeter have cursed you openly, and say the earth will refuse to yield her fruits, and the gods have abandoned Athens, and will not come back till you have been recalled. And Pythonikosand Thessalos, and many others of the oligarchs, and some of the democrats, too, are going about telling the people no good will ever come of this expedition, and that the fleet and all the army will be destroyed unless your command is taken from you. They tell them that for years you have been the most arrogant of men; that in secret and amongst your friends you used to laugh at the demos, and declared you would soon upset the Constitution and make yourself tyrant in Athens. A lot of lies like these and all the other charges so exasperated the people against you, Alkibiades, that the Assembly decreed that the office of strategos should be taken from you, and that you should be recalled to Athens to be tried at once upon the charge made by Thessalos. But Kryptos was especially ordered to say nothing of your deposition while he was with the fleet, for fear of causing a revolt among the sailors.’
When he had heard all this, which was told him in scraps, first by one, and then another, as each remembered something of what he had heard the night before, Alkibiades spoke as though thinking to himself:
‘Oh, so they have revoked my office, have they? And they think I shall come back to let them try me before this dikasterion, do they?’
His mind was made up. TheSalaminiamade for Thurii, on the south coast of Italy. TheErosfollowed close behind. As they neared the land, Alkibiades called his friends round him, some of whom had been ordered to return with him.
‘Are you all anxious to yield yourselves up patiently to the good demos, who one day crown and cheer their leader, and the next day would deliver him to death?’
‘Not I, nor I, nor I,’ cried they. ‘And this is what we have been thinking of since we left Katané.’
‘Will Alkibiades give himself up to a people who are unworthy of him?’ asked Kolyphôn.
‘And be led away to death when he could overthrow them all?’ rough Agrestides said.
‘Or make a name for vengeance gratified, which would astonish all the world, and live in men’s memories for ever, as warning to an ungrateful country?’ said Kolyphôn.
‘All this have I been thinking of, too,’ said Alkibiades, ‘since we have been following that state trireme. No, Alkibiades shall not be carried like a fly caught by a spider to its hole, there to be executed at his captors’ will. Life is pleasant, and we have yet a greater name to make. We shall put in at Thurii, I expect. I havefriends there a little pledged to me for favours I have done them. If they will help us to avoid the old fool Kryptos, will you share your fortunes, come what will, with me?’
‘Indeed we will,’ they said in graver tones than they were used to speak in.
‘It may mean fighting to the death,’ said Alkibiades.
‘In fighting we would gladly die for you,’ said Agrestides, with something of emotion on his rugged face.
‘What fate were nobler? And how delightful to enrage those hounds at Athens!’ muttered Kolyphôn.
‘Keep with me, then, when we land at Thurii. We shall most likely dine at the house of my friend Eumanthes; he is much indebted to me. That is his great house more than half-way up the hill to the west there, almost hidden in the olive-grove. His slaves must still be getting in the vintage, one of the best in Italy. When we have dined, and you hear me say the word “Athanatos,” go out one by one, and wait for me at the shrine of Dionysos, which you will find at the right-hand side, at the end of his garden, further up the mountain. Now, no more of this! Remember, “Athanatos.”’