CHAPTER XV
‘Fortuna opes auferre, non animum, potest.’—Seneca.‘Fortune may carry off our wealth, it cannot rob us of ourdaring.’
‘Fortuna opes auferre, non animum, potest.’—Seneca.‘Fortune may carry off our wealth, it cannot rob us of ourdaring.’
‘Fortuna opes auferre, non animum, potest.’—Seneca.‘Fortune may carry off our wealth, it cannot rob us of ourdaring.’
‘Fortuna opes auferre, non animum, potest.’—Seneca.
‘Fortuna opes auferre, non animum, potest.’—Seneca.
‘Fortune may carry off our wealth, it cannot rob us of ourdaring.’
‘Fortune may carry off our wealth, it cannot rob us of our
daring.’
Onhis return to Thurii Alkibiades found Kryptos had indeed gone and taken theEroswith him. So he waited there for news from Athens. It was not long in coming. He heard how, as soon as it was known that he had escaped at Thurii, the dikasterion, in his absence, had sentenced him to death and confiscated all his property.
‘But I will show them I am still alive,’ he said. No one ever kept a promise better.
As he was dead to his country by his country’s act, his country became dead to him. Great as had been his devotion to that country in the past, great as it would ever have been, had she been worthy of it, great as it was yet to be proved to be in the distant future, at this time the one thought which engrossed his mind became how to make his revenge as overwhelming in its destructiveconsequence as her injustice had been great to him. It was so complete and terrible that the vengeance of no man has been like to it in the history of the ages.
He despatched Agrestides to Messana with information to the chiefs of the Syrakusan party of the agreement he had made with their opponents to open the city gates to the Athenian army. With the rest of his companions he sailed for Elis and landed at Kylléné.
This Agrestides, who was trusted with the message to the leaders hostile to the Athenians at Messana, was one on whose judgment and quiet sagacity Alkibiades had found he could implicitly rely. He was originally a poor Arkadian shepherd boy, troubled with the wandering spirit which has driven many another boy to leave his home and happy solitude, to be tossed about on the world’s wide waves, to hope, and long, and travel, to see many lands and divers peoples, and die at last unknown, unrecognised, and be buried amongst strangers. He could not be contented to tend his sheep in the peaceful valleys of Arkadia. The spirit of unrest, of adventure, which came over him, he could not resist. The desire to be elsewhere, to get past the mountains which shut in his nativeplains, grew into a force which became ever more and more resistless. The constant itching to be gone spoilt all his happiness. When the father and the mother and all of them were there, in the small family festivities, the temptation haunted him. In the gray morning light, when the others were asleep, he would gaze where the coming sun began to tinge the clouds, and the longing to be there where the sun rose saddened his days, and when it set over the distant hills his fever to be away, to see the world, to leave his uneventful life, burnt into his brain.
He dreamed at night of other lands, and strange great cities, and the unknown, mysterious sea he had heard men talk about who had actually been on it. So he left his sheep, and his mother, all his people—only his brother knew for certain he was going and reaching Korinth, he got on board a merchant ship that traded with the East. He soon became a skilful sailor. He had strength and endurance, as well as an intelligence and shrewdness about him; and getting to Athens, he was in time noticed by the captain of theEros, and engaged to serve with him.
From the time he first saw the owner of this wondrous craft he looked on him with awe and reverence. It so happened that he was able morethan once to be of service to his lord. So when theErosset out for Sicily, Agrestides—‘Aglestides’ his master, who was in the habit of lisping, always called him—was promoted, and kept in close attendance on the strategos. The Arkadian was captivated like the rest—the feeling of awe changed to one of loyal, distant, enthusiastic love, intense devotion. But what could the poor sailor say or do to show his admiration? One day, perhaps, he might do something. He might even save his hero’s life. Perhaps he might—best of all—show his affection by giving his life for him. He had both his wishes.
It was mid October before Alkibiades reached the mainland of the Peloponnesos. The people, when they heard who it was, went down in crowds to meet him. He made a triumphant entry into Elis, where, too, the people thronged to see the far-famed conqueror at the Olympic games, as though he had been some mythic hero of antiquity, who had come in this disguise to visit them, greater in disgrace than most men in prosperity.
He did not stay long in Elis. Plans were forming in his teeming brain, and must not be delayed. He sent to the Kings and Ephors of the Spartans for a safe-conduct to their capital, telling them that he might be able, as their friend, todo them greater service than, as their enemy, he had done them injury. The Lakedaimonians eagerly invited their old opponent to come to them at once; he as eagerly left the Eleian capital for Sparta. Before the winter had set in he found himself, for the first time, among that hard and rugged people.
They were curious to see one of whom they had heard so many strange accounts. Great was their wonder when they beheld the grave severity of his demeanour. They had been told tales of his fabulous luxury and extravagance—tales which had not been lessened in the telling. He dressed himself as the plainest citizen there. The flowing purple robe we last saw him wear in the house of his good friend Eumanthes he left behind at Elis. These simple-faring folk had heard tell of his many cooks, the battery of copper saucepans, and other paraphernalia of his kitchen, which must be taken with him even to the wars; they saw him eating at the common table of the coarse food of Sparta. They had been scandalized at the description of his costly baths of curious perfumes; they saw him bathing on winter mornings in the frozen river. And this went on for many months while he was carrying out his great designs. He met the leading men incouncil frequently, and showed them how they might advance their state while humbling Athens.
Before the spring came he heard how things were going on in Sicily—how Nikias had tried to enter Messana, and found, to his astonishment, that the gates were not opened to him; how that then he had gone back to Naxos and Katané, and wasted all the remainder of the autumn and winter doing nothing—wasting precious time and Athenian treasure while Syrakuse was strengthening her defences.
All this while he had his agents at work in Korinth. Late in the spring of 414, hearing that Nikias had at length made up his mind to attack Syrakuse, that his ships had entered the bay of Thapsos, and that his troops were on the hills above the town, he got leave to address the Lakedaimonian assembly. He found an audience very different from that which had so often been moved by him at Athens. Only members of the old Lakonian families sat here, who were intensely conservative; it was no easy task to gain their confidence.
He began in a diffident, half-apologetic strain, open and unaffected. He reminded them that his ancestors for many generations had been the ‘proxenoi’ of Sparta, their friends and agents;that no important business of their state had had to be done in Athens but his progenitors had aided them, and that none of their citizens ever became entangled in their private affairs but his progenitors had come to their assistance; and he impressed upon them that on his entry into public life he found a democratic Constitution had been long established. Was it for him to upset that Constitution? ‘And after all,’ he asked, ‘what is the first reason for the existence of a democracy but to oppose and ward off tyranny? Such as I found it I adopted it, and did my best to make it perfect. I and my ancestors before me found ourselves placed at the head of a democracy because of our known hatred of a tyranny. For, as amongst you it is your ancient oligarchy which saves your land from despotism, in Athens it is democracy which wards off this danger. We have striven to teach the people to rule themselves with moderation, that so they might conserve the Constitution as it came to them, in its grandeur and its liberty, that so they might stop the first efforts of a tyranny to raise its head, or scheme to bring about a revolution. It is these insidious foes we have ever fought; it is to them I owe my exile. Democracies may have many faults—I know it more than anyone. Would it have beenright in me to attempt to overthrow a long-standing Constitution while you and other enemies were at our doors?
‘Having said so much about myself and my own conduct, will you permit me, oh ye Lakedaimonians, to give you some practical advice and information? We did not sail to Sicily merely to assist the Egestæans or the Greek colonists. We intended, and the Athenians still intend, if they can, after completely subjugating Sicily, to turn their forces upon Italy. Sicily won, Italy would soon be theirs. Enriched by the contributions they would force from those lands, they could attack Carthage and her dependencies. If the Athenians succeed there, then, by the spoils of these rich peoples, they will be able to enlarge their fleet till it becomes larger than those of all the world together. With such a fleet it is intended to blockade the hostile ports of Greece, to become rulers of the Peloponnesos and of the whole Grecian land, and masters of the world. Such is their intention.
‘Remember, you are hearing of these designs from the mouth of one who helped to form them, from one who did something towards carrying them out. While I was in Sicily, I saw a good deal of that country, and I tell you plainly, ifyou do not act at once, Syrakuse must fall, and with it Sicily, and all the other plans and hopes of the Athenians may be accomplished. Then you will have to look to your home. It will be too late to think of Sicily or your allies. Furnish, then, your ships without delay. Fill them with your bravest hoplites. Above all things, put over them your ablest general.
‘I will tell you one thing more. If you wish to drive the Athenians from Sicily, if you wish to frustrate their designs, if you wish to weaken them at home, you must attack them in their own country. You must take, and you must fortify, Dekeleia, in Attika. That is what the Athenians dread the most; that is the most deadly blow you can aim at them. It would take long to enumerate all the advantages you will gain thereby. The Syrakusans will be encouraged to hold out against their besiegers. It will prevent the Athenians sending reinforcements. They will want all their men to protect them at home. It will stop a great part of their supplies of food coming from their fertile fields. It will stop the silver coming from the mines at Laurion. It will, by degrees, detach from Athens the islands and towns which are now allied to her by the treaty of Delos, but which love her not. Many ofthese, even now, are looking for the first opportunity to shake off her heavy imposts and ally themselves to you. It will turn the wavering who have not yet determined to which side to look for help. It will close her tribunals, to which the islands and the smaller states dependent upon her are now obliged to take their causes, and she will thereby lose the large revenues she now receives from the fees paid to her by those litigants.
‘Do not suspect the advice I tender you, nor fear, because I counsel you against my country, that my advice is insincere. I would not wound my country, but my country’s secret enemies, who, by abusing the power of her laws, thrust out her truest friends from her. I seek not to destroy my country; I seek only to regain her. He shows his love of country most who does what in him lies to purge his country of her enemies at home, and to force her to receive again those true sons who have been driven from her by her foes. To gain this end I will spare no pains, avoid no labour, fear no dangers, in your service. Just as I inflicted great injury upon you as your opponent in open war, so now as your friend I am able to be of the greatest service to you. By following the twofold counsel I have given you, you will gain peace at home and theempire of all Greece, which will freely give herself to you without restraint.’
The sincerity of his avowal that he wished to use his present hosts as a means to recover his rights at home; the obvious wisdom of his counsel; the simple eloquence of his whole address, without ornament or flowers of rhetoric, won the confidence of the plain Lakonian people. Indeed, he knew his audience. His apology for the democratic part he had played at home was a masterpiece of pleading, showing how the party of popular freedom at Athens and the strict oligarchic government of Sparta had the same end in view—the hatred, the apprehension, of anything approaching to a despotism; while his plain, pathetic peroration, in which he stood forth as the true friend of Athens, softened towards him the hardest heart, and the most suspicious intellect of his Spartan audience.
His words, as far as we can find trace of them, give little notion of the grave solicitude with which he mixed up his cause with that of his hearers, and brought vividly before them his earnest hopes, his heartfelt wrongs. His success is another proof—though no proof is wanting—of the injustice of the charge brought against him by his enemy Thukydides, that he had tricked andmeanly cheated the Spartan envoys while they were guests of his at Athens. For he was trusted, and his honest declaration won its end. It vanquished fears and hesitations, and persuaded the Lakonians to join with the Korinthians in sending aid to Syrakuse.
This aid came just in time. As long as Lamachos lived some little energy was shown by the Athenians, in spite of the sluggishness and cowardice of Nikias. When the large force under the two remaining generals at length came upon Syrakuse, the citizens could hardly hope to hold out long against it. But Lamachos was killed in an engagement, and from that time Nikias did little but beg for more money, more ships and men from home. Syrakuse, however, was reduced by force of the numbers of its besiegers to the last extremity. It was on the point of surrendering when Gongylos, the Korinthian commander, who had been despatched to Sicily on the advice of Alkibiades, was allowed, by the negligence of Nikias, to enter the port of Syrakuse. He persuaded the people to remain firm a little longer, for a Korinthian fleet was on its way, and Gylippos, a Spartan general, was even now landing in Sicily. By the like negligence of the unfortunate Athenian commander,Gylippos was allowed to land on the north coast of Sicily, march unmolested through the island, and at length enter Syrakuse, almost surrounded, as it was, by the besiegers’ works.
Gylippos almost immediately took the field against the Athenians. Athens, entreated by the desponding Nikias, in the following autumn sent out to him a force even larger than the first, with seventy-five ships and two more generals. All was of no avail. Disaster followed on disaster, relieved by few and, for the most part, unimportant gains. Before the summer of 413 was over Alkibiades heard that such of his late comrades as had not been either killed in battle or drowned in their shameful flight, lay starving and rotting in the Syrakusan quarries, into which they had been thrown by their victorious enemies. The splendid fleet with which two years before he had set out from Athens, together with its reinforcements, had been destroyed by his new-found friends, and his colleague Nikias, the unhappy cause of all the evil, had been taken prisoner and put to death.
So far his prophecy made to the Spartan assembly had come true. The rest was to be verified.
His other counsel had been acted on. TheSpartans, under Agis, had taken and fortified Dekeleia, and were overrunning Attika. Athens could see from the Akropolis the rising walls threatening her with immediate danger. The citizens were forced to live prepared to fight at any moment. Their fields were ravaged, their commerce well-nigh ruined, the mines shut up, even the tribunals closed. The allied towns from which, by the terms of the confederation of Delos, she was to receive a great part of her revenues were falling from her or growing luke-warm in her cause. The neutral states were looking to her more successful rival, and yet the vengeance of Alkibiades was not satisfied.
In the autumn embassies came to Sparta from Tissaphernes, satrap of the Persian King in Ionia, and from Pharnabazos, satrap of the country near the Hellespont, offering alliance against Athens. Alkibiades advised the Spartans to postpone all thought of carrying their arms to the Hellespont, but he saw of what advantage an alliance with Tissaphernes would be in carrying out his present plans. An alliance was therefore concluded between Lakedaimôn and the satrap of Ionia. By the terms of this treaty, which was soon after ratified by both parties, the Persian was to bring a large fleet to aid theSpartans, and to pay the wages of those employed on board the Spartan fleet.
At the same time an offer of alliance came from Chios, the richest and most important of the Grecian islands, near the continent of Asia Minor. Chios was still nominally a member of the confederation of Delos, in alliance with, and bound to pay an annual tribute to, Athens. The Spartans knew the strength it would give them if they could cut away this strong support from their opponents. They promised to send a fleet of forty triremes to aid Chios in her revolt, and to act in concert with her new ally and ancient enemy, the Persian. In the spring of 412 these ships, with those of others of the Spartan allies, reached Lechaion, the western port of Korinth, and were hauled over the isthmus to Kenchreia, the eastern port, where they lay, ready to start for Chios as soon as the Isthmian games were over.
In the meantime the Euböians had made the like offer of alliance to Agis, the Spartan king, at Dekeleia, and asked for the same assistance against Athens. The required help was promised. Before this aid could be given, and while Agis waited for reinforcements for that purpose, Lesbos revolted, and prayed the same aid from Agis. A smallforce arrived at this time from Sparta, and was sent on at once by Agis to help the Lesbians.
But while this conspiracy was going on against her Athens was not idle. Like a lion brought to bay, she roused herself as dangers quickened round her. Her army gone, her great fleets sunk or burnt at Syrakuse, her food-supplies diminished, her revenues almost destroyed, without money or allies on whom she could depend, the whole state in mourning for the sons who never could return to her again from that sad Sicilian expedition, the islands and the tributary towns which she had rescued from the Persians, and guarded from their other enemies, revolting from her, or gone right over to a foe who was plotting with those very Persians to destroy her utterly, she rose majestic in her grief; the word ‘surrender’ was not so much as named—never breathed by any citizen; the idea of compromise was never for a moment entertained. Each blow as it came quick upon her roused her to fresh vigour. The ingratitude, the shameless ingratitude, of those small states, of which for nearly sixty years she had been the constant safeguard, might burn into her soul, but it did not shake her. In the past, perhaps, she sometimes domineered over them in herpride, and taken large tribute from them in the days of her power. But she protected them from ever-prowling enemies, and gave them back more than she took from them. And now—now in her distress—they were deserting her, going over to an enemy who, for his own immediate and selfish purpose, was not unwilling to undo what the pan-Hellenic federation had done, and it seemed that Marathon and Salamis had been fought in vain.
Well, let them go if they must go; she, to her last ship, to her last timber, to her last man, to her last drachma, she would still fight, and, if the gods decreed it, she would die fighting. As long as her liberty should last and her democracy should remain, she would never lose her courage.
That was a country to be proud of, a race to boast about. Did her great son far away in Lakedaimôn, while he was counselling, directing all the movements of her foes against her—did he ever in his heart feel a secret pride that he was sprung from her? Was his just wrath ever so little cooling, or did it still burn so fiercely that he could not see her glory?
The Athenian Ekklesia decreed the creation of a new fleet, the suppression of every expense not actually necessary, the immediate fortification ofSounion, to prevent her corn supplies from being cut off by sea, as they had been by land. Aristokrates was sent to Chios, where the oligarchic party was expecting every day the arrival of the promised Spartan fleet. There he demanded assistance according to the terms of the treaty of Delos. They delayed him as long as they could, and until they began to despair of aid from Sparta. The democratic party at Chios, as in other places, still clung, though coldly, to the Athenian alliance. At last they provided seven triremes fully manned. With these Aristokrates hastened back to Athens. Adding them to some thirty others, which were all the Athenians could get together, they determined to stop, if possible, the joint fleet of Sparta and her allies from leaving Kenchreia. That fleet had got into the Saronic Gulf before the Athenian and Chian ships came up with them, but was then forced to take refuge in another Corinthian port. There the Athenians, having landed some of their hoplites, attacked the enemy by sea and land, slew many of them, including their admiral, and blockaded the whole fleet.
On news of this disaster reaching Sparta, the new friends of Alkibiades were for giving up the expedition at once, and would have done so butfor him. The oligarchic Lakedaimôn did not, at this period, prove itself so steadfast in misfortune as its democratic sister in Attika had done. But the determined spirit of Alkibiades moved amongst the Spartans indefatigably. It needed, indeed, all his energy and power of persuasion to keep them up to their engagements with the Persian Tissaphernes and with Chios.
‘Let me go off at once to Chios before news of the blockade of your fleet is known. They will trust me more than anyone. The picture I shall draw of the Athenian distress, and the readiness you will show by sending me to their assistance, will so encourage them in their revolt that this slight reverse on the Korinthian coast will not endanger our great plans.’
He worked privately, too, among the Ephors, especially with his friend and relative Endios, who was not fond of Agis. He put before him the advantage he would gain personally over his rival if he obtained the whole credit of making and carrying out the treaty with the Persian king.
He again prevailed, and started off at once with Chalkideus, one of the ablest of the Lakedaimonian admirals, and only five triremes for Chios, leaving Agrestides behind to look after his affairs at Sparta. The voyage was unusuallyrapid; it was too slow for his impatience. For more than two years he had been living inactively at Sparta. Since November, 415, to this the early spring of 412, his life had not been quite what he would have chosen. The frugal fare and the simple Spartan life was all very well, but two years and a half of it was quite enough for him. There were none of the gay Athenian spirits there, no banquets, no symposia, no fun or frolic—all heavy, dull, rude decorum. What little amusement he did get, if report says truly, nearly cost him his life. But we cannot trust all that report says of him during those two years and a half at Sparta.