CHAPTER XVII
‘I am rapt, and cannot coverThe monstrous bulk of this ingratitudeWith any size of words!’Timon of Athens.
‘I am rapt, and cannot coverThe monstrous bulk of this ingratitudeWith any size of words!’Timon of Athens.
‘I am rapt, and cannot coverThe monstrous bulk of this ingratitudeWith any size of words!’Timon of Athens.
‘I am rapt, and cannot coverThe monstrous bulk of this ingratitudeWith any size of words!’Timon of Athens.
‘I am rapt, and cannot cover
The monstrous bulk of this ingratitude
With any size of words!’
Timon of Athens.
In the pleasant isle of Samos there were many and great misgivings amongst the Athenian generals and the high-born, delicately nurtured, intellectual Greeks who at this crisis were serving under them. Sailors are generally conservative; they were often known to be oligarchic, sometimes even monarchic. The officers and many of the men in the fleet at Samos were no exception to this rule. Pressed to serve among them, in this last extremity of their country, were not only many of the ‘aristoi,’ the better sort, who formed the bulk of the aristocracy, but some even of the ‘beltistoi,’ the very best of all, the very highest of that favoured class who divide mankind—that is, the gentle portion of mankind, the rest not counting into the good—thatis, the well-to-do and worthy citizens of some estate, the better, and the best, in which last class they place themselves.
Somehow this self-complacent distinction has at different times been adopted by various ranks and classes, and the highest in the social scale have been the most apt to consider themselves entitled to have applied to them the predication of an adjective, with its varying degrees of comparison, which other simpler folk suppose should be kept exclusively to denote an ascending scale of virtue.
The high-born sailors who lay inactive all this time at Samos had fallen into this convenient way of classifying their compeers and themselves, as their fathers had done before them. They were of the good, the better, and the very best, and they loved not the unclassed, the mere ‘hoi polloi,’ who actually ruled at Athens. They had often wondered how a gentleman like Alkibiades, who, they all admitted, was, by right of birth, one of the beltistoi, could, even in name, belong in politics to the party of that huge collection of undistinguished, indistinguishable human beings, ‘that balmy mass of puffed-up froth’ which called itself the demos. His ancestors certainly had set him the example; his family had belonged to that side, andhad led these ungovernable masses, and perhaps that made a difference. There is something conservative in doing as your ancestors have done. He knew best. He was the cleverest man in Greece, and ought to know. But for the life of them they could not understand it. They could not believe that he really cared for tailors, and tinkers, and cobblers, and water-carriers, the riff-raff of the town.
Their hearts had yearned towards him when they saw him at Miletos leading the poor Milesians and beating the stupid Argives. Some had caught sight of him one day on a Spartan trireme passing by Samos, defying the Athenians to come out into the open sea and fight. He stood there on the high deck of the Spartan ship defying them cheerily, dressed no better than a common Spartan. They recalled a day, three years ago, when he stood on his own good ship theEros, with its purple sails,—the god Eros wrought in silver upon them, as it went proudly at the head of the fleet, which they thought was going to subdue the world, ‘and would have done so, had they left him alone, before his enemies brought those silly charges against him in his absence, and the sillier demos swallowed them.’ TheEroshad been taken into the service of the state—indeed, was there atSamos,—though its purple sails and silver gods of love had long been sacrificed to the necessities of Athens.
These necessities were becoming serious. It was very well for the Spartans to stay shut up at Miletos or Rhodes. The Spartans were maintained by the Persian satrap. Tissaphernes paid regularly a whole drachma a day for every sailor in the Spartan fleet. They had all the ports and rich towns on the Ionian coast to victual in, ‘while we have only Samos we can call our own, and three oboloi a day per man, paid at long intervals, and the gods alone know how long even that pittance will last.’ So said the sailors. And, indeed, an army of some thousands, with one hundred and twenty triremes and their crews, cannot be kept for nothing. Each day news was expected from Athens that she could do no more, that the last obolos of the reserve of the ten thousand talents laid up by Perikles was gone, and that they must shift for themselves in future.
Besides these many causes of complaint, the sort of general the demos had sent out to them did not tend to make them love the demos any better. Phrynichos was universally distrusted and disliked. Sprung from the lowest class of the people, he had made his way upward by the basestmeans. He had been one of those, the most odious of mankind, who gained a living by bringing accusations against citizens to the dikasterion—sycophants they were called at Athens. At all times and places the office of delator has been held in horror and contempt, though it has not seldom raised those vile enough to adopt it as a calling, to wealth and even civil dignity.
This calling was little known in Greece, and in that respect, democratic Athens shows its moral superiority to imperial Rome. But Phrynichos succeeded and grew rich. He grubbed together enough money to make himself conspicuous, and he had sufficient cunning to mislead the people. Of genius or capacity to lead a senate or an army, he had none, but he was great in intrigue. Cunning is ever the mark of littleness of mind, and generally ends by destroying the possessor of that gift; so it was with Phrynichos.
Vague rumours, too, had reached the Athenians at Samos from time to time of a huge fleet—of three hundred sail, it was said—lying at Aspendos, waiting the orders of the Great King to come into Ionian waters to destroy them. They cared not much for Persian ships or Persian sailors, but three hundred long-ships added to the large fleet the Spartans had already—what could evenAthenians do against such odds? It was all the fault of this infernal demos; but for them there would have been no quarrel with the Spartans. Even the demos must see to what their rule had brought the state, and any change would be accepted rather than the starvation which now threatened them. The demos, though it loves shouting, haranguing, or listening at its Ekklesia, does not love starvation. So something must and should be done to change all this.
Thus thought and spake to one another the well-to-do Athenian sailors, as they lay idling away their time, after the manner of sailors, in the fair port of Samos.
Not far off, at Miletos, on one of these evenings, Alkibiades was supping in the frugal Spartan fashion with his friend Astyochos, High Admiral of the Spartan fleet, when they were suddenly interrupted in their conversation by a messenger who had just arrived from Kaunus, bearing an urgent despatch from the commissioners of Sparta.
The two friends were talking of their future plans and movements, both complaining of the delay which kept them there in idleness, wondering when help would be sent from Lakedaimôn, and if the Persian fleet would ever really come to their assistance, and what it would be likewhen it did come. They had heard that commissioners were to be sent from Sparta. Astyochos asked what on earth commissioners were to be sent for; he cursed the commissioners and their interference, and the changes in his well-laid plans which these men, ignorant of warfare, would be sure to make. As soon, however, as Astyochos had glanced at the message which was thus suddenly given to him, he bade his friend good-night, for next day early, he said, he would have to start for Kaunus with the fleet.
Alkibiades went back to his lodgings in the town. On his way a stranger met him, and followed him along the street and into his room. The Athenian turned round hastily upon him and grasped a weapon. They stood face to face.
The stranger removed a weather-beaten sailor’s cap—there was Agrestides. The exclamation of surprise that Alkibiades was about to make was stopped by the strange and agitated look of the newcomer. They sat down upon the plain, hard couch. Agrestides, trembling with emotion, told the message of warning which Endios had given him.
He noticed the hard smile upon the face of perfect beauty. It came for a moment and was gone.
The open-hearted sailor, for all his knowledge of his master, could not help feeling astonishment at the cool reception of the news which he had brought, the terrible nature and effect of which had not been absent from his mind by day or night since it had been entrusted to him at Sparta.
‘Get you as swift a horse as you can find at once. Meet me outside the eastern gate in half an hour. Let no one think that you have seen me.’
Agrestides went out. Alkibiades put on a Spartan sailor’s dress, got his horse himself, and in less time than he had mentioned was out of Miletos by the eastern postern.
Agrestides was there before him. They went for some distance in an easterly direction, and then, turning sharply to the south, struck the road to Teichioussa. They rode in silence through the night. Alkibiades knew the road. He had lately been that way when he saved Miletos for the Spartans. Before dawn they were at Teichioussa. There he found some Persians he knew, and learnt from them that Tissaphernes was at Magnesia. After a short rest he got fresh horses and a Persian robe, and the two set out again.
Throughout the past night’s ride along thesolitary road Alkibiades had spoken no word. His companion could not see his face. There was that within him for which no words of human language have been found. For all his faults—and by this time those who have followed his career thus far may perhaps think he had some,—there lay beneath them all a well of generosity. Among the varying qualities which went to make up that mixture of divergent sentiments which we call his character was an overwhelming, innate love of justice. When that was outraged, there arose within him the deadliest and most enduring desire for revenge. He enjoyed life enormously, and had that keen pleasure in the mere consciousness of being, which others, less gifted, cannot imagine, and he wished that all other men should enjoy their lives. He loved his ease, his happiness, his indulgences; he wished that others should be happy; the idea of happiness was, for the most part at that time, confused with pleasure and indulgence. But above all this there was a loathing of, a nervous shrinking from, anything which in any way could be regarded by anyone as a taint of cowardice. ‘I would rather die than be a coward,’ he had once said to Sokrates while he was an ardent, dreamy boy. These are nearly the first words we find recordedof him. When he once saw another boy of nearly twice his size taking by force a smaller boy’s playthings from him, he rushed at him in such fury that he had thrashed and smashed him before the bully had recovered from his astonishment. It was this generous love of right as much as his extraordinary gifts of intellect and beauty and excellence in all manly exercises which had made him an uncrowned king among the boys of Athens, and would have left him king of men throughout his life had not the spirit of injustice been too strong for him.
And now, as he rode silently through the dark night to Teichioussa, his wrongs came over him in their intense reality. It was only the old determination still—to die rather than be, or be thought to be, a coward—which prevented their weight from overpowering him. It was not vindictiveness. You may call it pride, vanity, spirit of revenge, or what you will, but it was rather a burning sense of wrong, whenever he found that wrong was being done, and a determination to set it right; a determination to be stopped by nothing till he should have conquered the injustice, at whatever cost; a stubborn resolve to set himself right in the eyes of men—this is what has been mistaken in him for vindictiveness, and by thosewho have not read his character below the surface, for selfishness and vanity. In fact, when a great deed was to be done, however much it clashed with self-interest and vanity, no one showed a greater disregard of self than he did.
In a sense this was in itself a species of pride or even vanity. He had his share of both. In what great human action is there no admixture of vanity? Is there, or has there ever been, a man who, when doing the most unselfish, self-denying, humble work of charity, has not some far-hidden and scarcely conscious sense of behaving rather better than some others would have done? Has there ever been anyone who would devote his whole existence to alleviate the sufferings of others if he were quite certain that no one would ever know what he had done, and that he would never get any possible reward, of any sort, for doing it?
We are not defending him in all he did. We only seek impartially to analyze the feelings which had moved him in the past, and were now again to do so, and to rescue his memory from the injustice that has been done him by those who imagine him to have been a mere voluptuary, and who, not able to understand his character, mistake his apparent carelessness for flippancy,and are led away by contemporary writers whose personal hostility to him has made them seek to depreciate, and even to distort, where they cannot deny, the heroic actions which they are forced to admit.
Against his natural inclinations and sympathies he had adopted the side of the populace at Athens. Having chosen it, he fought repeatedly for them, and would have gone on fighting for them, had they been true to him, as he would have served his country’s cause for ever if it had let him.
He had advised a war against a power which was domineering over smaller states and cities allied with his country in Sicily. If he had been allowed to finish the war which he had strongly advised and prosperously begun, it would, as far as we can see, have redounded to the honour and glory of his country. He had given his whole energy to the conduct of the war; he was, he believed, about to bring it, in spite of the difficulties in his way, to a successful end. He was recalled while striving for this object, and doomed, without a spark of evidence worthy of a sane man’s belief, upon a silly, trumped-up tale, to die a shameful, a malefactor’s death. He knew he had been cursed by an interested hierarchy. Heknew a stone had been set up in Athens recording his sentence and disgrace. The thought of that stone lie was never absent from his mind through all the weary time he lived at Sparta. Thenceforward, while that stone stood there, there never passed a day without a renewal of his vow that it should be cast down by the will and deed of those who had set it up, that the same voices which had ordered the lie to be engraved upon it should order its obliteration, and that the tongues which cursed him should recall their curse. Any other life but one devoted to this end and object would have appeared to him a life of cowardice. He declined to live in that condition.
Then when, in order to gain this end of his existence and to teach a salutary lesson to the workers of injustice, he had sought the help of Spartan enemies of Athens, and had promised to spare nothing in their cause, and they had accepted his assistance and made use of him, he kept his word to Sparta. How well he kept it she knew, and so did Athens. He would have kept it to the end, as throughout his eventful life he was ever true to whatever he had promised or had undertaken.
He had counselled the Spartan oligarchy, and told them what would come to pass if his advicewas taken. They took his counsel; every word came true. His influence and power had gained for them the allies he had detached from Athens. Day and night he thought and worked, and fought and won, for his new associates. In the midst of his, and their, success came this second blow, as that other one had come before.
Perhaps we can grow accustomed to the hardest fortune by degrees. Succeeding sorrows, though on less grievous, seem to affect us less than the first great sorrow did. We do not grow callous, but we seem to get accustomed to them. This second stab was not felt so keenly as that other; at all events, it was not from his own people that it came. His vengeance, or rather the vindication of his fame from a suspicion that he could live without punishing this Spartan evil-doing, was no less startling and complete.
Through the long dark ride a nightmare of oppression had hung over him. He tried to shake it off; it came again, heavier and more oppressive. Had he no friends, no one on whom he could rely? Were all mankind alike—all unjust, all plotting for his death, all, especially those he deserved most thanks from, banded together for his destruction? His mind was in a state of high excitement and exaltation, by the time he gotto Teichioussa. During their short stay there he had not slept, he had not rested; the nightmare was still on him, pressing the life out of him, just as the Spartan commissioners, or perhaps his friend Astyochos, or some purchased assassin, would have done, if they could have caught him at Miletos.
He rose to rid himself of this intolerable burden. He roused Agrestides; he had almost forgotten Agrestides and gone off without him. The honest sailor’s face cheered him as he looked at him for a moment, fast asleep, worn out by bodily fatigue. He woke him. Agrestides sat up and gazed round, half awake. He saw by the worn face of Alkibiades that he was suffering. A tear fell down the rough man’s cheek. His master noticed it, comprehended what it meant. All mankind, then, were not in league against him; there was at least this one who was true. There might be many others that he knew not of.
So they journeyed together. First, along the valley which they had passed through the night before, on to the reach of sea not far eastward of Miletos, then to the winding banks of the Maiandros, and through the rich and pleasant land by which it flows. Agrestides told all he knew of the conspiracy, and how he had beensent by Endios to warn Alkibiades of his fate and frustrate his enemies’ designs. Alkibiades had forgotten Endios. There was then another faithful friend that he could count upon.
He had put off the Spartan sailor’s dress, and wore a Persian robe of some magnificence which he had obtained at Teichioussa. His spirits rose again as he went on. With the bright, genial sunshine he had come out of the dark horror of the past night, and was living in the future, cheered by the new plans that he was already forming, with a double purpose—to get back in honour to his country and to punish Sparta.