CHAPTER XXIII
‘Come, have a care for thine honour, since now this land calls thee saviour for thy former zeal; and never let it be the memory of thy government that we were set upon our feet and afterwards cast down, but lift up this city so that it stand fast for ever.’—Sophocles:Oid. Tyr.
‘Come, have a care for thine honour, since now this land calls thee saviour for thy former zeal; and never let it be the memory of thy government that we were set upon our feet and afterwards cast down, but lift up this city so that it stand fast for ever.’—Sophocles:Oid. Tyr.
Uponthe Hellespont, the Propontis, and the Bosporos, the northern Athenian dependencies were everywhere reduced to their old tributary subjection to their ancient suzerain; the Spartans were driven from the sea, and a truce was made with Pharnabazos, pending negotiations for peace with the Persian king. In the beginning of the year 407 Alkibiades, leaving Thrasyboulos to complete the conquest of the Greek cities on the Thrakian coast, assembled his mighty fleet at Samos.
It is unnecessary to describe the advent of the conqueror once more into that port, where his faithful friends and supporters had been true to him when every other Grecian city had turned against him, and where his statue now stoodgloriously in the temple of the special guardian of the island, the witness of the people’s gratitude to the liberator of Ionia.
He had still work to do upon the Karian coast, the last remnant of the late Spartan conquests, and had more tribute to collect from unfaithful cities for impoverished Athens. After reducing these places to subjection and strengthening the forts at Kos, and with a treasure of one hundred talents which he had collected, he returned to Samos.
He now felt that the time was come when he might at last answer the repeated call of Athens, and return to his beloved home. He sent Thrasyllos with the main part of the fleet and a large portion of the captured ships and other spoils before him to Peiræus, to prepare the people for his coming.
The impatience with which they awaited him was indescribable. They were as anxious to see the man whom they had driven from them, and who in return, his justice satisfied, had raised them from despair and misery to their old supremacy, as he was to come back to them. This had been the fixed purpose of his life for eight long years. In spite of the temptation to return at her earnest cry three years ago, he had gone on enduring dangers, imprisonment, andhardships, and adding victory to victory, till he felt his hands were full enough of blessings. Now they were so full they scarcely could hold more, and he returned to her to lay them at her feet.
Collecting his great ships from Samos and the other ports where he had posted them, with all his prisoners and his prizes, he proudly sailed towards Attika. No need now to avoid hostile places; he rather diverged from his straight course, to show the world who was supreme mistress of the seas, and on the twenty-fifth of May he sighted the Peiræus. When the people heard that he was really coming, the city was deserted. All the quays and walls were lined with human beings. The sailors of Peiræus, Mounychia, and Phaleron, all who had ships or boats of any sort, crowded out upon the sea to welcome him. The sea was black with boats. Every mast swarmed with men and boys, and lucky was he thought who should first get sight of him.
While the people waited on the shore in wildest expectation, there was but one thought in all their minds, one and the same subject furnished the topic of their talk with one another. Some old men were heard conversing.
‘Ah! you remember the day he set out forSicily—just such another day as this. Would to the gods we had never let him go on that God-cursed expedition!’
‘Rather, would to the gods we had let him stay and fight for us in Sicily! He was just beginning the great siege when we recalled him. He must surely have been victorious.’
‘Why, then, were we not more wise? Surely some blindness must have fallen on us from the gods.’
‘How many of our sons who perished there would have been here to-day? Or perhaps we might have been just about to welcome them, instead of ever mourning for the deaths of brave men whose unburied bodies lie underneath the sea.’
‘They would be coming with the conqueror of Sicily, of Greece, of the barbarian, had we not been blinded for our sins.’
‘But, think you, he would have been victorious at Syrakuse, where two armies of Athenians fell?’
‘Why not? Has he not been victorious everywhere, wherever he has fought? Are not the Lakedaimonians better warriors than the men of Syrakuse? Has he not beaten Spartans and Persians, too, whenever he has met them?’
‘Ay! and they say the fight at Kyzikos wasgreater than any could have been in Sicily, or any that our men ever fought before.’
‘Indeed, it seems nothing can withstand his conquering arm.’
‘Then to accuse such a one of profanation of the sacred mysteries! I know not what they are, but could such a wise man ever think of so great a wickedness?’
‘So I said all along, but none would hearken to me.’
‘And the great ones said he wished to make himself a tyrant in Athens.’
‘What! he? Why, he could have made himself a tyrant here any time these last three years.’
‘Or if he had come when the four hundred were murdering us, and ruining all things in Athens, the people would have crowned him king. And, like as not, he will be king, too, before long.’
‘And a good thing, say I for one, for then he would turn the Spartans out of Dekeleia, and we should get bread cheap again.’
‘They say he will not land till they have reversed the sentence on him. Some say his enemies will try even now to have it carried out. But see where the boats make way,—he comes! he comes!’
The whole crowd pressed forward to catch aglimpse as ten great Spartan triremes came slowly forward, their prows and sides covered with the armour taken at the fight at Kyzikos, while standing in sullen groups on the decks, were the Spartan hoplites who had been taken prisoners there, wearing the red tunics that the Athenians knew and dreaded.
Then came ten more triremes with Spartan spoils and prisoners from Abydos; ten others decorated in like manner from Chalkedôn and Chrysopolis; then ten more with the five hundred Spartans who surrendered at Byzantion. Then came ten other triremes with spoils of Thrakian cities, and with Thrakian soldiers who had followed the chief out of admiration for him, clad in skins of beasts, looking keenly round about them, gesticulating, and wondering at all they saw. Then came twenty other triremes, with Persian horsemen squatting on the decks, dressed in long robes of every hue, perfectly indifferent to everything.
Then, gently at first, over the calm, sparkling sea, came the sound of rhythmic song, growing gradually louder, and the stately Athenian triremes came grandly forward, their oars splashing in the sun, and keeping time to the measured music of the rowers’ voices as they pulled with one accord to the beat of the keleustes, who led their singing.Onward they came, majestic,—their sterns, prows, bulwarks, masts, garlanded with flowers and boughs of the wild olive-tree. Then, last of all, amid the shouts and cries of great delight, was seen the well-rememberedEros, dressed more plainly than any of the others. And there—yes, there—apparelled like the sun-god of the heavens, in his armour of chased gold and ivory, that glittered in the bright May-day, was Alkibiades.
The other triremes ranged themselves on either side as he came through them. With an unassumed modesty and a smiling carelessness upon his face, he could that day with difficulty conceal the emotion of his soul. Not at Selymbria, when he found himself with a few followers in the middle of a hostile town; not at the fight at Kyzikos, when the engagement was at its hottest, and he was nearly overcome by Mindaros;—never on any previous occasion—had the struggle been so hard as that one now, which called forth all his power to keep back the flow of tears. The first favoured ones who welcomed him were his cousin and many more relations. As soon as he saw them, he came from off theErosto the wharf. Cries went up to Heaven, the crowd closed round him, each one striving to take his hand, or only touch his garments.When a way was made for him it became a path of flowers. Along this triumphal road, made by the long walls from Peiræus to the city, he passed upward to the Peiræian gate, past the colonnades with their well-remembered paintings, and the heroes’ statues that he had been wont to gaze on with wonder when a boy; past the house of his friend Polytion, where a lying slave had been tortured to tell the people that he had profaned the mysteries; and past the many well-known spots where his boyhood and his early manhood had been spent—the scenes of his joys, his pleasures, and his triumphs; and the thoughts that they brought back swelled up within him, and made the struggle to restrain his tears grow ever greater. But when he came to the turning which led up to the Pnyx, where the people in their Ekklesia were now assembling to receive him, there was a pause in the procession, and an opening in the deep lines of citizens, and out from amongst them came Deinomache, his mother, grown almost blind, led by his young son Alkibiades. As he folded his mother in his arms, the tears he had so long kept down broke out. It was the first, the only, time that he was ever seen to weep. Then he went upward with his son to the Ekklesia.
In spite of the enthusiastic welcome with which the city, and the whole state, received him, he had not forgotten the dread sentence which had been passed on him, and which still weighed upon him, and by the laws of Athens must be carried out, unless reversed by the same tribunal which had pronounced it. That was why the meeting of the great Assembly was held immediately on his return. That was why he made his way straight to the Pnyx.
As he passed through the assembled people sitting there in silence, and ascended the stone tribune, how could he but think of the first time he had stood there and swayed their wayward mood, saving them from alliance with that oligarchic Lakedaimôn which he was afterwards to stir up against them, and then beat back in its full career of conquest?
He spoke to them simply of what he had suffered since they had thought fit to cast him out, and his hearers were moved to tears. Then he spoke modestly of some of the services he had been able to render to the state while absent from them. He deigned not to defend himself against the charges on which he had been condemned, for long ago they had been given up as baseless calumnies. But he did not spare his hearers as hetouched upon the fickleness and injustice often shown by popular assemblies. Then skilfully he turned the fault from them, attributing all the wrongs to his own bad fortune, from which he had so long suffered, and to the influence of some evil genius. Then, as though brushing aside, and forgetting all his own grievances and troubles, and coming before them only as strategos, to give an account of his conduct since they had conferred that post upon him, with all his peculiar grace and terseness, he went through the actions of the late campaign. He explained graphically the present position of the enemy, and closed his speech by an appeal to them to keep up their courage, to be ever true to themselves and their traditions; true, too, to those to whom they confided the command of their forces; to hope on still, to quit themselves like men; and he, for his part, promised them a great and glorious ending to their struggle.
Then, and not till then, they broke out into a burst of loud applause. Their ringing voices could be heard in the most distant corner of the Agora and in the high Akropolis, and all men knew that he had spoken. They vowed vengeance against the authors of his banishment, as though it had been some others and not they who hadbrought it about. In their joy at seeing him again they dried their tears. With one voice they recalled the sentence of death which had been passed upon him, and restored to him all his wealth and patrimonial estates, which they had confiscated. They ordered the pillar on which the awful sentence was inscribed to be demolished. They made the Eumolpidai, the sacred Eleusinian priests, revoke the sacerdotal curses which they had pronounced upon him. They conferred on him the office of Autokrator, or generalissimo of all the forces, both by land and sea, which only on three other, and most perilous, occasions in the whole history of Athens was ever entrusted to anyone. It made him absolute over the other generals, and gave him complete and autocratic power in all matters which concerned the war.
When the Assembly of the Ekklesia was over his friends made him go forth again, that all might see him. He descended from the Pnyx, passed through the western gate of the Agora, where stood the great Hermes, guardian of the market-place, and, hard by, a bronze chariot drawn by four horses, where one stood life-like in the chariot who had won the prize for Athens more than three Olympiads ago. Ah, those four dear horses, he had come back to gaze upon them,as in the bronze they seemed to bound and leap for joy of the encounter. He was there,—not quite so full of life, perhaps, as he had been at the time of the race,—but where were they?
Then, passing the Eumenia portico and the theatre of Dionysos, where his chorus had sung before the whole of Athens in the Trachiniai of Sophokles, his friends led him on by the Odeion which Perikles built, with its peaked roof made of the masts of captured Persian ships, resembling the tent of Xerxes. He remembered being taken there when he was six years old to hear the contest of musicians when Perikles opened it. Then he proceeded up the street of Tripods. Upon the temple he had himself erected stood the tripod he had gained when his chorus won the prize. Not far off, a little higher up, on a smaller temple, was still the tripod once proudly placed there by poor Nikias. Then by the north side of the steep rock of the Akropolis he passed the ancient Agraulian sanctuary, where, as a young man, he put on his first armour, and swore to defend his country to the last. So past the Anakeion, the ancient temple of the Dioskoroi, they brought him, by Apollo’s grotto, to the Agora again, to the Stoa Basileios, the Court of the King Archon, near which was the Prytaneion, where the sacred fireever burnt, and where the Prytanes and other privileged guests dined at the state’s expense.
Their dinner was preparing, as he, followed by the people who had brought him in triumph round the rock of the Akropolis, came to the Prytaneion. As a victor in the Olympic games he was entitled to his share of the meal the state provided daily for its public officers and honoured guests. Never before had he taken advantage of his privilege. He now claimed it. And the people were astonished and delighted when they saw the saviour of their country, their unconquered general, of whose luxury and indulgence so many famous tales were told, sitting amongst the citizens, enjoying the homely fare as much as any of them.
His public duties finished, he was escorted to his mother’s house by all who claimed relationship with him, and they were many now. There, in the quiet of that sacred place, we, like his Athenian supporters, may leave him for awhile. Nor shall we attempt to follow all his thoughts when he left at nightfall the solitary parent who had watched and waited for him while he had fought his country’s enemies, and while he had struggled with his great temptation to return too soon to counsel and to rule his native land.
Afterwards on his way to his own house, so long deserted, he was accosted by a well-known voice that sounded older and much sadder than when he heard it last.
‘Oh son of Kleinias, you have longed for glory, and you have it. Does it seem as sweet as you imagined?’
‘Indeed, Sokrates, I think it is sweet to gain glory in fighting for one’s country.’
‘And dost thou think thy country will render glory to thee long?’
‘Indeed, I hope so, if I continue to deserve it.’
‘Hast thou lived, then, all the years since I first met thee on the banks of the Ilissos, and yet hast not learnt the evil nature of this beast called Demos?’
‘I think I ought by this time to know something of its nature, Sokrates.’
‘Then is it better, think you, to save a people from its enemies, or to save it from itself and teach it wisdom?’
‘Why, I should say it is better to free it from its enemies first, and teach it wisdom afterwards, as I now hope to do.’
‘Tell me, then, oh much-wandering, much-enduring man, where in thy travels thou hast learnt this wisdom, that I, too, may go to seek it.’
‘Alas! Sokrates, in all my wanderings I have found mankind alike in need of it, alike in want of it; and I would come to you, the wisest of the Greeks, to learn it.’
‘Then tell me, great strategos Autokrator, when all thy possessions were taken from thee by this demos, and thou hadst scarce wherewithal to pay for thy black broth in Lakedaimon, couldst thou bestow much money on thy hosts?’
‘No, by the gods! And I still sometimes laugh to think how poor I was. How could I give what I had not myself?’
‘Which, then, is easier to obtain, money or wisdom?’
‘I should say it is easier to get money, for we often see men who have acquired heaps of money who do not seem able to get much wisdom.’
‘And yet you hope to teach these people wisdom, which you say you have not got, and which is harder to obtain than riches.’
‘Ah, Sokrates, it is still just as of old. Somehow when I talk with you I seem to be ignorant of everything; though when I am with others I fancy I am cleverer than most of them.’
‘And do you not know why?’
‘Not I, unless it be that the oracle said trulythat Sokrates, the son of Sophroniskos, was the wisest of the Greeks.’
‘And you know not why it said so?’
‘I have heard you say in the old days, but now I quite forget.’
‘Well, I will tell thee. Perhaps it meant that I, in truth, was the most foolish of mankind.’
‘How mean you, Sokrates?’
‘Because that all my life I have tried to show the people their own ignorance, and they will turn and rend me soon, for all my pains, as they will rend you, ere many months are passed, for fighting for them, oh beauteous son of Kleinias.’
So they parted, and Alkibiades entered his father’s house by the large heavy doorway, and went into the courtyard, where the fountain was splashing still as though he had never been away, just as it splashed when he used to sit and watch it in his dreamy boyhood, yearning for knowledge, or in more ardent mood when he looked upon it from his room at night, longing for adventures and glory, and eager to leave that quiet place where his mother lived; as it splashed when he had gazed up at the mysterious Akropolis, with the moonlight over it making dark shadows on the walls of its silent temples; as it splashed when he brought his youngwife joyfully to her new home, and when he returned there, on that guilty morning, and found her gone; and as it splashed when he came back from Ephesos and saw her lying still and silent on her couch.
This was the day he had lived for, and fought for, and schemed for; now it was here. He had come home to Athens in greater triumph than he had ever dreamed of Glory, that he had followed after all his life, had come to meet him, as she had seldom come to meet anyone, and more splendidly than he, even in his highest hopes, had been able to imagine. He had got more than glory; he had got justice. As he passed through the Agora, or market-place, that day, he had seen men with hammers breaking down and beating into dust, so that they might take and scatter it into the sea, the record of the false and cruel sentence which had been passed upon him. He had broken down injustice. He was going with his strong will, and with all his might, to deserve more than ever his country’s gratitude, so that when he died, fighting for her some day perhaps, the abhorred sentence which had been graven on the shattered stone might be forgotten, and it might be writ of him upon the eternal brass that he, more fully than anyother of her children, had loved, and lived for Athens.
And yet, even at the ending of that day—a day the like of which few men have ever known—even at the end of that glorious day he heard the words of Sokrates above the echo of the cheers and cries of joy that were still ringing in his ears, and he was somewhat sad.