CHAPTER XXV
‘Tu proverai sì come sa di saleLo pane altrui, e com’ è duro calleLo scendere e il salir per l’altrui scale.’Dante:Par., xvii.
‘Tu proverai sì come sa di saleLo pane altrui, e com’ è duro calleLo scendere e il salir per l’altrui scale.’Dante:Par., xvii.
‘Tu proverai sì come sa di saleLo pane altrui, e com’ è duro calleLo scendere e il salir per l’altrui scale.’Dante:Par., xvii.
‘Tu proverai sì come sa di saleLo pane altrui, e com’ è duro calleLo scendere e il salir per l’altrui scale.’Dante:Par., xvii.
‘Tu proverai sì come sa di sale
Lo pane altrui, e com’ è duro calle
Lo scendere e il salir per l’altrui scale.’
Dante:Par., xvii.
‘Thou shalt find how salt doth taste another’s bread,How hard the way is up and down another’s stairs.’
‘Thou shalt find how salt doth taste another’s bread,How hard the way is up and down another’s stairs.’
‘Thou shalt find how salt doth taste another’s bread,How hard the way is up and down another’s stairs.’
‘Thou shalt find how salt doth taste another’s bread,How hard the way is up and down another’s stairs.’
‘Thou shalt find how salt doth taste another’s bread,
How hard the way is up and down another’s stairs.’
Inthe course of this story we have had to watch the hero of it assailed by many temptations. We have seen him give way to some which many of us think we should have overcome, and overcome others to which most of us would certainly have given way. This that stood before him now, beckoning him, as it were, with wizard hand, was the greatest of them all, and came in most specious shape. All his life he had desired to excel. As a boy, and as a young man, his greater gifts had enabled him to excel and rule his compeers. The desire for pre-eminence and command had not grown less as, in his maturer years, he had found that his proper place was at their head, and thatthe others ceded that position to him as of right. Yet in his most ambitious moods there had not come to him the thought that he should ever rule alone, supreme, in Athens.
He had supposed that he might one day fill the place of Perikles, but to a democratic Greek the thought of usurping the sole power was almost an impossibility. And yet the urgency with which the offer came, the power and the numbers of those who made it, assured him he had only to consent, and he would be proclaimed ruler, not merely without any dangerous protest, but with the enthusiastic joy of nearly all the people. He believed, too, and not without good grounds, that this would be for the immediate good of Athens. He saw the clouds that were gathering round the state, the incapacity of the present form of government to contend against the combined power of Persia and Sparta. He knew that his own strong personal influence with one important satrap was unbounded, whenever he chose to exercise it. He believed that he had made some progress in the confidence and respect of another. The embassy now on its way to Susa might bring back to him, if he still held the reins of power, the pledged alliance of the Persian king. He knew that one strong arm, and one strong will, at thehead of all, and wielding despotic power, alone could grapple with the situation, and stave off the threatening danger. His belief was justified by the event. Here was a great temptation.
He put aside the offer laughingly. He hesitated, and communed with himself, but only for one day.
‘Tell me, Agrestides,’ he said that night, ‘shall I be king of Athens, like Theseus?’
‘No,’ said Agrestides, ‘be a man, like Alkibiades.’
‘Agrestides, thrice hast thou saved me—first from the Spartans, then from the Persians, now from my greatest enemy, myself.’
In the morning he gave orders that the fleet must be ready to depart next day.
At the head of a hundred triremes he set sail at the dawn of a mid-September day. Shading his eyes from the rising sun, he looked onward, as if trying to wrest its secret from the future. Then he turned towards Athens. He saw the uplifted hands of thousands praying for blessings on him as he went. He knew he might have been their king, perhaps the founder of a kingly race, and the saviour of the people from themselves. But the splendour of his Athens, the largeness of her arts and literature, her greatness, which wasto live for ever in the wonder of the ages and the races yet to come—these things had been grown and nurtured, they had flourished, in her free soil; they would be cramped and would perish under a fat and lazy despotism. His hand should never be the hand that killed them. He stamped his foot upon the deck to check—his anger, disappointment? No, only his emotion. He was never prouder of himself than at that moment; he was proud of what he had done for Athens; proud of what he was going to strive to do for her; prouder, much prouder, of what he had refused to do. Thousands were waving hands to him, and bidding him gratefully adieu. How many knew what he had renounced for them? How many knew that they would never look upon his face again? He saw theEroslying in the harbour, grown too old for the hard service on which he is bound. He gazed at the citadel, and at the helmed Athene. Did any sad foreboding cross his mind that he should never more behold that much-loved place? He passed by Aigina, where his ancestor was once king—there might be kings in those days—his royal body lying in its sanctuary, surrounded by white marble walls. Strange the thought that for a moment glanced across his mind, that he might soon see that ancient king now a judge in Hades, but might never see his land again.
He made first for the isle of Andros, where the inhabitants had revolted and received a Spartan garrison. He dispersed the native troops and the Spartan soldiers, who attempted to resist his landing, chased them through the island, posted an Athenian garrison at Gaurion, and left Konon, one of his best officers, with twenty triremes to reduce the capital; and then set sail for Samos, which became again his base of operations.
Almost immediately after he left Athens a signal tribute was paid to his military genius and strength. Agis had been watching him from Dekeleia, fuming at the insult of the procession that dared to pass almost beneath his eyes to Eleusis, and challenged him, as it were, to come out and try to stop it. He had remained safely shut up behind his walls as long as the conqueror was there. No sooner was he gone than he made an attack upon the city with 28,000 foot and 12,000 horse. On a dark night he surprised the outposts near the Keramik gate, massacred the guard, and had it not been for the system of vigilance which had lately been established, as far as we can see, the city must have fallen to the Spartan. The alarm was given. Torches beckoned from the Akropolis, and were answered by torches on the other heights. Athens was up in arms. Every citizen ran to thepost which had been assigned to him. And thus, though Alkibiades was far away, it was his care and watchfulness which saved the town.
In the morning the people discovered Agis and his Lakedaimonians lying close to the walls. The cavalry rode right up to them, calling to the Athenians to come out and fight them. The Keramik gate suddenly opened, and as if still instinct with the life that Alkibiades had breathed into their souls, his horsemen charged the enemy, and drove them off. Next day the Athenian hoplites marched out, and took their stand before the walls. Agis attacked them in vain, and, covered by the archers and peltasts from the walls, the hoplites did some execution on the invading army. The Spartan Agis thought it wiser for the present to return to his fortress at Dekeleia.
By the time Alkibiades arrived at Samos events had happened that utterly ruined the hopes and plans which he had formed, and changed the course of Grecian history. Two fresh characters appeared upon the scene. The Spartans, when their informal overtures for peace had been rejected, set themselves vigorously to work to repair the damage done them by the crushing defeat at Kyzikos, and the subsequent loss of the supportof Pharnabazos. They appointed Lysandros, the ablest of their rising men, to the command of the fleet, for they had need of an able commander at this crisis, and they saw not the depth of his designs.
Lysandros, who was the son of a poor descendant of an ancient family, and whose mother was a slave, cherished an ambition to rise above the hereditary kings of Sparta and all the other high-born Lakedaimonians, who scorned him for his poverty and his want of thorough breed. His one idea was to gain his ends by success in war, untouched by pity, and unmoved by any sense of honour, or by any of the nobler feelings of humanity. The fox, he said, can often gain his object where the lion fails. Oaths, he once declared, were made to deceive mankind. He had studied the career of Alkibiades, and tried to learn the secret of his success. Without the genius or generosity of the latter, and a stranger to his higher qualities, he was also without his weaknesses, or, if he had any of them, he carefully concealed them, that he might the better gain the ends to which he devoted all his life, and to which he sacrificed everything worth living for. While the one man renounced despotic power that he might the better serve his country, the other formed designs by which he might gain such power, even at the cost of his country’s ruin.The Fates ordained that at the time when Lysandros came to take up his command, the instrument by which he was endeavouring to work out his plan was coming from far off to meet him.
Kyros, the younger son of Dareios, King of Persia, a prince of high ambition, careless as to the means by which he might obtain his objects, and moved by an inveterate hatred of everything Athenian, had been appointed by his father to the supreme military command of Lydia, over the head of Tissaphernes. On the way to take up his command he met Mantitheos, and the other Athenian legates, who were travelling with Pharnabazos to his father’s court to negociate the terms of peace. If they once got there they might, with the help of Pharnabazos, who now inclined towards Alkibiades and an Athenian alliance, persuade the king to alter his policy, and to recall the powers with which Kyros had been invested, and so destroy the hopes and schemes which filled his head. The prince ordered the ambassadors to be given up to him. Pharnabazos protested in vain that they were sacred envoys. Kyros cared nothing for all that, and ordered them to be imprisoned, so that they should neither proceed to Susa nor return to Athens to report the failure of their mission.
Kyros and Lysandros were necessary to one another. The new Spartan admiral, feeling the hopelessness of pursuing the war in the Hellespont without the assistance of the representative of Persia, turned his attention to the Ionian coast. From Sparta and her allies he collected a fleet of seventy ships, and sailed with them to Ephesos, where Athenian influence was weakest, and where he would be at the nearest point to Sardis, which Kyros had made his capital. He soon appeared at the young prince’s court. These two men became close allies; they suited and resembled one another. Lysandros laid before the Persian the needs of his country, and persuaded him to double the pay of the sailors of the Spartan fleet. Kyros showed the wondering Lakedaimonian the stores of gold he had brought with him for that purpose. By this means the Spartan fleet was restored to its old strength, and manned by the best sailors, who were drawn to it by the larger pay with which the admiral was now able to reward them. This fleet was lying ready for action at Ephesos, within a short distance of the port of Samos, when Alkibiades arrived in the island.
The new condition of affairs might well have discouraged one of less resources. The ground upon which he had been building crumbled beneathhim. The very largeness of his fleet became a weakness to him; and his reputation, his almost unparalleled success, a cause of discontent. The object of his opponent in moving his station to the Ionian coast was twofold. It hindered the Athenians from getting their tribute and supplies from their tributary towns; and it enabled him to receive more readily the payment of the Persian subsidy. Alkibiades had reckoned upon the influence of Pharnabazos at any rate to stop any further payment to the Spartans. Without that payment he knew they would not long keep their fleet at sea. He now found the subsidy not only continued, but increased, while he could get scarcely anything with which to pay his sailors even the smaller wages he had promised them.
Instead, then, of attacking the enemy at once, he was obliged to lose time by employing his fleet in petty freebooting expeditions on the Karian coast. And when he had collected something in this way, he could not get the crafty foe to meet him in fair fight. In vain he brought out his ships, paraded them before Lysandros at Ephesos, and challenged him to come out and fight on equal terms. The fox was too wary to be caught. He knew that each day the enemy’s difficulties would increase, while he could tempt that enemy’s bestsailors from him by the bribe of higher pay with Persian gold. Delay was what he wanted, not a hazardous engagement with the first commander in the world.
Not being able to entice the Spartan fleet to fight, Alkibiades determined to conquer, one by one, the Ionian towns which were in revolt. Leaving a portion of his fleet to blockade Lysandros in the port of Ephesos, under the command of a skilful sailor named Antiochos, who had been pilot of theErosin the celebrated race in pursuit of Tissaphernes, with strict orders on no account to risk an engagement while he was away, but to keep the enemy shut up inside the harbour, he sailed for Phokaia. Thrasyboulos was already there, and they thought together to make a successful beginning of the final reduction of these rebellious dependencies.
Antiochos, whom he thus left behind, was an excellent sailor, and his chief, who had known him from boyhood, had no reason to suppose that he would disobey his orders. Unfortunately, he was one of those who mistake ambition for ability, and thought himself brave when he was only foolhardy. No sooner was his general-in-chief departed than, finding himself in unexpected power, he resolved to distinguish himself by fighting the Spartans. With only two triremes, he enteredthe port of Ephesos, rowed past the bows of the hostile fleet as it lay at anchor, and having by words and acts insulted Sparta and the Spartans, returned towards the rest of his ships, lying hard by in the Bay of Notion, imagining that he had done some valorous thing.
Lysandros, not believing that Alkibiades was really gone away, and thinking that this attack was but a ruse to draw him out, sent only a few swift ships to overtake and punish the lieutenant. The rest of the Athenian fleet came out to protect their temporary leader, and sailed in disorder towards Ephesos, not in close line, but one by one and anyhow. Then Lysandros knew the master was indeed gone, and hastened to take advantage of his absence. He met the Athenians in line, killed many of their men, amongst them the rash and disobedient Antiochos, took fifteen of their ships, and chased the others back to Samos. This victory at Notion was of itself of no very great importance to either side. But in its result it proved the most serious and fatal blow that had ever fallen upon Athens. To it we can trace, with certainty, her overthrow, the overthrow and final ruin of the most fascinating, and in some respects the greatest, people who have yet appeared upon the stage of the world’s theatre.
As soon as Alkibiades heard of this misfortune, he set out for Samos, but the old difficulty, the want of money, made it necessary for him to tarry on his way. He visited Kyme, not far from Phokaia, to receive the tribute that was due. The inhabitants refused to pay. He landed some troops. The native soldiers came against him. He was obliged to chastise them, and collect the tribute they had failed to pay and some booty by way of penalty. Then he returned to Samos.
There he found his fleet with its prestige injured, its numbers lessened, the friend to whom he had entrusted it killed in the miserable engagement at Notion, and all his men disheartened and murmuring. He alone was not disheartened at this second blow. He landed, learnt the whole truth of the bad tidings, and embarked again, confident that, if he could only get the enemy to fight, he would soon wipe off the temporary disgrace which in his absence had come upon his men. With the remainder of the ships he sailed straightway to Ephesos, and dared Lysandros to come out and try which was the better fleet, the abler admiral. Lysandros, notwithstanding the superiority of his forces, thought it wiser not to meet the conqueror of Kyzikos, and remained in port and in safety.