‘And even Strombichides waxes poetical.’
‘Oh for Zeus’ sake, Charminius!’ Strombichides’ voice goes rough at the edges. ‘I’m simply speaking the truth. And it goes against the grain quite enough, to admit it, without your sneer! If the thing were put to the vote among them, I honestly don’t know which would win, their democratic loyalties, or the combination of Persian gold and something that Alkibiades trails behind him as he does those ridiculous great cloaks of his.’
‘The overthrow of the government is still not a step to be taken lightly,’ says Charminius. ‘Can we really afford so high a price for the luxury of Alkibiades back among us?’
There’s a long pause, and I turns round from looking over Samos. The shadows is gathering under the portico, and the three men round the table has their faces thrust in on each other. Then Paesander says, ‘Whatever he has done or not done, it is because he has the ear of the Satrap that the Spartan fleet is short both in pay and morale and the Phoenician fleet has so far been held in leash. My friends, given the least chance of getting him, can we afford not to have Alkibiades back among us?’
The Citizen
It was early autumn — the fourth since the young men marched for Syracuse; and the city, a city of old men and young boys and cripples, was still free; and that was about all that could be said — when a customer at my father’s shop told us that the Paralos was in from Samos with General Paesander on board. And soon after, we heard that he had been with the Council, and would speak before the Assembly, summoned for three days’ time.
My father and I went up to listen and cast our votes. There was no difficulty about leaving the shop with only a slave in charge, the man who brought us news of Paesander’s arrival had been the first customer in days, and there hadn’t been another since. All Athens had a fairly shrewd idea what Paesander had come to say; and I remember there was a kind of uneasy quiet, a great sense of waiting, about the crowd gathered on the Pnyx. It was one of those days when the Meltemi falls asleep, and there seems no air to breathe. Parnes, far off beyond the wooded slopes of Colonus shook in the heat haze, and southward the sea was like burnished silver, hot in the sun, that will burn the fingers at a touch. On such a day the stink of a great crowd is almost suffocating; but that day there was another smell, of fear and expectancy and anger held ready for use; and running through and under it all — how can I describe it? — a kind of unwilling hope. The smell of the crowd’s mood, that was almost as tangible as the stink of its sweat …
I am not Thucydides, with his copies of speeches after they are made; I remember only the gist of what Paesander said, but it is enough.
After the usual preamble which is seldom more than the beating of the gong in the theatre before the play begins, he led up to a very direct statement of facts. Alkibiades had sent word that he was willing to return to Athens and lead her war effort.
I have said before, that all Athens had some idea what was coming; but speaking for myself, the sheer valiant impudence of it took my breath away. Rightly or wrongly the Athenian Assembly had condemned him to death, and he was still under that sentence. He had gone over to the enemy and handled their war effort (Oh, we all knew whose brain was behind Dekalia and the loss of Syracuse), for more than two years, with a notable success. And now, with Sparta too hot to hold him, he did not ask us to forgive him, but as good as told us that he would forgive us.
But not without conditions.
Paesander was saying now that Alkibiades and only Alkibiades could detach Persia from her Spartan alliance, and bring in the weight of her gold and her ships on the Athenian side; and Alkibiades would not lift a finger in the matter unless he was recalled to Athens, and the government which had outlawed him and then so criminally mishandled the war effort, were in its turn thrown out.
At that, the crowd raised a furious outcry — two separate out-cries that met and mingled with each other. The one was led by the priestly families of Eleusis, furious at the idea of recalling the man who had profaned the Mysteries and so brought the anger of the Gods upon Athens; the other, and much larger, a general protest at the bare suggestion of overthrowing with our own hands, our own hard-won democracy. My father joined in that. I remember him, his face dark red and the veins on his neck standing out like whipcord, shouting, ‘Maybe the Oligarchs aren’t enough! Let’s have the Tyrants back, while we’re about it!’ I did my own share of shouting, partly I think because it was the easiest way to get rid of the clamour of conflicting emotions pent up within me. Athens was the democracy, often as we grumbled at it; and to overthrow it, and set up an aristocratic rule of the few instead of the free voice of the many, seemed to me in that moment a kind of snuffing out of the spirit. It was too high a price.
I have known men try to shout down an angry crowd, and a few, a very few, who succeeded. Paesander didn’t attempt it. He just stood there until we had shouted ourselves out, and then went on.
‘My friends, it goes hard with all of us, none more so than myself, to consider this change in our way of government, but we must consider also that it need not be for ever. When the war is over, there will come a time for changing the government again —’ (The dirty dog! said something within myself, but at the time I scarcely noticed it.) ‘It is no bad thing, in wartime, when quick decisions are needed, that they should be made by the few. And Alkibiades, coming of our greatest democratic family, will be the first to see when the time is ripe to return to the way of government that is natural to us.’
There were doubtful mutterings among the crowd, and a few shouts of dissent began to rise again. Paesander held up his hand for silence, and when he got it, went on. ‘As to the blasphemy charge — remember that most of the men who brought it have since fallen into disrepute; several are in gaol for one cause or another. I tell you frankly, that it is not Alkibiades who has brought the wrath of the Gods upon the city, it is Athens who has brought the disasters of these past years upon herself, by driving her greatest and most brilliant General into the arms of the enemy!’
He paused then, to see the effect of his words, and from the crowd came an uneasy murmuring. ‘You all know how it is with Athens. The Spartans from Dekalia are loose in our land; we have less than twenty warships at Piraeus, barely enough to beat off an attack from the sea; the rest of our fleet, and the citizens to man it are at Samos and cannot be recalled unless we are to lose Ionia. Our treasury is empty. The Spartans on the other hand have risen in the scale of seapower until their fleet about equals ours, and they have the whole sea strength of the Peloponnesian league behind them, backed by Persian gold. The gold has been cut and is in arrears, you say; yes, and we all know whose doing that is. We must all know too, that if Alkibiades can sway the Persian Satrap in one direction, he can sway him in the other.’ He leaned forward, his heavy face seeming to kindle with the urgency of what he said; his eyes moved to and fro over the crowd. Then he flung out his hands as though in a last appeal. ‘Tell me, if there is one man here who can do so, what hope have we, apart from Alkibiades?’
Men looked into each other’s faces and away again up to the big shape on the rostrum. The uneasy muttering and the stray shouts of dissent died away. No one had any answer. We had no hope apart from Alkibiades.
Before the Assembly broke up, we had voted that Paesander and ten of our leading citizens should go to Sardis to negotiate with Alkibiades and the Satrap, with full authority to accept their terms. And since it was clear that there would be trouble with certain of the Samos senior officers, including that re-doubtable democrat, Phrynichus, we had passed another, relieving them of their command. Having once accepted the idea that Alkibiades was coming back to us, nothing must stand in the way.
Years later, Aristophanes put a line into his play The Frogs, ‘Athens loves and hates him too — but wants him back.’ We wanted him back; and he was coming …
We did not know, then, the full price that we should have to pay.
The Seaman
It was late
autumn when the embassy came from Athens, and the weather turning cold. They had given Alkibiades a brazier burning charcoal and scented logs in his quarters, and he checked a moment to hold his hands to it every time he passed in his caged pacing. Once he checked at the window end of his track, and twitched back the crimson hangings that were supposed to keep out the whining draughts, and peered out through the star-shaped window-fret into the darkening courtyard. ‘The almond tree is almost bare,’ he says, disgusted. ‘We’ve been a year in this well-cushioned abode of the damned; while the fleets of Athens and the League scuttle about the Aegean taking and retaking islands, and fighting six-a-side battles that get nobody anywhere. Isn’t there one commander worth the name on either side?’
He’d been like that for weeks, months; impossible to be with, and somehow impossible to abandon. I’d been near changing my name and taking out my earrings and slipping off to Miletus to enlist as a rower more than once; but always I’d known in the end that I couldn’t leave him up there in Sardis to go to the dogs by himself.
But now that the embassy from Athens had come, now that he had supped with them … ‘Soon will be,’ says I. ‘At least, that’s the word going round Sardis.’
‘May Sardis rot,’ says he, letting the hangings fall across the window and turning back to his pacing. ‘Meaning me, I take it?’
‘Meaning you.’ I takes a good look at him as he comes back to the brazier, the first real look I’ve taken in a long time. And I don’t like what I sees; his face is puffed and blotchy, the old scar dark on his temple, his eyes heavy and hot, set in bruised circles like the eyes of a man as hasn’t slept for so long that he’s almost forgotten what sleep is like. ‘What’s amiss? Athens hasn’t been fool enough to refuse you?’
He gives a shout of laughter. ‘Refused me? No! Listen, my dear anxious old drunken pirate — Gods! Antiochus, have you any notion how appalling you look? Paesander has been bringing me good news between mouthfuls all evening. The magic of my name — or the hope of what I can do for them — has raised me a strong party in Athens; the Assembly has voted for my recall, and in order to oil the skids, they have removed Phrynichus from his command at Samos.’
‘Well then, what in the name of the Dog —’ I begins.
‘All this depends — it must depend — on my ability to bring in Persia’s support on our side.’
I nods. ‘That’s the message I took to Samos.’
‘And it was a message in good faith. That’s the howlingly funny part! I’ve used trickery before now, what politician hasn’t; but I sent that letter in good faith. I had Tissaphernes’ promise, and I trusted to it. I even believe that he meant it at the time. But that was in the summer; now the almond tree is almost bare, and Tissaphernes has had second thoughts!’
I gets up from my stool beside the brazier, and stares at him through the fronding smoke, feeling a bit sick. ‘Why? He can’t have!’ I said stupidly.
‘He has bethought him of earlier council I gave him when I was — warming him up — that keeping both sides equally balanced and letting them waste each other is better policy — for Persia and for Tissaphernes, that is. He’s right, of course; it’s cheaper for one thing, and less trouble, and offers better chances for a clean-up by Persia with proportionately rich pickings for the Satrap of Lydia, in the end. Only I thought I’d got him safely past that point. I had, but he’s doubled back on me.’ We stands facing each other through the smoke, Alkibiades breathing through flared nostrils; then he adds — oh, quite pleasantly — but the pleasantness makes the hairs crawl on the back of my neck, ‘May he die slowly and screaming, in the hands of the Merciful Ones!’
The sour taste of the wine I had drunk earlier came back into my mouth. I gagged, and spat into the hot charcoal.
‘So what do we do now?’
‘There’s only one thing to be done, and that I’ve done already,’ he says. ‘Persuade Tissaphernes to demand impossible terms.’
‘And how will that help us?’
‘It will force Athens to be the one to break off negotiations. With any luck it will mean that the people will spit on Paesander’s name rather than on mine — if they don’t look too closely at the terms, but see only that they had the chance of getting me back, and Paesander lost it for them.’
‘Alas for Paesander,’ I says. ‘You’re very sure of your charm for the Athenians.’
He says, looking into the red heart of the charcoal, ‘I know Athens. I don’t think anyone ever knew her as I know her, or as she knows me.’
And by Blue Haired Poseidon, he said it as lover speaks of lover!
*
The negotiations ran on for three days; and Alkibiades spent the days in the conference chamber and the nights in the brothels of the town. (I had asked him once why he never had his little flute girl back; it was reputed that she was good in bed; but he only laughed and said that he liked variety.) And then on the third night, when I was drinking in a wine-shop not far from the Temple of Cybele, I looks up and sees him standing in the doorway. He sees me at the same moment and comes lurching across the crowded court and crashes down on the bench beside me and yells for wine. ‘They told me I might find you here,’ he says, and leans sideways to smack the plump pink-draped backside of the girl who brings the wine jar. I remember I was as shocked as Plato might have been. It was the kind of thing, other men do, as a matter of fact I’d done it myself a short while before; but it was all wrong for Alkibiades; a kind of deliberate grossness. The girl darted off giggling to attend to another customer, and he turned to me. I thought he’d been drinking already, for his face was darkly flushed and his eyes bloodshot, and when he put out his hand to the wine cup it wasn’t as steady as it might have been; but I meets his gaze straining in his head; and he’s stone cold horribly sober.
‘It’s all over,’ he says. ‘The embassy have broken off negotiations.’
I says under my breath. ‘Hadn’t we best get out of here? Somewhere we can talk without being overheard?’
‘It’s not much matter whether we’re overheard or not,’ he says. ‘It’ll be public property soon enough, anyway.’ But he keeps his voice down, all the same. ‘The Satrap made his demands — firstly that the whole of Ionia, coast and islands alike, should be ceded to the Great King. There was a good deal of argument of course, but Paesander agreed to that at last. He actually agreed, Pilot! Oh I suppose he thought that with Sparta crushed by the aid of the Persian fleet, we — Athens — would still have her Thracian colonies and the cities of the Hellespont — corn trade safe, and no Sparta to stand between us and the sun. But that was only the beginning — do I not know it, I who framed the demands! He made more demands, and more, and Paesander and his troop accepted or half accepted or asked for time to think; and at last he demanded that the Great King should build what ships he pleased and send them where he pleased, even along our coasts and throughout Greek home-waters.’
I set down my wine cup so sharply that a few drops flew out, out, and spattered the table top with crimson. ‘But that means only one thing —’
‘One damnable thing,’ Alkibiades says. ‘With Sparta crushed, Persia would turn her new Navy on to us. To agree to that would be as good as selling out to the Persians here and now. Incidentally, I’d almost certainly become Satrap of Athens, which is a pleasant thought, if I could make up my mind whether to laugh myself sick or howl like a dog. Well, at that even Paesander dug his toes in, as I’d banked on his doing. And proceedings came to an end, with Tissaphernes gathering his furred robe round him and stalking out of one door, while Paesander and his envoys stalked out of the other.
I says nothing. There doesn’t seem much point even in cursing; and when things gets beyond cursing, it’s better to keep quiet. Alkibiades is watching his own hand on the table, playing with the light in that great signet ring. In a little, he says carefully, ‘Tissaphemes pretended he wasn’t fluent enough in Attic Greek and made me act as his interpreter, so that the demands came from my mouth. I thi
nk he found that very amusing.’
And then suddenly he looks up at me. ‘Do you know what nearly broke my heart, Pilot? That Paesander so nearly accepted. I — you can imagine what conditions at home must be.’
‘You don’t know your own strength,’ I says.
14
The Soldier
Seven thousand men went into the stone quarries at Syracuse; and half a year later, rather less than seven hundred came out, to slavery of one kind or another.
I was sold to a farmer, and worked most of my time among his pigs. Pigs are surprisingly good company, when you get to know them as well as I did; and their smell is sweet and wholesome compared with the smell of the quarries. I wake up with that smell in the back of my throat sometimes, even now; the smell of despair and filth and old grey stone dust, and the sickly-sweet stench that came from the dead bodies of our friends. The guards would not take the dead away, and we had nowhere to bury them — you cannot dig graves in solid rock; so we piled them on top of each other in the worked-out galleries of the quarry. We had a great many flies. They swarmed on the dead, and blew in the wounds of the living. Anyone with an open wound almost always died, you couldn’t keep the dust out of it; and the fly maggots hatched out, and that was that. We began to know after a time.
Astur died in the early days. Quite quietly, with his head on my knee. We were together all through the long hideous campaign, and the desperate retreat that ended at the Assinaros ford. We never knew one quiet hour together, save for some odd spell on watch. We never swam together, or lay in the shade and laughed holding hands; or playing kotobos, trying to make the initials of each other’s names in the wine lees after supper; or hunted with a shared pack in the oak woods of Colonus. Because of Astur, I have never known these things — oh in the way of friendship or with casual companions, yes; some of these things at least; but not as lovers know them. His grave bright-eyed shade with the sudden laughter would never have held me back; I have simply never wanted it with any other. He was the one and the only one. And after him, I became a man for women, and even that, not for a long while.