Alkibiades stood there; the envoys looking small beside him and nothing but his presence saving them from a very unpleasant death. Some of us began to shoulder through to make a guard about the rostrum; several of my lads came with me, even the hero of the dead cat incident, for this was a different and an uglier thing. And gradually Alkibiades got them quietened again. When they were in a mood to listen once more, he looked round at us, gathering us all in. He still had the power of making the least and farthest man in a crowd feel that he was speaking to him direct. Then he began. ‘Lads, are your memories so fogged with Samian wine that you can’t recall raising this self-same garboil less than a month ago? Or the answer that I made you then? It is the same answer now, and for the same reasons. If we go back now as you wish, to deal with the Oligarchs, it means civil war. Do any of you want civil war running through the streets of Athens? Also, if we go, leaving the squadrons of the Spartan League at Miletus with the Phoenician fleet maybe joined to them, the Island Empire, with none to guard it, is going to fall like ripe fruit when someone shakes the bough. If that’s what you want, you can choose out a new Commander and sail for Piraeus tomorrow, but I’m not leading you!’
And they were quiet. I don’t believe anyone but Alkibiades could have done it. It was like watching a superb driver bring a bolting chariot team back under control again. The men quietened, and out of the quiet someone shouted, ‘What are we to do, then?’
‘This,’ Alkibiades said. ‘We will send these men back safely as they came, to carry our orders to the Athenian government.’ Then turning to the envoys, he spoke to them, smiling courteously, but in the same tone pitched to carry to every man in the Assembly.
They were to carry back to Athens his orders that the Assembly of five thousand, which, though not the full Assembly of the old democracy, was reasonable enough, might remain at least for the present. But the Four Hundred must go. Above all, the five who ruled the Four Hundred must go. Phrynichus turned a dirty yellow when he said this. And having said it, he became all at once honeyed. ‘When that is done, and Athens if fit for decent men to consort with again, we will look for some means of healing the sad rift between her and Samos.’ And then last of all, when he was already half turned to leave the rostrum, he added as by an afterthought, ‘If anything — unfortune — should happen to either Athens or Samos, it would be a sad thing for the survivor, left with no one to be reconciled with, and the full strength of the Spartan League to face alone.’
Next day the Athenian envoys went home. It must have been annoying for them to realise that their being alive to sail at all they owed to Alkibiades; and that he had quite clearly found the situation amusing.
The Citizen
Athens had become a strange city, in which men dared not speak their thoughts aloud lest the friend they spoke to should be an agent of the Four Hundred. Indeed it seemed to me at that time that Athens, the Athens I had known, was dead and stinking. But before the Four Hundred had been much over a month in power, there began to be signs of a rift among them, between the extremists led by Paesander and Phrynichus, and the more moderate men such as Theramenes; and when the envoys returned from Samos with Alkibiades’ order that the Four Hundred were to be abolished, or rather, since nobody else could do it, that they were to abolish themselves, the rift not unnaturally widened. Not that that helped Athens. The extremists had still the upper hand, and used it with the ruthlessness of desperate men, while it was still theirs.
The embassy they had sent up to Agis at Dekalia had come back with no success behind them. Now they sent another to Sparta itself; and meanwhile they pressed on with building the sullen great fort down at Piraeus, and at home in Athens itself they took steps to see that any spirit of revolt was kept well trampled down, among ordinary people.
It was at that time that they called at our house one night, and took my father away. He had always been too apt to speak his mind in politics. I got between them and the door (I don’t know what I thought I could do, there were four of them), and I remember my father looked at me, his hair rumpled and his face a reddish grey, and a dignity about him quite different from his dignity in the shop, and said, ‘Don’t be a fool, Timotheus, you can’t help me, and who’s to look after your sister if she is left with no man at all?’
Next day we heard that he had drunk hemlock in prison, rather than face trial for his heinous crimes. That was the usual story. If he had lived a few more days he would have escaped the hemlock altogether, for the time of the Four Hundred was almost all run out.
They gave us back his body. I had never got on well with him, but I suppose he had something of my heart. I know that I felt closer to him in the moment they took him away than ever I had done before; and I gave him a decent funeral as funerals went in those lean times; a better one than I could afford, with Tekla dependent on me. I had scarcely buried him when news came that Euboa, which had revolted from us some while before, had called for Spartan aid, and a fleet was making ready to sail from Gythion in answer to their call. But in a few days more, the rumour was running through Athens that the fleet was not intended for Euboa at all, but had been invited by the Four Hundred to enter Piraeus, to take possession of the city. Theramenes had said as much, standing up in Council. Instantly the trouble between the moderates and the extremists flared into the open. The moderates claimed that the extremists had meant treachery all along, and that the new fort being built on the mole was intended for covering the ships of the Spartan League and holding the harbour against the Samos fleet if they came to interfere.
Next day it was known that the Spartan fleet, after raiding Aegina, was waiting off Epidauros for a wind to attack Piraeus. That morning Phrynichus was murdered in the Agora; and the man who did it got clean away. I don’t think the crowd were too eager to catch him.
By noon, word came flying up to the city that the Spartan fleet were standing off Piraeus. The soldiers employed on building the mole fort had struck work. The whole port had gone up in revolt. The Four Hundred had issued orders for its instant suppression, but since the soldiers were in it too, there was nobody to carry the orders out. We heard that Theramenes himself had gone rushing down to cope with the situation; but it was beyond him, or any other man, except possibly one. By evening we heard that the Spartan fleet had made for Salamis for the night, and troops and townspeople were combining to pull down the fort.
‘It’s the end of the Four Hundred,’ said old Episthenes, our next-door neighbour. And it was. They met once more, early next morning, but by then the troops had actually marched into Athens and encamped with their arms in the old cavalry base by the Temple of the Dioscurii. I shut Tekla, my sister, in the women’s chamber and forbade her to come out. It looked unpleasantly like civil war.
But before anything else could happen a horseman came drumming up from Piraeus — the men of Athens were out in the streets, and I saw him come — shouting that the Spartans were out from Salamis and heading straight for the Great Harbour.
To judge by last night’s accounts, there would be little of the mole fort left standing by now; and the port was largely undefended. I remember turning and going back to the shop and through it into our house, to the chest where my father’s old equipment was kept, and getting out his spears, as though it was a thing I did every day. My sister heard me and came running despite my orders, to see what was happening and to demand the meaning of the uproar in the streets.
I told her, and bade her get some food together if there was anything in the house. She said, ‘This isn’t for you, Timotheus.’
I said, ‘It is for anybody who can hold a spear.’
And she began to cry again; she had cried so much since the funeral that my own head ached with it, and said, ‘Not you as well as Father. Timotheus, you can’t go, you’re a cripple.’
I heard the trumpet sounding from the Temple of the Dioscurii.
But in the end she got me the food and a cloak, then went back to the women’s chamber as I bade her, and ba
rred the door; and I was out in the street in time to join the stream of boys and old men heading for the port. The troops had of course gone ahead by then. I could not keep up even with the old men, but I’ve always been able to walk a good distance if I could take my time, and I arrived at last, though somewhat late. Our few ships, partly manned, were strung across the harbour mouth, and the quays and the long mole right out to the remains of the fort were lined with what troops we had, and every last man and boy, even slaves and foreigners, who could carry a spear. I took my place among them, and in that unlikely moment I was happy, with a young man’s happiness in the feel of a spear shaft in my hand and another man’s shoulder against mine. Happy also in finding that my city could still stand like this, united in the face of an enemy. These might be her last moments of life, but at least she was not dead yet as I thought, and when she died it would be a cleaner death.
We could see the Spartan galleys out beyond the harbour mouth, so close that we could make out the devices at their prows and catch the sun-flash on dripping oar blades.
There was a long murmurous silence all along the quays. My leg ached from the long walk, and my mouth was dry, and my hand suddenly slippery with sweat on the unaccustomed spear shaft. The waiting time drew out long and thin …
And then, small and clear across the water, we heard a trumpet call from the foremost Spartan trireme. It was echoed from another, and another, and before our eyes the whole fleet went about. It seemed like a dream, and we dared not believe what our eyes told us; but it was true; the galleys were broadside on now, heading past the harbour mouth. They passed almost within bowshot of the mole, and stood away for the open sea.
Rag tag and bobtail that we were, we must have made a better and more warlike showing than we knew.
‘What now?’ said a trader beside me, shouldering an old spear. ‘To look at all of us you’d think the war was over! Don’t forget the Spartans are still at Dekalia and with Euboa in revolt half our remaining corn supply is gone.’
The same thought must have occurred to Theramenes and his party; and the extremists, their plans miscarried, dared make no counter-move; for within a couple of days all the ships in the harbour that had been so hastily manned that morning, had been as hastily victualled and equipped for a longer service, and with hurriedly gathered crews, were off on the trail of the Spartan fleet.
We heard no more of them for several days, and then a single battle-scarred trireme limped back into Piraeus. I was in the shop, checking over the little stock that remained, when I heard the wailing in the street. I went out, with a sudden cold fear on me; and a man was standing by the fountain at the end of the street, shouting his news in a hoarse cracked voice. ‘Twenty-two ships,’ he was shouting. ‘It wasn’t a battle, it was a bloody rout! What could you expect with ships half-equipped and half-manned? We’re done for — finished; it’s all over with Athens I tell you!’ And then he sat down on the steps of the fountain and began to cry.
Looking back, I still cannot think what saved us then, unless the Gods made the Spartans mad. We were wide open, and must fall at a touch, no possibility of holding off a single enemy squadron; and they remained at Euboa, and never came.
In the breathing space Theramenes and the new Democratic leaders (not merely moderates now, but Democrats!) made one last desperate effort and got together twenty ships, to guard Piraeus — half-rotten hulks, converted merchantmen, craft half-finished off the slipways like premature children — and while that was doing they formally dispossessed the Four Hundred, who in fact had already ceased to exist, and called an Assembly of the Five Thousand.
I was not one of them; it was not the old days when every citizen was free and expected to attend the Assembly. But the news of their first vote was in the streets almost before they had cast it on the Pnyx. It was a vote to recall Alkibiades.
That night the first autumn rain fell in Athens, pattering on the hot, parched ground, drawing out the scent of the dark scrub from Lykabettus and Colonus to breathe cool across the city. And the whole thirsty earth seemed to sigh and stretch itself and drink. I remember that a lively lightness of heart seemed to come upon the city. Our prospects were as black as ever, but the magic of Alkibiades’ name was in every mouth, and the little myrtle tree in our courtyard lifted up its head and drank in the rain.
The Seaman
Phrynichus and his bunch of beauties had only departed a few days when Alkibiades sent for me one evening. I dropped whatever I was doing and went up, for the summons had an urgent sound to it; and found him on the terrace of the fine white house above the town where he had taken up his quarters. He was leaning on a saffron painted column and looking down towards this merchantman that had put into harbour earlier in the day.
He swings round as I comes out on to the terrace, and says, ‘Tissaphernes has bestirred himself it seems. He’s off to Aspendus, and the Spartan Commander with him.’
I whistles. The idea of Tissaphernes doing anything more active than taking a morning’s ride on a well-schooled horse with a belled falcon on his fist seems unlikely. ‘Who brought you that news?’
He jerks his head in the direction of the merchantman.
‘And you’re sure it’s true?’
‘No. But my scouts don’t generally make mistakes.’
He was wearing the dress of an Athenian General again; but the difference in him was deeper than that. He had done another of those changes of his that seem to reach down to wherever it is a man keeps his soul. He had laid aside the Persian noble with the eye-paint and the silk diadem; and he looked now as though his whole life had been spent on the deck of a galley; like a man doing the thing that he knows and loves best in the world, and burning with a restless inner fire.
‘The Phoenician fleet is at Aspendus,’ I says.
‘I hadn’t forgotten. Close on a hundred and fifty strong, and if they link up with the Spartan League that’s the last hope gone for Athens.’
‘Do you think that’s what it means?’
‘I can’t think of anything else likely to take Tissaphernes and the Spartan Commander to Aspendus. They must have decided that the time has come to close in for the kill.’
‘And has it?’ I says, feeling my mouth suddenly a bit dry.
He stands leaning against his saffron column with his thumbs stuck into his belt, looking at me, and I sees the old lazy sunshiny look back in his eyes that most times means foul weather brewing for somebody else. ‘What do you think, Pilot?’
‘I think you’ve another of your neat bits of devilry in mind.’
‘It’s a time for devilry,’ he says. ‘You know as well as I do, that the last hope of getting Persia in on our side is gone. But that’s not to say we have to sit back and watch them go in with Sparta. I’ve done my humble best to foster distrust and ill-feeling between them; and I must admit I thought I was doing none so badly — till now.’
‘And now it’s pretty clear that they’re planning to join forces after all, and attack either Pireus or Samos.’
‘So we must try sowing a little extra distrust and dissension — a catch-crop, as it were — and without undue loss of time. Have the Icarus ready to sail by noon tomorrow. I have already sent orders to the Trirarchs of the First Squadron.’
I suppose I goggles at him, for he grins, and says, ‘I know; a Commander of any intelligence would see at once that the only chance was to keep the fleet together, and head for Athens to try to prevent a blockade, or bide here at Samos and try to save the Island Empire. But which, Pilot, which? No, my way is better.’
Next morning he takes a fine lighthearted farewell of the troops on Samos, telling them fairy-tales about bringing them back the Phoenician fleet for allies if they’re good, and don’t burn down the island while he’s away; and at noon we sails for Aspendus with a squadron of thirteen triremes. But I’m the one standing close enough to him to see his face, and I knows him better than most; and it’s the face of a gambler making a desperate throw.
&
nbsp; The Soldier
In the Bunch of Grapes that evening, Callias of the Hypolita said, ‘Well, that’s the last we shall see of him.’
I put down the shared wine cup on the bench between us. ‘Meaning?’
He shrugged. ‘My dear Arkadian — he’s going over to Sparta again. With things looking as ugly as they do for us at the moment, it’s the obvious answer.’
‘Not to me, it isn’t,’ I said.
‘Oh come! Have the stone quarries robbed you of your wits? Or your memory?’ And then he laughed. ‘Oh, you needn’t pretend to be so much his man; all Samos knows you could have had the Icarus marines and you turned the offer down.’
I wanted to say a great many things to Callias at that point, but could not think of words sufficiently foul for any of them. I picked up the wine cup — I remember doing it very carefully, as though it was something that needed to be done with great accuracy — and poured what was left of the wine over his head.
He came for me like a bull, then; poor Callias, his size, next to his stupidity, was always his undoing. I tripped his feet from under him and threw him on my hip. He went down with his mouth open, all arms and legs, and we fought it out under the benches among the feet of the other customers, until the shout went up that Thrasbylus was coming up the street; and then several of them pulled us apart.
Thrasybulus was a great one for discipline, especially among his officers, and we’d probably both have lost our lieutenancies if he’d found us at it. But we grew good at standing by each other in the Samos fleet. Samos City was a plague spot in many ways, but I never knew men so close knit as we were. Perhaps it was because of that that our hates, as well as our loves, grew so strong.