“Here I must set delicacy aside and speak straight and blunt. There are those who are jealous of me, of my private celebrity. I understand this, friends. I ask you, however, to consider that I now place this fame at your disposal, to be yoked to your ends. What I achieve by my private exertions redounds to Athens’ glory as well as my own. Recall Olympia; the leading men of Sicily stood present in the stadium when my horses took the triple. They erected pavilions in honor of my victory and clamored about me, seeking my friendship. Will they not be favorably disposed when I and my fellow commanders, backed by this mighty armada, address them as I do you tonight, not with arrogance, threatening the destruction of their homes and enslavement of their families, but seeking their alliance, bidding them join us? Immodest as it sounds, I ask: who else in Athens may command such attention?
“Two more points, gentlemen, and I will finish.
“First, to those who protest that our nation now stands at peace, that we have a treaty with the Spartans, and that this Sicilian venture, though technically not in violation, will in the event plunge us back into full-scale war. I answer with a question: what kind of peace is it when the nations of Greece are in fact fighting on more fronts now than they did under formal declaration? What peace is it when the third part of our young men elect to serve as mercenaries for these very states? War will come again, this is certain. What remains for us to decide is when. Will it resume at the hour of our enemies’ choosing, when they have elevated their forces to the peak of readiness? Or will it come at our election, when our cause stands most likely to prevail?
“Now to the nub. To others, gentlemen, I may confine my appeal to considerations of profit and risk, and these are not inconsequential. But to you who perceive with the eyes of wisdom, I may speak to deeper designs.
“Our nation is great. But greatness begets obligation. It must prove worthy of itself or it falls. You have all seen what this war, prosecuted piecemeal and without vigor, and this so-called Peace have done to our young men’s spirit. Those fresh to maturity crave action, while veterans turn sour and sullen. They are going bad—let us call it by its name. Sicily is the antidote. A call to brilliance which will summon ourselves and our youth back from their depletion and despair. Pericles was in error to set us on the defensive. This is not Athens. It is not our style. We are dying by inches, shackled by this ignoble Peace, declining not for lack of goods, but want of glory.
“Athens is a sword rusting in her sheath. We may not sit still, we Athenians. Idleness is fatal to us. What I hate most about this Peace is the toll it has taken on our nation’s soul. It will finish us, my friends, as surely as defeat in war. Athens is not a draft mule, but a mighty racehorse; she must be harnessed not to a plough, but to a chariot—and a chariot of war.
“Lastly this, gentlemen. To those who mistrust me and fear my ambition. When this fleet takes station before Syracuse, you will not discover me shrinking from the foe. My ram will be the first to seek and strike the enemy. Perhaps I will be slain. Then you will be quit of me. My pride will no longer vex you. But hear this…
“The fleet will remain.
“Long after my bones are dust beneath the earth, you will have her. Athens will have her. She will be yours, to make use of as you wish.
“Consider this proposal, my friends. Think it over. The spoils of our enterprise will be shared by all, even those who remain safe behind. But glory and honor are his who early sets his name upon the rolls. Join me, brothers and countrymen. Launch from our harbors this mighty armada and let the world stand back in wonder.”
XV
A LECTURE FROM NICIAS
The debate that succeeded Alcibiades’ departure from my grandfather’s halls replicated in heat and animation, no doubt, that which transpired within every other cell or association to which he had spoken or subsequently did speak.
Beyond the merit of our guest’s presentation, whether one agreed with him or not, what could not but strike each listener was the force of his personality. Many of the clan’s elders had had occasion to view Alcibiades only in Assembly. They had never had the chance to examine him close up, across their own board, where they might look him in the face, see the intelligence in his eyes, the expressiveness of his hands, the resolve in his voice. In person he was a force. His belief in the enterprise he championed was so genuine, and delivered with such conviction, that even those chary of its wisdom or in out-and-out opposition were called upon to summon all their stoniness of heart to resist the persuasiveness with which he represented it. The beauty of his person easily won over those previously disposed, and disarmed even those who abhorred his character and conduct.
Even his lisp worked in Alcibiades’ favor. It was a flaw; it made him human. It took the curse off his otherwise godlike self-presentation and made one, despite all misgivings, like the fellow. Though I have here rendered his speech as if it unspooled seamlessly and without interruption, in actual moment its impact was augmented by a certain charming foible.
Alcibiades had the habit, when memory failed to summon the word or phrase he sought, of pausing, sometimes for moments, his head tilted to one side, until the precise idiom presented itself. There was to this an attractive lack of artifice, an ingenuousness and authenticity. It was winning.
Within our clan, reaction split dramatically. My uncle Haemon, a diehard of “the Good and True,” scorned our guest’s representation of the expedition as honorable and himself as a patriot. “He is a panderer to the mob, plain and simple, and this Sicilian stunt seeks to pass off audacity of action and scale of ambition for justice, to contrive a simulacrum of honor. It is not honor but thrasytes, boldness, alone.”
More spoke, opinion divided. My grandfather frowned, volunteering nothing. Pressed at last by his son, my father’s brother Ion, he rejected Alcibiades, declaring, “His skirt is too long.”
This was greeted with howls from the younger men. “Go back to your snooze, Grandfather,” my cousin Callicles hooted.
The patriarch responded. “Traditional generations hemmed their garments higher, to honor their origins as tillers of the soil, whose dress must not trail in the dirt and muck. But the new generation, born of the city, knows nothing of the land, so they cut their skirts to drag about, immodest and unseemly. What I fear has nothing to do with groves or vines, Callicles, but the virtues which cultivation of the land imparts: modesty, patience, reverence for the gods, of which this Alcibiades knows little and cares less. He is a product of the city and evinces all its vices: vanity, arrogance, impatience, and immodesty before heaven.”
Callicles responded with heat. “I will give you more virtues of the country, old man. Narrow-mindedness, misanthropy, skinflintedness, insularity. Good riddance to these! The virtues of the city are boldness, imagination, vision, and inclusiveness.”
“The man of the land,” Grandfather rejoined, “is in the business of peace, he of the city in the service of war.”
“This service has done your purse no harm, Grandfather. Nor any here beneath this roof.”
A general uproar ensued.
“Gentlemen, gentlemen.” My uncle Ion restored order. It was he of all assembled who most embodied that sagacity which country men call “dirt wisdom”—the horse sense of middle years. What did he think, his kinsmen inquired, not alone of our guest’s proposal but of the man himself?
“I fear him. But I fear more dismissing him. As I watched him address us tonight I could not but imagine, as he suggested, how he would appear in halls like these in Sicily, braving these foreign nobles and soliciting their alliance. Sicily is rich, yes, but she is also rude. Her princes are like ours a hundred years ago. They may be awed less by the might of Athens than by her aggressiveness and audacity—qualities which they fear, admire, and envy, and which our guest personifies more than any other. He is Athens, or that portion which indeed may overawe and win these foreign knights.
“That point made by the captain Pythiades is also well taken, that Syracuse—whose conquest, all concur, hold
s the key to Sicily—is a democracy. We have witnessed our young champion’s appeal to the mob. Perhaps this, too, may work in the expedition’s favor. And yet…”
“And yet nothing,” put in our youthful firebrand Callicles. He spoke of his service, this winter past, on the Naval Resources Board. Among his duties was to treat with the brokers who represented the foreign sailors—the islanders of Samos, Chios, Lesbos, and the other maritime nations who served for pay in the Athenian fleet. He knew these men, Callicles said.
“They are neither pirates nor grog-besotted salts, but responsible professionals, possessed in abundance of the spirit of adventure and harboring keen hopes of advancement. They know their skills’ worth and hire it out cannily. Yet these foreigners serve in our fleet not for money alone, which they could get anywhere, but for a far more potent intangible.
“They are in love with Athens.”
Observe them, Callicles submitted, on any holiday. They parade in the festivals, pack the benches of the dance and chorus. In their off-hours they congregate in the Lyceum and the Leocorium, the marketplace and the Academy, and the groves and enclaves where the philosophers and their students assemble. You have seen them, cousins. They roost in the margins, attending spellbound to Protagoras of Abdera, Hippias of Elis, Gorgias of Leontini, Prodicus of Cos, and the scores of sophists and rhetoricians who set up shop in the open air to vend their wares of wisdom. They cluster about Socrates. But before all, they are taken with the theater.
“On the morn of a competition one discovers them by hundreds in the forecourt, seeking shade beneath the statues of the generals, or trooping from the plane grove of the Amazoneum with their sweethearts and their picnic baskets, with their woolen sea blankets over their shoulders, employing as theater cushions the very pillows upon which they sit at oars.
“I have seen them in the gymnasia, those which admit foreigners. The Hebrew sailors endure the pain of those copper clamps called ‘mushroom caps’ which stretch the circumcised flesh of their members back over the exposed foreskin, so that, naked, they may look like Greeks. Like Athenians. That is how smitten they are with our nation. Open the rolls of citizenship and the lines of applicants will lap the agora thrice over.
“But here is my point, gentlemen. In any overseas port I am approached twenty times a day by foreign seamen, crack mariners beseeching me to use my influence to gain them a berth. Many offer to serve without pay. They wish only to learn under an Athenian captain, to further their skills and advance their aspirations.
“These foreigners, I believe, will be drawn powerfully to serve under a commander like Alcibiades. The better and more ambitious they are, the more they will wish to sail with him, because they believe he will bring them victory, and because they are just like him. He is who they dream of becoming. He knows it and knows how to exploit it.
“Remember, these sailors all know each other. They frequent the same dives and cathouses; they know every officer in every fleet and which seamen sail with him. I make no brief for the man Alcibiades. But the chance of serving under him will draw to this force, I believe, the elite mariners of the world. I leave it to you to evaluate their impact, upon Sicily and our foes of the Peloponnese.”
Many of the wealthy, that winter, made warranty to lay keels. Yet as happens with men, when spring came they discovered excuses for delay. Alcibiades and his circle pressed forward on their own. Euryptolemus and Thrasybulus commissioned Atalanta and Aphrodisia; others Vigilant, Equipoise, and Redoubtable. Alcibiades commenced construction on Antiope and Olympia; these in addition to four he had already donated. Could he afford such an outlay? Perhaps not, but the start drew others who had hung back. The sight of these vessels rising on their timbered ways in the shipyards of Munychia and Telegoneia, the daylong thump of adzes and chisels hewing their beams, the stink of pitch and oakum being paddled into the seams of their mortise-and-tenon hulls, and the mob of technitai and architectones, carpenters and shipwrights employed upon them, created a momentum of its own, magnetic and irresistible. Soon an expanse of shoreline a mile long at the Cantharus and twice that along the Sounium Road stood chockablock with hulls under construction, not to mention those simultaneously arising on timber sites in Macedonia and the Chersonese, while the waterfront boomed with joiners’ shops and chandleries, sailmakers’ lofts and foundries, blacksmiths, armorers, rope weavers, and mast and spar factors. Pennants and ensigns painted the lanes with color; beneath their plumage drayage wagons lumbered night and day, bearing the matériel of construction.
The fever had caught. The city could talk of nothing but Sicily. In the marketplace, clay models of the island were snatched up by the hundred; men and boys scratched outlines in the dirt and extolled her wonders in the barbershop and the saddlery. It was as if we had conquered already and had no more to dispute but division of the spoils.
The aristocrat Nicias addressed the Assembly one blistering forenoon, when the sun-blasted Pnyx stood packed to the rearmost station.
“Athenians, I see your hearts are set upon this venture. Today departing for this congress, I could not locate my attendant; he was discovered at last among the grooms, blathering ecstatically of Sicily. What else? It is your nature, men of Athens, to count as yours already that which you have set your hopes upon and, your minds made up, you will suffer no one to quarrel counter to your whim. You will shout him down, as if he sought by his speech to take from you that which you already possessed instead of counseling you for your own good in regard to that which you may never get and the pursuit of which may bring you to ruin.
“I see before me, too, in the foremost row, that young man and his confederates whose ambition has inflamed your hearts to this folly. He is smiling, this proud breeder of horses and corrupter of the public morals, because he knows I speak the truth. I hate to see that smile, my friends, however comely. And do you not, gentlemen, chancing to find yourselves beside this buck’s henchmen, permit yourselves to be intimidated by their bluster, or feel shamed if they call you coward for demurring to underwrite this expedition. Yes, his friends heckle me now. Let them. But if these hotbloods will not attend seriously to my words, I pray that you, their elders and betters, will.
“I see there also, in that shaded precinct he favors, Socrates the philosopher, to whose counsel alone our youthful champion attends. We all know where you stand, sir. You have spoken out, resisting this Sicilian adventure as unjust, to bear war to a people who harbor no intent of bringing it to us. Speak up, my friend, if I say false. Your famous daimon, that voice which warns you of peril or folly, has enjoined this escapade, has it not? Yet I see none heeds your gray hairs or mine.
“Let me speak, then, men of Athens, not in opposition to this enterprise, for I perceive that your course is set and nothing may deflect you from it, but only to set before you from experience’s locker, as they say, those concerns which must be addressed if we wish to pull off this spectacular stunt and not come a cropper in the bargain.”
Nicias spoke of the hazards of venturing far from home and resupply, across such distant and treacherous seas, at such a remove that in winter even a fast dispatch ship may require four months for the passage. In all previous overseas campaigns we had had the bulwark of allied harbors as forward bases and friendly territories from which to secure supplies. Not in Sicily. We would stand there at the ends of the earth, with not a crust to gnaw but that which we bore with us. He warned, too, that in taking on this new enemy we left another on our doorstep, the Spartans and their allies, who had very nearly laid us low before and who, though forbearing now under the Peace, would resume operations with vigor once we committed ourselves to this western front and, should we suffer a reversal there, would take fresh courage and, reinforced by new allies similarly emboldened, redouble their efforts to finish us off.
He spoke of the foreign merchants, mechanics, and sailors who manned the docks and shipyards and no minor portion of the benches of the fleet. With what confidence could we rely upon these who were not
of our blood but without whom we could not hope to prevail? Were we not placing ourselves upon the same perilous perch occupied by our enemies, the Spartans, who must fight with one eye on the foe and the other on their own serfs? In war even one’s own countrymen may not always be relied upon. How much less those who serve only for pay?
“Today as I walked to the Assembly I observed numerous construction sites of houses and shops going up. This is well. But do not put from your memory, Athenians, that these very properties are those abandoned and even torched by their owners during the Plague. Have you forgotten, friends? Is your recall that fleeting of those hours when our survival hung by a whisker and no resource we possessed, neither of wealth nor power nor entreaties of the gods, proved of avail to lift this siege of heaven? Peace, which I negotiated, has brought its blessings. We may open the city’s gates, ride again to our estates, repair them and replant. Children are born who have not inhaled the stink of the enemy’s incendiaries or witnessed their mothers’ corpses carted away in the night. You have stumbled ashore upon safe haven, my countrymen. Yet what is your first thought? The bones of your own fathers have barely found rest within their tombs and now you propose to plant your own beside them. Can you not enjoy the quiet life? Am I that old, that I find comfort in a fireside at close of day and take joy to watch my children at play within the court?
“But this is not your nature, men of Athens. Nothing is more unendurable to you than peace. Each moment at leisure is to you an interval squandered and a chance for gain cast away. The farmer has learned that fields must lie fallow, and fruit bears only in its season. But you have repudiated these quaint premises. You inhabit another realm, a fictive country which you call the future. You dream of what will be and disdain what is. You define yourselves not as who you are, but as who you may become, and hasten over oceans to this shore you can never reach. That which you possess today you count as nothing, valuing only what you gain tomorrow. Yet as soon as your hands seize this treasure, you disown it and press on for what is new. I do not wonder that you esteem this young man, this chariot racer, for he lives further beyond his means even than yourselves.