Atlantis and Other Places (26 page)

“I have opinions on a great many things,” Sokrates replied. “Some of them, I hope, are true opinions. Here, however, I shall not venture any opinion. The unfolding of events will yield the answer.”

“You don’t know either, eh?” The sailor shrugged. “Well, we’ll find out pretty cursed quick.”

“I thought I just said that,” Sokrates said plaintively. But the other man wasn’t listening to him any more.

 

 

No triremes came forth from Peiraieus to challenge the fleet’s entry. Indeed, Athens’ harbor seemed all but deserted; most of the sailors and longshoremen and quayside loungers had fled. A herald bearing the staff of his office stood on a quay and shouted in a great voice, “Let all know that any who proceed in arms from this place shall be judged traitors against the city and people of Athens!”

“We
are
the city and people of Athens!” Alkibiades shouted back, and the whole fleet roared agreement. “We have done great things! We will do more!” Again, soldiers and sailors bellowed to back him up.

That sailor came back to Sokrates. “Aren’t you going to arm?” he asked. “That’s what the orders are.”

“I shall do that which seems right,” Sokrates answered, which sent the other man off scratching his head.

Sokrates went below. Down in the hold, hoplites were struggling into their armor, poking one another with elbows and knees, and cursing as they were elbowed in turn. He pushed his way through the arming foot soldiers to his own leather duffel. “Come on!” someone said to him, voice cracking with excitement. “Hurry up! High time we cleaned out that whole nest of polluted catamites!”

“Is it?” Sokrates said. “Are they? How do you know?”

The hoplite stared at him. He saw that he might as well have been speaking Persian. The soldier fixed his scabbard on his belt. He reached around his body with his right hand to make sure he could draw his sword in a hurry if he had to.

Up on deck, the oarmaster shouted
“Oöp!”
and the rowers rested at their oars. Somebody said, “No one’s here to make us fast to the pier. Furies take ’em! We’ll do it ourselves.” The ship swayed slightly as a sailor sprang ashore. Other sailors flung him lines. They thumped on the quays. He tied the transport to the side of the pier.

A moment later, the gangplank thudded into place. Up on deck, an officer shouted, “All hoplites out! Go down the quay and form up on dry land!” With a cheer, the soldiers—almost all of them now ready for battle—did as they were told, crowding toward the transport’s stern to reach the gangplank. Duffel over his shoulder, Sokrates returned to Athenian soil, too.

This wasn’t the first transport to disembark its men. On the shore, red-caped officers were bellowing, “Form a phalanx! We’ve got work to do yet, and we’ll do it, by Zeus!” As the battle formation took shape, Sokrates started north towards Athens all by himself.

“Here, you!” a captain yelled. “Where do you think you’re going?”

He stopped for a moment. “Home,” he answered calmly.

“What? What are you talking about? We’ve got fighting to do yet,” the man said.

Sokrates tossed his head. “No. When Athenian fights Athenian, who can say which side has the just cause, which the unjust? Not wishing to do the unjust or to suffer it, I shall go home. Good day.” With a polite dip of the head, he started walking again.

Pounding sandals said the captain was coming after him. The man grabbed his arm. “You can’t do that!”

“Oh, but I can. I will.” Sokrates shook him off. The captain grabbed him again—and then, quite suddenly, found himself sitting in the dust. Sokrates kept walking.

“You’ll be sorry!” the other man shouted after him, slowly getting to his feet. “Wait till Alkibiades finds out about this!”

“No one can make me sorry for doing what is right,” Sokrates said. At his own pace, following his own will, he tramped along toward the city.

He was going along between the Long Walls, still at his own pace, when hoofbeats and the rhythmic thud of thousands of marching feet came from behind him. He got off the path, but kept going. Alkibiades trotted by on horseback in his purple chiton. Catching Sokrates’ eye, he grinned and waved. Sokrates dipped his head again.

Alkibiades and the rest of the horsemen rode on. Behind them came the hoplites and peltasts. Behind
them
came a great throng of rowers, unarmored and armed with belt knives and whatever else they could scrounge. They moved at a fine martial tempo, and left ambling Sokrates behind. He kept walking nonetheless.

 

 

“Tyrant!” the men on the walls of Athens shouted at Alkibiades. “Impious, sacrilegious defiler of the mysteries! Herm-smasher!”

“I put my fate in the hands of the gods,” Alkibiades told them, speaking for the benefit of his own soldiers as well as those who hadn’t gone to Sicily. “I prayed that they destroy me if I were guilty of the charges against me, or let me live and let me triumph if I was innocent. I lived. I triumphed. The gods know the right. Do you, men of Athens?” He raised his voice: “Nikias!”

“Yes? What is it?” Nikias sounded apprehensive. Had he been in the city, he would surely have tried to hold it against Alkibiades. But he was out here, and so he could be used.

“You were there. You can tell the men of Athens whether I speak the truth. Did I not call on the gods? Did they not reward me with victory, as I asked them to do to show my innocence?”

A lie here would make Alkibiades’ life much more difficult. Nikias had to know that. Alkibiades would have been tempted—more than tempted—to lie. But Nikias was a painfully honest man as well as a painfully pious one. Though he looked as if he’d just taken a big bite of bad fish, he dipped his head. “Yes, son of Kleinias. It is as you say.”

His voice was barely audible to Alkibiades, let alone to the soldiers on the walls of the city. Alkibiades pointed their way, saying, “Tell the men of Athens the truth.”

Nikias looked more revolted yet. Even so, he did as Alkibiades asked.
Everybody does as I ask
, Alkibiades thought complacently. Having spoken to the defenders of the city, Nikias turned back to Alkibiades. In a low, furious voice, he said, “I’ll thank you to leave me out of your schemes from now on.”

“What schemes, O best one?” Alkibiades asked, his eyes going wide with injured innocence. “All I asked you to do was tell the truth to the men there.”

“You did it so you could seize the city,” Nikias said.

“No.” Alkibiades tossed his head, though the true answer was of course
yes
. But he went on, “Even if no one opens a gate to me, I’ll hold the advantage soon enough. We draw our grain from Byzantion and beyond. I hold Peiraieus, so nothing can come in by sea. Before too long, if it comes to that, Athens will get hungry—and then she’ll get hungrier. But I don’t think we need to worry about that.”

“Why not?” Nikias demanded. “The whole polis stands in arms against you.”

“Oh, rubbish,” Alkibiades said genially. “I’ve got at least half the polis here on the outside of the city with me. And if you think everyone in there is against me, you’d better think again. You could do worse than talk with Sokrates about the whole and its parts.” As he’d expected, that provoked Nikias again. Alkibiades hid his smile and looked around. “Where
is
Sokrates, anyway?”

A hoplite standing close by answered, “He went into the city, most noble one.”

“
Into
the city?” Alkibiades and Nikias said together, in identical surprise. Recovering first, Alkibiades asked, “By the dog of Egypt, how did he manage that?”

The hoplite pointed to a small postern gate. “He told the soldiers on guard there that he didn’t intend to fight anybody, that he thought it was wrong for Athenians to fight Athenians”—as most men of Athens would have, he took a certain cheeky pleasure in reporting that to Alkibiades—“and that he wanted to come in and see his wife.”

“To see Xanthippe? I wouldn’t have thought he’d been away from home
that
long,” Alkibiades said; Sokrates was married to a shrew. “But the gate guards let him in?”

“Yes, sir. I think one of them knew him,” the hoplite replied.

Nikias clucked like a hen. “You see, Alkibiades? Even your pet sophist wants no part of civil war.”

“He’s not my pet. He’s no more anyone’s pet than a fox running on the hills,” Alkibiades said. “And he would say he’s no sophist, either. He’s never taken even an obolos for teaching, you know.”

Nikias went right on clucking. Alkibiades stopped listening to him. He eyed the postern gate. That Sokrates had got into Athens only proved his own point. Not all the soldiers defending the city were loyal to the men who’d tried to execute him under form of law. A little discreet talk, preferably in the nighttime when fewer outside ears might hear, and who could say what would happen next?

Alkibiades thought he could. He looked forward to finding out whether he was right.

 

 

Quietly, ever so quietly, a postern gate swung open. At Alkibiades’ whispered urging the night before, the guards who held it had anointed with olive oil the posts that secured it to the stone lintel above and the stone set into the ground below. A squeak now would be . . .
very embarrassing
, Alkibiades thought as he hurried toward the gate at the head of a column of hoplites.

“You shouldn’t go first,” one of them whispered to him. “If it’s a trap, they’ll nail you straightaway.”

“If it’s a trap, they’ll nail me anyhow,” he answered easily. “But if I thought it were a trap, I wouldn’t be doing this, would I?”

“Who knows?” the hoplite said. “You might just figure you could talk them around once you got inside.”

He laughed at that. “You’re right. I might. But I don’t. Come on. It’s the same with a city as it is with a woman—once you’re inside, you’ve won.” The soldiers laughed, too. But Alkibiades hadn’t been joking, or not very much.

He carried no spear. His left hand gripped his shield, marked with his own emblem. His right tightened on the hilt of his sword as he went through the gate, through the wall itself, and into Athens. It was indeed a penetration of sorts.
Bend forward, my polis. Here I am, taking you unawares
.

If he wasn’t taking the city unawares, if his foes did have a trap waiting for him, they would spring it as soon as he came through. This would be the only moment when they knew exactly where he was. But everything inside seemed dark and quiet and sleepy. Except for his own followers, the only men who moved and talked were the guards who’d opened the gate.

In flowed his soldiers, a couple of hundred of them. He sent bands out to the right and left, to seize other men and let in more men back from Sicily. How long would it be before the defenders realized the city was secure no more? Shouts and the sounds of fighting from another gate said the moment was here.

“Come on,” Alkibiades told the rest of the men with him. “We seize the agora, we seize the Akropolis, and the city’s ours.”

They hurried on through darkness as near absolute as made no difference. Night was a time for sleeping. Here and there, a lamp would glow faintly behind a closed shutter. Once, Alkibiades passed the sounds of flutes and raucous, drunken singing: someone was holding a symposion, civil strife or no civil strife. The streets wandered, twisted, doubled back on themselves, dead-ended. No one not an Athenian born could have hoped to find his way.

More lights showed when Alkibiades and his comrades got to the agora. Torches flared around the Tholos. At least seventeen members of the Boulê were always on duty there. Alkibiades pointed toward the building. “We’ll take it,” he said. “That will leave them running around headless. Let’s go, my dears. Forward!”

“Eleleu!”
the hoplites roared. A handful of guards stood outside the building. When so many men thundered down upon them, they dropped their spears and threw up their hands. A couple of them fell to their knees to beg for mercy.

“Spare them,” Alkibiades said. “We shed as little blood as we can.”

A voice came from inside the Tholos: “What’s that racket out there?”

Alkibiades had never been able to resist a dramatic gesture. Here, he didn’t even try. Marching into the building, he displayed the Eros with a thunderbolt on his shield that had helped make him famous—or, to some people, notorious. “Good evening, O best ones,” he said politely.

The councilors sprang to their feet. It was even better than he’d hoped. There with them were Androkles and Thettalos son of Kimon, two of his chief enemies—Thettalos had introduced the motion against him in the Assembly. “Alkibiades!” Androkles exclaimed in dismay. He could have sounded no more horrified if he’d seen Medusa standing before him—the last thing he would have seen before gazing upon her turned him to stone. No one else in the Tholos seemed any more delighted.

Bowing, Alkibiades answered, “Very much at your service, my dear. I will have you know that my whole army is in the city now. Those who are wise will comport themselves accordingly. Those who are not so wise will resist, for a little while—and pay the price for resisting.”

He bowed again, and smiled his sweetest smile. If his enemies chose to, they could still put up a fight for Athens, and perhaps even win. He wanted them to believe they had no chance, no hope. If they did believe it, their belief would help turn it true.

“Surely you are a kakodaimon, spawned from some pit of Tartaros!” Thettalos burst out. “We should have dealt with you before you sailed for Sicily.”

“You had your chance,” Alkibiades answered. “When the question of who mutilated the herms first came up, I asked for a speedy trial. I wanted my name cleared before the fleet sailed. You were the ones who delayed.”

“We needed to find witnesses who would talk,” Thettalos said.

“You needed to invent witnesses who would lie, you mean,” Alkibiades answered.