Tides of War (23 page)

This was the mightiest armada ever launched beneath the banner of a single city. So densely lapped rose the sails of the second and third divisions that their mass cut off the wind of the first. What open water remained stood so thick with small craft that one could have trod from Eetion to Munychia and never gotten his feet wet. There must have been a thousand boys’ “itty-bits,” pressing so densely about the warships that the oars in their sweep overturned no small number. The boys cheered even as they foundered, clinging to the keels of their overturned pots.

You are impatient, my grandson. You wish me to get to the notorious affair of the Herms. Here is how I learned of it:

The date was twenty-one days before departure. I had been up all night at Naval Affairs, racing not only to complete this document but to pack up the office, which was being relocated to quarters in the Choma mews, at the harbor. With two other officers, my friend Orestiades, captain of the
Resolute,
and the younger Pericles, son of the great Pericles and the courtesan Aspasia, I emerged to the dawn from our basement space. It was the morning after Gleaning Day, the early barley harvest, when the widows and orphans had had their hours to scavenge and the stubbled fields, picked clean, had been set ablaze outside the city and across on Euboea. The haze, drifting down the channel and mingling with the sea fog, cast the city in an eerie pall. We had just started toward the marketplace when a press of women hastened past on the Street of the Weavers. They were wailing and uttering cries of distress.

We turned the corner into Council Square. More throngs clamored in disorder. Two slaves dashed past. Pericles seized one and demanded to know what was going on. “They’ve knocked all the cocks off, sir!”

“By Heracles, speak plain and clear.”

“The herms, Captain. The whole city’s dickless!”

During the night a pack or packs of vandals, identities unknown, had rampaged through a number of quarters, defacing the stone statues of Hermes that stood with their erect phalluses as good-luck pieces before private residences and government buildings. The criminals had batted these knobs off and even smashed the statues’ faces.

Who could have committed such an outrage? No sentence shy of death
could requite such an act of desecration! Here was a violation not alone of clan or tribe but of the commonwealth itself, of the divinity who shields all voyagers and sustains the very polity of our nation! Already the crowds—stricken with terror at the vengeance of heaven which such a stroke of impiety was certain to draw down, not to mention the evil luck it would pronounce upon the fleet—hissed with the names of notorious malefactors. Troops of vigilantes dashed off. The wheel and rack were readied. The square seethed in mob fury.

I recall the look of consternation upon the face of my comrade, the younger Pericles. Of his family, so devastated by plague and war, none remained save himself to link Alcibiades to the elder Pericles. For this reason, and the young man’s native gifts, Alcibiades had clasped him close, more as an older brother than a twice-removed cousin; Pericles esteemed his elder without reservation.

“This is Androcles’ work,” the young man declared at once. “He or the Philaidae in league with Anytus and his ilk.” He directed our attention to certain men who circulated, inflaming the mob’s passion. Surely these were provocateurs, recruited to foment this unrest. “They will accuse Alcibiades. I must find him and inform him at once.”

Charges were lodged against Alcibiades that morning. Witnesses were produced, slaves and freedmen, the former put to the torture, the latter granted immunity. On the wheel no few named the object their tormentors sought. In the Assembly Pythonicus, Androcles, Thessalus, and Anytus called for the penalty of death.

Alcibiades came forward, dismissing these accusations as a ham-fisted attempt by his enemies to frame him for a crime only a madman would commit. How witless did his foes imagine him to be, that on the eve of his most passionately sought triumph he would sabotage his own cause in this preposterous manner?

Alcibiades denied all charges and demanded to be tried at once. This hysteria must be put behind him before the fleet sailed. But his enemies, reinforced now by Procles, Euthydemus, Hagnon, and Myrtilus, brought forward fresh indictments, including profanation of the Mysteries. The accusers produced slaves and attendants who, under grants of immunity, described evenings in private homes when Alcibiades and others of his circle had donned mock-sacral garments and, prancing about in unholy caricature of priests and mystae, had amused themselves by presiding over sham initiations in disreverence
of divine Demeter. These offenses were cited not merely as outrages against the gods, meriting death on that account alone, but as evidence of their perpetrators’ contempt for the democracy itself. They were the acts of a would-be tyrant, who set himself above all law.

Nor was Alcibiades the only man so charged, but scores and even hundreds, of all parties, fell under the informer’s suit. For the scale of the desecration was so vast, the people believed, as to have been perpetrated only by a coalition, or coalitions in collusion with others of like minds, with intent to overthrow the state.

Rounds of arrests began. An informer of one faction would come forward, naming fifty or seventy or even a hundred. At once a second stooge materialized, as spokesman for the accused faction, to denounce those who had denounced his own.

In terror the people threw them all in jail. Arrests went on for days, enacted not by officials observing due process, but by armed posses snatching their victims off the street and even from their own homes. The agora stood vacant; none dared enter for fear of arrest. Appeals to the courts went unheeded; the magistrates were terrified of being hauled off themselves. Such was the chaos in the Assembly that sessions were not merely adjourned in disorder but suspended entirely. Nor did this reign of terror abate with time but, fueled by its own excesses, heightened and intensified until it had set the state at the very threshold of anarchy.

What had driven the city mad?

In my view it was Sicily—the people’s fear of this epochal enterprise, and fear of its author and his equally monumental pride. Remember, my grandson, that Alcibiades possessed no dearth of enemies. Like a lightning rod, his ambition drew the mistrust and hatred of both democrats and oligarchs. The aristocrats feared him as a traitor to his class. He had sold out his kind, they believed, to pursue his ambition as champion of the masses. In the nobles’ view, the Sicilian expedition boded nothing less than their own extinction. Should Alcibiades return victorious—which he doubtless would, backed by this insuperable fleet—what would be his first act upon setting foot ashore? With the mob’s blessing he would set himself up as tyrant. Nor would he tarry long to make his second move, the gentry believed, namely to strip them of their power or put them to death. Such were Alcibiades’ enemies of the nobility.

Of the commons his foes were equally virulent—those halfpenny rogues who had ridden to fame on the backs of the multitude, before he had snatched
this constituency from them. Hyperbolus, the arch-demagogue, whom Alcibiades had conspired successfully to exile; Androcles, his successor, who nursed a bitter grudge to requite his friend; Cleonymus, that most arrant of wretches; Thydippus, Cleophon, and the great thug Archedemus. What characterized these villains was beastlike cunning and shamelessness. No outrage was beneath them. They knew how to play to the people’s baser motives and would stay at nothing to achieve their ends.

Which brings us back to the mad stunt of defacing the statues of Hermes. Who could do such a thing? Both extremes possessed equal incentive—and equal want of scruple. And why would the people react with such hysteria?

In Polemides’ account of the Sicilian disaster he relates a tactic employed by the enemy when harrying the mass of our army in its retreat. The foe would launch his attacks not along the entire column, but concentrated upon one point of the rear guard. His object was to incite a panic in one sector which would be communicated, as occurs so frequently in large bodies of men, to the rest.

A city can panic too. A polity may go to pieces.

The evil of panic is this: that even the brave man is powerless to stand against it, but is either overrun where he stands or swept up in flight, indistinguishable from the coward.

I had an acquaintance in those years named Bias, a ship’s executive officer, thrice-decorated, whom all knew to be blameless of wrongdoing. He was arrested nonetheless and sentenced to death. In desperation he resorted to the following gambit: he confessed to crimes he had not committed and, granted immunity, promised to name the names of his coconspirators. He then cited only those who had already been denounced by others, or had fled the city and were safe. It worked; he was released. But one of the men he had named, Epicles the son of Automedon, had not yet got clear; he was arrested and executed. Grief-stricken, Epicles’ brother Polites marched to Bias’ house and, hauling him forth to the street, slew him in broad daylight, daring any to bring charges.

Such extremities, multiplied a thousandfold, had now seized the city. Suppose your friend tugs you aside and asks as a friend, “Tell the truth: do you have information about the guilty parties?” If you do and confess, your friend may inform against you, under pressures you cannot know. So you tell the truth as it were a lie, or a lie as it were the truth, and he performs the same. Thus friend becomes dissevered from friend, even brother from brother,
for in the atmosphere of terror and mistrust, one could set faith not even in his own kin.

In the end, after all stool pigeons had sung and informers wriggled clear of the rack, it came to light that one political club of a hundred members had carried out the mischief. In my opinion it was damn stupidity. They struck out as children in spite, owning no notion of the evils their heedlessness would unleash.

Recall the insight of Euryptolemus, reported by our client Polemides, from that evening at the harbor tavern, Fair Wind. Two currents were at war for Athens’ soul, he professed: the ancient ways, which revere the gods, and the modern, which make the city itself a god.

It was the ancient ways which now rebelled. These cracked-pate young aristocrats had defaced the city’s divinities by night, and this struck the fear of God into the masses. That bulwark which understays any society, the simple God-fearing soul of its people, quailed and broke before this affront to heaven. Now their audacity to mount this spectacular overseas enterprise became, to them, that pride which calls down the wrath of Olympus. Their nerve failed. They recalled the Plague and the death ships coming home with the ashes of their sons. Staring at the shattered statues of Hermes, who escorts men to the underworld, they felt dread of hell and terror of the Almighty. The Sicily fleet seemed now an armada of doom. They recoiled before the scale of their own ambition and, inflamed by those with motive to profit thereby, struck out at its author.

Numbers had now been executed. Scores more moldered in prison; hundreds had fled the city entire. Yet Alcibiades’ enemies dared not arrest him, such was his backing with the fleet and the army, the foreign sailors and the allies. Instead they sniped with rumor and defamation. An indictment for treason was being prepared, they said. Reports were published that Alcibiades stood in league with Sparta to conduct the fleet to destruction. His foes calumniated the memory of his father and grandfathers, citing the Lacedaemonian derivation of their names, and Alcibiades’ own, and blackening even their heroic deaths in battle against the Persians by recalling that these actions had been fought in alliance with the warriors of Sparta. Not even the memory of Alcibiades’ Lacedaemonian nurse Amycla was spared. Even as a babe, his foes testified, Alcibiades had “suckled at the breast of Sparta.”

My comrade the younger Pericles, in concern for his kinsman, went seeking him one morning.

“It was still early, that hour when shadows are long and the market vendors have not yet set up their stalls, when we came upon him, Orestiades and I, in the Lyceum. The square was deserted; he was with Socrates, the pair obscured in the early mist, beneath the plane tree that grows out of the hillside above the fountain. So locked were they two in converse that my companion and I drew up at a distance, not wishing to intrude.

“Alcibiades stood before the philosopher in a posture of abjection. I had never seen him so chastened or contrite. His head hung; tears streamed down his face. Socrates had one hand placed in kindness upon the younger man’s shoulder. He was speaking to him quietly but with force. At once Alcibiades dropped upon one knee and buried his face in his master’s cloak. Even at a distance my mate and I could see his shoulders shudder as sobs wrenched from his breast. We withdrew at once, neither wishing to be seen nor to let our friend know that he had been.”

Despite his insistence upon being tried without delay, Alcibiades’ enemies conspired to have the arraignment postponed. They knew if they gave their rival the chance to speak before a jury, he would sway the people to his side. His enemies wanted Alcibiades gone, at sea with the fleet, so they could try him in absentia, where he could not speak in his own defense.

Throughout this ordeal Alcibiades maintained his rounds of exercise and attendance upon the fleet. I was present one morning at the expeditionary offices, housed temporarily in a dockside warehouse, when Alcibiades arrived. He was alone save his trainer; they had come straight from the gymnasium, their flesh still mottled with the dust of the wrestling pit. Alcibiades was clearly distraught.

“What more do the people want of me? I have donated all I own to the city, my fortune to the last obol, and now they defame even the memory of my fathers!” He was desperate to have his day in court. Let the
demos
convict him now and wake to their folly when he was dead.