Tides of War (46 page)

So the galleys went ahead. These made port at Piraeus two days prior to the squadron, accompanied by a fast courier with instructions to return, reporting the vessels’ reception. But the arrival of the
merchantmen precipitated such elation in the port, with the news that Alcibiades’ ships followed, that the people would not let the cutter reembark until a proper reception may be mustered to accompany her. Meanwhile the squadron, advancing unapprised of what awaited, began to fear. Beating round Cape Sounium into a fierce westerly, the lead vessels, descrying a score of triremes bearing down out of the sun so that their ensigns could not be made out, the younger Pericles, officer of the van, had brought the formation to line abreast to defend itself when it was realized that the advancing vessels bore not hazard but welcome, garlanded, and laden with parties of kinsmen and notables.

Still Alcibiades feared treachery. Beneath his cloak he wore not the light ceremonial cuirass, but a bronze breastplate of battle. Directions were rehearsed to the marine party to remain about him at alert. The ships, which had been advancing in two columns, deployed to singles approaching the harbor entrance at Eetoniea.
Antiope
lay off, seventh in column, that she may put about at once in the event of duplicity. We could see the ramparts now. Reflections flared, as from spearpoints and armor of massed infantry. The flagship bore sidescreens “at the step,” primed for deployment. But as the vessels drew abreast of the bastion, the men could see the flares were not of missiles or armor, but of ladies’ vanities and children’s sundazzlers. Clouds of wreaths descended. Youths launched candies upon the breeze, suspended from the spruce spinners that old men whittle wharfside, which can soar for miles on the updrafts. These now came winging overhead, clattering against the hull and splashing amid the oar sweep.

Small craft swarmed, hailing the heroes. It seemed the entire city had taken holiday. The ships came parallel to the Choma now, where the trierarchs of the fleet for Syracuse had assembled so gravely before the
apostoleis
to receive the blessing and the Council’s order to launch. Such a mob now swarmed upon the mole as to hide it entire.
Atalanta
advanced to our starboard, obscuring the vantage. Amid the throng, glimpsed through the rigging of our squadronmate’s stern, ascended the figure of Euryptolemus, bald dome reflecting. With one hand this noble embraced himself, as if to fix his self-command; the other, with exuberant welcome, waved his straw sun hat.

“Can that be you, cousin?” Alcibiades spoke in a whisper, and, bending toward the apparition, permitted his arm to respond. Ahead rose the pediment of the Bendidium and, beneath, the raked beaching ground of Thracian Artemis.
Kratiste
and
Alcippe
already executed reversions in place, for the bumpers to capture their sterns. Garlanded ephebes manned the shoring blocks awaiting
Antiope
. A pinging metallic clatter began to assault the deck. The people were throwing money. Boys swarmed over the gunwales and scrapped with their mates for the showering coins.

Where the Northern Wall abuts the Carriage Road, that dolorous highway I had trekked alone years past, returning from Potidaea; there where the hovels of the damned had sprawled during the Plague; now this gauntlet of horror had metamorphosed into a boulevard of joy. Cavalry mounts awaited the commanders. Their hooves trod a carpet of lavender. Though the other generals rode in prominence, the mob paid no heed but rounded only to behold Alcibiades. Fathers pointed him out to sons, and women, elder dames as well as maidens, clutched at their bosoms and swooned.

He was borne to the Pnyx, where the hillsides overflowed with celebrants, roosting even in trees, like birds. There had been a ceremony on the way before the Eleusinium. Here at the hour of Alcibiades’ banishment, the King Archon had mounted before the multitude to ordain the striking of the expelled’s name from the
katalogos
of citizens and a stele of infamy erected, that the people never forget his perfidy and treason. Now advanced a new
basileus,
trembling, to present to this same man the reconstituted title to his holdings, within the city and his horse property at Erchiae, which had been confiscated at the time of his exile, and a suit of armor, the belated award of his prize of valor for Cyzicus. The stele had been broken apart, the archon pronounced, and cast into the sea.

Throughout these rites Alcibiades had maintained a bearing so stern and remote as to evoke in the people a species of dread. For the man before whom they now danced in supplication was no longer that princeling discharged so stonily beneath their whim but a war-scored commander at the head of such a fleet and army as at a word may seize the state and make dice of them all. The congregation searched the
thunderheads of his brow, as children caught at mischief sound their headmaster as he grasps the rod. And when he suffered the multitude’s recantations with impatience and even disdain, handing off to aides the various encomia and bills of praise without even a glance, the crowd rustled in deepening trepidation.

In the square before the Amazoneum the triumphal wagons caught up with the procession, bearing the ensigns and warpeaks of the enemy, their rams, and the shields and armor of her generals. In the crush it would take hours to reach the High City where these trophies would be dedicated to the goddess, so here, by gesture, since his voice could not carry above the tumult, Alcibiades bade these prizes be set down. This siting was unpremeditated; it so chanced, however, that this cargo of glory found its rest beneath the great marble of Antiope, namesake of his flagship, whose facing bears these verses to Theseus:

At the Museum, beneath the statue of Victory, his sons and the sons of his kinsmen were presented to him, in their white ephebic robes, bearing willow wands and crowned with myrtle. This sight surely, the people anticipated, must make the darkness of his bearing relent. Yet the opposite obtained. For the sight of these whose childhood had flown unwitnessed by him, for his exile had endured now eight years, only amplified the estrangement of his heart and the bereavement he felt of those absent and lost. His immediate family, all long dead: mother, father, and wife, infant daughters, brother and sisters fallen to plague and war, elders wasted by age in his absence. Now, following, were presented those of his extended clan, babes unborn when last he saw the city, maidens now brides with infants of their own, and beardless lads waxed to manhood; most he could neither nominate nor recognize so that, as the herald tolled each name, the publication seemed to wring his heart,

The daughter of his cousin Euryptolemus was directed forward, a bride of sixteen, bearing her infant son, she garlanded with yew and rowan as rendering the Kore, her babe in violet for Athena. Advancing before the multitude, the girl, unnerved, could not recall her stanzas of welcome and, faltering, flushed and began to weep. Alcibiades, taking her elbow to uphold her, was overcome himself and could no longer contain the tears.

At once the dams of all hearts burst, as each, whelmed itself, induced capitulation in its neighbor, till none may withstand that which swelled, possessing all. For the people, who had either feared Alcibiades’ ambition or dreaded his vengeance—in other words, had confined their concerns to self-interest—now beheld upon their prince’s face, as he supported the sobbing girl, that grief he had borne in isolation all these years apart from them he loved. They forgot the evils he had brought and remembered only the good. And recognizing that this moment constituted that pinnacle of reconciliation at which city and son stood at last reunited, all concern for their own slipped their hearts, supplanted by compassion for him and joy at their mutual deliverance at his hands. By acclamation the Assembly appointed him
strategos autokrator,
supreme commander on land and sea, and awarded a golden crown.

He spoke while yet weeping. “When I was a boy in Pericles’ house, I would steal with my mates on Assembly days into those
peuke
trees there, upon the Pnyx’ postern brow, and attend all day to the discourse and disputation, till my chums had grown bleary and begged me to depart with them to play; yet I alone remained upon my perch, attending the argument and debate. Even then, before I possessed command to articulate it, I felt the city’s power, as if she were some great lioness or beast of legend. I marveled at the enterprise of so many individual men, of such disparate and conflicting ambitions, and the engine of it all, the city, which by sublime alchemy yoked all to all and produced a whole greater than her parts, whose essence was neither wealth nor force of arms nor architectural or artistic brilliance, though all these she
brought forth in abundance, but some quality of spirit, intangible, whose essence was audacity, intrepidity, and enterprise.

“That Athens which exiled me was not the Athens I loved, but another, failing of her nerve, dread-stricken before the exposition of her own greatness and banished from herself by that dread, as she in turn banished me. This Athens I hated and set all my energies to bring low.

“I was wrong. I have worked grave harm to her, this city I love. There stand no few here this day whose sons and brothers have lost their lives because of actions advanced or undertaken by me. I am guilty. Nothing may be said to exonerate me, unless it be that some dark destiny has dogged me and my family, and that this star, driving me apart from Athens and Athens from me, has reduced us both by its sinister designs. Let that bark take upon itself our transgressions, mine and yours, and bear them away upon the seas of heaven.”

Such a cry acclaimed this phrase, and such pounding of feet and hands, as to make the square tremble and the very columns of the sanctuary seem to quake. The people cried his name again and again.

“My enemies for years have sought to sow fear of me in your hearts, my countrymen, claiming that my object is rule over you. No fabrication could be more malign. I have never sought anything, my friends, but to merit your praise and to bear to you those blessings as would induce you to grant me honor. Yet that expression is imprecise. For my conception has never construed the city as a passive vessel into which I, her benefactor, decanted blessings. Such a course would be not only insolent but infamous. Rather I wished, as an officer advancing into battle at the head of his men, to serve as flame and inspiration to her, to call forth, by my belief in her, her birth and rebirth, altering with Necessity’s command, but always advancing toward that which is most herself, that engine of glory which she was and is and must be, and that exemplar of freedom and enterprise to which all the world looks in awe and envy.”

Deafening acclamation made him hold long moments.

“Citizens of Athens, you have tendered me such surfeit of honors as no man may alone requite. Therefore let me summon reinforcements.” He motioned his fellow commanders forward, who had attended thus far in silence upon both hands. “With pride I present
to you, your sons whose feats of arms have brought about this hour of glory. Let me call their names and may your eyes feast upon their victorious manhood. Absent Thrasybulus, but present: Theramenes, Thrasyllus, Conon, Adeimantus, Erasinides, Thymochares, Leon, Diomedon, Pericles.”

Each in turn stepped forward and, elevating an arm or executing a bow in salute, elicited such cascades of citation as seemed must never end.

“These stand before you not alone for their own marks but in the stead of thousands yet on station overseas before whose might, we may state at last and acclaim its truth, the enemy has been swept from the seas.”

The roar of acclamation which greeted this eclipsed all which had preceded it. Alcibiades waited until the tumult had subsided.

“But let us not overextol the moment. Our enemies occupy half the states of our empire. Their Persian-provided treasury is ten times ours, nor is their fighting spirit attenuated but by our victories over them recharged and reinspirited. But now and at last, my friends, Athens possesses the will and cohesion to withstand them and prevail. Let us only be ourselves and we cannot fail.”

Such a clamor now arose that the very tiles on the roofs began to clatter and spill. Someone shouted, “Let him see his home!” and at once the tide engulfed the platform, catching up the party and sweeping it toward Scambonidae, to Alcibiades’ former estate, restored now by motion of the Assembly and refurbished in anticipation of his return. The scale of the swell choked the square, prodigious as it was, and the gates, capacious enough even for the great procession of the Panathenaea, could not contain the crush and jammed up in a merry mob.

At the peak of this jubilation, a citizen of about sixty years emerged and shouted toward Alcibiades: “Where are those of Syracuse, thou treasonous villain!”

Angry cries commanded the elder to break off.

“Their ghosts are not present to cheer thee, godless renegade!”

At once the old man’s form was swallowed by the mob. All that could be seen was the pack’s rising and plunging fists, then their feet
assaulting him, defenseless, on the earth. I turned to reckon Alcibiades’ response but could not glimpse him, other figures intervening, but Euryptolemus’ countenance rose proximate beside me. Upon his features I beheld such an expression of woe and foreboding as to blight the sun itself upon a cloudless noon.