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, holds 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 materiel 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
