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
